My son loves sugar. Whenever I mention going to the bank, he asks for a lollipop. When I make him dinner, he eats a little and then wants “dessert”, which I accommodate by giving him fruit, little oranges we humans have bred to the point of sugar saturation. He looks forward to the weekends because that’s when we have ice cream. My son’s sweet tooth makes sense. He’s a growing boy: he needs to put on half a pound a month and still have enough energy to run around like a pinball, and pure sugar is one of the few foodstuffs with enough energy to do that (the fat in the ice cream is one of the others).
Of course, I have roughly the same sweet tooth. When my son has oranges, I have one or two, as well, and when he has ice cream on the weekends, everyone has ice cream with him. I even have a larger bowl, because I weigh like six of him or so. My sweet tooth doesn’t make as much sense. I try to work out, but I don’t burn anywhere near the calories he does, pound for pound, and while I am still growing, it’s out at the middle rather than up at the top.
My sweet tooth makes a similar sort of sense to my son’s, though. We’re both shaped by evolution, by the need to find the highest-energy foods possible, and the brains we balance at the top of our spines are huge energy sinks. Our thought-meat require about a fifth of all calories we consume at rest, and that all has to be sugar, ideally. Our bodies think we’re always about to run out of food. For most of evolutionary existence, that was an excellent heuristic. Our ancestors were always a week away from starving to death, and in that regime, it makes sense to eat the high-energy food — dessert, that is — first. Eat the stuff that will stay on your body as fat today because you might not be able to eat anything tomorrow. If you try to make your diet with nothing but kale, you might not even have enough time to get today’s food in, let alone tomorrow’s.
Look around the world, and you see this evolutionary tendency in everything we do. We can only taste five flavors (salty, sour, bitter, umami, and sweet), and we only really like sweet things. Go to any mall, and you’ll find stores dedicated to selling candy, food to overload our sweet receptors. Picture how fast a store that sold only bitter food would close. We do have one chain of stores in malls that sells nominally salty food — Hickory Farms — but if you look at their ingredients, you’ll find sweeteners like Dextrose appears near the top of ingredients. Sure, we might like to season our sweetness with saltiness or meatiness but it’s secondary. We dose our barbecue in sugar-filled sauce, rather than putting bacon grease on Gummi Bears.
This need for sweetness has become problematic for us. We Americans are fat and getting fatter, and we’re losing our feet to diabetes, brought about by over-stressing the parts of our digestive tract that handle sugar. We do what we can to subvert our love for sugar with dieting and artificial sweeteners, but it’s as struggle, and it probably will be until we stop being able to ship sugar and corn syrup across the country.
We Americans are fat and getting fatter, and we’re losing our feet to diabetes, brought about by over-stressing the parts of our digestive tract that handle sugar.
|
Evolution has written other ways to survive famine into our DNA, though, and one of the best was to make someone else give you their food, rather than eat it themselves. If you make yourself a bigger threat than starvation, you could get fat while everyone else withered. If you could physically intimidate other members of your troupe, you and your children could take their food and your genes would be more likely to survive. You could even work this angle in times of plenty: you’d have to keep making sure that your suckers stayed suckers, had to keep making sure they wouldn’t decide to disobey you when things got worse. To help our ancestors survive, evolution programmed in us an inherent desire to boss other people around, so that even when there’s no other advantage we want to issue orders that the receivers have to obey. That little jolt of ridiculous pleasure of command for command’s sake is the same as the wafer-thin mint that comes after a three-thousand-calorie meal.
Just like we still see candy-shops, we still see that ancient current of authoritarianism in world. And just like the sweet tooth has given us diabetes, the little pleasure we get when we control others’ actions leads to mischief in the modern world. We carry guns so no one can tell us what to do, even though those guns are are more likely to shoot us than someone trying to assert dominance over us. We men, in particular, bully, badger, and threaten to make sure that everyone around us knows we’re the top dog. And there’s no real point to that other than that evolutionary reward.
The obesity and diabetes that our sweet tooth gives us are nothing compared to the problems that our drive to authoritarianism give us. If you look at the majority of mass murders in the United States (and therefore in the world), you find that before men shoot up pubic places, they tend to assert their dominance through domestic violence. If you look at the public policies of the governments we see as most evil throughout history, you’ll find that, at root, they all wanted to make some group of people do something they didn’t want to: die, starve, work, refrain from sex…
The pleasure we get from making people do things also explains why people go along with those evil regimes. Like LBJ said, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” When a politician says “We’re going to oppress those people,” a good portion of the people in the audience will hear that as “You’re going to get to oppress those people through me,” and then get that rush of pleasure, programmed into the brain by millions of years of near starvation. It doesn’t matter who the people being oppressed are: Jews, gays, blacks, women, transsexuals, intellectuals and counter-revolutionaries have all played that role, just as cupcakes, chocolate bars and ice cream have all satisfied our sweet tooths. And it doesn’t matter if anyone at all will be made better from the oppression, even the oppressors, just as our sweet tooth doesn’t care if we’re already fat and our toes are going numb. All that matters is putting them in their place, and then we get a rush of pleasure.
It gets worse than that, though. Oppressors justify their oppression by creating evils and assigning them to their victims.
|
This one drive to oppress others gives us all the evil in the world. On the one hand, of course oppressing others is bad. We have only to look at the ways some Christians treated the Jews, the way some Muslims treat Christians, the way slave-holders treated slaves, or the way the Communists treated dissidents to see that: pretty much the only people who don’t see those oppressions as bad are the ones who get that little star-burst of pleasure from thinking “There’s still people below me.”
It gets worse than that, though. Oppressors justify their oppression by creating evils and assigning them to their victims. That’s why Christians invented the blood libel and the myth of the Christ-killer. That’s why some straight people decided gays were pedophiles, why some white people decide that blacks are lazy and criminal. Just like when you tell yourself you can have a candy bar because you took the stairs to your office, people committed to that jolt of authoritarianism will tell themselves its okay to hate counter-revolutionaries because they’re in league with the CIA. And if you look at all these evils, they say the oppressed is moments away from becoming the oppressor, that those people want to treat us the way that we want to treat them. This projection, that the those people want to take over and make everyone else follow their orders, is probably true, because those people are still people, and have the same evolutionary baggage the same sweet-teeth and desires to command. The solution to authoritarianism isn’t having the right authorities.
There is still hope, though. I’m an atheist, so I don’t have a place in my framework for “evil” except when I’m playing Dungeons and Dragons. People aren’t infected with some sort of amorphous taint that makes their souls black, sent to them by some goat-horned demigod in an alien plane. People are animals who do what they do because it used to work for their ancestors, and that means we can alter our behavior by altering our situation. We have the tools. We can provide ersatz means of satisfying the drive to oppress, which can help in limited dosages, just as artificial sweeteners can reduce intake of sugar. We can make sure people know the costs of oppression and the risks people take when they try it, just as we educate people about proper diet.
Most importantly, we can make sure people see their fellow humans as people. One key place our sweet tooth differs from our desire to oppress is the fact very few people empathize with cupcakes, where as almost everyone will empathize with other humans, given the chance. This is why we’ve seen such a massive shift in support for gay marriage around the world: people have realized they know gay people and they’re not the pedophilic monsters they’d been conditioned to expect. It’s not a panacea, but it’s what we have to work with.
I could say we’re at a precipice, that the world teeters on the edge of an abyss, where we could fall into violent authoritarianism, all because of that little giggle of pleasure we get at bossing others around. I won’t say that, though, because we’re always on that precipice, always ready to fall into that chaos, and only our constant work prevents it.
__