Voltaire pretty much nailed it with:
"Ils ne se servent de la pensée que pour autoriser leurs injustices,
et emploient les paroles que pour déguiser leurs pensées"
—François-Marie Arouet--'Voltaire', Dialogue xiv. Le Chapon et la Poularde (1766).
"Men use thought only to justify their wrong doings, and employ speech only to conceal their thoughts"
From Nautil.us, September 15:
The Dark Side of Smart
Manipulative communication surrounds us. With misinformation and disinformation about the pandemic, “cheap” and “deep” fakes of elected officials, and targeted ads and emotionally exploitative social media algorithms, it can begin to feel like all communication is manipulation.
Well, as it turns out, this is the thesis of an influential paper by evolutionary biologists Richard Dawkins and John Krebs. The cynicism behind this statement can make many people uncomfortable. When we think about communicating, we tend to think about our own thoughts and feelings rather than how we might be influencing others. One major reason an evolutionary perspective on our own behavior can be so confronting is that it doesn’t take our word for why we do things. It looks at how what we do influences the two core currencies of life on earth, survival and reproduction.
One of the major selection pressures on humans was to outsmart each other, otherwise known as the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis. Niccolò Machiavelli, perhaps the most famous political thinker, endorsed using any strategies available—including cooperation, corruption, and deception—to gain status and maintain political control. According to the hypothesis, figuring out other minds is one of the most complicated things that minds can do. Look at most of the smartest animals on the planet, like monkeys, elephants, parrots, and hyenas, and you’ll see that they live in complex, rather than simple, social systems. In a herd of deer, for example, there are no shifting alliances, no outsiders coming and going from the group, and no dominance hierarchies.
We have evolution to thank for shielding us from complete self-knowledge.
For most animals living in complex social systems, including humans, eating calorie-dense food, like fruit and meat, both made the stakes of competition much higher and made us able to afford the calorically expensive brains we needed—and of course still need—for social scheming. In small human societies, for thousands of years, there were shifting alliances and status hierarchies, people who were good to cooperate with and people who most people ostracized. Now we have different sorts of status hierarchies for each identity—related to, for example, class or occupation—and a fire hose of social information layered on top of our personal relationships. And because social information was the most important possible information throughout our deep history, we cannot today pull ourselves away from it, or diminish its salience, online or off.
When minds start to figure out other minds, a lot of cognitive power gets built up that can be used for other things. Consider one of the groundbreaking insights in evolution in the last few decades, the idea of the “extended phenotype.” Evolution isn’t just acting on an individual’s characteristics but the way it interacts with the environment—including other minds. Evolution is selecting not just on the teeth and tail and claws of a beaver, but also on how well its dam keeps out water. Not just the bees’ wings and bodies but also the structure of their hive....
....MUCH MORE
