In last week’s New Insights Course, Human Nature’s Yin and Yang, I summed up a thread running through more than a hundred episodes: the entanglement and contrast between the side of human nature that seeks order and the side that seeks chaos.
In that episode, I said that the reason human nature has these yin-and-yang sides is, ultimately, that this contradiction is built into the human condition. The core issue is how to obtain survival resources. Generally speaking, in a relatively closed environment, resources and opportunities are limited, so maintaining the “order” that distributes those resources is the foremost survival problem; in a relatively open environment, many unknown resources are waiting to be explored, and embracing “chaos” may create new opportunities for survival.
So, beyond these two ways of obtaining survival resources, is there an even more fundamental origin for the yin-and-yang sides of human nature?
That more fundamental origin may be that humans are omnivores. And omnivores have an innate “foraging dilemma.”
Most animals are born knowing what to eat. Take koalas, for example: their foraging systems are shaped entirely by their genes. Koalas are born knowing that they eat eucalyptus leaves—and that eucalyptus leaves are all they eat.
But we humans aren’t like that. We have to learn what’s edible. We are omnivores.
Being omnivores, of course, gives us tremendous flexibility: even if you enter a completely unfamiliar region, you can still be fairly confident that you’ll find something to eat. Koalas don’t have that kind of confidence.
But being omnivores also brings enormous risks: the new food you find might be poisonous, contaminated, or full of parasites.
This is what the renowned psychologist Paul Rozin calls the “omnivore’s dilemma”—omnivores have to seek out and explore new food sources while also staying wary of them until they’ve been proven safe.
“So omnivores live under the pressure of two competing drives: curiosity (the allure of novelty) and fear (fear of novelty).”
Driven by curiosity, the omnivore takes a step forward and embraces chaos. Driven by fear, it takes a step back and returns to order.
The tug-of-war between the two poles of human nature may come from exactly this: at the beginning, all we wanted was to find something tasty to eat.
This world of flavors and human life—honestly, it makes you love it and hate it at the same time.
References:
Jonathan Haidt. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion
Note
- This series of articles, the Psychology New Insights Mini-Course, consisted of short popular-psychology essays and miscellanies written at the time to accompany related content from Zhichao Wei: Psychology New Insights Course. They were published on the now-closed platform Fantuan, and the original link no longer exists.
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