Group-forming activities help release the brain’s natural opiates. “Grooming” – as in social rather than haircuts – gives us a natural high. This, at least, was what Robin Dunbar (of 12, 50, 150 fame) was saying on the radio this morning. It made me wonder whether the flipside of this collective bliss was essentially a drug war.
Dunbar was talking about his new book, The Human Story. One of the ideas in it was that religion, myth and story-telling are cohesive forces – they offer ways to help us make the trade-off between short-term desires and long-term gains, and they oil the wheels in our social machinery. That much, on my lay reading of things, seems to be fairly standard evolutionary psychology stuff.
Related to this was the fact that these various different types of social grease – be they the Bible, King Arthur’s Round Table or Ghostbusters – can make us all pretty high social kites. Religious ecstasy, feeling at one with the (socially constructed) world, and that buzz of being in an audience watching something good all seem to be signs that opiates are beginning to float round our circuitry.
These chemical carrots exist as an aid to group-forming. But here’s the rub. These same carrots might also ensure that the group acts against any individual who might take away their high. The bigger the high, the bigger the aggression.
Just a thought.