Being Mean To Someone Is A Terribly InefficientWay To Get Your Needs Met

From interpersonal relations to social media to politics, I’ve never, ever seen being adversarial work out well.

I’ve seen mean. I’ve seen people hurl the most offensive insults in social media. I’ve seen people threaten each other in a dispute. I’ve seen parents being mean to their kids. I’ve seen one faction in politics being cruel to another. It’s all out of spite, and all of it really misses the point of communications anyway.

The only time we ever really talk to other people is because we want something from them. We want something they have, their companionship, or their cooperation. I believe that humans invented language for the purpose of more efficient cooperation. We talk to other people to get what we want, and every word we speak to another is for just one thing, cooperation.

Cooperation is a skill that is baked into our genes. Cooperation is the foundation skill of all of humanity. All human achievement is built upon our capacity for cooperation.

If I have a need, I must have a way to express that need. For babies, the primary means of expression is crying or fussing. Babies don’t have words to describe what they need. They lack the skills to articulate their needs, so they cry and make other noises to get the attention of the parents and to get their needs met.

As humans grow older, we develop the skills of speech. We begin to articulate our needs with words. As a parent, I’ve never seen a child be mean to get what they want unless they learned to be mean from someone else. Children are at an enormous disadvantage when it comes to getting their needs met. They are cute and cuddly precisely for the purpose of appealing to our sympathies. Being mean is the least productive way for babies and young kids to get their needs met.

Many of us have had power struggles with our parents and have been raised by parents who believed that punishment and reward were the primary means of extracting compliance from kids. I didn’t know that compliance is something to be extracted from kids. It’s as if some parents actually believe that if they are mean enough, cruel enough, that they can get their kids to behave. I’ve seen this tried and I’ve never seen it work. I’ve seen reports in the news and the literature that led to fatal results for the kids. Some parents do not…