So, what next?

Bec and I are busy teaching our little girl the social niceties. How to be polite, considerate, etc. And then I remembered this xkcd comic from a few weeks ago:

Why do we behave the way we do? A lot of it depends on the conditioning we are exposed to as children, conditioning that we are actively imposing on our daughter right now. But if we are able to overcome that conditioning, what then?

Anarchy? Chaos? Disorder?

Almost certainly.

We live in dense populations in regular close contact with thousands of other humans who we don't know and will probably never know. So why should we care about them? Because without social rules then we would descend into a mass of violence and depredation from which only the strong few would arise (thank you Charles Darwin). And there is a hierarchy to the conditioning that is applied to keep people in line:
1. The truly uneducated are made to fear posthumous retribution via religious indoctrination.
2. The general masses are made to fear punishment under laws imposed by the ruling elite.
3. A small few recognise the need for social order and voluntarily abide by appropriate moral guidelines.

Of course there are many to whom none of these apply, notably criminals and sociopaths. And the more intelligent one is the easier it is to bypass these controls; there is a known correlation between lower intellect and blind religious observance, smart criminals can evade the police (and frequently do), and a self-imposed moral code is inherently arbitrary.

The alt-tag to the above comic is "Sometimes I'm terrified by how many options other people have."

Rightly so.

Maybe we've got it wrong. Maybe the outcome of the breakdown of social order will be that, following the death of most humans at each other's hands, the Earth will return to an equilibrium that has been long since disturbed by our "social niceties".