Follow the Leader

A fellow trekker and I quickly approached Alessandro to see what he might have found for us. "We have a fire tonight!" he exclaimed. Alessandro is a guy from Italy who was traveling to Cusco at the time. I met up with him and his friends to trek the famed Rainbow Mountain. I've always wanted to trek this mountain, to see it in all its colors and in all its glory. I had been in this country for a while but I just didn't want to trek on my own. I thought it would be better to be with people, or not.

I was a slow trekker and I realized that this activity was just not for me. Suddenly I saw Alessandro from a distance, taking the woods in the empty village. He handed us the woods he gathered from the tiny village. "Take it, there won't be woods up there anymore". Up there in the rainbow mountain is a vast emptiness and nothing more. Seeing his ability to think ahead makes him a good expedition leader. He probably cared for his own hot meal that night or whatever that would benefit his group of four. I was exhausted, his motives didn't really matter to me.

Sure we had a fire and the luxury of warm food that night, but at what cost? As we were going back to the town, a group of natives appeared and began harassing us. Alessandro being our great leader took care of the ordeal. He had to pay a hefty price for stealing the woods from the poor villagers. In the end, instead of spending really cheaply for his travel experience, he ended up paying more. But yes, we are all equally responsible.

At the time, I was probably thinking about my own interest as well. I needed to eat and survive the cold night, nevermind if we already had something with us. We needed more, for safety and security. I look back thinking that I was being a sheep. It was easier to be that way. What happened to the thinking person who can distinguish what is right from what is wrong? I realize how pressure from a group or authority can make you do absurd things. The free-thinking individual can vanish in a snap.

This experience came to my mind while I was reading this article from evonomics. It is about how corporations and big businesses are turning nice people into psychopaths. Once they were nice people then they slowly turn into psychos once the massive accumulation of wealth starts. Their ability to be pro-social vanishes as the shareholder-value dogmas focus on caring only about their own wealth. The leaders instill into their minds the dominant business paradigm of "maximizing profit".

There's a theory that the purely rational or purely selfish person is just a functional psycho. You know how this works, a big-time businessman cares nothing for ethics or other's welfare anymore, he will do anything that will serve his own material interests, steal, cheat or even murder. That is not everyone though, fortunately, most of us are not yet conscienceless pyschos.

People are likely to be nice or pro-social when it only takes a little, if not a lot, from our piggy bank. If the 'acting nicely' becomes expensive, then the pro-social behavior also declines. Here is where the good old ' help yourself first' comes into play. We are likely to help others if it's not going to cost us that much. People are willing to make small sacrifices to follow their conscience and help others.

Our ability to be more helpful or prosocial largely depends on external social cues. Group pressure can greatly affect our ability to make a decision. We are more likely to 'act nicely' when asked. We are more likely to act nicely when we are made to believe that others would act nicely as well. People also tend to be nice if something is structured in a way that cares for ethics or others' welfare. And if something is structured in a way that would only maximize profits and disregard the consequences, people tend to follow the same values.

Now it makes me think about why the majority of people are still not proactively going out there to oppose or make changes to the apparent destructive values of the few. If the system is structured in a way that doesn't care about others, and only perpetuates political dominance in this world, then the rest will follow. It is easier to be a sheep.