“To ape.” It’s a pejorative expression to describe mindlessly mimicking. It conveys the idea that apes like chimps and gorillas are more inclined to demonstrate such behaviours than sophisticated human beings.
In fact, the opposite is true.
As noted in a 2017 article in Science Daily, “Decades of research has shown that apes, in spite of their proverbial aping abilities, are rather poor imitators, especially when compared to human children. The imitative superiority of children has been attributed to a higher social motivation to engage others in communication and the sharing of experiences.”
Human beings are much better than ‘aping’ than their simian cousins because cumulative cultural evolution is key to our big-brained survival. A young child has to learn in short order to copy a wide range of potentially life-saving behaviours and skills, with the encouragement of its parent(s).
An added dimension is the human capacity for “prestige bias,” a tendency to learn from individuals to whom others have preferentially attended, learned or deferred. With age, parental authority gets mapped on to those presumed to be the best and brightest, or most successful. Status estimation skews our mimicry.
This represents both the glory and the tragedy of the human species. Bad, maladaptive ideas and behaviours can tumble down the generations with as much facility as good, adaptive ones - at least until selection pressure decrees otherwise. And even as adults, we show tremendous capability to unquestioningly ‘ape,’ as this disturbingly entertaining video demonstrates:
Even more surprisingly, humans will alter their perceptions - or at least the reporting of their perceptions - under peer pressure. We literally see the world differently depending on how others see the world. The Asch conformity experiment show how deeply this phenomenon runs:
When you combine this pattern of conformity with obedience to authority, the truly dark aspects of human behaviour arise, as demonstrated in the infamous experiments by Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1963.
Milgram found that 65% of the participants in his study delivered the maximum shocks; that is, kept going to the point they believed they were delivering fatal shocks to the supposed test subjects. The psychologist’s conclusion: “I would say, on the basis of having observe a thousand people in the experiment and having my own intuition shaped and informed by these experiments, that if a system of death camps were set up in the United States of the sort we had seen in Nazi Germany, one would find sufficient personnel for those camps in any medium-sized American town.”
The positive spin? 35% of participants refused to follow the directives of authority all the way through, threatening the lives of others. They would not press the button.
I started with the belief that every person who came to the laboratory was free to accept or to reject the dictates of authority. This view sustains a conception of human dignity insofar as it sees in each man a capacity for choosing his own behavior. And as it turned out, many subjects did, indeed, choose to reject the experimenter's commands, providing a powerful affirmation of human ideals.
- Stanley Milgram
Greater artists than we realize
Like others in my circle, a psychologist friend has been aghast at what’s happened over the past two years: not just the newfound readiness of liberals to uncritically parrot claims made by corporate amd state officials trafficking pharmaceutical copy, but their willingness of many to demonize those who question, to the point of endorsing endangerment of their lives and livelihoods.
In casting about for an explanation, my friend appeals to various ideas and discoveries from his discipline, including prestige bias, the ten main cognitive biases, and the Asch conformity experiment.
Belgian psychologist Desmet Matthias made a broader attempt to explain what he calls “mass formation”, a process of delusional thinking fostered by official exploitation of fear. Citing Milgram, Matthias points out that there is always a solid proportion of the population that will follow authority uncritically and unquestioningly, no matter how nonsensical the directives and information becomes.
What might the profile of today’s true believers look like in another era? An article in Le Soir, which began as the underground newspaper of the French Resistance in World War 2, supplies a sobering comparison of past and present.
Due to losses of soldiers to typhus in World War I, Germany in the 1930s and 1940s had great concern for public health. They cultivated an obsession with infectious diseases. "There was a fanatical fear of typhus spreading to the German people and its army" the Australian scientists explained.
Simultaneously, scientists reached the scientific consensus that Jews were the carriers of the disease. Therefore, to protect the population from the pandemic, a wall was built as a public health effort to contain the typhus spreaders. It was 10 feet high and 18 kilometers long. It was the "epidemic wall". In this way, the Jews of Warsaw, about one third of the entire population of the city, were confined in the neighborhood. The total number of Jews in all of Poland was 3.4 million.
When typhus cases increased in the ghetto, as was to be expected due to the crowding of people in a small space, physician Jost Walbaum, the highest health authority, reinforced the already established scientific consensus: "The Jews are overwhelmingly the carriers and disseminators of typhus infection."
- Filipe Rafaeli, Le Soir
Liberal progressives have always feared fascism arriving in jackboots. Or possibly outfitted in size 42 clown shoes and with an orange tan. But they find the idea that fascism could ever materialize wearing a face mask and holding a syringe as both risible and ridiculous. For further clarification on this point of contention, go here.
As the entire COVID narrative continues to unwind, from the effectiveness of masking to vaccines themselves, how can intelligent, educated people ‘unsee’ what’s so blindingly apparent to others to the editors of Le Soir and many others: the signature of global totalitarianism, under the guise of a forever war against an endemic virus?
The question of not seeing brings us back to apes. Give this “selective attention” test a try:
We often literally see what we are prepared to see, and no more. Any one us is quite capable of ‘hallucinating’ a person in a gorilla suit right out of existence. Or any other datum that doesn’t fit. (As Nietzche observed of the human relationship to reality, “we are much more the artist than we realize.”)
Do we hairless apes have the collective will to cultivate awareness of our highly-evolved abilities to fool ourselves? True critical thinking skills includes understanding the revelations of 20th century social psychology, and how they apply to the shifting worlds inside our skulls.
It may be that we are puppets…puppets controlled by the strings of society. But at least we are puppets with perception, with awareness. And perhaps our awareness is the first step to our liberation.
- Stanley Milgram, 1974
Perceptive and sort of terrifying, but with a ray of hope at the end. The LeSoir article gave me the shivers...thanks for continuing to write with great insight, Geoff.
Truly Appreciated Geoff, Thnx!
Such curious times we're in ....