I have a few pieces of knowledge that I think could be somehow synthesized to form a really powerful idea with a lot of implications.
In Yvain’s excellent “A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum” (read it if you haven’t already!) he makes a really compelling argument that “rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.”
It seems to me that a similar analogy can be made with happiness, where happiness is thrive mode and depression is survive mode. I’m not sure how widely accepted this theory is, but it seems kind of intuitive and obvious to me—happiness is what happens when things are going well, depression is what happens when things aren’t, and the two moods must serve some sort of evolutionary function, right?
There is a direct relationship between happiness and political ideology, where the more right-wing you are, the happier you are, i.e. far right people are the happiest, far left people are the least happy. (I got this information from the General Social Survey by correlating the happiness and political ideology variables, but it was a few months ago when I did this, and the website is really confusing and I can’t figure out how to display it the way I had it before, let alone link to it. So maybe you’ll have to take my word for it.)
So it seems like the strategy you’re using for yourself is the opposite of the strategy you’re using for society, or something? Yvain theorizes in the post how someone who formulates a heuristic for themselves early on in their life that says “the world is basically dangerous” will become a right-winger, and someone with the opposite heuristic will become a left-winger, and this explains why people divide so easily into political categories. But it seems like the reverse is in fact true? This makes sense with religiosity (believing in a loving God who will keep you safe) being correlated with right-wing beliefs and poverty (growing up in a dangerous environment where survival is uncertain) being correlated with left-wing beliefs.
I don’t really know what to make of this, but it seems like it could be really important.
happiness is what happens when things are going well, depression is what happens when things aren’t, and the two moods must serve some sort of evolutionary function, right?
Depression causes inactivity, helplessness, not dealing with problems, cutting social ties, and sometimes suicidal behavior. It’s hard to see how any of that could be evolutionarily beneficial in any scenario. (Which is not to say it’s not an evolved behavior due to some different mechanism, like being tied to otherwise beneficial genes.)
I’ve often thought the symptoms of depression seem similar to those of hibernation. Depressed people usually sleep more, decrease activity levels, cease romantic/sexual efforts, withdraw/hide from others, etc. That behavior pattern seems like it might be adaptive during temporary hardships (drought/famine/winter, etc.) where you really are helpless to change circumstances, and nothing you can plausibly do would help.
If depression was hibernation-like you’d expect oversleeping and undereating. Melancholic depression causes insomnia and undereating, atypical depression causes oversleeping and overeating.
Yvain makes some good points, but I don’t buy his argument, in part because I think that a single political dimension (aka one left-right axis) is inadequate for any in-depth analysis.
I don’t agree that happiness is necessarily associated with the thrive mode and depression—with the survival mode. People who are engaged in a struggle to survive are rarely depressed, they don’t have time for this. On the same “intuitive” basis I can argue that sloth/ennui is the consequence of the thrive mode and motivation/energy is the consequence of the survival mode.
I don’t believe that “direct relationship between happiness and political ideology”. I’ll need to look at the data and at how does the analysis control for other variables before I might be convinced it’s real. However I do have a strong prior that this is not so.
We already know that a political dichotomy is game-theoretically mandated by the U.S. voting system. Which means we don’t particularly need a separate and additional explanation for political dichotomies, and so I’d want independent evidence of other explanations.
and the two moods must serve some sort of evolutionary function, right?
Maybe depression is like the appendix, or a congenital skin rash, or food allergies, or male nipples, or the optic nerve being in backwards, or ingrown toenails, or the coccyx. In other words, sometimes evolution is just stupid.
Maybe depression is like the appendix, or a congenital skin rash, or food allergies, or male nipples, or the optic nerve being in backwards, or ingrown toenails, or the coccyx.
The implication being that the coccyx is useless? How so?
Indeed, Wikipedia says the coccyx is far from useless in humans:
it is an important attachment for various muscles, tendons and ligaments—which makes it necessary for physicians and patients to pay special attention to these attachments when considering surgical removal of the coccyx.[2] Additionally, it is also a part of the weight-bearing tripod structure which acts as a support for a sitting person. When a person sits leaning forward, the ischial tuberosities and inferior rami of the ischium take most of the weight, but as the sitting person leans backward, more weight is transferred to the coccyx.[2]
I don’t think the US political system explains that much, countries with different systems also have political dichotomies, and how much they correspond to the US ones has more to do with culture and society than with political institutions.
It seems to me that some people really are stuck in a “survival mode” and some people are stuck in an “exploratory mode”, and that this influences many of their life choice. The former will approach possible changes by saying: “This is far too dangerous. The life is not perfect as it is now, but we can manage.” The latter will approach possible changes by saying: “Change is exciting. What could possibly go wrong? You’re a chicken!”
This is probably a consequence of some evolutionary algorithm: “When in danger, play it safe, when in abundance, explore new possibilities.” Except that one does not update immediately on their current situation, it takes more time, and perhaps the situation at some specific age has a long-lasting impact. For humans, their setting influences how they perceive the world, so even if the original situation is gone, they can filter their inputs to make themselves believe the situation remains.
Another, independent part is how these modes map to political opinions. Seems to me this is not completely straightforward, and may be just a consequence of a specific political system, or a specific history of political alliances in the past. -- E.g. it happened a hundred years ago, for random reasons, that many Blues adopted a “survival mode” agenda and many Greens adopted an “exploratory mode” agenda. This created a positive feedback loop, because young people preferring the “survival mode” were more attracted to the Blue politics, and young people preferring the “exploratory mode” were more attracted to the Green politics, and in turn they made the agenda of the parties more extremely “pro-survival” or “pro-exploration”.
The specific mapping of “right: survival; left: exploration” may be correct for USA, but it cannot be generalized for the whole world. Which suggests that the mapping is either arbitrary, or shaped by some US-specific factors.
For example, in Slovakia the communists recently won the election using the slogan: “People deserve certainties.” (google translate). On the other hand, decriminalization of marijuana and homosexual marriage are considered right-wing topics in Slovakia (more precisely, they are topics of one specific right-wing party; all other parties avoid these topics completely). So to me it seems that the political left is fully “survival mode” here (Communists, Slovak Nationalists), and the political right is divided into “survival mode” (Catholics, Hungarian Nationalists) and “exploratory mode” (Libertarians). I am using the words “left” and “right” here to reflect how those parties identify themselves or who are their typical coalition partners.
Why is it so? Well, we had a history of communist rule here, that’s the difference. Seems to me that the “survival mode” people are scared of the present, and attracted to some part of history which they idealize. So if a country did not have a communist history, communism will be attractive only to “exploratory mode” people; but if a country had a communist history, “survival mode” people will be attracted to it, simply because it is a history. They remember the mandatory First May parades with red flags, strong rule of The Party, mandatory employment, newspapers without scandals… and they want it all back. (In a different country, the same type of people would want mandatory prayers, strong rule of The Church, church-approved materials without scandals, etc.) On the other hand, the whole “free market” concept is an exciting new thing here, which attracts the “exploratory mode” people. Free markets, freedom for homosexuals, freedom to use marijuana… all these things appeal to the “exploratory mode” people, so they get groupped politically together.
Which leads me to conclusion, that there is a difference between “survival mode” people and “exploratory mode” people, and this difference is reflected in the structure of political parties. However, the connection between a specific mode and a specific party seems to be mostly a historical coincidence (either “we already tried this, but never tried that” or “hundred years ago, our enemies joined the Blues, so we had to join the Greens”).
I don’t know how well it generalizes outside the US, but here, I would expect the correlation between happiness and ideology to reflect the fact that the political right effectively employs the just world fallacy in far more explicit ways than the political left. More advocacy of wealth redistribution is correlated with thinking that the status quo distribution is unfair. Plus, In the US specifically, both old-fashioned Calvinist determinism and modern prosperity gospelism are associated more with the right than the left.
People who think either or both of “the status quo is better than the alternative” or “it’ll all even out in the afterlife” are likely to be happier than people who think the world as it is is unjust.
I’ve noticed a depressive tendency on the left, but I think it might be an accidental bad strategy.
Please take this as my observations which may be shaped by what I choose to read.
It seems to me that left wingers have a habit of having every bad thing in the world remind them of every other bad thing. This may be a lack of respect for specialization, or it may be a side effect of competition for mind space, where everyone is trying to recruit everyone else for their preferred cause.
I also think that efforts to puncture grandiosity have overshot to the point of causing despair. That one’s race or country or species aren’t reliably wonderful (no doubt true) isn’t the same thing as them being the worst thing ever.
Another aspect is that right-wingers get angry. Left-wingers get angry too, but their goals are so large and absolute that they also get sad.
Also, I think left-wingers didn’t used to have the inclination towards depression, or at least the earlier pro-labor, pro-civil rights bunch don’t strike me as being especially unhappy.
I think depression is the wrong word there. Too clinical, too enduring. I think you would be on stronger footing to use optimism and pessimism as strategies for thrive/survive; happiness and sadness are the feedback mechinisms letting you know if you are using the right strategy:
optimistic and wrong = failed expectations-> unhappy
optimistic and right = opportunity taken and paid off->happy
Regarding: “rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.”
My suggestion would be that politcal beliefs in general are for optimizing survival and fairness. Both ends of the spectrum want the world to be safe. Both ends believe in fairness. But the threats are coming from different places.
Yvain makes a major assumption in his post that in apocalyptic scenarios people turn on each other. But this is something I would say we find more in films than in real life, except in cases of insider-outsider groups, like pogroms. At the same time, it is a defining factor in a person’s political views. If we were to argue about this, we’d be arguing about politics, and I think we consider that off-limits here? Anyway, in the abstract:
It seems to me that the defining characteristic of left and right is how much authority, power, structure there needs to exist for there to also be order. “People don’t rape, kill, and steal because the government/god/[structure] stops them.” vs. “People don’t rape, kill, and steal because they don’t want to, for the most part.” So the methods of optimizing for a safe environment with these opposing views point in opposite directions. Are the structures and hierarchies holding our society together, or are they its biggest threat? Build them up, or tear them down? Obviously, there are more moderate positions.
Basically, these are not safe vs. unsafe, but about the perception of where that source of danger will be found.
Regarding your last two points: “happiness is what happens when things are going well, depression is what happens when things aren’t” and “the world is basically dangerous” etc.
Thinking makes it so. A person on the right perceives their enemies as far away, and weaker because their idea of an enemy is likely a foreigner in another country without a large military. They never have to personally interact with those they consider enemies (unless left leaning citizens qualify). A person on the left perceives their enemies as nearby, and stronger: the police, the courts, possibly many societal institutions and corporations, capitalism, sexism, their boss, etc. which are at least seen if not experienced in some aspect or another.
What I would suggest is, the closer and stronger your political opposition is perceived to be, the less likely you will be happy, and vice versa.
Both ends of the spectrum want the world to be safe. Both ends believe in fairness. But the threats are coming from different places.
Exactly. Sometimes you even find both sides using the same applause lights, but with different political connotations.
For example, “freedom”. Everyone agrees that freedom is a good thing. Only for some people, “freedom” means freedom from opressive government, which can be achieved by a free market. And for other people, “freedom” means freedom from a demanding employer, which can be achieved by a government regulation and taxation. Both sides will argue that their definition of “freedom” is the right one.
Below that, there is perhaps the same emotion. We all would prefer to be not commanded, not pushed around, free to choose how we spend our days. It’s just how we evaluate the risks, based on our experiences and the model of the world.
It seems that the Right/happy Left/angry-and-depressed distinction may have been around for a long time. The English Roundheads were infamously grim and dour, the Cavaliers laughing and cheerful.
As for Yvain’s post, he is buried so deep in Whig history (believing that the whole arc of history is leading to his own leftist beliefs taking over the world) that his whole thought process is absurdly provincial and hopelessly flawed. The left’s ascendance in western countries over a period of a couple centuries in no way implies that the it is destined to control the future.
The left’s ascendance in western countries over a period of a couple centuries in no way implies that the it is destined to control the future.
To be fair, western civilization is the best candidate for a singularity of some kind, and if anyone’s values got preserved (by an FAI or just high-tech conquering all opposition) it would probably be whoever fooms first (unless we all die instead.)
I think that Yvain is reversing good times and bad times. In the EEA people generally did not get their food from things that they made or planted. They got their food from things that they hunted or searched for. Which means that they didn’t have anything to defend in bad times. So this is the way I see it:
Survival Mode/: What you enter when you see a reasonably clear way to survival. You continue to do things the way you know that it works. You try to preserve the status quo, because the status quo is to your advantage. You accumulate wealth if you can because 1)there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll get to use it and 2)it might help you stay in your good situation longer. You are ready to fight other tribes to keep your place in the sun (or more realistically your place by the water), but you don’t go looking for trouble. etc
Exploration Mode/Normality: What you enter when times get tough. You move on (call it “explore” if you think that sounds better) because the place you are can’t sustain you or is dangerous. You look for new sources of food and other things you need because the old ones are not enough. You don’t care about many material things because anything you keep will encumber you, thus reducing your chances of surviving even further. etc
It seems to me that a similar analogy can be made with happiness, where happiness is thrive mode and depression is survive mode.
People who are depressed aren’t very productive. Depression is no useful survival mode.
Yvain theorizes in the post how someone who formulates a heuristic for themselves early on in their life that says “the world is basically dangerous” will become a right-winger, and someone with the opposite heuristic will become a left-winger, and this explains why people divide so easily into political categories.
I don’t think that people are so easily devideable into political categories.
I can imagine plenty of situations where passively being sad and not going out and attempting to be productive are safer. Maybe depression is an alternative to cabin fever? Long hard winters are easier to survive if you’re too depressed to go out and possibly freeze to death and instead stay in your cave/yurt eating the most easily accessible saved food. That would explain the evolutionary value of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
Another thought from hypothesis land: maybe a little depression is a chance to retire and regroup, but in the original environment, there was more that would pull people out of depression—social contact and work that obviously needs to be done.
This is about mild-to-moderate depression, though. Major depression seems to be different, and not good for anything.
I wonder what the highest rate of occurrence something can have and still be an evolutionarily detrimental spandrel, rather than an evolved response we just don’t understand.
I have a few pieces of knowledge that I think could be somehow synthesized to form a really powerful idea with a lot of implications.
In Yvain’s excellent “A Thrive/Survive Theory of the Political Spectrum” (read it if you haven’t already!) he makes a really compelling argument that “rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.”
It seems to me that a similar analogy can be made with happiness, where happiness is thrive mode and depression is survive mode. I’m not sure how widely accepted this theory is, but it seems kind of intuitive and obvious to me—happiness is what happens when things are going well, depression is what happens when things aren’t, and the two moods must serve some sort of evolutionary function, right?
There is a direct relationship between happiness and political ideology, where the more right-wing you are, the happier you are, i.e. far right people are the happiest, far left people are the least happy. (I got this information from the General Social Survey by correlating the happiness and political ideology variables, but it was a few months ago when I did this, and the website is really confusing and I can’t figure out how to display it the way I had it before, let alone link to it. So maybe you’ll have to take my word for it.)
So it seems like the strategy you’re using for yourself is the opposite of the strategy you’re using for society, or something? Yvain theorizes in the post how someone who formulates a heuristic for themselves early on in their life that says “the world is basically dangerous” will become a right-winger, and someone with the opposite heuristic will become a left-winger, and this explains why people divide so easily into political categories. But it seems like the reverse is in fact true? This makes sense with religiosity (believing in a loving God who will keep you safe) being correlated with right-wing beliefs and poverty (growing up in a dangerous environment where survival is uncertain) being correlated with left-wing beliefs.
I don’t really know what to make of this, but it seems like it could be really important.
Depression causes inactivity, helplessness, not dealing with problems, cutting social ties, and sometimes suicidal behavior. It’s hard to see how any of that could be evolutionarily beneficial in any scenario. (Which is not to say it’s not an evolved behavior due to some different mechanism, like being tied to otherwise beneficial genes.)
I’ve often thought the symptoms of depression seem similar to those of hibernation. Depressed people usually sleep more, decrease activity levels, cease romantic/sexual efforts, withdraw/hide from others, etc. That behavior pattern seems like it might be adaptive during temporary hardships (drought/famine/winter, etc.) where you really are helpless to change circumstances, and nothing you can plausibly do would help.
If depression was hibernation-like you’d expect oversleeping and undereating. Melancholic depression causes insomnia and undereating, atypical depression causes oversleeping and overeating.
Yvain makes some good points, but I don’t buy his argument, in part because I think that a single political dimension (aka one left-right axis) is inadequate for any in-depth analysis.
I don’t agree that happiness is necessarily associated with the thrive mode and depression—with the survival mode. People who are engaged in a struggle to survive are rarely depressed, they don’t have time for this. On the same “intuitive” basis I can argue that sloth/ennui is the consequence of the thrive mode and motivation/energy is the consequence of the survival mode.
I don’t believe that “direct relationship between happiness and political ideology”. I’ll need to look at the data and at how does the analysis control for other variables before I might be convinced it’s real. However I do have a strong prior that this is not so.
We already know that a political dichotomy is game-theoretically mandated by the U.S. voting system. Which means we don’t particularly need a separate and additional explanation for political dichotomies, and so I’d want independent evidence of other explanations.
Maybe depression is like the appendix, or a congenital skin rash, or food allergies, or male nipples, or the optic nerve being in backwards, or ingrown toenails, or the coccyx. In other words, sometimes evolution is just stupid.
The implication being that the coccyx is useless? How so?
Indeed, Wikipedia says the coccyx is far from useless in humans:
I don’t think the US political system explains that much, countries with different systems also have political dichotomies, and how much they correspond to the US ones has more to do with culture and society than with political institutions.
It seems to me that some people really are stuck in a “survival mode” and some people are stuck in an “exploratory mode”, and that this influences many of their life choice. The former will approach possible changes by saying: “This is far too dangerous. The life is not perfect as it is now, but we can manage.” The latter will approach possible changes by saying: “Change is exciting. What could possibly go wrong? You’re a chicken!”
This is probably a consequence of some evolutionary algorithm: “When in danger, play it safe, when in abundance, explore new possibilities.” Except that one does not update immediately on their current situation, it takes more time, and perhaps the situation at some specific age has a long-lasting impact. For humans, their setting influences how they perceive the world, so even if the original situation is gone, they can filter their inputs to make themselves believe the situation remains.
Another, independent part is how these modes map to political opinions. Seems to me this is not completely straightforward, and may be just a consequence of a specific political system, or a specific history of political alliances in the past. -- E.g. it happened a hundred years ago, for random reasons, that many Blues adopted a “survival mode” agenda and many Greens adopted an “exploratory mode” agenda. This created a positive feedback loop, because young people preferring the “survival mode” were more attracted to the Blue politics, and young people preferring the “exploratory mode” were more attracted to the Green politics, and in turn they made the agenda of the parties more extremely “pro-survival” or “pro-exploration”.
The specific mapping of “right: survival; left: exploration” may be correct for USA, but it cannot be generalized for the whole world. Which suggests that the mapping is either arbitrary, or shaped by some US-specific factors.
For example, in Slovakia the communists recently won the election using the slogan: “People deserve certainties.” (google translate). On the other hand, decriminalization of marijuana and homosexual marriage are considered right-wing topics in Slovakia (more precisely, they are topics of one specific right-wing party; all other parties avoid these topics completely). So to me it seems that the political left is fully “survival mode” here (Communists, Slovak Nationalists), and the political right is divided into “survival mode” (Catholics, Hungarian Nationalists) and “exploratory mode” (Libertarians). I am using the words “left” and “right” here to reflect how those parties identify themselves or who are their typical coalition partners.
Why is it so? Well, we had a history of communist rule here, that’s the difference. Seems to me that the “survival mode” people are scared of the present, and attracted to some part of history which they idealize. So if a country did not have a communist history, communism will be attractive only to “exploratory mode” people; but if a country had a communist history, “survival mode” people will be attracted to it, simply because it is a history. They remember the mandatory First May parades with red flags, strong rule of The Party, mandatory employment, newspapers without scandals… and they want it all back. (In a different country, the same type of people would want mandatory prayers, strong rule of The Church, church-approved materials without scandals, etc.) On the other hand, the whole “free market” concept is an exciting new thing here, which attracts the “exploratory mode” people. Free markets, freedom for homosexuals, freedom to use marijuana… all these things appeal to the “exploratory mode” people, so they get groupped politically together.
Which leads me to conclusion, that there is a difference between “survival mode” people and “exploratory mode” people, and this difference is reflected in the structure of political parties. However, the connection between a specific mode and a specific party seems to be mostly a historical coincidence (either “we already tried this, but never tried that” or “hundred years ago, our enemies joined the Blues, so we had to join the Greens”).
I don’t know how well it generalizes outside the US, but here, I would expect the correlation between happiness and ideology to reflect the fact that the political right effectively employs the just world fallacy in far more explicit ways than the political left. More advocacy of wealth redistribution is correlated with thinking that the status quo distribution is unfair. Plus, In the US specifically, both old-fashioned Calvinist determinism and modern prosperity gospelism are associated more with the right than the left.
People who think either or both of “the status quo is better than the alternative” or “it’ll all even out in the afterlife” are likely to be happier than people who think the world as it is is unjust.
I’ve noticed a depressive tendency on the left, but I think it might be an accidental bad strategy.
Please take this as my observations which may be shaped by what I choose to read.
It seems to me that left wingers have a habit of having every bad thing in the world remind them of every other bad thing. This may be a lack of respect for specialization, or it may be a side effect of competition for mind space, where everyone is trying to recruit everyone else for their preferred cause.
I also think that efforts to puncture grandiosity have overshot to the point of causing despair. That one’s race or country or species aren’t reliably wonderful (no doubt true) isn’t the same thing as them being the worst thing ever.
Another aspect is that right-wingers get angry. Left-wingers get angry too, but their goals are so large and absolute that they also get sad.
Also, I think left-wingers didn’t used to have the inclination towards depression, or at least the earlier pro-labor, pro-civil rights bunch don’t strike me as being especially unhappy.
I think depression is the wrong word there. Too clinical, too enduring.
I think you would be on stronger footing to use optimism and pessimism as strategies for thrive/survive; happiness and sadness are the feedback mechinisms letting you know if you are using the right strategy:
optimistic and wrong = failed expectations-> unhappy
optimistic and right = opportunity taken and paid off->happy
pessimistic and wrong = missed chances->unhappy
pessimistic and right = danger avoided
Regarding: “rightism is what happens when you’re optimizing for surviving an unsafe environment, leftism is what happens when you’re optimized for thriving in a safe environment.”
My suggestion would be that politcal beliefs in general are for optimizing survival and fairness. Both ends of the spectrum want the world to be safe. Both ends believe in fairness. But the threats are coming from different places.
Yvain makes a major assumption in his post that in apocalyptic scenarios people turn on each other. But this is something I would say we find more in films than in real life, except in cases of insider-outsider groups, like pogroms. At the same time, it is a defining factor in a person’s political views. If we were to argue about this, we’d be arguing about politics, and I think we consider that off-limits here? Anyway, in the abstract:
It seems to me that the defining characteristic of left and right is how much authority, power, structure there needs to exist for there to also be order. “People don’t rape, kill, and steal because the government/god/[structure] stops them.” vs. “People don’t rape, kill, and steal because they don’t want to, for the most part.” So the methods of optimizing for a safe environment with these opposing views point in opposite directions. Are the structures and hierarchies holding our society together, or are they its biggest threat? Build them up, or tear them down? Obviously, there are more moderate positions.
Basically, these are not safe vs. unsafe, but about the perception of where that source of danger will be found.
Regarding your last two points: “happiness is what happens when things are going well, depression is what happens when things aren’t” and “the world is basically dangerous” etc.
Thinking makes it so. A person on the right perceives their enemies as far away, and weaker because their idea of an enemy is likely a foreigner in another country without a large military. They never have to personally interact with those they consider enemies (unless left leaning citizens qualify). A person on the left perceives their enemies as nearby, and stronger: the police, the courts, possibly many societal institutions and corporations, capitalism, sexism, their boss, etc. which are at least seen if not experienced in some aspect or another.
What I would suggest is, the closer and stronger your political opposition is perceived to be, the less likely you will be happy, and vice versa.
Exactly. Sometimes you even find both sides using the same applause lights, but with different political connotations.
For example, “freedom”. Everyone agrees that freedom is a good thing. Only for some people, “freedom” means freedom from opressive government, which can be achieved by a free market. And for other people, “freedom” means freedom from a demanding employer, which can be achieved by a government regulation and taxation. Both sides will argue that their definition of “freedom” is the right one.
Below that, there is perhaps the same emotion. We all would prefer to be not commanded, not pushed around, free to choose how we spend our days. It’s just how we evaluate the risks, based on our experiences and the model of the world.
It seems that the Right/happy Left/angry-and-depressed distinction may have been around for a long time. The English Roundheads were infamously grim and dour, the Cavaliers laughing and cheerful.
As for Yvain’s post, he is buried so deep in Whig history (believing that the whole arc of history is leading to his own leftist beliefs taking over the world) that his whole thought process is absurdly provincial and hopelessly flawed. The left’s ascendance in western countries over a period of a couple centuries in no way implies that the it is destined to control the future.
To be fair, western civilization is the best candidate for a singularity of some kind, and if anyone’s values got preserved (by an FAI or just high-tech conquering all opposition) it would probably be whoever fooms first (unless we all die instead.)
I think that Yvain is reversing good times and bad times. In the EEA people generally did not get their food from things that they made or planted. They got their food from things that they hunted or searched for. Which means that they didn’t have anything to defend in bad times. So this is the way I see it:
Survival Mode/: What you enter when you see a reasonably clear way to survival. You continue to do things the way you know that it works. You try to preserve the status quo, because the status quo is to your advantage. You accumulate wealth if you can because 1)there’s a reasonable chance that you’ll get to use it and 2)it might help you stay in your good situation longer. You are ready to fight other tribes to keep your place in the sun (or more realistically your place by the water), but you don’t go looking for trouble. etc
Exploration Mode/Normality: What you enter when times get tough. You move on (call it “explore” if you think that sounds better) because the place you are can’t sustain you or is dangerous. You look for new sources of food and other things you need because the old ones are not enough. You don’t care about many material things because anything you keep will encumber you, thus reducing your chances of surviving even further. etc
People who are depressed aren’t very productive. Depression is no useful survival mode.
I don’t think that people are so easily devideable into political categories.
I can imagine plenty of situations where passively being sad and not going out and attempting to be productive are safer. Maybe depression is an alternative to cabin fever? Long hard winters are easier to survive if you’re too depressed to go out and possibly freeze to death and instead stay in your cave/yurt eating the most easily accessible saved food. That would explain the evolutionary value of Seasonal Affective Disorder.
There are more people with SAD who get depressed in the spring than in early winter or the darkest part of winter.
Another thought from hypothesis land: maybe a little depression is a chance to retire and regroup, but in the original environment, there was more that would pull people out of depression—social contact and work that obviously needs to be done.
This is about mild-to-moderate depression, though. Major depression seems to be different, and not good for anything.
I wonder what the highest rate of occurrence something can have and still be an evolutionarily detrimental spandrel, rather than an evolved response we just don’t understand.
If the harm can be something that only occurs under some circumstances that didn’t obtain in the EEA, 100%