You just had to ask.

I have a rather ambitious goal for this post. So ambitious, in fact, that I might as well consider this the first part in some sort of series, or at least an ongoing theme.

A friend of mine, Beth, asked me to describe “why people do things”.

That’s so vague that it just might work. I’m going to answer a vague question with a hopelessly complex but inconclusive collection of nonsense. The idea, however, can be summed up in one sentence. If you want to understand why people are a certain way, then you need to throw yourself completely into their circumstances. That means everything. The visible, the invisible, all of it. I’m going to take a sort of Rawlsian approach in the sense that I’ll start with the general aspects of what makes people and work my way to the specifics. The reason that I hope to do this is so that I can slowly introduce different variables and circumstances in order to show what distinguishes people and why.

Let’s start with the most general. Let’s have a formless, intangible life form. Superficially it may seem that we can’t discern any interesting information out of it. However, that’s exactly the opposite of the case. We know it’s alive, so it’s very plausible to say it will die. It’s also reasonable to say that it will have to sustain itself, and future generations, etc. Every one of these points tells us a considerable amount. How is a society formed in which the people live 10 days? What about ten trillion years? What about a species that has a birth rate in the hundreds of thousands? All of these, as ridiculous as they may be, will change how this species interacts, and how their society will be formed.

Let’s make it a little more specific. Now we have a generic, absolutely bland, and insipid cutout of a human being. We know nothing about this person. So far, the only thing we can concretely say is that it IS a person. Like our last example, we can gain a considerable bit of information. We know, for instance, that it’ll have human tendencies, and won’t, say, lay eggs.

However! Don’t take that lightly!

Very much like our beginning life model, these minor distinctions dramatically change potential social and economic institutions, and could be the difference between a war mongering mole people, and humanoid teenage mutant ninja turtles. Everything makes a dramatic difference.

Now, let’s take off the veil of ignorance. This is very important! What we’ll do next will separate INDIVIDUALS from each other. Beforehand we were speaking generally, and therefore everything caused major changes in EVERYONE. Now, let’s introduce things such as gender, race, age, height, mental and physical aspects, etc. (I’ll leave out things like creed and the like till later.) Well, now we have physical and mental differences between people. What next? As anyone can tell, all of these make very considerable differences. We now have people who are 6’ 5”, Asian, female, and 42, as well as people who are 4 foot, constantly sick crybabies who complain all the time (you know who you are).

I won’t go into very great depth as to what these differences do. I imagine at this point it’s fairly obvious. I’ll just move onto the next stage, and note that this is the one that’s considered most often in all areas of the social science.

We have humans that have perceivable (and certainly some imperceptible!) differences between each other. What now? Well, now we throw them on different parts of the world and time periods and see how it goes. Some will be left in tropical areas, some in nearly barren wastelands, some in ancient periods, and some in more contemporary settings. What this does is give them environments and circumstances in which these differences in time, body, mind, landscape, etc., all make a difference.

Things have just become considerably more complex.

Now, people in certain areas will have to form their societies given these circumstances. They now have to take into consideration their physical and environmental constraints. Not only that, but they also have to take into consideration each other. 

This is where the brunt of the conversation comes in regarding economics. In fact, this is entirely what economics is, given the generic definitions I mentioned before. Why do people in South America grow bananas, and why do people in the United States grow corn? It’s much more reasonable to do so, and more can be produced. Why do people show consistent and systematic bias in their decisions? Why do certain countries grow, while others don’t? Why does the tragedy of the commons exist? Why do we have people doing the things they do at all? It’s the constraints and restrictions surrounding them. Some may be religious, because they were raised in a religious household, and therefore change their decisions according to that. They could belong to a society in which democracy is highly limited and therefore autocratic rule and lack of economic growth is pervasive. You could have a friend in which you gave money to, but didn’t put any restrictions on. How will they react? How could contracts between two people work at all? Why does that prick hit on you? Why’d your friend lie to you? There are so many structural reasons that affect our reasoning that it makes life considerably complex, but at the same time enriches it dramatically!

So, why do people act certain ways and do things? They’re a result of everything that makes them, them. The mental aspects, the cultural and social, the structural, the environmental, and on and on.

That’s the majority of it. Now, if you just want to know why people are so hard? It’s because people are pricks.