Why is everyone the same. Genes are to blame for everything: why are all people the same, but states are so different
As a child, I loved to play with my mother's makeup bag. Of all the treasures hidden in her plastic interior, I liked most of all the sharp-beaked drawing pen - a formidable-looking piece for drafting, with which Soviet women plucked their eyebrows into a thin thread. I liked the gray-blue shadows, ideal for drawing princesses, a little less, but my mother, on the contrary: if the punishment for the lost drawing pen was symbolic, then the broken palette was in the category of especially serious crimes. Once, having stood up for her in the corner, I moved to draw my malvins to visit a friend - her mother had the same shadows. And the same drawer. And the same mascara-brasmatik. Only blush and views on the education of young artists are different.
The contents of the cosmetic bags of Soviet women were strikingly similar: Polish shadows, French powder, mascara from the banks of the Neva. Everyone cut and curled under Edita Piekha, painted their eyes under Barbara Brylska and, according to my mother, looked “like from one incubator”. Later, when I started using cosmetics for their intended purpose, instead of anecdotes, she told how, together with her friends, she got those modest shadows and powder - having huddled, digging and standing in line or through acquaintances, “we meet at midnight at the crossroads.” Mom always ended her stories in the same way: how good it is, they say, that now there are other times, other mores and there is no shortage of either china, or nails, or decent eyebrow pencils. Now, my mother said, young people can look as they please. If you want, be a blonde, but if you want - red, draw, paint, let down, matte, varnish, with a shimmer, with glitter, pink powder on top - a solid celebration of individuality.
No, mom. Alas, everything was not so simple.
Now, when cosmetics stores flood customers with news about their “revolutionary novelties”, when there is so much red in the palette of nail polishes that the human eye is not able to distinguish the nuances of shades, when every girl has enough French perfume and powder to sink a squadron and repaint an elephant in beige, everyone looks the same again. No kidding. When in doubt, open Instagram and look at the main stars there. Everyone has dark chocolate or platinum blonde hair wide eyebrows with a clear outline plump lips in matte nude lipstick, painted cheekbones and a nose with a thin back (“dark on the side, on top with a highlighter”). The average Instagram beauty is good, no doubt; and at the same time looks like Kim Kardashian, Megan Fox and a transvestite at the same time. Not Barbara Brylska, of course, but the times with mores are not the same.
Makeup artists who can do this to a woman are literally worth their weight in gold. It's no joke - with the help of two kilograms foundation and a spatula to turn the Ryazan simpleton into a twin of Kylie Jenner. After all, this is real work, work for a million - rubles and likes. The best of the masters are already touring the CIS and sharing tricks of transformation from TV screens - the ratings of such programs, to the great delight of producers, are growing.
And if it’s approximately clear to me why all our mothers look a little alike in archival photos, then why, for example, all our football players are married to twins, I can’t figure it out. Surely the appearance of this army of clones in the "golden age" of fashion on different types beauty has some reasonable explanation. Sociologists here could speculate about the desire to be like a successful neighbor, which does not depend on gender and age; biologists - to draw an analogy with pack animals that are friends only with similar individuals, and dissimilar ones are pecked and driven away with sticks; culturologists - to recall the different aesthetics of the masses and elites. But only these pleasant and clever scientific explanations can hardly be called simple. And the only simple explanation is a pleasant one: in a time when there is no shortage of porcelain, nails, or eyebrow pencils, individuality was in short supply. But it is she who should be emphasized by all these shimmers, glitters and beige lipsticks. To paint with matte and lacquer, sprinkle yourself with pink powder and sparkles and finally look the way you want, and not as usual, you need not be afraid to be yourself. Alas, this is not taught at the master classes of Instagram makeup artists.
Personality psychology is perhaps the most interesting branch of psychology. Since the late 1930s active research began in personality psychology. As a result, by the second half of the last century, many different approaches and theories of personality have developed. To date, there are about 50 definitions of the concept of personality.
Personality is a stable system of socially significant features that characterize an individual as a member of a particular society.
The most modern approach regards man as a biopsychosocial system. And, by and large, the totality of these three factors: biological, psychological and social is personality.
The biological factor is external signs: the color of the eyes, and the height, and the shape of the nails; internal signs: sympathetic or parasympathetic type of the autonomic nervous system, features of blood circulation, biorhythms, in a word: the biological factor is all that relates to human anatomy and physiology.
The psychological factor is all mental functions: perception, attention, memory, thinking, emotions, will, which are based on a material substrate and are largely conditioned by it, i.e. determined genetically.
And finally, the third component of personality is social factor. What is meant by this social factor?
The social factor is, in principle, the whole experience of communication and interaction with other people and with the outside world as a whole. Those. it is essentially the whole life experience of a person.
What do you think: from what moment does the formation of personality begin?
I don’t remember who said it, but it’s very accurate: “You are born an individual, you become a person, and you defend your individuality.”
People are born very similar. Of course, babies are different because each has its own individual set of biological as well as psychological traits that will develop rapidly in the first years of life. And yet they are very similar to each other. Gradually, each person not only develops his psychological qualities, but also acquires social experience - the experience of relationships with people around him. Gradually, a person grows up and the circle of people around him becomes wider, more diverse, and his communication experience becomes more and more versatile. This is how a personality is formed, this is how the uniqueness of each person is multiplied, because everyone has their own life experience. It is impossible to plan, calculate, because too many random phenomena and circumstances daily and every minute interfere, are built into the life of every person. Life experience is a social factor of the individual, it is formed not only on the basis of interaction with people, but also on the basis of interaction with various social and personal events.
For example, a person is seriously ill. What's happening? Here a person was born with a certain set of biological and psychological qualities, he lived - developed - gained experience in social interactions and suddenly fell ill. Illness is an event that changes the biological factor - during the period of illness, some part of his health was lost, the psychological factor also changed, since during the illness the state of all mental functions and memory, attention, and thinking change - in any case, the content of thinking - now a person thinks about the disease and how to recover from it. And the disease also affects the social factor. The surrounding people treat a sick person differently than a healthy one. If the disease is short-lived, then its influence will be short and insignificant, and if it is a serious and long-term illness. For example, a child is 7 years old and it is time for him to go to school - this event is planned, at school he will communicate with peers and teachers, a lot will change in his life and he will intensively acquire new social experience. And if a serious illness and treatment requires several months? And in this case, a person will acquire his own unique social experience, only this experience will be different in content. He will communicate with peers, but not at school, but in the hospital, he will also communicate with authoritative adults, but not with teachers, but with representatives of the medical professions. In addition, his relationship with those close to him will also change. Moreover, sometimes these changes in relations with the immediate environment can continue not only during the period of illness, but also for a long time after. This example is a particular one, but it will illustrate how variable and not always predictable the social experience of each person can be.
It is this social experience that makes each person unique and makes him unique, one of a kind. This is the answer to the question: why are all people different.
On the other hand, we often say: people are all the same, and even throughout their history of existence, a person has not changed much. Z. Freud, in the course of creating his psychoanalytic theory, deduced the general principle of the psychological structure of a person - the principle of absolute hedonism, which means that a person constantly strives to get pleasure. Based on this principle, the main need of a person and the main motivation for all his actions is to get pleasure. Many do not agree with this formulation and are ready to argue. Subsequently, this principle was finalized, slightly modified and was called the principle of relative hedonism, which sounds like this: a person seeks to have fun and live without conflicts. Those. a person in his desire to get pleasure constantly correlates the satisfaction of his needs with external circumstances, wanting to maintain a balance between his interests - pleasures and the social environment. The principle of absolute hedonism is inherent in the child's psyche. If you watch a small child during the day, it becomes obvious that all his thoughts, interests and actions are aimed specifically at getting pleasure and restoring a state of inner comfort. Gradually, the child is included in the process of socialization, and the social factor becomes the main limiting factor preventing pleasure. The more successfully socialization is completed, the more autonomous and, at the same time, more adaptive the personality is formed. To be happy and to live without conflicts is a universal guarantee of the mental health of every person - every person.
“Well, what is wrong with me? Why do my friends meet normal guys, but I only goats? If such thoughts visited your lovely head, urgently read our article!
Two halves at a party
There is such a kind of "difficult fate" - co-dependent relationships. We see them every day, one has only to look around: the victim and the sadist, the needy and the rescuer, the father and the little girl, the thunder woman and the sissy, the hard worker and the gigolo. Seems like why not? They will hit bumps and meet normal partners. But there is a catch. Every time, parting with their codependent partner, women meet another exactly the same.
According to sociologists, the phenomenon of "halves" exists. True, in a somewhat strange form. Even at the noisiest party, in the thickest crowd, a woman will single out exactly the one who complements her complexes: a sadist, gigolo, an alcoholic ... In a word, whom she is subconsciously looking for.
How this "magic of halves" works, God only knows, but it practically does not fail. And if a woman who is unsure of herself meets the One-Same-Male-Ideal, she will quickly spoil the acquaintance and run away. Because he does not know how to be in integrity healthy relationships. Or Mr. Perfect himself will hasten to take his leave. Because he senses that something is wrong with her.
The most important man in life
And is it all my fault again? Maybe not. Maybe it was the evil fairy who cursed you in the cradle because her parents didn't invite her to the christening. And at the age of 16, she was pricked with a needle from a tattoo machine and carried out a spell. Now you are bound to meet the wrong men until the clock in the tower square strikes forty and the house is filled with geranium and cactus pots. One for each year of girlhood.
In fact, everything is more prosaic: the model of relationships with men is built on the basis of the image of the father. And not so much from how he behaved with his mother, but how the little girl was used to seeing him.
Let's do a simple exercise: Sit comfortably, close your eyes, exhale. Imagine that your mind is a white board. If thoughts-writings appear on it, erase them with an eraser. Achieve complete thoughtlessness. And now extend the sentence with the very first word that arises from the subconscious: "Father is ...".
Whatever answer comes up is the right one for you at this moment in your life. If "Father is a friend," most likely there are many male friends in your environment. But they don't see you as a woman. If your father is a threat (who knows, maybe he mistreated your mother), it is not surprising that you will shun the relationship. And further down the list.
Big question mark?
But what if the father is an empty place? In the sense that you don't even remember it. Father did not rock you in his arms and did not carry you through puddles. You didn't kiss the dimple in his stubbly chin and fall asleep with your head against his strong shoulder. How then to define its image? How to build relationships with men if there is a hole instead of the image of a dad?
Yes, just like in any other case - remove the label. We often sin by giving definitions: people, events, deeds... The one we have is a loser, another infantile, the third is a bore. Any of these definitions may seem worthy to you. And each of them will be secondary.
Because the only important role of a father in a woman's life is the Creator. He gave her life and gave the whole world. Maybe he didn’t teach him to perceive it (due to his own reasons), to interact with it - but he handed over the key to the kingdom and opened the gate to life. And the only thing we need to do is remove the label of assessing his personality. And see in him only your Creator.
Her own slave, her own executioner
Remember, older people advise: “Look how he treats his mother. He will treat you the same way." The situation also works in the other direction: as a woman treats her father, she treats men the same way. And the more we judge the father, get angry or, conversely, fawn over his image, we do the same with life partners.
What are your feelings about your dad? Anger, hatred, contempt? Before the eyes are bright days or family quarrels? Do you remember how much pain he caused your mother and yearn for revenge? And then unconsciously realize the role of an avenger with those who love you.
Or can you not forgive a mother who missed, disliked her father, let him out of her life? You cook a lot of dishes, wash your husband's socks and underpants, obediently wait for him from work until the morning and close your eyes to all your mistresses. With every action you unconsciously prove to yourself and your mother: “This is how you need to love men” ... And you turn into a slave.
Changing settings
To exit from vicious circle the same men, you first need to come to terms with the main one. Because the only feelings that should arise at the thought of a father are love and gratitude. And any other feelings and thoughts are the result of acquired attitudes and beliefs. And they can and should be changed. Repeat like a mantra until awareness becomes part of you: “He is the Creator. He gave me life."
It is worth accepting a father in such an incarnation, forgetting insults and expectations - everything will change dramatically. We look at men with love and gratitude. And we will see the smiles and faces of those who used to stand with their backs to us.
Fashion is fashion. It is worth walking down the Paris catwalk supermodels in haute couture crop tops, as in a season when the trend descends into the mass market, everyone from high school girls to matrons is bare-bellied. But if you wear a rag and replace it, why do the same with the face? Masha, what's with the face? Why are all women the same?
Plastic surgery has now descended into the mass market, and cosmetology costs a penny. And if trendsetters slowly come
into herself, and Renata Litvinova, in defiance of the trend, even declares that the “pinned” mouth steals
individuality, then a mass audience that has access to fillers
flirts and arranges a real freak show.
Meeting a girl at a party in the same dress is still a nightmare, but equally tailored faces are encouraged and even
make beauties fit into the same circle. There is already a trend: the upper
sponge - with a dense arch, cheekbones, like the eyes of a hammerhead shark, are deployed in different
side, the forehead is smooth, miserable, slightly upturned nose of a twelve-year-old peasant woman - and voila.
A lot of memes have been created on the web for a funny trend towards identical faces, but psychologists are sad. They say that the conscious desire to be similar was once given to us by nature. To survive, people huddled in groups and defined "their"
according to special indications. Today's craving to gather in a herd is a sad bell. From what
we became so afraid to be not like everyone else, to be not accepted? Why does each
a girl sitting on a cosmetic needle is not so friendly with herself that she wants from herself
get rid of?
It wasn't always like this
The peak of fashion for the absence of fashion - for individuality - fell
DO NOT etch the same mole that was her hallmark.
“The women we wanted,” wrote one of my FB buddies
under a photo of such different supermodels of the 90s in a post about modern
clonism. It seems like yes - that decade was repeatedly called the sexiest,
and the generation of people whose youth fell on the 90s, according to statistics, even today
has sex more than any other.
But if you take the FB friend who said this, put it opposite
him a trio of girls he has dated in the last five years in real life
life, dress them the same way and also provide them with sunglasses ... Believe me, he himself will hardly immediately understand who is who. Because everyone is the same. In other words,
modern fashion for clones appeared not least thanks to men. It is difficult to track at what point and why a woman turned into
into a kind of accessory, and therefore, like any other accessory, it must
From an evolutionary standpoint, all human races are variations of the same gene pool. But if people are so similar to each other, why are human societies so different? T&P publishes science journalist Nicholas Wade's opinion on this paradox from the bestselling book An Inconvenient Legacy. Genes, Races and the History of Humankind, translated by Alpina Non-Fiction Publishing House.
The main argument is this: these differences do not grow out of some huge difference between individual members of the races. On the contrary, they are rooted in very small variations in the social behavior of people, for example, in the degree of trust or aggressiveness or in other character traits that have developed in each race depending on geographical and historical conditions. These variations set the framework for the emergence of social institutions that differ significantly in their nature. As a result of these institutions - mostly cultural phenomena based on the foundation of genetically determined social behavior - the societies of the West and East Asia are so different from each other, tribal societies are so different from modern states, and .
The explanation of almost all social scientists boils down to one thing: human societies differ only in culture. This implies that evolution played no role in the differences between populations. But explanations in the spirit of "it's just culture" are untenable for a number of reasons.
First, this is just a guess. No one can currently say what part of genetics and culture underlies the differences between human societies, and the assertion that evolution plays no role is just a hypothesis.
Secondly, the position "it's only culture" was formulated mainly by the anthropologist Franz Boas to contrast it with the racist one; this is commendable from the point of view of motives, but in science there is no place for political ideology, whatever its persuasion. In addition, Boas wrote his work at a time when it was not known that human evolution continued until recently.
Third, the "it's only culture" hypothesis does not satisfactorily explain why the differences between human societies are so deeply rooted. If the differences between tribal society and the modern state were purely cultural, it would be fairly easy to modernize tribal societies by adopting Western institutions. The American experience with Haiti, Iraq and Afghanistan by and large suggests that this is not the case. Culture undoubtedly explains many important differences between societies. But the question is whether such an explanation is sufficient for all such differences.
Fourth, the assumption "it's just a culture" is in dire need of adequate processing and adjustment. His followers failed to update these ideas to include a new discovery: human evolution continued until the recent past, was extensive and regional in nature. According to their hypothesis, contrary to the data accumulated over the past 30 years, the mind is a blank slate, formed from birth without any influence of genetically determined behavior. At the same time, the importance of social behavior, as they believe, for survival is too insignificant to be the result of natural selection. But if such scientists admit that social behavior does have a genetic basis, they must explain how behavior could have remained the same across all races despite massive shifts in human social structure over the past 15,000 years, while many other traits are now known to have evolved independently in each race, transforming at least 8% of the human genome.
“Human nature throughout the world is generally the same, with the exception of slight differences in social behavior. These differences, though barely perceptible at the level of the individual, add up and form societies that are very different from each other in their qualities.
The idea of [this] book suggests that, on the contrary, there is a genetic component to human social behavior; this component, which is very important for the survival of people, is subject to evolutionary changes and has indeed evolved over time. This evolution of social behavior certainly occurred independently in the five major and other races, and small evolutionary differences in social behavior underlie the difference in social institutions that prevail in large human populations.
Like the "it's only culture" position, this idea has not yet been proven, but relies on a number of assumptions that seem reasonable in the light of recent knowledge.
First, the social structures of primates, including humans, are based on genetically determined behavior. Chimpanzees have inherited a genetic pattern for the functioning of their characteristic societies from an ancestor that is common to humans and chimpanzees. This ancestor passed on the same model of the human branch, which subsequently evolved to maintain features specific to the social structure of humans, from about 1.7 million years ago to the advent of hunter-gatherer groups and tribes. It is difficult to understand why humans, a highly social species, should have lost the genetic basis of the set of social behaviors on which their society depends, or why this basis should not have continued to evolve during the period of the most radical transformation, namely the change that allowed human societies to grow into ranging in size from a maximum of 150 people in a hunter-gatherer group to huge cities with tens of millions of inhabitants. It should be noted that this transformation had to develop in each race independently, since it took place after their separation. […]
The second assumption is that this genetically determined social behavior supports the institutions around which human societies are built. If such forms of behavior exist, then it seems certain that institutions must depend on them. This hypothesis is supported by such authoritative scientists as economist Douglas Northey, political scientist Francis Fukuyama: they both believe that institutions are based on the genetics of human behavior.
The third assumption: the evolution of social behavior has continued in the last 50,000 years and in historical time. This phase undoubtedly occurred independently and in parallel in the three major races after they had diverged and each had made the transition from hunting and gathering to settled life. The genomic evidence that human evolution proceeded in the recent past was extensive and regional, generally supports this thesis, unless some reason can be found for social behavior to be free from the action of natural selection. […]
The fourth assumption is this: developed social behavior can actually be observed in various modern populations. Behavioral changes historically proven in the English population over the 600 years leading up to the Industrial Revolution include a reduction in violence and an increase in literacy, a propensity to work and accumulate. Similar evolutionary changes seem to have taken place in other agrarian populations in Europe and East Asia before they entered the era of their industrial revolutions. Another behavioral change is evident in the Jewish population, which has adapted over the centuries, first and then to specific professional niches.
The fifth assumption is related to the fact that significant differences exist between human societies, and not between their individual representatives. Human nature throughout the world is generally the same, with the exception of slight differences in social behavior. These differences, though barely perceptible at the level of the individual, add up to form societies that are very different from each other in their qualities. Evolutionary differences between human societies help explain major turning points in history, such as China's building of the first modern state, the rise of the West and the decline of the Islamic world and China, and the economic inequality that has emerged in recent centuries.
The assertion that evolution has played a role in human history does not mean that this role is necessarily significant, much less decisive. Culture is a powerful force, and people are not slaves to innate tendencies that can only guide the psyche in one way or another. But if all individuals in a society have the same inclination, however slight, for example, towards a greater or lesser level of social trust, then that society will have this tendency and will be different from societies in which there is no such inclination.
