Socioprimates
Plato is dear to me, but truth is dearer.
There are many truths, but only one fact. Everything else is interpretation, which each person presents as their truth.
What is the key distinction between the concepts of fact and truth? A fact is an objective event or phenomenon that can be verified and confirmed independently of anyone’s views. For example, it’s raining today – this is a fact, if it’s actually raining.
However, when people discuss facts, they often interpret them differently, based on their experience, beliefs, interests, or emotions. This interpretation becomes each person’s truth. This is precisely why there can be many truths: everyone has their own perspective on the same fact.
For instance, one person might consider rain a blessing for crops, while another sees it as an obstacle to their walk. Both speak truth from their perceptual standpoint, though the fact itself (it’s raining) remains unchanged.
In philosophy, this theme has been discussed since ancient times. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle emphasized that truth should transcend personal sympathies and subjective opinions – truth is what most closely approximates facts and objective reality. But in real life, people often call their interpretation of fact, rather than the fact itself, truth.
Personal beliefs exert decisive influence on the perception of truth. They form distinctive filters through which a person perceives and interprets facts and events. Beliefs determine what a person considers truth and what they don’t. What one perceives as obvious fact, another may completely deny if it contradicts their internal convictions.
Sources of beliefs include personal experience, upbringing, cultural norms, authorities, and social stereotypes. These convictions can be rational or irrational, positive or limiting.
Under the influence of beliefs, a person selectively perceives information: they tend to notice and remember what confirms their views, and ignore or reject what contradicts them. This phenomenon is called selective perception.
Irrational or rigid beliefs can distort reality, lead to erroneous conclusions and emotional reactions that don’t correspond to the objective situation.
Thus, personal beliefs not only influence how a person perceives truth, but often shape their own version of truth, distinct from others’ views. As a result, truth becomes subjective for each individual: it consists not only of facts, but of their interpretation through the prism of personal beliefs.
What This Book Is About
Human social norms and behavioral constraints are not merely biological givens, but the result of purposeful behavioral model formation, closely tied to our species’ evolutionary history. This book examines questions of how and why norms emerged, how they became entrenched, and why they became critically important not only for survival, but for evolutionary progress.
Collective agreements, mutual obligations, and support mechanisms became the foundation of moral and cultural development. A naturally poorly-armed species – humans – created their moral firmware not only to survive, but to build complex communities, cultures, and eventually civilizations.
Before you lies the first volume of a series devoted to human behavior and methods of its external control. But not behavior in general – inherited behavior, formed through phylogenesis. And above all – how this behavior can easily be controlled from outside. This is important. I don’t plan to examine endless religious, idealistic, and philosophical concepts, nor delve into psychological depths. The analysis is based on behavioral models of living beings – including us, social primates – grounded in sociobiological, ethological, and psychogenetic paradigms.
If we set aside physiology and reflexive acts, most human behavior consists of behavioral templates working toward the future: survival, reproduction, dominance. And they operate not through reason, but through built-in behavioral algorithms developed through millions of years of selection.
Instincts. Everyone’s heard the word, but few have considered what exactly lies behind it. Instinct isn’t simply a looped program, like in insects. It’s an innate predisposition – a drive, inclination, readiness to act in certain ways under certain conditions. It’s not a fixed set of movements, but a default behavioral direction. Humans, as beings with glimmers of reason, can follow this impulse or not. But only if they want strongly enough not to follow it. In other words – it takes reason, will, and effort not to be a biological automaton.
The vast majority of people aren’t inclined to notice their instincts. They operate in background mode, without internal voice, without a sign reading “attention: urge.” They simply exist – and are perceived as self-evident. Just like air or gravity: no one asks why objects fall rather than fly. Or why feelings of shame, retribution, love, or pride arise spontaneously, without prior command. They exist, and for most people, that’s enough.
However, all this isn’t universal laws of existence, but products of evolutionary assembly. These feelings and urges are tools polished by selection. What seems like internal impulse is the result of biological and social programming, which includes not only instincts, but primitiveness, imprinting, hormonal cycles, accumulated emotional experience, norms and morals, rules and traditions, environmental pressure, propaganda, content environment, and even the micro-tone of social signals. All this invisibly shapes the behavioral matrix – from partner choice to reasons for road rage or buying another useless gadget.
This is the hidden anatomy of motivation. Behavior is controlled through simple channels: consume, react, mate. Most people sincerely believe they act by their own will, though there’s no more real will there than in an ant following a pheromone trail.
And here’s the key moment: few facts, many interpretations. The same fact can generate dozens, hundreds of truths – because truth refers not to the event, but to its explanation. In society, a fact begins to live only after it’s been explained, processed, interpreted. Media, opinion leaders, moral frameworks, cultural algorithms – all package facts into interpretations, which mass consciousness then accepts as truth.
Humans instinctively gravitate toward interpretations matching their beliefs and experience. This reduces internal conflict and preserves the illusion of wholeness. In reality – people simply believe what benefits the system. What’s currently recognized as normal. Because an isolated individual without collective meaning feels vulnerable, and therefore easily controlled.
In daily life, people care less about dry facts than about their interpretations and explanatory versions – what they mean personally and how to respond. Interpretation activates behavior: triggers fear or hope, commands fight, wait, or turn away. Because humans act not on facts, but on meanings they’ve assigned to those facts – or that have been imposed from outside.
Interpretation of fact matters more than the fact itself – precisely because it transforms abstract events into something significant, personal, obligating action. Facts are merely building blocks. But what gets built from them – temple, prison, or advertising banner – interpretation decides. And this architecture of meaning is no longer chaotic. It’s shaped by those who own the megaphone: media, ideologues, digital platforms, educational institutions, and other agents of collective consciousness.
This is the book’s main purpose: to understand what exactly drives us, which internal springs set us in motion, and why most of these springs are carefully hidden from view – beneath the gloss of upbringing, morality, education, universal values, and other attractive screens. These control mechanisms don’t cancel free will, but trim it to leash length – convenient for leading.
Yes, in our time everything’s been written, said, calculated, and published. That’s not the point. My goal is to assemble scattered fragments into a working system. To connect biology and culture, instincts and ideologies, feelings and stimuli, creating a complete picture: not a philosophical treatise, but a navigation tool for understanding yourself and others. I stand on the shoulders of giants – scientists, thinkers, practitioners, observers, naturalists, cynical realists, misanthropes with telescopic vision, masters of systems thinking, grim prophets of human nature, and simple madmen who saw more than necessary.
I hope this book becomes a kind of exit from the fairy-tale world of self-illusions into the world of real behavioral mechanisms – into the world of crude, unvarnished truth about oneself. Where all illusions crumble and facts begin. Where you can no longer hide behind “that’s how it’s done” or “that’s what we were taught,” but see exactly why you feel what you feel right now – and why someone benefits from it.
