On posturing

Honesty - weakness - over sharing.
People like to be lied to. Told that everything is ok that this too shall pass, and love conquers all. In uncertain times they prefer a strong leader to a just leader - a George W over a John Kerry. It's human nature.

Posturing is an intrinsic part of the human experience. Hell, how about animalia?

Nearly all our interactions are a combination of honesty and dissimulation - some information needs to be accurate, but other information needs to be hidden. Show weakness and you become a target - just think ’high school’

And so we construct. We construct personas that we perform for the world, and psychological scaffolding to get us through the day.

Some of it is dialled in. There's nothing like the research on testosterone to shine a light on the ’mysteries’ or banalities of maleness - the impulsivity, aggression, but more interestingly how ’victories’ from combat to the craps table cause testosterone to surge predisposing the ’winner’ to engage in similar actions again.

So males take more risks - and at the risk of falling into the unscientific, of recounting an adaptive story that weaves a narrative based on possibility rather than falsifiability, it just so seems to confirm things we already knew.

And so posturing and dishonesty. If victory causes a physiological response that encourages you to repeat those actions that produced success, then cheating, lying, stealing, when successful are likely to be repeated.

You look at Facebook where nearly everything is superficial and you ask yourself is it a mistake to actually try and share what I think? That most if not all of what passes in the public sphere is rank bullshit because lying works? People don't like bad news - and I think of some of my friends who try and post bad news and how even I, who's read much of the same shit independently, often just don't want to hear it.

But I suppose for all of us there's only so much we can deal with - the looming disasters, our own mortality, can overwhelm if we take our hands off the next pint, or gaze too far into the future.

And I suppose that's ok - there's certainly nothing we can do about it. Evolution selected those who survived, and the niceties never really entered into it. So on the day to day do I always choose honesty, vulnerability, or display weakness? Hell no. But when I do I've got an advantage - I'm 6'2 and often 220 lbs - so people rarely call me on it.

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