There are
so many ways to stay entertained in the modern world. If you like food, you can
eat whatever you want. If you want attention, there are near limitless forms of
social media to express yourself and pass your days getting validation. If you
have a proclivity for promiscuity, you can hop on an app, go on a college town
bar, or find a hooker online within minutes of searching, not to mention
self-stimulation via pornography. Life is not a struggle for people who crave
these sorts of experiences, but rather a never-ending carnival of delights.
This may sound like a good thing, but because moderation is something that is
both needed and uncommon, it is a nightmare for the majority of people.
Whatever vices you have -- whether food, drugs, or sex -- those vices are
always a few clicks away.
Because
base gratification is near-instant for the majority of neurotypicals, genuine
introspection has suffered. If you have the normal urges and proclivities that
caused the previous generations to work steady jobs and go out into the world
to make something of themselves, you are now at a serious disadvantage. The
barrier or rather friction between humans and pleasure that used to exist has
been eroded at an increasingly exponential rate, turning motivations into
perverse mechanisms that remove the need to be productive in order to be
content in the short-term. This can easily be observed by looking around at the
average individual in most modernized countries, a slovenly, lazy, unaware, and
quite frankly stupid creature who is not able to comprehend cause and effect on
a time-frame longer than a few days or months.
Even
though the majority of people have suffered because of this environment, there
are those who have actually benefited: the genuinely anti-social. Imagine not
having the same compulsions as most of the people around you, responding in a
more muted manner to what brings the majority positive feelings. In the past,
this sort of person would generally underperform as they were not responding
properly (in the context of their environment) to incentives that drove those
around them into working hard and achieving a good start to life and then a
white picket fence, a beautiful wife, and happy, healthy kids. Now, these
people are the ones who are doing well.
The
anti-social are those who are increasingly benefiting from social media and
technology in general, because they are the ones who are not as caught up in
the skinner box of dopamine flooding and social accolades. Their internal
disconnect from communities, a disconnect that was once a severe disadvantage,
has now become an advantage, because they are not as distracted by the insane
amount of noise and toys that normal people are self-harming with. While others
are taking cues from what they see as general consensus that are really just
distorted and dishonest echo chambers, the anti-social with personal
motivations are more easily able to discern truth from fiction and be less
swayed by the number of shares or retweets generated by some opinion piece or
news story.
This is not
to say that the anti-social are the Übermensch,
but rather that the technologically integrated system that we find ourselves in
is increasingly being optimized into a cage that preys upon the majority of
people, the pro-social.
Because this system is not designed
to take advantage of psychological flaws of the anti-social, but still
accessible to the anti-social, this system is now functionally a lever for the
anti-social to manipulate the pro-social in ways and at scales that weren’t
possible in the past. The people who used to be outcasts, because of their lack
of natural motivation rather than some personality flaw or physical deformity,
are now the people who increasingly wield social and monetary influence. You
can see this in effect especially well with regards to most successful tech
CEOs, people who generally have some sort of abnormal wiring in the brain. They
understand how normal people act even though they don’t act that way
themselves, and are now enabled to interact with and take advantage of hundreds
of thousands or millions of normal people with normal internal motivations.
Where is
all this headed? In the short-term (the next few generations), those who are
anti-social are – and will continue to be -- experiencing a gold-rush of sorts.
Because the anti-social used to be much less successful than the pro-social,
there are very few anti-social individuals as compared to pro-social
individuals. In the past, the pro-social individuals were those who would have
good careers and get social accolades for “following the rules” and “fitting in”,
and thus they were the ones more likely to breed and pass their internal
dispositions onto offspring. For every anti-social individual who succeeded
evolutionary and passed on their genes, there were many more pro-social
individuals who succeeded and passed on their genes. Up until recently, the
anti-social was a maladaption for first world environments where cooperation
and group loyalty were highly beneficial. The incentive structure to life has
changed dramatically and thus winners and losers have essentially been inverted
from the “ideal” (what was conducive to success in the past) to the looked down
upon (what is now conducive to success.)
Eventually,
some form of equilibrium to our reshuffled value system will be found. Much
like over-fishing causes problems for fishers, the new predatory capabilities of
the anti-social will eventually be nerfed in the form of the anti-social
winners making up the majority of the population while the new pro-social
losers make up a smaller, lower caste group of victims that are still taken
advantage of, but not in the all-you-can eat buffet style that will be the norm
for the foreseeable future. At that point, the anti-social individuals who make
up the upper half (or more) of society will be forced to start designing
systems and tools to take advantage of each other. A small taste of this in
action can be observed with regards to “Social Media Experts” selling PDFs,
seminars, and courses to other would-be “Social Media Experts”, which is
generally (but not always) a tacit admission that the “Social Media Expert” in
question is not actually good at social media, but rather taking advantage of
would be predators who are also anti-social in nature. The parallel to this in
the pro-social domain would be motivational speakers who do nothing but sell
motivational speeches and don’t have anything to show for their motivational
speeches except for getting people to pay for motivational speeches and fall
under the category of a pro-social (usually) predator preying on pro-social
individuals, knowingly or not.
While we
are now in the anti-social age, not all anti-social individuals will end up “winning”
at life. As alluded to earlier, anti-social people are not perfect. In fact,
because being anti-social was a losing strategy for most environments up until
the very recent past, anti-social people generally have more self-destructive
and mentally ill problems than those who are pro-social. As a result, you can
see how there are many anti-social people who seem to do really well in the short
term under our new reality, then implode due to some sort of fatal character
flaw that makes them expend their energy in fatal manners. What is going to
happen is that the anti-social people who are not deranged will succeed long
term, while the anti-social people who have serious problems will succumb to
those problems and remain losers like their ancestors, and most likely die out
or end up only slightly better than their fathers and grandfathers did, despite
the new opportunity for success.
An
important distinction that must be made is the reality of pro-social people who
may seem anti-social at first. These are the people who are clinical narcissists,
sociopaths, and those with bipolar disorder. While they struggle to be
pro-social, they are ultimately not anti-social. They just tend to suck at what
they want to do, and live a life full of misery and disappointment, no matter
their material victories. Truly anti-social people do not have the urges that
these people have, and though they may behave in a similar manner at times
(distant, aloof, uncaring, unempathetic, shallow, and manipulative), the
internal motivations of the genuinely anti-social are different (and lacking in
that form of distress) than the internal motivations of the mentally ill
pro-social. Where this group of mentally ill pro-social people will end up
remains to be seen, but it will most likely be above the mentally healthy pro-social
but well below the genuinely anti-social who do not suffer from self-destructive
environmental maladaptation. This won’t matter much though, because these
individuals will exist in a form of neurotic misery much like the current pro-social
upper middle-class does, where they are constantly striving to be like their
betters, and unable to do so, being that they are not wired in the same manner
and do not truly understand the game that is being played or the internal
motivations of those playing the game better than them.
