Perpetual Conflict

I always enjoy coming across new ideas that provide greater insight into the challenges of communication. Recently, I "discovered" biologist E.O. Wilson who has put forth a new theory on man's behavior. Wilson says man is driven by what he labels "group selection" and "individual selection." Group selection is characterized by man's recognition that we need each other to survive. As a result, we create connections with others in the form of such things as clubs, neighborhoods, family units, shopping centers, and even Facebook. On the other hand, individual selection speaks to our drive to do our own thing, stand out from the crowd, be noticed, and, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, "march to the beat of our own drummer." These two internal drives encapsulate a fundamental struggle within all of us, according to Wilson.

It is no wonder, then, that communication is such a challenging enterprise for all of us. Whether we are a professional communicator or a so-called regular person doing what they can to interact well with others, it is important to understand this internal reality within humans. Years before Wilson came on the scene, psychologist Abraham Maslow also touched on the duality within us in his hierarchy of needs. Maslow said we all possess a need for self-actualization as well as a need for acceptance and membership in a group of some sort. The idea of picturing how this internal dual personality of ours reconciles all efforts to communicate with us is intriguing.

Campaigners urge us to support their candidate. Advertisers beg us buy their product. Children try to talk other children into taking their first puff of a cigarette. The examples are plentiful. A big part of our internal decision making process is reconciling whether we want to go along with or stand apart from others. Sometimes this decision is not easy. What is interesting is that just as our eventual decisions come from one of those two places, appeals made to us are often triggered by an acknowledgment of the existence of our innate duality as articulated by Maslow and, now, Wilson.