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Many people have heard a fable: the scorpion asked the frog to carry the river on its own. The frog was a little scared of the scorpion stinging itself. The scorpion said it wouldn’t, and it would die. The frog believed, but halfway through, the scorpion stung the frog. Finally, the drowning scorpion said sorry to the poisoned frog: “Sorry, I can’t control myself.”

Sometimes, the instinct brings us the response of “knowing that it is a pit and jumping down”:

Although there is a lot of work, we still brush the phone as soon as we get it;

In the face of fierce opposition from others, our first reaction is “counterattack”, not judgment;

Investment and financial management, dare not buy when it is very cheap after falling, you must chase after rising sharply …

But more often, instinctual reactions are the reason you see this article alive:

Most of the things that make people feel uncomfortable, such as snakes, looking down from high altitude, are actually dangerous;

When you see small things flying towards you, you will instinctively close your eyes, and big things will instinctively hold your head;

Hungry to eat, thirsty to drink, sleepy to sleep, hurt will hurt …

Some people summarize the law: Simple things listen to instincts, and complex things need to be instinctual …

But in fact, if you encounter some particularly complex decisions, dilemmas that are difficult to weigh, or the lack of information on the timing of decisions, both historical political figures and current business leaders are more inclined Yu listens to his “inner voice”-still the instinct prevails.

You see, the impact of instinct on us, both positive and negative, is not as simple as “when there are advantages and disadvantages.” This is worth our careful study.

Instinct is the cost of living “prepaid”

Humans are instinctively afraid of dangerous things as a result of evolutionary choices.

Suppose tens of millions of years ago, there are two genes in a group of apes, some of which have “fear genes” and some do not. Which part do you think is most likely to be our ancestor? Of course, the former, and the latter is easy to access those dangerous things, and finally die, so there is no chance to evolve into humans.

Many people don’t take the instinct “pain” as an example, but if you think about it, many cancers have no symptoms in the early stages. If humans evolved the “early cancer pain” instinct, can it save a lot of lives? Humans don’t have this instinct, because most cancers are geriatric diseases, and our ancestors simply could not live at that age.

Evolution is always in the direction of the easiest to survive. From the perspective of economics, there is a cost to doing anything. To be able to survive, one must make the harvest of survival greater than the cost of survival, and Instinct is the cost of living that our ancestors “topped up” for us through evolutionary mechanisms.

“To get rich, build the road first”, the instinct is to survive the “road” and other basic infrastructures. “One investment, benefit for life” Make quick decisions on a large number of simple behaviors such as eating and dressing to reduce survival. cost.

In fact, Instinct can be formed the day after tomorrow, which is what we often call “deliberate practice”, so that the acquired ability becomes an instinct. The Go players can blindfold and play chess with ten amateur masters at the same time.In “The Oil Soldier” who uses oil to pass through the copper coins, “without him, but his skills are familiar,” all turn skills into instincts.

Decreasing cost and increasing efficiency. This is the side of instinct that tends to benefit and avoid harm, but the problem is that the beneficiaries of instinct are sometimes not “the person.”

Humans are containers for genes

There is a book called The Selfish Gene. The author, Dawkins, is a biologist in the United Kingdom. He makes a shocking point: people are containers of genes.

The author believes that most animals, including humans, seem to make autonomous decisions. In fact, they are all manipulated by genes to achieve the goal of “generating their genes.”

For example, we usually praise maternal love, thinking that maternal love is the greatest and most selfless kind of love, but in fact, maternal love is a mechanism created by genes so that we can continue to replicate.

Of course, the so-called “purpose” here is different from the “subjective purpose” defined in our daily life. It refers to the inevitable result of a mechanism: not all women are willing to have children, but for human beings, However, having children is the result of the role of human genetic mechanisms.

A psychologist did a famous experiment. They bought a batch of wallets, put money in them, put baby pictures, dog pictures, family portraits, and charitable donation certificates in the photo folder, and left them in Pretending to be lost on the street. A few weeks later, the statistics of returned wallets showed that the highest percentage was wallets with baby pictures, accounting for 35% of the total.

Having a child is a purely “harmful, altruistic” thing. The “tricks” devised by genes are to create a “instinct to love and protect babies.”

“Selfish Genes” puts a lot ofPhenomenon is attributed to the survival mechanism of genes, so is mother love, family planning is so, husband and wife loyalty is the same, red apricot is out of the wall, selfishness is a kind of selfishness, altruistic behavior is also a kind of selfishness,

In the book, there is a concept called “parental investment”. In order to inherit their genes, animals tend to have more lives. However, after birth, the mother cannot treat each child equally, in order to increase the inheritance of genes. The probability that there will be a selective focus on “investment”.

In ancient China, the words “unfilial piety” and “not filial piety” are synonymous. “Not xiao xiao” is not what I mean. What is different from me is that I have fewer genes, that is, filial piety to me. .

So Dawkins said that “human beings are containers of genes”, then, instincts serve as a mechanism for survival, and the objects of benefit are not individuals but species.

When the interests of the individual are in conflict with the interests of the species, it is likely that it is your own instinct to sacrifice.

When competitors have the same instincts

A can of cola contains 35 grams of sucrose, which is equivalent to 9 cubes of sugar. Nine cubes of sugar are really eaten in one breath and will tire you, but under the cover of Coca-Cola’s mysterious formula, you will only feel happy.

Scientists have discovered that when people ingest sugar, the dopamine receptors responsible for providing pleasure will be activated to provide satisfaction, so they are called “fatty house happy water”. In fact, most food formulas look at ways to make you eat more sugar without getting tired.

Why is it human instinct to eat sugar? Because there are more ways to obtain sugar than the other two sources of energy, “protein” and “fat”, ancestors who like sugar are more likely to survive.

So, what about the health problems of eating too much sugar? It is not important for genes, because these diseases are acquired after middle age, and our ancestors could not live at that age.

This is the conflict of interest between genes and individuals. Genes only need you to survive, so that they can be passed on to the next generation. (So ​​the marriage instinct is the instinct of the parents) Our desire is “to live healthy and live wonderfully.”

This makes modern people fight their instincts every day.

Most people ca n’t focus on something for a long time, because concentration is very energy-consuming. The most important thing for human ancestors is explosive power. There is not much benefit from concentration.

But concentration is very important to modern people. This is an age of high division of labor. Only concentration can use the same time and learn more skills.

Furthermore, “delayed gratification” means that those who give up the immediate enjoyment for the sake of long-term benefits will often have better future.

However, “delayed gratification” is painful because it is also anti-instinct. If our ancestors had this gene, they did n’t eat when they had meat, and they did n’t have food storage technology.

Why is almost everything anti-instinct on the road to success?

Instinct is our ability to “evolve” in the fight against nature, but when we humans are already invincible on this earth, our competitors become “our kind.” Resources are scarce. What you are after is what others want.

When competitors have the same instinct, instinct becomes a burden in the competition, a disaster, and “anti-instinct” becomes the winning way.

For example, “herd mentality.” At work, if most people hold a certain point of view, you are afraid to make a different voice, because “herd” is an instinct. Our ancestors lived in a threat-filled environment. Only by being consistent with the group can we survive. .

But in modern society, the sociality of man exceeds the naturalness of man, “conformity” has become a disaster. The public will always be like a headless fly, from one extreme to the other, and can choose Hitler. Taking office can also create one bubble after another.

The “greed when others are scared, fear when others are greedy” is a naked “anti-instinct”.

But let’s think a bit further. If everyone learns “anti-instinct”, if “anti-instinct” becomes instinct, what will the world look like?

Why are we so tired?

Humans generally mature sexually at the age of 15 and 6. At this time, rationality has not yet developed and they do not consider the consequences of doing things, so it is easy for them to come up with their offspring. This instinct is the “conspiracy” of genes.

It ’s modern civilization. Everyone thinks that this time is the most suitable for studying and learning, and desperately prevents young people from falling in love early. After hesitating to delay the marriage and childbearing age by several years, by then, people ’s rationality is sound. Willing to do things like give birth to children at a loss?

Nature is fair, and when we can get what we want, it also comes with something we don’t like.

In the book “A Brief History of Mankind”, the author believes that the efficiency of agricultural production is higher than that of hunting and gathering. Therefore, the population of the farming era has rapidly expanded, and the status of “protagonist of the earth” has been established since then. But as an individual, engaging in hunting and collecting is actually happier than agricultural production, because the physical cost of hunting and collecting is far less than agricultural production, that is, less tired.

In fact, it can also be analyzed from the perspective of historical materialism’s “productivity determines production relations”: hunting and gathering only require a simple division of labor, and the relationship between people and people is relatively equal; the era of farming requires large-scale social collaboration and needs to overcome people and health The inherently loose and free nature is an “anti-instinct” activity. It is necessary to establish a totalitarian organization, so that classes are created and slaves are created.

In fact, as far as living standards are concerned, slaves in the slave society live better than the free people in the primitive society. What we call “miserable” refers to the inequality of rights and status.

But is it true that people pursue equality? Those rebellious peasant heroes who succeeded are another emperor. What we are pursuing is not “equality”, but “more equal than others”.

When “anti-instinct” is used to deal with similar competitors, we don’t want to “live better than before”, but “as long as I live better than you, live better than you all” — —This is not our vanity, but limited resources.

A highly competitive society in which everyone is “anti-instinct”, the result is: as a group, society continues to progress, science and technology continue to develop, the number of humans is increasing, and it is increasingly invincible on the planet; but As individuals, they are becoming more and more unhappy, more and more anxious, and more and more want to return to the natural fantasy created by “Li Ziyi”.

Environmental problems, mental health problems, energy crisis, and even the rich-poor polarization problem facing human society today are, to a certain extent, problems brought about by “anti-instinct” modern civilization and competitive society, so many people have begun to reflect “Anti-instinct.”

Four important points of this article

The person with the highest martial arts in Jin Yong’s novel is the sweeping monk in “The Eight Dragons”. Murong Bo and Xiao Yuanshan lurk in the Shaolin Temple, and have stolen 72 Shaolin stunts. The sweeping monk is like catching a chicken. Extermination of existence. Why is his martial arts so high? The book indirectly gives the answer through his persuasion to Murong Bo and Xiao Yuanshan.

The sweeper monk said to the two men that every time they learn more, there will be one more internal injury. At this time, the Dharma should be used to resolve it.

It turns out that the sweeping monk has high martial arts because of his high dharma.

Tianlong Babu is a novel with a strong sense of Buddhism. Therefore, using “Dharma to resolve internal injuries” is just Jin Yong’s view of life influenced by Buddhism, but the novelist’s style is a good analogy.

In the setting of martial arts novels, martial arts is an “anti-instinct” because he requires you to spend a lot of time learning. PeopleWhen a punch comes over, normal people dodge instinctively, but people who learn martial arts have to resist instincts, either predicting the opponent’s punch in advance or forcibly blocking it.

The Dharma is a kind of instinct. The Buddhists say that “there is impermanence and impermanence,” meaning that one cannot always have one thing, so we must let go of our mind to be free from pain.

Wulin is a world in which everyone is “anti-instinct”. Unconsciously, they have accumulated obsessions and need Dharma to resolve them. The higher the martial arts, the stronger your anti-instinct ability, the more you need to reconcile with instinctual Dharma.

So the more advanced technology is, the more human beings need religion to gain spiritual comfort.

Let’s review four important points of this article:

1. Instinct is the cost of living that our ancestors “recharge prepaid” for us through evolutionary mechanisms;

2. The objects of instinct are not individuals, but species;

3. When our “enemy” is the same kind with the same instinct, “anti-instinct” becomes the winning way;

4. “Anti-instinct” social competition, the result is that the group continues to progress, and the individual is increasingly unhappy

Some philosophers say, The human era is a paradox.

The paradox is that two opposing conclusions are implicit in the same proposition, and the path to failure must be hidden in the correct logic. The best example is that while humans invented life-saving antibiotics, Created “super bacteria” that can destroy themselves.

“Instinct” and “anti-instinct” are paradoxes we face every day. Each of our decisions is nothing more than choosing between “instinct” and “anti-instinct”, but no matter which one is chosen, it may be backfired by the other.

This reminds us not to over-extract resources and not to limit indefinitelyHigh efficiency, don’t be paranoid on the right point, don’t stay at the end of success, otherwise it is the fable at the beginning:

“I can’t control myself.”

The article comes from WeChat public account: People and God Work Together (ID: tongyipaocha)