7 Eternal Rules of Human Nature

Why studying human nature is more future-proof than STEM

1. Human Nature Doesn’t Change

In trying to summarize his investing strategy, Warren Buffet offered one crucial principle: you should invest in what doesn't change.

When you choose a degree, you try to pick one which will still offer employment in 40 years. You exercise and eat well because physical health is never irrelevant. If you want to acquire knowledge and skill somewhere it’ll always be rewarded, your best choice is to study human nature.

A quick demonstration of this is that Nikolai Tesla, one of history’s great innovators, was broke for most of his life.

Extraordinary talent + bad social skills = very pissed off superiors.

Humans created civilization, and scientists began to explain behavior in terms of nature vs nurture. Psychologists lined up on each side of this high-stakes debate, which intersected with third-rail political issues such as racism and IQ. Books are always being written arguing that civilization has coarsened us, alienated us, or ennobled us, relative to our natural instincts.

But rumors of a separation were greatly exaggerated. As if nature and nurture could be split apart and examined as individual entities, like oxygen and hydrogen. A genetic code is simply a form of knowledge about the environments (nurture) it had reproduced itself in.

In some ways modern society has alienated us from our nature, but there’s an important qualifier. Humans built civilization in their own image, ultimately to assist with the reproduction of their genes. This is the claim of Richard Dawkins's book The Extended Phenotype, which says that our constructions are continuous with our bodies in the sense of both being the vehicles of reproduction of our genes.

If there is such a thing as human nature, and there is, its reality has only been consolidated by the passage of history. Human nature has not been liquidated by the growth of civilization; it has diversified its assets.

2. Humans Avoid Pain

This is the most reliable law of human behavior. It inspired the now-outdated school of psychology called Behaviorism, popularized by Frank Skinner who famously taught pigeons to play table tennis simply by a program of punishment and reward.

Behaviorism went out of fashion because it started to seem too simplistic. It was felt that humans often went against their own best interests. At times they seemed to actively invite pain and trouble into their lives. Those interested in art and literature and music disliked hearing that ‘Macbeth’ or Beethoven’s Fifth were composed out of a basic search for pleasure, just as they had previously been upset by Freudian suggestions that such works were created out of a sublimated sex drive.

The reality is that because humans do not receive the world just as it is, but interpret it creatively, it is not always obvious what a person will enjoy. Say you are being flattered for a quality you worried you didn’t have. You might be expected to enjoy hearing this, but instead you imagine the person to be insincere. Or you go skydiving, which a naïve behaviorist would have ruled out as a form of entertainment due to the very fear that you find thrilling.

It is the complexity of the human mind that refutes analytical behaviorism. But humans always try to at least avoid pain. Each voluntary action is evidence of an anticipated pleasure. Could you go 30 seconds without doing something to make yourself feel better?

3. Humans Want Power

The sensation of having no control over one’s circumstances is one of the most awful things a person can experience. These days it is fashionable to decry power, to say it corrupts and to present oneself as above those kind of games. In Hollywood, actors give speeches in favor of liberal causes and criticize the plundering and exploitation carried out by large corporations. Overt shows of ambition make a person unpopular. But on TV, shows exploring power dynamics, such as The Sopranos, Game of Thrones and Succession, are some of the most popular entertainments in the world.

Working on a psychiatric unit, I saw an endlessly recurring pattern among the people admitted with depression. Power had been taken away from them, whether through financial struggles or the breakup of a relationship. They had felt helpless to do anything to improve their situation. Hobbies and interests which had captivated them now seemed dull and grey. The missing element, which had left everything seeming utterly pointless, was the feeling that (if only slightly) it was possible to bend reality to their will.

With no way to admit that power was what they wanted, my patients had to resort to bland statements about a lack of meaning and the wickedness of people.

4. Humans Aren’t Rational (Not Even For Themselves)

It Does Not Act in the “rational best interest” of the person in whom it operates

People do not make the decisions that are “best for” them. They make the decision that feels right. Why does it feel right? Because it’s what their genes want.

The author and consultant Luca Dellanna has pointed out that positive emotions are what “feel like survival.” Sugary foods make you feel like you’ll survive the harsh winter because you’ve found a source of high energy. Winning an argument feels great because it indicates higher status than your opponent.

One of the fundamental differences between our ancestral environments and the 21st century is that now it is much less rational to prioritize survival rather than flourishing. Our society has vastly reduced downside risk through socialized medicine, insurance, bankruptcy laws and social welfare. But we still feel loss aversion and generalized anxiety because our mind’s haven’t caught up with this development.

And generally, there is no reason why what’s best for the propagation of your genes, which is the primary objective of natural selection, won’t also make you miserable.

5. The Question of Fate

“A man’s character is his fate” — Heraclitus

Most of a human’s behavior is outside of the conscious control of that human. That is true regardless of whether you take one or another view of nurture vs nature.

When Warren Buffett advised to invest in what never changes in people, I took him to mean “Invest” should be taken in the broadest possible sense: giving yourself the best chance to thrive in the future. We will always have to contend with the question of how immutable is our character and therefore our fate.

The first thing to say is that even if your fate is predetermined it’s not predictable. And it may not have the quality of how your fate is currently playing out.

Genes Allow Themselves To Be Changed

The foundation of your character is your genes. They make the rules for how ‘nurture’ can influence your development. For example, the college experience may be very positive for extroverts who now have contacts and job opportunities; the introvert who was socially anxious to begin with may end up scarred by the “same” experience. Every event has an objective and a subjective component. So it’s clear that nature vs nurture is not a viable dichotomy.

We can go deeper on this. Genes are (literally) a form of knowledge, specifically knowledge about the environmental niches in which your ancestors survived and reproduced. The genetic code contains information that predators exist — this translates into a tendency to become anxious. They “know” that you are stronger in a group, and the phenotype of this knowledge is extroversion and agreeableness. And so on for every trait you’re born with.

As you gain experience of the world you acquire new knowledge, which may confirm or refute the knowledge in your genes. Your childhood extroversion may be reduced by negative experiences with people, for instance.

There is a crucial difference between the knowledge in your genes and the knowledge you accrue from you environment. The latter is explanatory. You can discover ‘why’, you can understand that it is conditional, specific to certain circumstances. It is non-programmatic. Genetic knowledge tends to manifest in instinct and intuition, gut feelings that you can’t quite explain. Acquired, explanatory knowledge is based in thought; slower to operate ‘System 2’-type knowledge, newly acquired (over single digit years as opposed to millions of years) and hence slower to operate.

Exposure to New Knowledge

You can acquire knowledge from your environment that overrides the knowledge in your genes. System 2 can inform System 1. For example Graduate Exposure Therapy can be used to treat specific phobias. If the patient has a fear of spiders, the therapist will start a gradual process of introduction. They’ll talk to them about spiders, then show them a picture of a spider, eventually getting the patient to hold a spider in their hands. The direct evidence of non-harmfulness can override the genetic knowledge about the danger of spiders, until the patient’s instincts no longer tell them to freak out when a spider appears in the bathtub.

The human mind is “universal” meaning that it can comprehend anything that can be comprehended. So in principle there is nothing a human cannot learn. One application of this principle is that any human instinct, whether for food or sex or anything else, can be overridden. It’s a matter of the knowledge of how to do it. Therefore Evolutionary Psychology is a useful instrument for explaining the initial situation of anyone wishing to change their behavior. But it’s no authority where a person can go from there.

6. Life Is a Single Player Game

“I don’t believe in the idea of the independent individual. I don’t believe in the idea that anyone is independent from anyone, because the more that I think about how the world is structured, the more I think about how we rely on each others’ labor all the time. For the food we eat, for the clothes we wear…

So to believe in myself as an independent person, as an independent individual, it just seems delusional.”

— novelist Sally Rooney, in an interview

They say you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.

As with all behavior, this theory of crowdsourced personality is true in some contexts and not others. When you are with people, the way you speak and the humor and body language you use will start to resemble your closest friends. You will take up new habits based on the culture of the group, in particular what’s considered important or high status.

But there is always a separate, deeper self which outlasts the temporary fashions of your social circle. It’s what makes you choose who to spend time with in the first place, makes you feel lonely among your friends, makes you move apart from them and then barely recognize them as the people you used to be so close to.

Rooney said elsewhere,

“Our life in the west rests on the labor of millions in poverty.”

Somewhat true, but misleading. We do not have a simple one-way relationship with the developing world. Hundreds of thousands of people are involved just in the manufacture of one pencil.

The reduction of our economy to an image of a hypothetical worker somewhere in the developing world, and a hypothetical rich businessman in the developed world, one exploiting the other — this is fatuous.

Rooney’s case fails because it underestimates our interconnectedness.

Our self is the home which we leave in order to approach the world and its people. No one can organize our life for us; no-one can make our decisions about work, where to live, who to have a relationship with. A couple can be married 40 years and still be strangers to each other.

Life is a single player game. Our essential freedoms — from physical encroachment, from restrictions on speech, from false collectives — these are the freedoms we need to come to terms with this fact.

7. The Self

When we are born, we have an experience in the first year or so which will never be repeated. We have someone, our mother, who gives us every bit of attention we demand. She comforts or feeding us when we cry. It’s as if there is an open channel between the world and our desires.

Then as we start to grow, attention is withdrawn. You become aware of siblings or a father vying for your mother’s attention. At school, your friend wants to play with someone else. Other kids demonstrate they are more talented than you are. By adulthood life has drilled it into you that there are billions of other people in the world and that you aren’t special. Through these stages we are developing something called a ‘Self’ in order to deal with this harsh reality. This Self has an imagination that makes you the protagonist in a hero’s journey: alone with your thoughts, you are achieving great things, winning arguments and earning the adoration of onlookers.

When events call into question this idealization we mount a defense. We create rationalizations that explain away our mistakes, constructing praise for our successes, always telling ourselves we’re better than the average person, more moral, better-looking, smarter and more tasteful.

When a person asks in a fit of shame “what sort of person does this make me?” this is their Self adaptively anticipating what the social consequence of this would be were people to know. The Self can be seen in part as a mechanism of survival in a social world, always performing thought experiments about potential scenarios in order to avoid learning through irreversible consequence.

Positively re-framing the basic facts of our existence is the necessary precursor to convincing others of our value. We tend to accept at face value behavioral clues from people relating to their health and status because this saves us time in a complex environment. In order to give off the right cues, it might be better to first deceive ourselves.

Conclusion: Principles and Honor

In The Art of Worldly Wisdom, Baltasar Gracian counsels, ‘Avoid affairs of honor’. What he is talking about here is, do not bank on a person relenting when their self-opinion is under threat. They will sideline everything else to defend it. You will not convince them that they have been acting immorally or without sense. If you harm their reputation, which is a crucial part of their self-opinion, they won’t stop until they get revenge.

If you want to persuade someone, the best way to do it is to convince them that it would credit them as an individual. Imply that voting for you is what an ethical person does, that only the most fashionable people buy your product, that a relationship with you would increase their social status. Everyone has a pronounced narcissistic streak. Therefore your service will never “sell itself” and no-one cares about your noble character independent of its benefit to them.

If you are someone who likes to think that people are inherently selfless, know that I have just described the way to activate that quality in them. They will be fascinated by your attentiveness to their self-esteem and will repay it in kind. If you are a realist who values a life founded on truth, you will acknowledge this fact about people unless you have undeniable evidence to the contrary (I doubt it).

And be wary of always acting on principles. If everyone acted on theirs, a war would break out in five minutes.

Further reading (not an affiliate link): Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature