PERCEPTIVE PEOPLE HAVING TO DEAL WITH JUNGLE GENES

Perceptive people are said to feel more uncertain because they have more impressions to deal with than others. But perhaps there is an additional force that counts, a force that has to do with our distant past and is still stored in our genes.

Humanity could not have survived for seven million years of evolution without the deep sense of uncertainty that gave us the situational awareness needed in dangerous nature. That basic sense of uncertainty, a blessing in the face of danger, got simply engrained in our genes.

Only in the last 10,000 years, when our ancestors started the agrarian revolution, we went for control of nature and belief in the creation of safety. Modernity, with its belief that once-and-for-all control and total comfort are possible, has been the final outcome sofar.

This culture of control makes us believe that a sense of uncertainty is inconsistent with what society achieves or wants to achieve. It can even be seen as an undermining of the collective belief in control. Uncertainty feelings remind us of the permanent alertness that was needed to survive in the jungle but we now find uncomfortable and suppress.

However, our genes have not been eliminated by the control culture. They are still geared towards permanent alertness in the natural environment. So, our genes go on undermining the control culture, while we dislike that undermining and try to suppress it.

But those perceptive people who are in close touch with their own system, including their genes, may feel the awareness that made our ancestors survive in the wild. Because of that awareness, they have to deal with the contrast between what they authentically feel as sound and what society wants them to suppress.

Therefore, those in close touch with themselves get perplexed by this genes-society friction that nobody explains to them. No wonder that their perplexity produces a second layer of uncertainty, an uncertainty that they also learn to see as wrong and to be suppressed.

Courtesy: Richard Leakey, Pedram Shojai; Elise Pattyn