Prof. Darcia Narvaez of Notre Dame on growing up to be “A Good and Useful Human Being”

My guest is Professor Dasha Narwaz, who is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Notre Dame. Her research focuses on moral development, human flourishing and early childhood well-being. Welcome, Dasha. Thank you very much. Good to be with you. Yeah, thanks for doing this. So I want to start with one of your book chapters entitled "Ethoginuses, Evolution, Early Experience and Moral Becoming." And in that stack, you see here, what's the best comprehensive theory for understanding moral development? Take an evolutionary development system standpoint that includes multiple ecological levels and extra genetic inheritances, development and niche self-organization. "Ethoginuses" describes species typical moral development, which includes relational tunement and cabule imagination. Orientations and capacities that emerge from the bio-psychosocial development of the brain slash mind in early life within a species typical niche. Yeah, so I want to get a little bit deeper into this. So let me just rewind time back a little bit. So morality, well, we don't have any archaeological data from 300,000 years ago. But we talk about band level communities here. We talk about that a little bit. Do we have any evidence how 300,000 years ago, I mean, for homo sapiens became widespread, how they were organized and how they were living? Well, we have the Sun Bushman who have been around for 150,000 years, their culture, and all our genes come through them. And so we do have their life way to look at. So that's where I focus primarily. So it's also like a picture in frozen time that we can look back and perhaps speculate how people used to live. And the Bushman culture and life appears quite different from the modern life, isn't it? And the society organization and how they treat each other and all that stuff is quite different, is it? Certainly. And but many of the practices that I focus on were common all over the world until a few hundred years ago. So it's, it just gives us the glimpse of the kind of the holistic perspective. And then we can see that many of the practices, and I focus on babyhood in particular. But the practices for getting along with one another and with the natural, the rest of nature are common, we're commonplace. Commonplace. So if I understand you correctly, so 150,000 years, I mean, we have some glimpse of how things were. And if I understand you correctly, things were sort of going along pretty good, till maybe when agriculture started, maybe 10, 15,000 years ago, and things broken down, is that the way to think about it? Yes. And that's the reasons for that are debated, whether it was climate change, whether it was some overpopulation that had to be taken care of with settlement and who knows. It's unclear. But somehow people started to domesticate animals and domesticate plants, plants that put up with being disturbed all the time. Most plants don't, but the grasses that we and the grains that we are used to put up with that. And so yeah, something happened where we, people started to hoard or collect things that others didn't have, but needed and you get a hierarchy. And with hierarchy, in my view, you start to degrade the evolve nest. And so we've had thousands of years of degradation, but especially in the last few hundred years and especially in the 20th century, the nest has really gone downhill. And so you have all these people with dysregulation. We think it's normal to have aggressive violent people around, but no, it's not. Yeah, so I mean, the band level or society organization was quite different. It appears that based on the limited data that we have, it appears that they were very egalitarian. I get somebody on talking about Costa Rica, you know, from long time ago. And the hierarchical structure, as you say, is a recent phenomenon. It used to be that people sort of got together and lived together. So I know that you spend some time outside. So I want to get outside the US. I want to get a sort of a cultural perspective on this too. Dasha, so I open South India and I know that you spend some time outside the US. I don't know where. And when we look around the world, we have a significant variation in how they're living even now, right? I mean, it's not just time. It's also space in some ways, yeah? Right. Yeah. So the colonization, though, is interrupted and conquered. So there E. Richard Sornsson, an anthropologist, talks about pre-conquest and post-conquest cultures and how different they are. And he had to, he took films and lived with them around the world, different groups. And he said, I couldn't really understand what I was experiencing until I watched the films over and over and over. And so we have interrupted what is species normal, in my view, with colonization and all the people interfering and trying to impose their ways on others. Yeah, colonization is one thing, but I don't think we have too many examines of non-coronized societies. But if you go to, I don't know, I mean, Southeast Asia or some other places that were not colonized by Europeans. Sure, there were. There still are maybe vestiges. The Ottoman, for example, the semi, what anthropologists were able to, who they were able to examine or study, at least in the past. Now it's really hard. Yeah, so you say here, dispossitional or situational, in any given situation, in any given situation, an orientation can become the mindset that dominates perception and action. For most people, moral mindset shift frequently, depending on the context, who is present in the task at hand. Yeah, that's interesting. So I always thought morality is, and they're correct if I'm wrong, it's sort of an absolute thing. It should be shifting by context, if I understand it correctly. But doesn't? Well, it depends on what you mean by morality. So I mean virtue, behavior, what you're behaving like in the moment. And most people, when they think of morality, think, "Are you judging and thinking and reasoning properly?" I mean, that's philosophy, right? But it's much more than that. It's your emotions. How are they now? Are they centered? Are you centered? Are they the skills to respond appropriately in the moment? And so my view of virtuous morality is that you are there to enhance and connect to others and not to control or dominate, which is a different kind of morality. That's morality too. But it's rooted in the misdevelopment of the neurobiology of the person or cultural frames that make you want to be dominant over others. So morality is also about societal contribution, correct me if I'm wrong. A moral person will contribute and we make a grand statement, you can objective it. A moral person will contribute to societal development. And that could be a diagnostic to sort of determine if a person as, I don't know, I mean, this is a grand statement, moral or not moral. Well, I would say that it would have to be contribute to the well-being of the community, not just part of it, not just the billionaires, but not just humans. It's the rest of nature too. Are you contribute to the well-being and enhancing the well-being? And our hunter-gatherer past and our Native Americans have written out a lot of this and discussed how you have to be relationally responsible and ask permission and be respectful and give something that you're taking a life. You have some, it's reciprocal, right? There's always this sense that you're on a web of life connections. everything you do is reverberating everywhere else, right? So you have to be aware your manner of behaving your practices and how you balance it out again Yeah, no, so it's it's really interesting so we have kind of a few billionaires out there's a solving poverty They've been doing they've been solving poverty for maybe 100 years now I haven't solved it yet and so poverty is Recently had an exchange with with the friend he said if you look at the United Nations metrics poverty is declining I mean you know Exactly so I was telling you then poverty is a state of mind It is not a number And so Yeah, I mean in many ways I think we have a pandemic In some ways in poverty, right? So Yeah, so I mean the billionaires don't seem to understand what they're trying to solve I mean even if they have a good mind. I don't know. I mean, maybe they're trying to get make more money I have no clue what they're trying to do but Even if they have a good mind They don't seem to understand the context of the problem that we're trying to solve I think And it matters what you mean by poverty The United States is highly impoverished socially Ecologically There's a lot of money around and people of course now it's much worse everyone's suffering here, but Before recent years people had enough money to live on but there was still socially impoverished I like the traditional collectivist communities In India for example, right that you know you feel always connected your families there you have you know Love and belonging and all the things that matter to people beyond money So the United Nations and the capitalist system, you know focuses on this little thing As if it may not matter to some degree But it's in the fact if you focus only on that you're destroying forests and waterways and cultures and biodiversity Off with that little thing right and everything becomes more impoverished Yeah, so the GDP per capita is used as sort of a grand metric uh to look at uh poverty Which it seems very misplaced You see here the evolved development niche So like all animals over the course of evolution Humans developed an early life niche for their offspring That matches up with the uh with the maturation or schedule of the young Humans are highly immature at birth born 9 to 18 months early Compared with other animals With the most intense and longest lasting niche for offspring development Over 20 years Yeah, so I think nature got this wrong dasha as i mean this seems like the most dangerous thing to do Baby is born He or she is completely incompetent It appears Maybe even an open brain splutch and then uh and then he or she has to be made a human outside the womb Um maybe for a couple of years and so during those couple of years what happened to you Is significant isn't it? Oh, yes the neurobiology is being uh constructed Co-constructed around experience the baby is self-organizing how they're going to be their personality their wellness Their health trajectory all being shaped by the other generations around them And so there's a huge responsibility of the Prior generations to actually honor the baby's needs and provide them Yeah, and so i'm a big believer in initial conditions so It is it is those initial conditions for the first couple of years that determines you in many ways and as um policy makers as society We haven't quite understood that And hence we haven't really focused on it Uh and problems crop up later and then we try to tactically bandate those problems Okay, so uh this is a fundamental policy question Um, so let me go back a little bit so you say it is morality in eight or learned You say here some forms of morality are in eight And others are co-constructed you said uh but social experience Especially in early life with brain systems the parameters and thresholds are established Yeah, so Yeah, so neuroscientists hate me when I make this analogy so um babies come with some sort of firmware I mean they uh they know how to smile um uh you know Uh how to be very cute uh it's a firmware but then uh They don't they don't really have the uh The software to actually go places rain Uh, well, you know it takes them a while to learn to smile it's like two months So i mean there's a lot of developmental things happening right all the time and they have to have the support system there at least a minimal amount For them to get to smiling because some of them won't smile if they've been neglected completely So uh yeah, there's uh And and you might we're boring we're mammals and we have social mammals and we have the same kind of emotion systems that are there to keep us alive So that's the rage system the play system the panic system the fear system panic, you know you start to Get distressed when you're separated from your can nurture uh we have those But they get conditioned up if you leave babies to cry leave them alone Uh, they those systems get conditioned up because and you become threat reactive stress reactive just to stay alive Uh, which is not species normal to be in that uh Develop your personality around that that's abnormal But we think it's normal because so many people are so easily triggered now Be from their early undercare. I call it undercare when you don't uh Provided with a nest Here says are going back to evolution again um Morality might have had a survival advantage um if you're nice to It's not just being nice, but it's more to Your compatriots They please you at a higher level and they come to your rescue when you're in trouble So imagine morality had a survival benefit, no? Yeah, I see them intertwined for survival. You have to be cooperative Not aggressive not withdrawn right not Dominating and whatever you have to have the whole bunch of skills that develop across childhood So you're not born with but you're you have uh instincts for them you have an interest in them and you you're ready from birth the first day Undrugged babies are ready to start connecting and they try to know they don't have much control over their body But they do little gestures and they expect their response and and and so it starts So it starts and And we haven't changed. I mean we've been here 300,000 years at least we haven't changed much um the The sort of the architecture remains the same Babies require care And you talk about this uh, I think not in this paper or it's where that they need to be held They need to be touched Yes, the nest I can go through the nest components. Yeah, we've identified nine that we've studied in my lab But these come from ethnographers who have observed them all over the world these same things in traditional societies Even those who are not undergatherers, right? And so if you start with the babies experience It would be soothing perinatal experience for the mother to feel supported the babies Wanted then soothing birth. There's no separation of mother no painful procedures Uh, and that's uh, and then the responsive care that babies needs to keep calm keep them calm while they're growing so quickly Right because you don't know what you're messing up if they're all stressed out their growth will stop slow down And they'll have gaps in their developments So you always want to keep the baby calm and collectivist societies know this much better than the individualistic ones like the USA Uh, and then you want to have lots of touch Babies expect to be in the womb right a little bit longer and so Ashley Monague the anthropologist talked about They need an extero justation a womb with a view Right so yeah, yeah, right and then yeah, so there's more But you want to yeah, so so it seems like they've wanted what nature decided is to um is to put them out in a very vulnerable position after nine to ten months. And if they cared for by the society, then they will go places. But then, but nature seems to have forgotten us that perhaps they're not cared for. But maybe this is a, I don't know, it's a competition, survival issue. I don't know, I'm just thinking about, yeah, well, there are, I mean, in a hundred gatherer communities, if the, there's the mother's child that exists already is only a couple years older, she might not nurture that child and commit in fantasy because she can't do both. Right? And especially if it's a boy that's older, the boys need much more nurturing for longer. They have less built in resilience and they're much more easily stressed. So boys are useless. Wonderful. I love boys except you need to nurture them properly for longer. So. Yeah, so as you say, they're in mature and they mature much, much slower pace than girls. Yes. And so they're a little bit of a higher cost on parents. It seems to me, right? So, I just want to touch on one thing. So you see his morality intuitive or deliberative, one or two or many processes. See morality involves one's manner of being in the moment, which of course involves a shifting combination of intuitive and deliberative processes. Implicit moral processes emerged from social experience. Through our life with foundations that I established in early life, but all sorts of implicit understandings of social world are cornered. Yeah, so let me ask you this. Is morality intuitive or is some sort of deliberative educational process? Have you taken kids through? Well, that's a good question. I would say it's mostly intuitive, but when you don't have the proper social experience, then you're kind of what do you have? So this is right brain versus left brain. If you know, even McGill Chris work showing what happens when you numb one side of the brain or the other and what they're like, the right hemisphere is the tacit, the intuitive connected where full of life and relational connections. And that's the one that develops more rapidly in the first three years of life. And that's social and social intelligence and all the things that make us are true selves, bring about our two selves, but the left hemisphere starts growing more rapidly in age three or so. And if that right hemisphere is very weak and it's weak, it will be without proper support. It'll be weak at the mitochondrial level. So that the cells just aren't very strong. And so this little weak true self over there, the left hemisphere comes in, left hemisphere doesn't know life. It doesn't, can't connect. It just, you know, is linear and it likes to categorize, deal with dead things, static things. And so it'll make a false self to protect that little true self or even suppress it. And there you have, you know, all the false selves running the world now, that tell us, oh, we're not connected. You're an individual and don't know. So then you have what happens in school in the British kind of self-realization. British kind of schooling is you training the left brain, how to reason well, how to, you know, what the rules are, all the rules and that little true self doesn't have much to go on. Or maybe it doesn't. It's, you know, just regulated, you know, the survival systems have gotten so, it's that, but you have this part. And so you have a lot of hypocrisy, right? Because this part says, oh, you have to do this. But I don't want to in the moment. And so in the moment, this is what controls you. Yeah. Well, then that deliberative, you know, reason thing. Yeah, I haven't seen my right brain for like three decades. You haven't thought. I hope to meet her at some point. Well, the arts, the arts are what grow it throughout life. So playing children and, you know, music making and art painting and all sorts of things. Dance. Yes. So you see here in another chapter, theoretical stance, similarities and uniqueness of ito Genesis theory. You say similar to other theories, ito Genesis looks to implicit processes as a power base for model functioning. Implicit processes include neurobiological foundations for social, moral intelligence, built in early life. When the right hemisphere is developing rapidly. But implicit processes must be well educated to be worthwhile. Yeah, so. So it's very clear the first two to three years of a baby. I would say it first four or five or six years. Four or five years. Because in the boys, the boys are, you know, months and five. For boys, the first 30, 40 years. Yeah. But you know, so during that during that window. What do you experience? How your parents treat you have society around you or the family around you treats you or the society around you is your perception. How do you treat it? Well, it's your neurobiology affects your perception. So earlier you brought up how we shift by situation. Yeah, so if you feel threatened in a situation, we know that your vision narrows. Your perception shuts down and looks for some way to be safe. And so you don't, you're not flexible, attuned and all this stuff that you'd want to be. If you feel safe and you're well developed, because you have to have all that social, emotional intelligence. Then you're flexible, you know, on your wife, why perception? Yeah. Yeah, so. I think I think you talk about this. Maybe somebody loves that. So if I have a safe space. And I have a threatened space. And if I spend most of my life, most of my time in the safe space. Then my brain grows. In one direction. If I'm generally always threatened. By the social space that I am in. It grows in a different direction. I mean, it's all the stress hormones. You know, so again, out of African savanna. I mean, we have seen lines and tigers. If you see one of them. You are dead. So you have to. You have to try to, yeah, fight or what is the call? Fighter flight. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Fighter flight. So that's where we are, right? If so if you are in a threat and space. That is how your brain is going to grow. I mean, you're basically trying to survive. Not trying to live. Right. And so in our heritage, you wouldn't have been threatened. I mean, rarely if it happened by your mother or your father or the people in your village or your band. You wouldn't have been threatened by them. It would have been the animals, right? The predators. And so, but today we are frightened by people. And we're left alone. We're left to cry. We're put in this desperate state. And so you develop those systems of threat reactivity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Being triggered easily. Yeah, I mean, there are two types of threats here. One is in a professional setting. There's a threat. They're not going to kill you, but they they might just fire you or something. That's a threat. When you walk around, you know, there was an incident at the Penn station New York today. Somebody come and stabs you. That's a more tangible threat. Right, right in the middle of civilization. So there are different kinds of threats, but it affects the brain. Yeah, yeah, go ahead. Sorry. Yeah, no, there are many, many kinds of threats today. Yeah. And in our ancestral context, it was the predators primarily. And you learn because you have freedom to run around as a child, you know, which trees were safer than others. And you learn not to go in that river because of the crocodiles or alligators or whatever. So you had a sense of safety most of the time. But and then you got to pick when to take the risks to climb that tree. That's way up there, you know, but you can do because you have animal sense. And we've undermined all that over controlling young children so they can't develop their animal sense. And then we put all sorts of situations that are on supportive, right? So threat reactivity is norm. Yeah, so you talk about this. This is band level gatherer of hunter societies. Do we know much about how. a baby is born into that society. I mean this is a very imp, you know, not, I mean, imp prohibition is as a right word. I mean they're looking for food. They have to survive and the baby is baby is born. So now you have to feed another mouth. And it's a difficult thing. I would imagine when there's a significant resource comes trained environment, right? So do we know much about how they treated babies and all that stuff? Well the anthropologists, the ethnographers who observed the band level life talk about how babies don't cry. I mean they might express something for like 10 seconds. And then the gild and merrelli at the Harvard says, oh people say, pick up the baby, pick up the baby because they know intuitively that if you let the baby get too upset you're kind of undermining their future. And the band's future too because they'll be more dysregulated and irritable or whatever. So they're more oriented to meeting the needs quickly and they're on bodies most of the time, the babies. And it's not just mom. It's multiple nurturers. There's just another component of the evolved nest. Multiple nurturers welcoming that baby. They love the baby in pre-conquest cultures. It's like so delightful to make the baby laugh. And you know, and they don't talk as much as touch. So a lot of tactile communication. And then the baby learns how to make other people happy and enhance them. And children are welcomed by the older children into the play group because this is so much fun. And so life is about enjoyment. And most of these communities are in the tropical areas. So food is abundant. Right. So you're not living in the desert like the Bushman now. But yeah. So it's so much. That's how we started at that level. In some sense, in the modern world, we don't necessarily have societies. We have secluded ourselves into high-rise buildings, in apartments, and so on and so forth. And there's a different way of living. I mean, it might have some benefits, I don't know. But it's not really a homo sapien living in some ways. It's all happened only last 100 years. Yeah, Beto Maturana, Chilean biologist, worried that we were not, he said that we evolved to be homo sapiens almonds, loving, loving, but he was worried that we were becoming homo sapiens aggressons to be aggressive or arrogance, arrogant. And because of the lack of nurturing in early life, and what you do without the nurturing is you develop a biology of fear, which is the threat reactivity, right? Instead of a biology of love, which is that open, flexible toolment. Yeah, so in some sense, this is an objective function failure. Till somebody tells me I'm going to live for five or eight years, our horizons are pretty limited. And to optimize between that horizon, there's a guy going around saying I'm going to be a trillian air. That's the only thing he's focused on. And he also has a limited horizon. I don't think he ever thinks about it. So this is an objective function and horizon problem. When we are gone, we are gone completely. I mean, nobody's ever going to think about you once you're gone. That realization doesn't, doesn't, uh, set in for most people. It's like, let me make as much money, let me, you know, do whatever I want to do. It's a crazy notion, yeah. Oh, in our ancestral environment, in our society, they were aware of the unmanifest, the spiritual world. So their ancestors were still around. They're just in another form. And you had to, you know, and so I was just reading Nuret Bird David, who studied the Nayaka. And she puts out that a Gala Teran is the wrong term because they are responding to the spirits, to the ancestors. And they're, they're, they have to be respectful, which is hierarchical then, or they could, you know, be sick or harmed in some fashion. So the Gala Teran isn't quite the right word for that broader inclusion of the unmanifest. It works though for the people that, you know, and everyone gets their needs met without complaint and their generosity of sharing over and over, yeah, just assumed. So, yeah. So in our ancestral context, we wouldn't do, uh, limits it to this life, right? Right, right. But then there's a fantasy, isn't it? Oh, I don't know. I know it's, it's not Western science, but it is native science. So, okay, okay. Yes, I wouldn't challenge you on that. So I want to go into another, another book chapter, the 99% you say here, development and socialization within an evolutionary context, growing up to become a good and useful human being. Yeah, that's a good objective function. Going up to become a good and useful human being. You say here, this chapter discusses a substantial mismatch between our contemporary society and the conditions under Bishop Jean-Sobhan has evolved. It argues that compared to our pre-agriculture foraging cousins, we are far from butchers and might even be considered to have lost their minds if not humanity. In fact, we are quite immoral, wicked and stupid. If he has anthropological reports of those, uh, who live like our perceived nomadic, foreaging gatherer, hunter ancestors as a baseline, how did this come to be? You ask the chapter compares to ancestral social environment as known from extant small band. We talked a little bit about this. How did this come to be? I mean, we have some data from the past. Seems like you say your turn is a bad word, but not the right word, you said. But we know these band level early societies were organized very differently and they appear to be reasonably happy. Otherwise, we would not be here. Right? So, so what happened to us? Let me put it to you that way. Well, that is debated, right? Whether it was the hoarding of grains, there's something about growing grains that lends itself to hoarding. Unlike, yes, you can't hoard yams, for example. So, yeah, and you can get tax money from the, yeah, from the grains, people's harvests and stuff. So, there's something about that in the Middle Eastern area that I live on that people moved in that direction. Although around the world there were other hierarchical arrangements, but then they would abandon them. They would abandon them when they didn't work anymore and they go back to the egalitarian or they come together for kind of a hierarchical thing for a little part of the year, go hunting together or something, but then they go back to the band. So, there's a lot of flexibility in our past and the Graber and Wendrow in their book The Dawn of Everything, which is actually not a good title for what they talk about, but anyway, they pointed some of that. So, I think we have to remember that we can change too. It's that we forgot that very political, important practice they had of controlling the big egos. Don't let people get an inflated ego. And in our, the anthropologists talk about the, in the Central Africa, the elder women are the ones that will tease anybody who starts to get a big head. Besides the hunters, the hunters will say that the big animals so small, we should go back and get a rabbit and then they'll be better than all this until the hunter laughs. And because the laughing brings them down from the ego, could sit back in his right hemisphere instead of the laugh. Otherwise, he becomes dangerous to everyone else. Yeah, I mean, I haven't thought, I don't know if this is a new research. I haven't really thought about this. So, singing and dancing was fundamental to homosexualness, apparently, on. I mean, that's how we survived. And it's bonding too. And it's the right hemisphere growing. Yeah. So the contemporary human, if you, she is not able to smile or take a joke about himself or herself, the vagus nerve. Yeah, I talk a little bit about the vagus nerve. Well, the vagus nerve has to be set up correctly. It's kind of a network of nerves that contribute to the well-being of the whole body, right? Connect to the digestive system, the heart, the liver, the brain, and so on. And if things don't get set up properly with the evolved nest support, then you can have issues in your health in those different areas and those different major organs. And you'll have trouble with intimacy. And you can see when a person can't smile and they're just kind of stiff face like that, that's a vagus nerve that hasn't been working properly. Yeah, smiling is fundamental to humans. So I want to go to another chapter here. It's a championship culture. Sorry, it's a companionship culture. You see one of the notable features of SPGH life is the companionship lifestyle. It will present some boundaryless context that involves non-exclusive intimacy and face to face connection that's constituted by a sharing of food, movement, residents, company, and memory. Yeah, so as I was mentioning, in South India, families were sort of altogether. You know, you know, this is a name for it. Some sort of extended family type thing, you know, grandparents always lived in the house and so on and so forth. And that's gone now. We put ourselves into one bedroom, high-rise apartment complex. And it's a different life, isn't it? That's right. Yeah, you're missing all that support. And especially if you have children yourself, you need the grandparents. And the grandparents are ready to be just really melded to the young children. They both kind of are, you know, close to life and death and they understand each other. And the adults and parents, they're oriented to, you know, making a name for themselves, getting their work done. And they're not oriented to having fun and playing like the grandparents are. At least, well, nurtured grandparents, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to mention that babies are not that far. I mean, it's difficult. I mean, this kid's a difficult to bring up, I would say. I just brought up one and she's never know what you were. And so she's bringing up 10 or 15 every day. But yeah, babies are difficult. So going back to, so let me put morality in sort of an economic question. Is morality economically beneficial for humans? Well, it depends on what you mean by economic, again, right? If it's about the wholeness, is it about well-being then, yeah. If it's just about making money and being number one and being a trillionaire, no. Not quite yet. Stop again. Yeah. Yeah, you talk about this person code at individualism. So this goes back to some sort of cultural questions here. So SBGH members value individualism, but it's of different nature than the individualism of the modern Western world. Point of the difference is the best in our is considered to be rational, self-contained and autonomous locked within the privacy of a body, standing against and competing for the rewards of success and aggregate and aggregate other such individuals and societies. So yeah, so individualism is considered very good in Western cultures, especially in the US. That's a lot of things going to the left brain idea. Left brain idea. So at some point I will find my right brain. You're laughing and that's your right brain. But individualism has some benefits, I would say. So, you know, there are people who came here, including myself, with a few dollars and made a living in the new country. And individualism actually helped those people. And so I'm not ready to completely reject that idea. Very, very distant. Well, I mean, in the circumstances, you do have to have a lot more gumption on your own to move ahead because the whole network of support is pretty degraded, right? What else are you going to do? You're sitting bed? I don't know. So, yeah, I mean, the whole cultural neglect of our biology then has led us to have to be much more planful, more left brain than our ancestors. Yeah. Yeah, so you see an archipelago among SPGH. And that is, there is no central authority and no formal leaders. Yeah, so I had somebody, as I mentioned, from looking at the coastal weakened societies from very, very early and no central authority, no hierarchy. And we have seen societies like that. And the societal utility of those systems have been quite high, I would imagine. I mean, they appear to be happy. I mean, in the contemporary sense, we have Scandinavia. Maybe we put that out there to react to the big, quote unquote, "democracy" are failing. We know at least two of them that appear to be failing. Those not pretending to be democracies seem to be doing okay. There's a big one out there. But then the small systems, like eight to ten million people in Scandinavia appear to be thriving and they appear to be pretty happy. Yeah. So how do you react to that? Yeah, it seems that way. I mean, I don't study them, so I can't really say any detail or insight. Yeah. But they offer paid parental leave when you have a baby and lots of supports and thin lent supposedly the happiest nation and they offer prenatal counseling from others. And just so much that helps you then bond and helps you be more nurturing that is completely missing in the United States. It's the opposite here. Yeah. So we can only measure the outcomes after period of time. And it's the same thing with crime. So suppose we have a system where we just put down, you know, we just take the person who's committing a crime to the jail. But we don't care about how that whole thing happened from the beginning. We'd be locking up a lot of people and that's what we are currently doing. But it is sort of brain dead anyways from a policy perspective. Yep, I agree that you don't provide for the well-being of babies and mothers and children. You're going to result and if you misunderstand how people develop, you're going to just punish them all the time. Yeah, I don't know what you're talking about. So I think the Catholic school in South India and the non-sused to use to punish people in those Catholic schools. And yeah, let me put that out. You may have something to react to that. Well, the Jesuit relations, that's a series of documents that are like diaries almost of the Jesuits in North America. And there's one case I like to cite where they write about a French boy is hitting a drum with a drumstick and one of the here on natives comes over to look at what he's doing and the kid, the child hits the native. And then he wants some recompense. And in the here on society, you give a gift to men, to relations, but the French said, "Oh, we got to punish him." And so they're going to strip him, they're going to whip him. And the natives, the here on's are going, "What are you doing? It's a child." No, take it to me. And so one of them takes off his clothes and is like, "Do it to me." So the idea that you punish a child is just so foreign to the traditional Native American culture. and indigenous perspective, because they know you're damaging the spirit, the soul of the child, they're gonna be forever marked and not be cooperative the way we want them to be, right? - Yes, they're so interesting. So, so you think the Native Americans is sort of a Miller to the past in some ways, how they organized and how they tweeted, can't send all of that. - Well, before the recent genocide and this treatment, yeah. - Yes, yes. So, you know, another chapter here called group collectivism, you say here, all of this is a greater individualism and individual autonomy among SPGH. There's also a deep collectivism and group identity that focuses on the contemporary membership in the group and membership that fluctuates with the interest of individual members. Yeah, so I mean, this sounds like some sort of club to me. Darsha, so, you know, we have this, people go to this universities and all that, they have this clubs and they're members of this clubs and then, you know, they're sort of in there, you know, they can, they can get help from each other and all of that. But it is a, you know, a little bit like a class system and something. So the class system in India, I had a similar characteristic, I would say. - Well, you have to understand that the moving, changing groups all the time. And so you have connections, kin in that group over there too. And you even, they've documented that when the climate or the, there's a famine or something, a group will go a thousand miles, just for help to another group. So it's not like they, they're only, they're clubby that way. They're actually inclusive in many ways, right? And it includes, again, the non-humans so that they're part of the community. They're kin also. - Inclusive of the goddess of space and time. The problem with the clubs that we have now, it's very constrained in space and time. And so it's a different club, yeah. So another chapter, you say, "Here economics, pleasure and desire." You say, "Here is clear from ethnographics that SPGS do not fit with best and see your type. That human nature is full of unlimited warns in the world of unlimited means through setting and scarcity." Como economists, economic man is naturally acquisitive, competitive, rational, calculating and for ever looking for ways to improve his material well-being. Yeah, this goes back to what we discussed before is sort of the objective function question. So the economic man accumulates wealth all his life and then one day he or she drops dead. And none of that is going anywhere. I mean, it's a comedy in many ways. But why do people do this? I'm really at a loss to understand it. Yeah. - Well, when you're not nested, when you didn't get breastfed for several years, which is the norm for our species, at least two years on average four years, that plus you're not touched very much, you're not able to play, it will, you run around, there's a toddler, you're gonna feel the world is unfair and you feel a sense of scarcity and you always have a hole in your heart and so you want to, you gotta get something to make yourself feel better. It's like you get up in the States, you get obsessed with breasts, right? As if, you know, that's not an aportop. That's as the, you know, you get obsessed with all sorts of things that are from the deficit that you have. - Yes. Yeah, so if you're running out of time, Dasha, so, - Yeah. - So do you want to sort of summarize the 10 light years here? So, if you were to sort of summarize what we talked about, what are the sort of the most important points that people should take away from here? - Well, I think they need to expand their imaginations to understand that we don't have to be so miserable. We don't have to be so destructive of life on the planet and one another that there are ways to get back to our species normal way of being compassionate, connected, self-controlled, right? And we don't need all the stuff. It's about presence, about being connected to the other and that means to the trees, to the animals, to the plants, to the waterways, to people. - The system. - Be here. Yeah, be here now and love it and feel it. You know, earth loves you. You're here. The cosmos loves you. Feel it. - And smile and dance. I think at the end of the day, we have short horizons. You might not think so now, but they are short horizons. So you just have to enjoy life a little bit. Excellent. Excellent, Russia. Thanks so much for spending time with me. - You're welcome. Thank you for having me. Good to meet you, Bill. - Thank you. - There.