We Are The Beasts Who Want To Conform: How Fear Plays A Big Part In Morality.

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When social rules are externalized the only way to sustain these new moral codes is to?invent enemies. We need to make examples of what to do and what not to do. This is never done systematically. Morals don’t arrive as ready-to-package deals—they get optimized as we go along. In this sense, morals like the preferences that birthed them, morph and amalgamate to whatever the end goal is. There is a sequence to how preferences change from personal to social rules.

The Sequence of Moral Invention

Preference ————> Value ————> Objectified Values ———> Morals ———> Laws

It’s important to recognize that values do change. Behaviors change. Biases change. Change is the constant in morals. Even when those morals are ratified into law. For example, in history, it was completely acceptable (and legal) to sacrifice children to the gods. This has been outlawed in almost every country. (However,?some tribes ?still participate in this practice today.)

Morals are?never?about objectified biases though, they are about social cohesion and how we are evolutionarily hardwired for living in social contexts. We are inherently social beings — yep, even introverts are wired for the occasional group gathering.

Morals don’t make you moral, they make you acceptable.

Morality has been passed ?on through the course of evolution because?it helps us to live in large social groups by enhancing our ability to get along and interact with others.

When we walk into a room and people are behaving in certain ways and we pick up on it — we feel social pressure to act as others do. We WANT to fit in. So, we adapt to our environment to look and even sound like other people — mainly, to keep the peace and get along, and feel accepted. The drive to be trusted is?stronger ?than the desire to be an individual.

People will change how they talk based on the groups that they are in. Have you ever heard a pastor at a religious gathering use a load of curse words? Have you ever been to a somber funeral gathering where people make jokes throughout the whole event? Have you walked into a room and felt the need to shake someone’s hand? That demonstrates that social codification is ingrained into us from our childhood. Conformity is not the glue to group cohesion, fear is.

Morality can be a Trojan Horse. It can seek to define the contours of living in a community, yet, can also simultaneously diminish the value of individual thought. These rules act as a way to assess, criticize and even silence ideas that don’t work toward the identity of the group. In social theory, it’s referred to as groupthink. Many people do not naturally think of agreed-upon codes of conduct as a strategy to demoralize creative thinking. Even though this might not be the intention of manufacturing social expectations, it is a natural adverse effect of their presence in our lives.

The Pavlovian strategy in public relations has people conditioned more and more to ask themselves, "What do other people think?" As a reuslt, a common delusion is created: people are incited to think what other people think, and thus public opinion may mushroom out into a mass prejudice.

Expressed in psychoanalytic terms, through daily propagandistic noise backed up by forceful verbal cues, people can more and more be forced to identify with the powerful noisemaker. Big brother's voice resounds in all the little brothers.”

The Dutch-American Psychoanalyst, Joost Merloo refers to morality as a Pavlovian strategy. Let’s unpack that. Remember?Pavlov ? He was the Russian Psychologist who got dogs to salivate every time they heard the sound of a bell.

Merloo is making the claim that every time we invent a social code for each of us to follow, we will follow without thinking about it. As if to make the assumption that we are beasts who simply want to conform. There is truth in this. Neuroscience shows that although we are not natural rule-followers, because we are social beings, we want acceptance more than rejection.

Moral expectations also point to someone in power. This someone does not have to be a person, but it can be an ideal that most members of a society agree upon. Morality assumes humans will always be narcissistic, self-driven, violent, and prone to never grow out of this stage. Basically, we all need ethical rules because we’re monsters.

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