[drewprops]

I didn't take psychology in school, but I'm pretty sure that nearly everything that we do (at the end of the day) is motivated by our survival instinct (desire to live) and our instinct to procreate (desire to screw)... right?

What I want to know is whether I'm right in believing that anything we do in the public (whether it's telling a joke, painting a painting or driving a nice car) is driven by our Ego... to establish social superiority, guaranteeing both of the aforementioned motivations (security and reproduction).

I hate to make things clinical, but it's been interesting to see how quickly people argue against the idea that art could be ascribed to survival mechanisms.


...

[thegeriatric]

Desire to live? Yes.
Desire to screw? Yes.
Ego? Well my Mac is bigger than yours
so that help then...............

[drewprops]

Man, I wisht this place hat a LIKE buh-uhn.


...

[torifile]

I think that motivators can be either avoidance or approach oriented. What we try to avoid or approach is up for debate. Sure survival and sex are two of those motivators, but I don't think that they're the only ones.

[billybobsky]

Well, brute survival is one motivator, but given our species need for 8-65 years of being looked after, providing a stable environment is just as important in the propagation of the species.

Art, the study of the world around us, and dancing drunk in oncoming traffic are all part of the desire for a 'good' life.

[Moogs]

Yes and no on the ego. "Anything we do in public" covers such a ginormous array of activities that trying to cram them all under one umbrella probably doesn't work IMO.

Perfect example: I think a lot of people (who are not professional artists but who still make photos, music whatever) do it for themselves as a form of expression and not to impress people. They may share it, but they don't care too much whether anyone likes it or not. They just share it because they can. It's an outlet, like blowing off steam by jogging 5 miles is an outlet. So in that case you don't jog to be seen by the neighbors or whatever, you jog to feel better.

That last example could fall under "surviving" too, or more appropriately "not dying young of a heart attack", but still... I think there are numerous examples you could find of outward behavior that has nothing to do with ego, or indirectly with surviving or getting laid. I guess it depends on how you define "ego" but as a sufficiently cynical bastard who loves to find correlations like that in people's behavior, even I have to say that you have to either narrow the scope of activities or really broaden the definition of ego for that to work.