16. Anthropology and Social Psychology Model of Human Behavior

This will be a model long in unfolding and with many revisions. Any input would be appreciated.

When a human wakes up in the morning he/she proceeds to seek gratification and avoid
negative gratification. Gratifications include coffee and breakfast in the morning, completing a word puzzle, having a job application accepted, having a research paper accepted, winning a race, listening to music. It includes many forms of power such as getting a promotion, winning an election, possessing money, possessing status. It includes many forms of aggression – yelling at someone in another car in traffic, expressing hatred toward someone or something, killing someone in war combat, or extra-judicially, winning at a contact sport contest such as boxing, football, rugby, etc. All the gratifications or negative grat one experiences during the day feed into a person’s store of happiness.

A human perceives a door to gratification as being open or closed, but may re-evaluate the situation: a man in a primitive society sees an animal he believes he can kill. He percieves this door to gratification as being open, but the animal gives him a rude awakening, an injury, and a new peception that the door to killing a wolverine or wildcat was not truly open. That door is closed. But upon growing stronger, or joining forces with a colleague, the door to this gratification is now perceived as being open.

• After the Civil War in America, great hatred was unleashed toward the freed slaves. Expressing hatred is gratification. This new source of gratification replaced the source that was lost. Slave owners lost property and means of production. The lower working classes, who never owned slaves lost status. Whereas under slavery, the white working class was a strata above slaves, after slavery was abolished, there was no one under them. Some ex-slaves accrued higher status thru land ownership or other means. No longer anyone to give them deference. Gene Hackman’s federal marshal character in The Killing Fields tells of his father killing a mule of his black neighbor who was expanding his farm. He explained his feelings. “If you’re not better than a nigger, who are you better than?”.

Closing doors to racism. In 1947 professional baseball was completely segregated. Neither the American League nor the National League had a single black player. But two individuals were determined to change it. Dodger general manager Branch Rickey, with the approval of the team owners, hired the first black man to play in the majors, Jackie Robinson, a man who fully understood and accepted the hatred and bigotry that he was to face. Upon his debut, many fans in the stadium yelled racial insults, even the home Brooklyn fans who didn’t want a black man on their team. These acts of aggression were gratifying and the door was open to this gratification through aggressive racial bullying. But 70 years later, the grandchildren of these bullies no longer perceive this door to be open. Because the result of yelling racial insults at a baseball game would perceivably lead to angering other fans and likely being ejected from the stadium. With the perception that this expression of racism is not an open door to gratification, the individual turns to other sources that perceptibly WOULD result in gratification. such as cheering on the home team -players of all races – and joining the camaraderie of the home crowd.

Of course another door for gratification was becoming the leader of the hate group. George Wallace gained great popularity by symbolically standing in the doorway to block the entrance of, James Meridith, the first Black American to attend UA after a federal court ordered it integrated. Wallace was elected governor twice more after this action. As the doors to gratification through racism slowly closed, Wallace later denounced racism. (UA is now 21% Black)

Assigning an evil status to capitalism is senseless. An artist who creates an unsuccessful painting does not say ‘Well, this was pretty bad. I painted it on canvass. Maybe I should try another material.’ Capitalism is what a society makes of it. A society like the US that allows off-shore tax refuge, legal bribes to congressmen, and allows the wealth gap to become quite obscene will experience more dislocations than the many countries that do not.

When viewing past civilizations and societies which have fallen into disfunction, the social scientist does not reason, that the greed of the patrician class was to blame, or the weakness of the military was to blame. Instead it is analyzed in terms of how and why they were unable to overcome the forces of their destruction. The chance election of a destructive candidate such as Trump is not seen as a cause but an effect of a long series of previous consequential events.

Two systems. 1 the dynamics of gratification, need for and denial of, and 2 the longitudinal progression of cultural values and the reasons for change

In 1940