The great social experiment

Salamu

Perception is a funny thing. One person will see a potato as a source of nourishment while another person sees it as a dirty vegetable. Technically both of these aspects of the potato are correct, it just matters on the point of view you are looking at it.

I must say that I have a unique mindset when it comes to many things. I am not your conventional person

who will think in one particular way. In fact, many people ask me if I go home to a mental institution every night. I think that my rationale is quite revolutionary, others beg to differ.

Take for instance night clubs. Many people think night clubs are social gatherings. But there is no way on earth that a night club is anything but a social experiment.

A social gathering is a gathering of two or more people where a variety of events can take place. A braai (which is a barbeque for you non South Africans) is a social gathering. Here you can drink, dance, eat, watch sports, hit on women and perhaps see some action. There are very rarely fights at braai’s.

A social experiment is a situation where limited activities are on offer in order to see the human reaction to things. Realistically, there are only three things you can do at a club: drink, dance and hit on women. People go to clubs and dance as some form of perverse mating ritual which will hopefully attract the fairer sex. If this is successful and you get some action, you will no doubt then get into another ritual of dominance with a guy that has had his eye on her the whole evening. For you uneducated out there, this is called a fight.

Dating in a sense, is also nothing more than a social experiment in order to see if you can effectively pursue a relationship with the other person. A relationship is nothing more than a social experiment in order to see if you can marry a person. This is the ultimate social goal that most humans aspire towards.

And this is just conventional dating. Now internet – or social media dating –  is even more of a social experiment. With conventional dating, you get to interact with the person on a personal level and you can see whether you are compatible. You make these judgements on various factors such as her smile, her nature, her demeanour during the dates, common interests and her personality. I recently joined Tinder and I found that on Tinder, you make assumptions on a person’s look and nothing more.

What defines a social event from a social experiment? Well the presence or absence of controllable variables. To get me to like a girl on Tinder, three things need to occur: Does she have beautiful eyes, does she have an awesome smile, and does she have a good body. If she’s blonde, it’s a bonus, but it will not exclude a girl if the other criteria are met. With a conventional date, it is harder to manipulate the controllable variables because your personality dominates.

A club is a social experiment because the controllable variable here is alcohol and the lack of other activities to entertain our primitive minds other than dancing and drinking. It is easy to manipulate these variables. The absence of alcohol frankly makes a club shit. But the absence of alcohol at a braai is not such a train smash.

You need to look for common denominators with all of this. And the overriding one is emotion. Which is why dating is nothing more than a social experiment, marriage on the other hand is less so because emotions are settled down significantly from when you were dating. The overriding factor at a night club is emotion (how you feel towards a song, how you feel towards a girl, how you feel towards getting involved in a fight) there are far less emotions involved at a braai.

How do you know the difference between a social event and a social experiment? There is a very easy test you can conduct which I call the Judge Judy test.

Judge Judy is a US television show based on a judge who rules on court cases brought before her. She needs to do this unemotionally. I often find myself sitting and watching Judge Judy and making my own mind up as to whether the person is guilty or not. I do this without having any previous training in law and I am only using common sense. This is also done unemotionally.

So the Judge Judy test is: look at the situation or event and UNEMOTIONALLY force yourself to look at it from the point of reason of common sense and then make a judgement call on the number of controllable variables are present. If there is more than two, it’s a Social Experiment.

Mei jua daima kuwa kabla yenu, na vivuli nyuma yako!