Have you ever sat down and thought about your values?

Values are important, motivating, and provide guidance.

I’ve done a lot of values work in therapy and find it challenging. I value many things, but prioritizing the top five to ten is difficult and dynamic.

One thing I have learned during over a decade of values work is that many human values suck.

I think a lot about universal or ‘optimum’ values

Are there ‘optimum’ human values? For my purposes, optimum is an adjective meaning most favorable or desirable. The best. In biological systems, we can think of optimum in terms of homeostasis or balance. Please see here for more on that.

An example of optimum is transportation. Can we identify an optimum mode of human transportation? Many suggest it is the bicycle:

Science of Cycling: Human Power | Exploratorium
© The bicycle is a tremendously efficient means of transportation. In fact cycling is more efficient than any other…annex.exploratorium.edu

In the case of transportation, we skipped past ‘optimum’ in pursuit of ‘better’. Now we burn jet fuel to fly around the planet. This uses more fossil fuels and creates more problems associated with that industry.

We also change our values

Change is inevitable. Everything is impermanent and evolves. Sometimes, we change toward improvement. Sometimes our pursuit of ‘better’ leads us astray. Words like improve, better, and success, are extremely subjective.

Modernity induced a key shift away from optimum values and toward money, status, and power. Currently, artificial intelligence is exacerbating this transformation.

With each technological advancement, we need to revisit our values. We are mistaken to believe that each step along the evolutionary ladder is an improvement. Rather, organisms experience increases in efficiency that facilitate new abilities. But these advancements are not always the optima.

Consider, briefly, biological respiration. An amphibian requires minimal energetic investments to oxygenate cells across moist skin. Humans, on the other hand, must breathe. While humans can be more active and grow larger and more complex, are we ‘better’?

So with evolution, knowing what is optimum is key

Humans evolved the ability to choose, which itself becomes a selection pressure. We can influence our evolution. If we want to remain extant we need to make better choices.

Valuing money, status, and power leads to our demise. To enhance evolutionary fitness we must revisit our past. In our past, we may find more optimum values to guide our future.

I will be assisting with delivering my future floating home for the next few weeks but will post when I can. Please check out my back catalog here and on The Neurodivergent Professor podcast and YouTube channel.

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You don’t have to look far to find something to complain about.

The world is full of problems.

Now, I’m no doomer. My intent is not to illuminate human suffering. Rather, I accept the Buddhist notion that there will be suffering. My issue is all the EXTRA suffering. I can’t shake the naive, hippie belief that solutions are within our reach.

When it comes to the end of the world I’m an optimist.

Isolation and ‘rugged individualism’ are a big part of the problem

I’m still wrapping my head around the concept of nonduality. I get that we are stardust. After all, I’m a huge fan of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. I believe the Big Bang is a good explanation of what probably happened to get us here. I understand ecological cycles and geologic time.

We are all connected, but I have seen little evidence of these connections in human behavior during my lifetime.

We exist in this world simultaneously as individuals and as obligate members of the human species. Many of us experience cognitive dissonance around being two places at once and I get that. This is a feature of reality we have to embrace. It’s quite literally cosmic.

We are going to have to hit ‘refresh’ on our values

Human values have shifted from the group to the individual. This ‘we to me’ transition aligns with modernity, the industrial revolution, financial systems, and religions. I continually ask, ‘What happened?’, to speculate about this transformation but we will never know.

The great value shift from kindness, connection, and cooperation toward money, status, and power has created most of our problems. The solution is a shift away from individualism and toward collectivism.

The problem is, that individualism promotes short-term fitness. Humans are hedonistic and we love a good dopamine hit. Our values shifted to maximize this. Moving back toward collectivism ain’t gonna be easy.

How do we convince ourselves that the ‘success’ of the human race over evolutionary time is more important than feeling high for a few seconds?

To move forward we have to understand our past

Winners write history.

The shift from collectivism to individualism is characterized by strong men defeating weak communities. This story gets recorded and repeated because the strong remain to tell it. Cherry picking at its’ finest.

Do we want the meaning of our existence to cater to a few men? Unfortunately, we continue to tell that story today.

We value the strong. The competitive. The winners.

We look down on the peaceful. The cooperative. The mutualisms.

Humans are so much better than this.

It’s time to move past maximizing the ‘line of cocaine dopamine bumps’ and understand the importance of delaying gratification.

Our nervous systems evolved for more complex and intimate social interaction but we are headed the other way toward simpler and less interactive social behaviors. Rugged individualism is a great leap backward and spits in the face of our evolutionary prowess.

Maybe we can stop treating life like a game of winners and losers

Winning is not better than losing. They are the same when we experience the game as a community and not as individuals.

We need to stop playing Monopoly with our DNA.

Rather than socializing the gains and privatizing the losses, we can socialize gains by being a good steward of Earth and all its inhabitants. This is the pathway toward reduced suffering. We can change our values. There is still time.

Frankly, I’m embarrassed for us if we continue to choose otherwise.

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Have you seen (or read) “2001: A Space Odyssey”?

The story opens at the time of early humans. Folks are going about their business when a ginormous monolith appears. Everyone freaks out at first, but then some develop the ability to use bones as tools.

At first, I didn’t understand that the monolith represented punctuated equilibrium. This is a phrase used by evolutionary biologists to describe a quick shift in the fossil record representing a significant change. Compare this to gradualism, characterized by the slow accumulation of small changes.

As an impatient person, I prefer punctuated equilibrium. Rather than waiting around and remaining comfortable, I’ve always been (generally) ok with quick changes toward a new condition. I don’t mind changing jobs (I’ve one it 32 times in 39 years) or homes (ten houses in 17 years). Some things, of course, I want to remain consistent, but I don’t fear change like a lot of people.

I would go so far as to say I sometimes yearn for quick change, because most changes are painfully slow. And life is short.

Mostly, though, changes happen slowly and punctuated equilibria are few and far between.

The world is in dire need of change. Do we have the time to wait around for it to happen gradually?

Can it happen gradually?

This is the question that drives me, and this article.

A built-in persistence mechanism

Not changing is good for a system to persist. We have become experts in the bait-and-switch technique where we create fraudulent mechanisms for change that don’t result in actual change but make us believe they do.

How long do we throw good money after bad, making minute alterations to existing systems in hopes that something changes? How many rounds of negative feedback evidence do we need to acquire before we stop?

Something like UBI, for example, could be a monolithic mechanism to change the global economy. But,

The risks of Punctuated Equilibrium are high

Mention to any neoclassical economist that capitalism is broken and prepare yourself for a tongue-lashing. Tell any politician that the government needs an overhaul and you may have your citizenship revoked. Tell a high-school principal that students should be learning about meditation and, well, you get the point.

People don’t like change.

Most of us fear the enemy we don’t know much more than the one we do. This explains why we stay in bad relationships, cruddy jobs, and unsuitable cities. Change is scary. But as I have mentioned in many an article, change is the underlying machinery of life. It is our DNA. That we fear change is not an excuse to avoid it.

Look, I get it, leaping into the unknown abyss is scary. But sometimes it is the only option.

Gradualism is ineffective, especially during stress

If a lion were chasing you, would you run or take some time to think about which direction to run? If you had to think about it, you’re dead.

Sometimes gradual change takes too long. Though that sounds like something Yogi Berra might have said, it’s true. Sometimes we need a change. Mostly this is because we tolerated non-change for too long.

Gradualism is about not changing. Not changing is resistance. What we resist, persists. Instead of protecting ourselves, we are going against the basic principles of biology. The universe changes. We must change with it.

If we want to change something, gradualism is not likely to work. Our problems require faster and more severe solutions. If we can’t get comfortable with discomfort we will continue to gaslight ourselves into thinking things will be ok.

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