HW 52: Initial thoughts on Human interactions

human beings are born around other people, immediately around their mother and then later on in society. It's impossible to escape other people, so we figure out ways to interact with them and make the most of these interactions. We interact differently with different people and treat people differently based on who they are in relation to us.

While it may sound selfish, every one has a goal in any given interaction. Weather it's to make friends, maintain a friendship, enjoy the other person's company etc. each person gets something out of the interaction. Some goals are conscious whereas others are subconscious. A student might say to themselves, "I should be nice to this teacher and then they'll give me a good grade", this is their goal for the interaction with the teacher. A subconscious goal might be "This person is mean to me so I will be mean to them to assert myself and possibly avoid getting bullied", of course this never works, but psychology and logic aren't always the same.

Even in interactions with friends people have goals. When around their friends people have similar subconscious goals (assuming this is a genuine friendship): "I want to be nice to my friend because if I'm nice them they'll stay in my life to make me happy". Even though the gesture of being nice to a friend may look selfless, the person wants the companionship of the other person for themselves. The basis of human interaction is to be better off in life than you were before, the goals of each interaction, conscious or subconscious, follow this ultimate guideline.

However this doesn't make human interaction a hollow and meaningless competition. Even though all of these goals are somewhat selfish there is a basic emotional foundation to them. People act differently around people based on how much they care about them, even if someone is just being nice to have the companionship of a friend, they still care about that friend. If anything this theory of interaction exposes how much we care about the people around us.

The conflict that occurs in human interactions, or the confusion that people might feel in interactions is the contradiction between the subconscious goal and the conscious goal. In the example of cheating someone might actively think: "I have a moral obligation to my spouse/lover and I shouldn't cheat on them" but they might subconsciously think: "This other person is attractive and my spouse/lover won't find out I should cheat on them". This conflict is the source of all moral dilemmas, the goal of our subconscious animal instinct and the goal of our conscious civilized self contradicting one another.

The conscious goals we have are determined by how we're taught and the subconscious goals are determined by how we're raised and how we would behave naturally in our hypothetical "wild" and "un-domesticated" identities. What you're taught is something that is explicitly stated to you and your mind remembers that lesson and thinks about it consciously. How you're raised is the subtext of those lessons that you pick up on that shapes you as a person. Natural instinct is more of a biological thing, that way the brain is meant to analyze situations based on what is the optimal outcome for survival. All of these things combine to create the goals that dictate how we interact with other people.