The Social Dynamics of Animal Spirits
The Role of Biological Herding in Shaping and Challenging Modern Innovation
In the coldest Antarctic winter months, Emperor penguins form large, tightly packed huddles that have been observed to contain up to thousands of penguins.
As each penguin pushes into its neighbor, a spiraling wave like movement propagates through the herd. This shuffling spiral rotates penguins at the periphery into the warm interior and moves those in the middle out to the periphery to have another lap. This spiral motion minimizes the space between neighbors, maintaining the density of the herd to protect against heat loss.
It’s like a big bonfire the penguins keep lit to survive the winter.
So animals gather in herds for good reason.
A herd offers collective defense against predators, weather and starvation. Spread out on a grassy hill the animals more quickly locates food or water. There are genetically diverse mates readily available. Within the herd, the individual constituents can have slightly better odds of survival because the herd does not play zero sum games.
It’s the deranged penguin that abandons the herd to pursue its own fortunes.
Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World
It’s important to realize that we humans are psychological herd animals.
In "The Lucifer Principle," Howard Bloom describes these psychological herds as a "super organism" – a complex meta-structure intimately interwoven through genetics, human behavior, and culture. This concept suggests that entities like your family, community, culture, ideology, religion, and country function as single entities, operating within the world using interconnected and interdependent components made up of individual people.
Similar to a bee hive or an ant colony, psychological super organisms will exhibit behavioral characteristics such as self regulation, homeostasis, collective intelligence, self replication, adaptive structuring and complex communication networks.
Ant colonies can form interconnected nests linked across vast areas called super colonies. They have anti-fragile characteristics. For example, destroying a line of ants can split the colony and worsen the invasion.
Due to the internet, there has been no time in history where roaming psychological human herds are more interconnected and self reinforcing. In the mindless scrolling it’s easy to mistake entertainment for cognitive programming. Logging into your social media account has replaced the Christian revivalist tent.
Nietzsche wrote about our tendency towards psychological herd behavior.
To leave the psychological human herd is to discard a system of morality and values. Perhaps even those of your parents or close friends.
Nietzsche felt this was accomplished only through self mastery, ongoing learning and intense introspection, after which a new value system tailored to each individual begins to take form. The“Ubermensch” thus transcends human mediocrity and reversion to the mean. The math is simple. For average outcomes do average things.
The challenge in aiming for extraordinary outcomes is all herds have social contours and rules about how to behave. When male lions reach maturity, leadership disputes are common. If the challenger loses, the young lion is at best expelled and at worst killed by the herd. The challenger must be killed because social cohesion is crucial for survival of the pride.
It is the “deranged’ penguin who wanders into the Antarctic wasteland in pursuit of something yet undefined.
To abandon a human herd means to incur attack from the power embedded in the social hierarchy. This power can be considerable. Consider the Salem witch trials or the McCarthyism during the cold war.
It is an attack motivated by the self preservation instinct of the super organism. It knows when enough blocks are removed from the Pyramids they collapse under their own weight.
In humans, Nietzsche felt such attacks came from our tendency towards envy.
The weak envy the strong. The ill envy the healthy. The slaves envy the masters. The poor envy the rich.
Do not covet they neighbors wife is a commandment for a reason.
Envy is one of seven deadly sins for a reason.
Even within the scrum of Emperor penguin spiral the aim of those on the frigid margins is to displace those in the warm interior. The many at the bottom always aim to displace the resource rich at the top.
Nietzsche observed a common lever by which this cyclical dethroning mechanism occurs in humans societies is the construction of binary moral systems, where those at the bottom vilify the attributes of those at the top and set themselves in diametric moral opposition.
This is good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressors, the poor and the rich, Saints and sinners, the French royalists and revolutionaries, Roman citizens and barbarians, Protestants and Catholics, the Islamic faithful and infidels, American capitalists and communists, Russian-Marxist proletariat and the bourgeoisie, Democrats and Republicans and so on.
When you view the world in such moral binaries it’s easy to believe you live in a world full of enemies.
And so humans will also try to kill, literally or figuratively, those who abandon the herd.
Indian spiritual figure Jiddu Krishnamurti, who advised against blindly following any guru, doctrine or spiritual authority, asserted that “truth is a pathless land.”
To set off into the psychological Antarctic alone and on foot, at great peril to yourself, is one of the highest moral aims. There is no a map anyone can give you.
The Übermensch is the homeless, beggar philosopher Diogenes, holding a burning oil mid day searching Athens for an honest man.
The Übermensch is also Socrates, sentenced to death for impiety by a jury in Athens, who accepts the hemlock chalice and chooses, for himself, death before dishonor.
In reading Plato’s written record of Socrate’s final reflections it is apparent why the herd wanted him dead.
Jacques Louis Davis, the Death of Socrates, 1787
The crux of this is how we all must decide the meaning which exists in our life for ourselves. Meaning does not exist external to you. It cannot.
Anyone who has ever abandoned a faith will tell you this is not easy. It requires a radical act of self immolation, subuku or psychological suicide because the super organism, an extension of the ego, is in an existential fight for its very existence.
To follow the advice of Nietzsche is to live a life of authenticity, in alignment with your highest self discovered values and to discard the life others want for you.
A few quick thoughts I think are interesting.
The penguin spiral resembles engineering systems that require heat distribution management or risk catastrophic failure.
A reverse penguin spiral is a combustion engine cooling systems that moves the engine heat to the radiator via radiator hoses filled with coolant.
Or the heat sinks and fans required by high performance computer processors. A MacBook Air is thinner than a MacBook Pro because the Air processor is not powerful enough to require a fan cooling system.
It’s like physiologic blood shunting in hypothermia. The body prioritizes warming the organs in the torso and head at the expense of fingers and toes.
It’s important to learn the physical laws of nature, such as thermodynamics, because all things follows these rules. You can never expect to play the game of life well if you don’t understand the basic rules.