Human Nature Is Misunderstood

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My Diabolical Social Experiment

“Dr. Hall, is there extra credit in this class?”

“Yes and no. Let me explain.”

Every semester, I’ve come to expect this question from students. I loathe the way USian education systems put pressure on students to care more about the scores they earn on assessments than they incentivise students into healthy learning practices, but that’s a conversation for another time.

Extra credit in my class comes in only one form: a simple choice at the end of each exam that students are invited to make. Here are the rules:

1) Choose 2 points or 5 points.

2) Students will receive the amount they select so long as no more than 10% of the class chooses the 5-point option.

3) If more than 10% of the class chooses the 5-point option, then no one in the class receives the extra credit amount they’ve selected.

For example, in a class of 50 students, five students may select 5 points, and those five students will receive five extra credit points. The remaining 45 students who selected 2 points will receive those two points. However, if six students choose the 5-point option, no one in the class, including the students who selected 2 points, will receive extra credit.

In nearly a decade of running this extra-credit experiment, I’ve only had two classes (I average four classes taught per year) earn extra credit on all their exams. Generally, a class earns the extra credit once and then exceeds the 5-point threshold on each subsequent exam.

Of course, the only way to guarantee extra credit points on each exam is for everyone to select the 2-point option. This week’s newsletter isn’t about the mechanics of game theory, but about what this experiment finally crystallized for me about human nature and how we confront some of the biggest challenges in anti-indigenous civilizations.

The Human Nature Cookie

If I could teach only two courses for the rest of my academic career, one would be a course I have yet to teach, and the other would be a course I used to teach but haven’t since leaving WVU.

I’m currently working on developing a wild food course at my current institution, which would make me incredibly happy (I also low-key want to teach an ecology and bioethics course through the lens of sci-fi novels like Jurassic Park and Dune). That’s the course I want to teach, but haven’t yet.

At WVU, my favorite course to teach was a seminar course titled “Humanity and Nature.” This course was modeled after one of the most influential books in my life, My Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. The book is somewhat difficult to explain. There’s a 12-year-old girl troubled by how messed up the world is, who meets a telapathic gorilla named Ishmael, who helps her think through the roots of [anti-indigenous] civilization to explain why humanity is in such a mess.

In the seminar I taught, we read broadly across genres of literature to answer a similar question: “How’d we get here?”

What Ishmael did for me, I tried to facilitate for students in the class. The ills of human society are not, in fact, rooted in an intractable human nature, but in the design of a given society. In other words, the outcomes of a human society are primarily rooted in the behaviors that society rewards and discourages.

The United States of America is, and has always been, controlled by people like Trump, Musk, Bezos, and McConnell, particularly by design. These are the men the founding fathers had in mind, who would and should be in power. Everything about how they conceived of the structure of this country ensures that people like them would have the most straightforward path to power.

That reality reveals that, rather than humanity being inscrutably greedy — as so many people like to think — the widespread greed we observe is more a product of the societies humans have constructed. The scale of violence, depravity, and systemic suffering billions experience daily is incredibly new to our species, given our 250,000 years of existence.

The Human Nature Cookie ended up being the visual representation of the range of behaviors humans are capable of, and helped me and (I hope) students understand the point I was trying to make. Our problems are not instinctive; they are cultural, and the latter is much easier to change than the former.

Are We Really Screwed?

Now, I said easier, not easy. Changing human culture is incredibly difficult; about as easy as holding one’s breath longer than a sperm whale. Nevertheless, the problems we face can change incredibly quickly, at the speed of pop culture.

What I learned from teaching Humanity and Nature was that addressing overconsumption is not about making people less greedy; it’s about designing a society that strongly discourages greedy behavior. What I’ve also learned over the years of studying this problem is that most people raised in AICs find it impossible to imagine a human society that discourages greed.

“That’s just who we are as humans.”

“We’re just inherently selfish and greedy.”

“We’ve always been this way.”

Humans have always had the capacity for greed, selfishness, and collective violence, but we have not always acted on such at the same level as in the last 10,000 or so years. And during that interim, human societies have developed stories, both supernatural and pseudo-scientific, to explain the outcomes of our societal structure as inherent and inevitable.

Stories like Adam and Eve and The Tragedy of the Commons — one religious, the other secular — are both rooted in the myth that humans cannot escape our nature as awful. Moreover, these stories’ purpose is to grant a specific demographic of humanity with power over others, lest humanity completely devolve and be destroyed. The Adam and Eve story villainizes women, giving men power over them, and the Tragedy of the Commons story villainizes the masses, favoring a ruling class.

However, just like all human cultures, these ideas are constructed and persist only as long as people accept them as true. The evidence to support who is inherently at fault is flimsy at best. More importantly, though, are the counternarratives that offer alternative accounts.

My favorite counternarrative for the Adam and Eve creation story is Skywoman Falling, as told by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. The first time I read this story, I cried. If you’ve read this story, the reason for my emotional response is obvious. If you haven’t read this story, you’ll understand why I cried immediately.

My unlearning of the inherent values of AICs has come from learning more about the myriad Indigenous cultures of the land I occupy. This isn’t a coincidence, especially given the half-millennia history of USian culture being antithetical to every Indigenous culture it encounters. The former demands the assimilation or annihilation of all Indigenous cultures whose land AICs covet, which is to say any and all land.

Indigenous peoples are by no means perfect or utopian, but they operate on a set of morals and beliefs that result in vastly different outcomes at all scales.

The key lesson I want students to take away from my extra credit is this: The best way to guarantee enough of what you want is to give up as much as you could receive.

An individual student could select 5 points instead of 2, but each who makes that choice risks the prosperity of the entire class. Tragedy of the Commons predicts the outcome I’ve observed over the last decade of my teaching, but the mechanism it suggests is wrong.

My class’s failure to always receive some extra credit is a matter of the culture they were raised in, rather than inescapable human greed. Or at least that’s what I choose to believe.

Almost without fail, the students who take advantage of the higher point extra credit offer are those who feel underprepared or at risk of earning a lower-than-desired letter grade in my class. Very rarely do the students who regularly engage in class and complete their work select the 5-point option.

Desperation is a terrible state for any living being. We are far from our best selves when desperate, and in that state, we do things we know are wrong to meet a threat we believe cannot be defeated any other way.

Desperation is USian culture, and that culture has many relatives across the planet. Ishmael describes these cultures as having two universals: 1) The people believe they are inherently flawed (the Adam and Eve creation story), and 2) All the food is under lock and key. In other words, humanity is hopelessly doomed from the start, and thus, to control despotism, essential elements must be controlled.

But the Skywoman Falling story is not imbued with the inherent greed and despotism ascribed to our species. The natural order of things is not dependent on human management, but rather on humans finding their place in a world that is already rich without their presence. Our value in the world is determined by how good a relative we are to others, not how expertly and efficiently we manage our inferiors.

We need to learn to see material wealth and power on the plate and say, “No thanks, I have enough.”

The Wild Kitchen and “enough”.

Nothing teaches you the meaning of enough like harvesting and processing your own food. The third most exhausted I’ve ever been in my life — besides football practice in the summer — was the time I stayed up until 4 AM cleaning fish my dad caught the morning before in Hianus Port, CT.

We came home to Maryland after only 3 hours of fishing early that morning, landing 150 small-ish (but still edible) spots and croakers. It was the most amazing time until it wasn’t, and by 3:30 AM, I was literally crying with fatigue and frustration as I tried to clean all the fish before my bus ride back to WV.

I went home with about 35 of those fish and maybe ate 5 of them.

It was a tremendous waste of time, energy, and the lives of those relatives. I’m ashamed to think of how wasteful and awful I was. What harvesting and processing those fish taught me on a visceral level was a keen sense of the labor it takes to feed oneself.

Two years ago, I harvested two bucklings on the penultimate day of hunting season. I was exhausted for a week afterwards from all the skinning, butchering, grinding, seasoning, and packaging of those relatives and vowed never to process two deer at the same time without significant help.

With wild food, enough is not determined by the sale price of the thing you want, but by the labor it will take to get what you want. In point of fact, so is the decision to purchase something with money, as money is supposed to represent the value of our labor, but the mechanics of that relationship are not always immediately coherent in the same way that being elbow deep in the thoracic cavity of a deer is.

Every day in fall, I look out into my backyard and see fox squirrels frolicking and think, “Man, I’d love some buttermilk fried squirrel tonight.” Most days, however, what stops me from grabbing my blow gun or air rifle is the other thought, “But do I really have time/energy to skin and clean a squirrel right now? Nope.”

Recognizing the privilege that comes with having more fish than you know what to do with and access to small game in your backyard, my challenge to push back from the table of possible abundance is directed at folks like me and you, dear reader.

We have a responsibility to acknowledge the labor that supplies the most resource-intensive activity we engage in: our food. Doing so creates a better relationship with many aspects of our humanity and opens up opportunities for us to help others who should have the same opportunities, but don’t because of a society that incentivizes greed.

Speaking of doing it yourself…

NEW ON YOUTUBE!

Why Butchering Your Own Deer Makes You a Better Hunter

This episode was one of my favorites to put together because it feels like I’m beginning to pull from previous content and deliver value rooted in earlier episodes and ideas I’ve been sharing on this platform over the years.

If you hunt, or are thinking about hunting, I strongly recommend you consider being your own butcher. The WHY is what this video is all about, but the series also has videos on HOW to butcher an entire deer. Check it out and let me know what you think!

Thanks for reading!

-Jonathan