Social exclusion

"Some of the chemical pathways for physical pain and pain from social exclusion overlap (MacDonald and Leary, 2005). The physical pain system may have been co-opted to motivate social animals to respond to threats to their inclusion in the group." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaptation

I would argue it evolved to counter the intrinsic cost of social existence which is the struggle for resources. In the short term social living should be impossible due to the negative effects of status (the "pecking order" that exists to distibute limited resources - lower status individuals die first in times of shortage). But in the long term orgainised groups are highly efficient and evolutionarily beneficial. So it is a genetic advantage to have a mentality which will suffer the struggle for status and

Occurs to me also that a second reason for the "cost" of social inclusion is a test against cheats. If joining and leaving groups was easy then an individual might join a group, cheat, and then leave again to join the next group. This positions the whole CV fiasco as a continuation of the more ancient evolutionary process. To prove "loyalty" a group might demand that a new recruit undergo a test which is so costly that having gained membership it is not worth leaving and joining another group. That test in the business world is the life long process of promotions. However if you leave a company you don't start again at the bottom of the new company so it doesn't quite work. However having gained so many years of skill and experience in a particular field it becomes increasingly costly to change and reskill. Anyway one might justify the behaviour of people around capital as being a test of new recruits to their loyalty of that capital.

If this is true then it would follow in a stable system however that the cost of gaining access to the capital would be of a similar order as the gain from being in control of that capital. One might envisage an individual working their way to the top of a bank. It might take them 15 years if they were very lucky. After this they have the freedom to set themselves any salary they want, fiddle the books however they want, rub shoulders on equal footing with the top of the business class, and be assured that they have the support of the system in everything except maybe the most serious crimes. Now the question is: was the 15 wasted years worth it?

You see there is an easier way to social inclusion. It is not the single-eyed approach of actually gaining social inclusion. This is a very imperfect inclusion because the other side of being included in one group is being excluded from another - what is the meaning of inclusion without exclusion? When we are born we are already included in a very important group, that of existence and within that the inclusion of living things and within that the inclusion of human beings and within that of family (genetically). These are real inclusions that have real meaning and are inescapable - that arise as a matter of being born at all. If we add further inclusions to the list they are only trivial and quite ironically only go to divide the previous memberships that we have. Unhappy with being a member of the human race we seek to divide the human race into subgroups to which we can become included and excluded from. A lot of work, a lot of time, a lot of status struggles and at the end of the day we are worse off than if we had done nothing!

This has been a motto of mine since the beginning of my life but I've been taught to view it as a weakness. I'm beginning to realise its the truth. Do Nothing (NULL) and be happy with that.