The Problem

Consider a human being, who possesses at a point in time various desires, impulses, and habits—various “forces”—each which, if taken in isolation, would incline them towards some actions; towards some “movement” in some “vector” or direction in the space of possible actions.

Likely these forces conflict with each other: hunger suggests they eat now, but work demands their immediate attention; perhaps they have in mind something they’d like to say to someone, but at the same time desire to not make a scene; perhaps they’d like to quit their job but for various reasons cannot. Our imagined person may not even be aware of all the forces motivating them, or of the fact they are in conflict; certainly we have all had the experience of being agitated by hunger without realizing it, say, or that we might be discontent in a job or relationship well before we allow ourselves to consider quitting it.

Schematically we get something like a force diagram in physics.

This analogy can be followed a bit: person under the influence of many contradictory forces is likely to experience a “decision paralysis”; the vectors of their desires cancel each other and render overall action impossible.

But unlike simple physical forces, we cannot sensibly “add” these desires to determine some net direction of motion. What then is “Newton’s Second Law” for human nature? In other words:

How is it then determined, given a number of conflicting desires, what a person actually does?

I say “how is it determined?” because, while we might from the outside view our character as deciding to do everything they wind up doing, from the inside it rarely feels this way. Quite a few of our actions proceed entirely by habit—we carry out our duties and chores almost by habit, we drive by rote, we put one foot in front of the other almost involuntarily. Of course at times we do consciously decide, but of these decisions, many are merely “solving” the problem posed by the conflicting vectors before us—perhaps it makes more sense to eat now and then do an errand later than v.v.; perhaps we put off bringing up a grievance until it occurs again; perhaps we alter our route to avoid some traffic on the road. Even these kinds of decisions occur by a nearly-unconscious evaluation of the options rather than real conscious thought or, especially, moral consideration.

But of course there are always the big decisions, where more serious faculties must be brought to bear. How do you decide when to quit a job, or which job to take? To quit a relationship, or ask a person out? To move cities, to undertake some political activity, to escalate a conflict, to express anger? These decisions usually take a long and fraught deliberation. And often we wind up waiting around for some external sign to cue us in one direction or the other, for lack of an internal decision framework capable of arriving at a conclusion on its own.

These kinds of questions constitute the “one-body problem” of human nature: how do people work? What forces move us to action and inaction, and how do we react under the effect of these forces?

Any answer to this question will be some kind of descriptive model or theory of human nature. It won’t, on its own, tell us what is good or right, but it will in some way provide a language to predict behaviors, and more importantly, to explain why we do what we do.

The Hierarchy of Needs

How is it determined what a person actually does?

Here is one model: we decide on the basis of a “hierarchy of needs”, something like Maslow’s. Certain needs, desires, or inclinations trump others in a stack-rank order.

But, I think, the categories are not exactly Maslow’s, and the process of ranking needs and desires is often difficult. We do not always know the nature of our own needs or desires, and can easily wind up faced with many competing “forces” acting on us with no easy way to weigh between them.

If I had to guess at the operational hierarchy of human nature, on the basis of my personal experience and observation, it would look something like this:

My version is more like a “hierarchy of safety” than ”… of needs”. “Autonomy” means being safe to bear one’s own opinions and beliefs and to speak and act on them; we could subdivide it further into “autonomy of thought”, “autonomy of speech”, and “autonomy of actions”. “Status” refers to one’s position in the social hierarchy, which may be seen as a safety from exclusion—to entitlements, attention, and respect—as well as a safety from disrespect and emotional abuse. “Connection” here is something like Maslow’s original “self-actualization”. I think of this as including intimacy, artistic expression, and acceptance into a role in a community; broadly it entails “becoming a part of a larger whole”¹, and could also be thought of as a safety from disconnection or alienation.

There is certainly some truth to the linear arrangement of the hierarchy, even if the exact categories aren’t right. Anyone who has felt uncertain about their basic physiological needs or physical safety will be know that these become an obsession. I’ve personally spent only a few months on the brink of not knowing where my food was going to come from (an entirely self-inflicted situation), and even that was enough to become completely preoccupied with food and frugality: cutting costs obsessively, chasing coupons, skipping meals, etc. Something similar happens for physical safety, social safety, esteem, and actualization: a person subjected to violence will be defensive and reactive; a person subjected to abuse will be prone to reacting strongly to triggers; a person subjected to a low social status will obsessively seek attention and validation. The need for connection seems to open abruptly around puberty, leaving many a middle schooler with a suddenly-gaping pit to fill, from which follows the adolescent preoccupations with attention, romance, sex, and artistic expression.

We can make some improvements to this model. First, the pyramid shape hardly means anything, and to my eye it makes more sense to turn it upside down. In this view we can interpret the size of each level as approximately representing the freedom entailed by the pursuit of that need—a person whose physiological needs are not met is extremely constrained and unfree, while a person whose needs are all met is in principle free to do anything they want.

But the pyramid shape will just get in the way as we proceed. We may as well arrange the needs along a line:

This mere ranking of needs is too simple a model to be very useful. Some additional epicycles are called for.

Timescales

Let us first distinguish short-term and long-term needs.

We can observe that the short-term timescales of each need in the hierarchy tend to be prioritized in hierarchy-order: short-term physiological needs (food, sleep) can necessitate risking one’s physical safety, people sacrifice their autonomy (e.g. in an abusive workplace, or when being mugged) when the alternative is physical harm or worse, people put up with low social status when the alternative is abuse, etc.

Likewise for long-term needs: how does, say, long-term access to food weigh against long-term physical harm? Here I think of the villagers in The Seven Samurai, who choose to recruit the help of the samurai to fight against bandits rather than have their food be stolen at the end of the season. We see a long-term physiological need superseding the fear of violence, and also superseding the status- and autonomy-risk entailed by the unknown samurais (who might themselves by thieves or rapists or tyrants, though it turns out well for the villagers in the end). So long-term needs may be said to follow the same ranking amongst themselves.

Now, how do short-term needs stack against long-term needs? What will a person trade away to avoid starvation in the future, say? Not their immediate physical safety—they’ll likely hold out for some unknown providence. But they likely will suffer mistreatment: if you don’t know how you’re going to feed yourself through the winter you will likely take any job, regardless of how unpleasant. What will a person do to avoid the risk of physical harm in the future? In general they won’t suffer abuse or a loss of their autonomy in the present—I think of a bully, who, if you allow them to dictate your actions, will likely harm you in the future; I also think of the threats made by Muslims against portrayals of Muhammed, which are considered by others to be an overreach, violating their autonomy of speech. But one might tolerate a lowered social status to stave off future harm.

Roughly it appears the “long-term” timescale of each need is about on par with the “short-term” need two levels down, giving a need vs. priority relationship like the following:

Escalation

According to the model so far, the need for autonomy should supersede the need for physical safety—yet it is the case that people whose autonomy is threatened will risk their lives to re-assert it; history is full of examples of rebellions and revolts to prove this point. Likewise it is the case that a has been denied social status will eventually escalate in some way—though it is not as clear that what is wagered is the next step down the hierarchy, autonomy. We may even identify the act of asking out a romantic prospect as a refusal to tolerate disconnection—staking social status, risking embarrassment, to assert a need which has gone unmet. What’s going on here?

The hierarchy of needs on its own would predict that we more-fundamental needs supersede less-fundamental ones. But evidently there is a second mechanism by which a need which is repeatedly unmet escalates in priority—we value the right to assert a need even more highly than the need itself.

In many cases these “escalations” are expressions of anger. When safety is repeatedly denied, at any level, we eventually retaliate, risking our safety at a more fundamental level while threatening the offending party’s safety as well. These, therefore, are “two-body problems”, and I will treat them more thoroughly later.

The obvious example is “dueling culture”: a perceived disrespect escalates quickly to a wager of physical danger and death itself. Of course, some people are more prone to escalating more readily than others—to be able to walk away from an offense is a virtue and can be rare, especially in the young; it is easy to imagine the kind of young man who starts a fight at every perceived disrespect, and we do not think highly of him. That we tend by nature to escalate does not make escalation good.

At this point I cannot help but think of the primordial story of anger, The Iliad, as a kind of prototype of all such escalations-over-disrespect. Its subject is explicitly named to be rage of Achilles and its plot is driven directly by Achilles’ escalations of his conflict with King Agamemnon from the level of social status (being a conflict over entitlements to the spoils of war—the relative ranking of king and the greatest warrior) to the level of autonomy (the question of whether Agamemnon can give Achilles orders, with Achilles eventually asserting his autonomy by sitting out of the war entirely).

As another example, consider the sequence of events leading up to the American Revolution. The American Revolution was not a revolution by a starving people—it may be the case that “every society is three meals away from chaos”, that “bread and circuses” can sedate any rebellious populace, etc.; that famine famously leads swiftly to revolution is simply the need for physiological safety superseding the need for physical safety. But the American Revolution arrived at violence by another course: as an escalation of injuries at less-essential levels of the hierarchy, when denied recourse for those injuries. The original offenses were largely at the level of social status: legislation like the Stamp and Townshend Acts treated colonists like lower-class citizens. The colonists protested first by asserting their equal status, as deserving of all the “rights of Englishmen” and the like, then by asserting their right to autonomy—of self-governance rather than rule by British appointees, and demanding “no taxation without representation”—and finally by escalating to physical violence and risking death itself.

Evidently there two paths to violence: the threat of physical harm is the one, but the denial of justice for violations of autonomy and status is another.

(Observed also that I am readily applying this framework to collectives and populations, not only individuals. The “one-body problem” pertains to human nature at any scale—whether a single human, a faction, or a nation.)

From these sketches it appears that “escalation” deserves one priority level higher than even a “short-term” need. Filling in our diagram:

(I don’t think it makes sense to “escalate” beyond physiological needs—I suppose at the point where your physiological needs are repeatedly not being met, you die.)

There is clearly much more to this escalation phenomena than what I’ve laid out so far. If we imagine a revolution fomenting, or a bullied kid resolving to stand up for themselves, there is a period where the right to act in anger has to be established on some grounds. They will brood or ruminate or deliberate, as the impulse for self-defense runs aground on—what? Fear of unknown consequences? Having to abandon some ideal of one’s own peacableness?

Meanwhile there are others for whom escalation comes easily; perhaps too easily. What’s the difference?

And escalation in romantic relationships seems to go in a different direction. A couple has a dispute—what has happened? One of the two has been made to feel unsafe or has not been seen, and attempts to make this known to their partner. If the information is not received and acted on, they pull away; an emotional rift has formed and may continue to widen. Eventually this can lead to a breakup. But this appears to be a giving-up of long-term connection—an escalation in the other direction, not towards violence but away from it (although relationship conflicts can and do escalate to violence too). Evidently something else is going on.

It’s also not clear to me at this point if “escalation” applies only to interpersonal relationships, or if we can make it fit in a man vs. nature context as well.

But we’ll leave these questions for now. We can return to escalation in a future discussion of the “two-body problem”.

Surrender

One more phenomenon belongs in this model.

Consider a person deprived of a need, at level of the hierarchy, which is allowed to persist or recur. The drive towards the need may eventually weaken, towards a state of learned helplessness or surrender, where the body downregulates its drive to fulfill the need.

For an extreme example, consider slavery: a person who is repeatedly denied their autonomy by the threat of physical violence may cease to assert their autonomy at all. This of course is the state the slaver would prefer—a broken and pliant worker—but to our eyes reads as evil and as a tragedy. Likewise a surrendering army may to a great extent place themselves at the mercy of the victors, ceding their autonomy or more. Or, a person who has been long been treated as low-status—ignored, scorned, mocked—will likely, over time, wind up depressed and wracked with self-loathing, and will likely self-isolate.

What I think is happening in such cases is that our innate drive to meet the needs in the hierarchy is felt as something like an “entitlement” or “birthright”—to physical safety, to our autonomy, etc. Above all we consider ourselves moral equals to others, and if they enjoy privileges then we ought to as well. But we can be disabused of this innate entitlement by repeated deprivation. The self or soul is made small; it fears contemplating the possibility that it is not the moral equal of others, but refuses to admit it. Instead it goes into retreat, into a kind of hardened or dissociated protective state, waiting for the opportunity to return.

power? being confused about our power…??

In some cases this phenomena may be cast in the language of trauma. The normal defense against deprivation of a need is fear and anger; an assertion of a boundary. But in a traumatized state the fear is somehow stuck and the anger cannot flow, instead becoming trapped in a deformed posture—not gone, but scrambled, unable to find its target, instead only able to express itself in unpredictable and often destructive ways.

Where does this “surrender” belong in our diagram? The framework, recall, is that a person will cede their safety at a lower-priority level when a higher-priority level is threatened. If they have ceased to defend a need, it must have been demoted in priority somehow. I am not sure how far this demotion goes, and it probably varies by case. I will place it one rank below; like an escalation, which really can take arbitrarily high priority, I expect an unlearned need can become arbitrarily low in priority.

Reasserting Needs

Earlier we mentioned the need for a person to resolve to escalate in their own defense—a period of internal struggle which may look like seething, brooding, or philosophizing.

The same sort of resolution seems to be required to reassert a need which has been surrendered. A person will become preoccupied with working out the moral grounds for their self-defense, and with convincing others of their entitlement to safety, often to the point of obsession.

… bullying, breakups…

Many examples of this kind of philosophical asserting of needs may be found in political movements; it may be the case that almost all politics is driven by this process. Consider the Civil Rights movement and the first few waves of feminism: both sought to restore essential autonomy and status-safety to populations long deprived of these needs, and whose disenfranchisement from those needs had become a deeply-rooted truth in the collective culture.

Much of the culture war discourse of the past generation has the same character: of a population attempting to argue the overall culture into respecting one its basic needs. That this characterizes MeToo and Tumblr-era feminism is obvious—justice for sexual crimes against women has been severely underserved for most of human history; it is no surprise the collective need for physical safety (among other needs) would rapidly reassert itself as the first available moment. (These movements I think of as having been brought about by the invention of social networks, which linked together a critical mass of young women to achieve the creation of a philosophical framework sufficient to assert their need for safety.)

What may be less obvious is that the conservative/reactionary backlash to social justice can be explained as the same phenomena: a mass assertion of the right’s rights to autonomy-of-thought and -speech in response to censorious treatment from the left. In a shouting match over, say, the question of whether “there are only two genders”, what is really being debated? Not any body of evidence, not empirical reality—but the validity of a traditional value system within which the traditional gender binary, along with its accompanying ideals, norms, and entitlements, are central—are perhaps the central moral feature of the world. The conservative position on gender, as far as I can tell, is actually this: you do not get to change my mind, and certainly not to rewrite my values, not by way of any academic or scientific argument, not unless I trust that you share those values—which I don’t. This is a defense of autonomy of thought, and per the present theory, is essentially impenetrable by anything short of violence.

The confusing thing is that the rewriting of gender frameworks by the left is essentially also a defense of autonomy—of the thought, speech, actions, and expression of people for whom the traditional binary is oppressive; an oppression which at times in history has been enforced by violence. There will never be a meeting of the mind between these factions; two defenses at the same level of the hierarchy cannot supesede one another; they must agree to disagree—must agree to use words differently, to grant each other the right to be wrong and even to be offensive.²

I’m getting ahead of myself—this is a two-body problem. Consider this a preview of the kinds of things this theory can predict.

But in fact, explaining the phenomena of modern reaction is one of my aims in developing this whole framework. Empirically, it appears to be the case that the “having one’s autonomy be respected” is more fundamental a human need than is “being in good moral standing”; the latter being merely a status-need. What has looked, from the center and left, like a turn towards “hate” by the right, is actually a psychologically-necessary defense against an a repeated failure to grant, as an axiom of interpersonal conduct, the proper distance between accepting what-someone-says and accepting their-right-to-say-it.

Something similar occurs with immigration. The conservative obsession with reversing immigration appears, to my eye, as completely unmoored from the reality of the effects of immigration (on wages, crime, jobs, etc.). But what the conservative hive-mind is really fighting for is not really a reversal of the consequences of immigration (most people prefer cheaper food!), but the right to have its needs and boundaries about this kind of thing be heard and respected at all. It recognizes—rightly I think—that the late-20th-century neoliberal capitalist paradigm offers no philosophical basis for restricting immigration in any way—only economic arguments are permissible, and the self-interested exercise of power is taboo. Furthermore liberal culture can sweep almost all arguments against immigration into the wastebasket of “racism”. But the fears around immigration are real and deep fears—of the world changing irreversibly, of crimes invited-in and unpunished, of a loss of a status and quality of life which was formerly considered a birthright—and while some of these entitlements, when seen clearly are not likely to be defensible, some are, and the conservative mind will stop at nothing to assert its right to defend them. No amount of moral condemnation can put it to rest.

At the same time, of course, the opposition to conservative immigration policy (ICE in particular) is an expression of a real fear as well. What drives this opposition is largely empathy, which so far has no place in our framework. We’ll address this later in the context of the “many-body Problem”.

Roughly it appears that the moral and philosophical discourse which aims to reassert a surrendered safety takes a priority approximately equal to that of the original need itself. Feminism, for example, started to take off when industrialization made long-term employment, and therefore food safety, imagineable for unmarried women—the discourse therefore appears to have had similar priority-rankings to long-term physical safety and autonomy.

Likely this is imprecise, but it will do for the purposes of our model. I won’t add anything to the priority-diagram—we’ll consider discourse around a need to be a part of the long-term timescale of that need.

By now we’ve covered quite a bit of distance from the simple “forces” we started with. The “one-body problem” of human nature is just as much about populations (like the American colonies) and subpopulations (women, black Americans, conservatives) as about individual people themselves.

There is quite a bit more which could be said here—in particular, escalation is a deep topic, better treated in the context of the “two-body problem”. And a few things are clearly missing from this picture. One is “empathy”, which motivates a great deal of behavior and politics—most politics is people defending other people’s needs, after all! This will be be better discussed in the context of the “many-body problem”, where I’ll also be able to say more about the distinction between populations and individuals. Another is ” intellectual curiosity” and perhaps also “novelty-seeking”—neither of these really has the same character as the sort of moral and political discourse just discussed, but are obviously important; novelty-seeking in particular seems to drive an enormous amount of human activity in the present era of short-form video. I haven’t given this much thought, though, so I’ll find a place for these later.

On top of all that the hierarchy of needs is just one model among many you could use to answer our original question of how humans determine what to do. But it will have to do for now. Let’s move on.

Love and Fear

This hierarchy of needs, with “connection” in the lowest-priority place, seems to contradict the common sense that human connection—love, community, etc.—is the right goal of human life itself. Is “connection” the lowest-priority need or the lowest? How can it be both at once?

We also ran into the contradiction above when we observed that escalation within romantic relationships leads primarily to disconnection, whereas escalation in other contexts tends to lead to violence. Somehow the role of “connection” in the hierarchy-of-needs picture seems confused.

To be continued…

See here for a discussion of the ways Maslow’s actualization actually involves “becoming part of a larger whole”. ↩
A useful heuristic to escape from culture warring is this: imagine that, instead of our modern hyper-connected world, the factions involved lived in separate towns separated by a sea, with only occasional interactions due to to trade and encounters in other towns. Each might believe privately: “those freaks across the sea use our words but mean other things, their values are not our values, we must be wary around them and must never let too much of their alien culture infect ours. Yet we must at times interact with them and we would like to avoid violence, so we must treat them respectfully to their faces and not say anything too offensive to their values.” Each would independently maintain be incentivized to norms of some minimal respect, for their own reasons, even if they privately find the other faction repulsive. What causes culture warring is the presumption we all ought to be able to agree to the same framework and to like each other—the intellectually-naive illusion that words must have single and correct meanings and that value-laden beliefs about human nature are metaphysical truths around which there can be consensus—gender may in fact be a social construct, by social constructs are real, and to disrespect another person’s social construsts to their face is a received as a violation of their autonomy. That mass consensus over such things is possible at all is, I believe, a historical anomaly, due mainly to the internet, which has us duped into believing we live in closer proximity than we do. ↩

The One-Body Problem