Is PTSD the Natural State?
The effects of trauma
I read this post by Iskra Fileva on Psychology Today: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-philosophers-diaries/202105/how-childhood-trauma-saps-inner-joy-and-the-ability-cope
It’s about how childhood trauma prevents one from developing the capacity for joy. Many people suffer long-term harm, in the form of PTSD, from traumatic events. But it’s especially bad for those who suffer repeated trauma in childhood. They might have lasting psychological dysfunction.
The general phenomenon is well known and often discussed. But while thinking about that, it occurred to me that perhaps these pathological states that trauma victims are in are actually the statistical norm.
The ubiquity of trauma
Imagine that for your entire life, from shortly after your birth, you constantly had to worry about being killed. If you saw a stranger, there was usually a serious danger that that stranger would immediately try to kill you. Suppose your parents knew this and behaved accordingly – throughout your childhood, they were on the lookout for any stranger who might try to murder you. Suppose also that pretty much all your basic needs were constantly in question. You were in danger of freezing to death in the winter, or starving at any time, especially during the winter. You had no access to medical care and so were always in danger of dying of diseases. If you were seriously injured, there would be no hospital you could go to, so you’d probably just die.
It seems plausible that you would grow up seriously psychologically damaged, relative to most healthy people today. You might be unable to form loving, trusting relationships. This might well make it impossible for you to ever be happy.
But that is actually the normal experience of human beings. (Statistically normal, not normatively normal, of course.) Most of our ancestors lived in that situation – if human beings from a neighboring tribe ever showed up, it would probably be to attempt to murder members of your tribe, just for the heck of it; they didn't have medical care that actually worked; their physical needs were always in question; etc.
Furthermore, that is the normal experience of any sentient being in this world. Almost all sentient beings are of course nonhuman animals, and almost all of them have lived their lives in conditions of severe adversity, worse even than those of the poorest humans. Most are in constant danger of being killed by hunger, disease, other animals, or some other natural adversity.
That’s probably why wild animals act so crazy – like, if you take one friendly step towards them, they immediately bolt away in terror. If you somehow get close enough to them and touch them, they’ll fly into a panic, desperately trying to scratch or bite you to death. As soon as they see you, they assume you’re there to murder them. If you met a person like that, you'd say that person needed major psychiatric help.
Questions to think about
1. How good is the universe?
The preceding reflections tend to bolster my idea that the universe may be infinitely bad (https://fakenous.net/?p=261).
2. What is “normal”?
We say that PTSD is abnormal, pathological, a dysfunction, etc. Similarly for psychological dispositions that prevent one from trusting others, experiencing joy, etc. But can these things really be abnormal if they are the typical condition of human beings? If they are the condition that we in fact evolved to live in?
To take an analogy, suppose that hyperintelligent aliens from 40 Eridani visit us.* They are shocked by our pitiful calculating abilities – most human beings, for example, cannot readily convert base-6 numbers to base-10 in their heads. They conclude that most humans (apart from a few mathematicians and autistic savants) are suffering from a cognitive disorder, “mathematical stupidity syndrome”.
(*This example is an allusion to the novel Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir.)
That seems incorrect. Suppose even that the aliens have devised an intervention that can augment our mathematical abilities (perhaps they have an operation they can do to our brains) to make them more like the normal Eridani abilities. It still seems incorrect to say that non-augmented humans are suffering a disorder, defect, or abnormality. Evolution designed us to be the way we are; when we’re operating the way we were ‘designed’ to operate, that’s not abnormal, even if another mode of operation would be better.
3. Why does modern life improve us?
Be that as it may, I think it’s weird – if I’m right about what the typical condition of humans and animals has been – that we (the people in advanced societies with reasonably good parenting) have managed to develop another way of being that seems better than the way people typically have been.
Usually, if you subject a creature to very different conditions from those it evolved to live in, either it manages to adapt and still thrive about as well as it does in its natural condition, or it does worse. Almost never does such a change result in something that we would intuitively consider improved functioning.
It’s quite striking how many seemingly irrelevant changes in the environment turn out to be seriously detrimental or fatal. E.g., if you take away normal gravity, people suffer space sickness, fluid starts to accumulate in their heads, they start to lose muscle and bone mass. If Earth somehow lost its magnetic field, we’d be bombarded by harmful radiation, which would greatly increase our cancer rates. Etc. Our bodies pretty much need everything to be the way it has been in our ancestral environment.
That’s true about our physical functioning. But there’s something unusual about our mental functioning: in an intuitive sense (i.e., using our intuitive notion of “improvement”), our mental functioning has been improved by moving away from our ancestral environment.
Maybe that’s wrong? Some people would certainly dispute it. A fair number of human beings in our society suffer from depression, and every year ~45,000 Americans deliberately kill themselves. Maybe that indicates that we’re ill-adapted to our current social environment, and it’s harming us psychologically. (See the suicide rate chart I got from Wikipedia. This does not show any clear trend over the past 40 years.)
The current U.S. suicide rate is high by world standards. However, I don’t know what the rates were like in previous centuries or in primitive societies. Also, people in earlier centuries were extremely harsh toward suicide victims, which probably artificially reduced the suicide rates (i.e., some people refrained from committing suicide, not because they found their lives worth living but because of social pressure, fear of bringing harm to their families, and fear of divine punishment).
Anyway, why do I think contemporary humans are “functioning better” psychologically than our ancestors?
One thing is that we’re functioning better cognitively. E.g., IQ’s have been rising for the past several decades (the Flynn effect), and this has happened too quickly to be genetically based (it’s also hard to see why our genes should have been improving). It seems that our contemporary environment is growing more conducive to intelligence, even as it gets farther from our ancestral environment.
But the main thing I had in mind is that I think modern people in our society interact with other people in a more healthy and appropriate way. E.g., when we have disputes with each other, we talk them out rather than murdering each other. When we form romantic relationships, they are expected to be based on love, and we have a norm (not always satisfied, of course) of treating each other with mutual respect, as equals – as opposed to the earlier practice of men treating their wives as chattel. If you met a person who had attitudes typical of people in earlier times, and who interacted with other people in our society the way that people in earlier times did, you’d think that person was seriously fucked up. I think this judgment would go beyond merely thinking that this person is harmful to others; you’d think that person was having difficulty forming healthy relationships, and you'd think he was somehow broken.
So that’s weird. Why does modern society improve us psychologically, rather than either damaging us or having no major effect, compared to life in our ancestral environment?
[Edit: Someone referred me to this article about PTSD in the animal world: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/wild-animals-ptsd/619736/.]