Granfalloons and Cognotypes

Granfalloons

Kurt Vonnegut introduced a concept of meaningless social groups in Cat’s Cradle (1963). The granfalloon is an open category that one might populate with such groupings as:

• The set of all men
• The set of all women
• The set of all members of a certain ethnic group
• The set of all members of a certain religion

While some people are trigger-happy to ascribe behavior or attributes to a such a patently superficial category out of prejudice or outright mental laziness, this would seldom contribute to an accurate assessment. Such impetuous groupings would instead be counterproductive and succeed only in reinforcing false and harmful stereotypes, casting a granfalloon in the light of a meaningful association.

So what is a meaningful association? One could claim that women belong together for their childbearing potential, for example, or that all citizens of a certain country belong together for obvious legal and political reasons. Kurt Vonnegut, I suspect, would most probably have objected to such groupings as not sufficiently meaningful, preferring instead the concept of a karass (a granfalloon being defined as a false karass) or karmic circle of people bound together by interwoven threads of destiny far too complex to perceive except perhaps occasionally in hindsight. The passing stranger, for example, who pulls you out of traffic just as a bus barrels past, or the bumbling airline clerk who puts you on the wrong flight – the one that doesn’t crash, for example, or that leads to a first encounter with a lifelong friend or partner – these are the members of your karass as Kurt Vonnegut defined the term.

I cannot but accept Vonnegut’s definition of a karass, not least because as its inventor, he gets to define it. I am free, however, to recognize other groupings – groupings aside from the karass – that like the karass do not qualify as granfalloons. I found just such an array of groupings when I read Chapter 5 of Snakes in Suits by Babiak and Hare (2006), in which the authors recount the results of their informal observations of people’s reactions to fraudsters they likened to the phony evangelist Elmer Gantry in the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster.

Cognotypes

Having benefitted greatly from the required reading in my college zoology class, namely Dictionary of Word Roots and Combining Forms by Donald J. Borror, and having come across the word in an obscure internet forum in which it was thrown into the mix of a word game without being defined, I have hereby chosen to designate the mind categories described by Babiak & Hare as cognotypes.

1. There are the fraudsters themselves, who are the main subjects of Babiak & Hare’s book;
2. About a third of an unsuspecting religious group will see the fraudster as convincing or charismatic;
3. About a third of the same group will be suspicious (“he makes my skin crawl”);
4. About a third will reserve judgment.

I’ve gotten the authors’ order of mention wrong in previous posts, so let’s use descriptive names instead for these four cognotypes using definitions from Babiak & Hare:

• fraudsters infiltrate, con and manipulate affinity groups or social hierarchies;
• acolytes have a tendency to buy into a fraudster’s message or persona;
• skeptics have a tendency to doubt a fraudster’s message or persona;
• agnostics have a tendency to reserve judgment on a fraudster’s message or persona.

By these definitions, we need a fraudster to stimulate the remaining three cognotypes so that we can tell them apart. It is typically by their reactions to or association with or revulsion or indifference to such fraudsters – the fraudsters themselves being common enough in everyday life for all of us to encounter and know, unfortunately – that these cognotypes are apt to reveal themselves on their own. I use terms commonly associated with religious questions so as to maintain a modicum of decorum in my nomenclature. Nevertheless, one may begin over time to notice in a given individual parallel behaviors in social and religious contexts, and the nomenclature sorts well with the original context used by Babiak & Hare.

“The interesting part is that when the scams, deceptions and depredations are revealed, many of the initial opinions remain unchanged. Those who were impressed at first still believe they were right and that there must be a mistake or misunderstanding. Those who were suspicious at first now feel vindicated (“I knew he was bad news”) and the remaining third are still on the fence (“what happened?”).”

The fraudsters themselves can be broken down further. There are psychopaths of several distinct styles, for example – the macho style and the puppetmaster being the the most dangerous to use the adjective applied here by Babiak & Hare – and narcissists – people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder or NPD – whom I personally choose to group as simply one more style of psychopath because a breakdown of their behaviors and what they accomplish yields the same results. I personally like to group the behavior modes of these fraudsters into 3 main attributes: (1) serial social predation, (2) pathological opportunism and (3) an intricate and mercurial fictional narrative – what psychopathologists call the psychopathic fiction. The pathological opportunism, in which the fraudster recognizes and seizes opportunities for gaining an advantage that lie far beyond the imagination and far beneath the consideration of saner people, arises from what the experts call the high Machiavellian IQs of these individuals. I adopt the adjective “mercurial” from former CIA director John Brennan’s assessment of the evasive course changes, round-the-clock damage control maneuvers and ephemeral escape methods of the 45th President of the United States. These sorts of fraudsters collectively make up between 1 and 5 percent of a random population depending on where the line is drawn on the psychopathy spectrum.

About Evolution

Evolution by natural selection is not simple. It is driven by random mutations and genetic recombination. These can take the form of new directions in the evolution of the species as a whole, or they can take the form of certain gene groups that produce different characteristics in different individuals of the same species — eye or hair color, for example, different variations of which can crop up in many populations. Psychopathy falls into this latter category based on a reasonable assessment of most of the scientific literature on the subject, which indicates that psychopathic spectrum disorders are not treatable. Psychopaths, therefore, are social predators who have evolved within the human species, not as a separate species. Because they are related to psychopathy by instinctive affinity, revulsion or insensitivity, and because they occur in consistent proportions atypical of acquired characteristics, the three mainstream cognotypes — acolytes, skeptics and agnostics as discussed above — most likely also fall into the category of emergent, genetically predetermined characteristics that recur within a single species — as discussed above, each having certain advantages on certain levels of society. To ease the cerebral pain, one could belly up and say that God made them that way, but that conversation doesn’t belong in a productive context. By the way, there is no third option, though anyone is of course free to propose one. Those who attempt to dismiss the question as a religious one, however, may find themselves met at the pearly gates by the ghost of Pope Francis, who has officially put his hand in with Charles Darwin.

The Tiger’s Stripes

In a recent epiphany, it occurred to me that the various styles exhibited by psychopaths have evolved over time to confuse us and to further obfuscate their circuitous designs and perverse ruses, lest we become familiar enough with any one sanity simulation to habituate effective countermeasures. There is a natural precedent for this in the myriad strains of a typical virus, which are widely understood to be aimed at confusing our immune systems and obfuscating the viruses’ attack modes, lest our immunity to one strain suffice against all of them. Were every psychopath to use the macho style, for example, the skeptics among us at least would habituate more quickly to them through folklore and anecdotal sharing. “Rah, rah, rah!” We’d hear them coming a mile away, roll our eyes and say “Here we go again…” and they’d be busted by the time they first saw us – made, blown, exposed, universally shunned and despised. As it is, we all get taken in, every single time, for the multitude of styles and for the multitude of ruses cooked up by any one fraudster, just as surely as our immune systems succumb to each year’s new strain of the common cold virus. Just like viruses, the social predators in our midst thrive on victims, hopping from one to the next by nature. Just as the acolytes rush to align themselves with the nearest predator, those who know better should be looking for ways to neutralize the predators and protect their victims.

Social Niches

Just as all creatures occupy ecological niches, social creatures also occupy social niches. While an ecological niche is an environmental context to which an organism has adapted over time, a social niche is a social context to which an organism has adapted over time. Just as members of the same species (and even siblings) can be born with different eye colors (an environmental adaptation), so can they be born with different cognotypes (a social adaptation), each one carrying survival advantages on a certain level. People born with an altruistic cognotype (the skeptics) confer a benefit to the species as a whole, while those born with a predatory cognotype as described above (the fraudsters) co-evolve to occupy a simple predatory niche within the society thus created. A mutual protection cognotype of benefit to members of the same cognotype (the acolytes) co-evolves with the social predators to rally its members around them like remoras to sharks, while a self-serving cognotype (the agnostics) co-evolves with the mix to keep its members out of the inevitable fray between the other cognotypes.

Niches as Attractors

Evolution by natural selection operates by filling or creating ecological or social niches. Over time, the haphazard courses of random mutations will stumble upon environmental and social opportunities for exploitation. They will occupy and if possible expand these niches to the degree that the advantages they are able to realize outweigh the drawbacks on various levels — individual, group and population. In this way, the very existence of an environmental or social niche embodies an attractor, welcoming accidental adaptations one by one as they stumble upon it. This is our clue that the very existence of each social niche described above guarantees over time that corresponding gene groups will emerge in the population to fill them.

Autism

I will take a step further and propose that autism in people with exceptional abilities, though considered anomalous today due to its genetic scarcity, is the “old normal” from which modern humans have diversified with the emergence of organized social systems that create exploitable niches for the mainstream cognotypes described above to occupy. Granted, in some cases such as that portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 motion picture The Rain Man, the subject has strong but narrowly focused abilities of limited value to society. In others, however, such as that embodied by the famous environmental activist Greta Thunberg, the condition confers what we perceive as a balanced set of attributes that stand out as beneficial to wider society — in Greta’s case, to the very future of humanity. Greta, in the context of the cognotypes described above, represents the rootstock of this “old normal” — what everyone would have been like in the deep past of humanity before social niches emerged for the mainstream cogotoypes to diversify into. As social organization pushed back on and lifted environmental selection pressures, the social niches described above began to exert social selection pressures — as the attractors that helped create the three mainstream cognotypes — surpassed the old environmental selection pressures and became the controlling influence over the courses of human evolution.

Predatory Epiphenomena

The advent of predatory cognotypes and their co-evolved acolytes and agnostics can be seen as an epiphenomenon of the society created by the skeptics. In benefiting from but not contributing to society, these cognotypes proliferate up to their equilibrium proportions, placing a burden on the species as a whole. The damage they inflict either by action or inaction, however, is delayed and often cumulative over years, decades or even centuries. This allows these damaging cognotypes to outrun the action of natural selection in correcting for the damage they do, thus remaining in their equilibrium proportions. When nature finally does take a hand, the correction it imposes harms different people than the ones who caused the damage, thus failing to operate on the predatory and parasitic cognotypes. In this way, the damaging cognotypes continually outrun the consequences of their behaviors. Nature operates in the blind and doesn’t know any better. It selects for the most part what works over the lifetime of a single organism.

The Clues Around Us

The scientific studies, news reports, political approval statistics and the applicable bodies of accumulated knowledge provide ample evidence of these cognotypes in the world around us. As I’ve described in another post, the observations of Babiak and Hare were not contradicted during the candidacy and election of Donald J. Trump to the U.S. Presidency in 2016. Trump suffers from NPD because if he doesn’t then nobody does. Al Gore called it a bad science experiment but it boggles the mind to think of how to conduct such an experiment on such a massive scale more objectively than to simply wait for it to happen. And so it did, ready or not. I for one was ready and it didn’t take me long to start collecting data.

Paradox Lost

Social dynamics appear complex but only because everyone thinks that everyone else thinks like they do. Contrary to popular belief, there are no majorities in the ways that matter. In a democracy, the minority skeptics are locked in an eternal struggle with the minority acolytes for the hearts and minds of the minority agnostics.

Nature continues to repeat this bad science experiment ad infinitum because natural selection operates in the blind. Nature doesn’t know any better and so far neither does humankind, at least not collectively and administratively. This may be an equilibrium balance to which all sentient societies converge. Having to constantly trifle with one another because of cognitive and behavioral differences we are not aware of makes the society vulnerable to external threats but natural selection works on all levels. It favors the skeptics on the level of the society as a whole because they tend to do what’s right for the society as a whole. It favors the acolytes on the level of their third of the population because they feed off of the society thus maintained to the benefit of their own third, getting a free ride like remoras on the undersides of the psychopathic sharks to which they attach themselves. It favors the agnostics on the individual level because they don’t get involved in the strife thus created and are constantly wooed by the skeptics and acolytes alike for their support.

Thus operating in the blind, rolling the dice of DNA recombination at every conception and without thinking or planning in advance, nature favors what works on each and every level concurrently, not necessarily what’s right for the species. If the result is locally stable but globally unstable, so be it. That’s the dynamic we end up with. As to the courses of history, this vantage has a tremendous power to explain them.

The chronic social instability and episodic political upheavals this dynamic creates also supply abundant fodder for solving the Fermi Paradox. It’s much harder to confront existential threats in the physical world when we’re constantly battered by the rise and fall of popular fraudsters – extinction level threats like Earth crossing objects or climate change to name the biggest two, not to mention social justice and workplace wellness. When the fraudsters hold us back long enough, something of epic proportions eventually happens that we didn’t have time, organization or resolve enough to prepare for and we are collectively reduced to a cosmic statistic. Maybe that’s why it’s so quiet out there.