We Are Fighting a War to Keep Our Hearts Alive

Is it time to give up? Was it already time to give up in 2020, or 2012, or perhaps even 1999? We usually justify our answers to these questions purely in terms of their rational foundations. But our reasoning is embodied, and variation in the details of our embodiment produce very different relationships to hope, despair, and the place one finds beyond them. In this episode, we examine the disoriented haze that seems to have descended over so many of us, and sketch the preliminary foundations of a new psychological trait: Heart Refuses to Die (HRD). To understand HRD, we explore a dopamine-mediated trait, found in all inventories of individual psychological difference, that affects activity and motivation. Differences in individual dopamine systems imply truly fundamental questions about the relationships between biology, behavior, and social structures. Why do we find the same realms of temperamental variation across species separated by hundreds of millions of years of evolution? Why are some humans psychologically more like some octopuses than they are like some other humans? What does it mean to speak of “species-typical behavior” when this is taken into consideration? We conclude by adding a number of other dimensions of individual difference to our very tentative psychometric of Heart Refuses to Die. Somewhere along the way, we examine how different types of people thrive in nomadic vs. sedentary societies, the lack of a major new political tendency in recent history, and how people with larger social networks also tend to end up in the emergency room more often.