Sometimes I think that the thing that makes us human isn’t tools or socialization or any of the things we do.

Sometimes I think the thing that makes us human is the thing we can not do.

Animals respond to conditioning; a guy named Pavlov demonstrated this pretty famously with a set of hungry dogs and a dinner bell. Dog training, generally, relies on this kind of conditioned response; you use this conditioning - this reward/punishment based training method - as a means of inducing the dog to sit when you tell it to, or give a hand gesture, or whichever trigger you’ve designated to communicate your intention to the dog.

And conditioning comes in a variety of other factors as well; it’s the stimulus/response mechanism behind any number of other things that animals - and we, too, are animals - do.

Or in some cases - look at the research around “learned helplessness” for examples - the conditioning prevents responses that would otherwise occur.

Conditioning can cause actions, and it can prohibit actions, in response to discrete or environmental triggers, and by conditioning an animal, you can cause all manner of sophisticated behaviors to occur.

We rely on this too. Look at any marching band.

And conditioning is very reliable. Once a behavior is conditioned in to an animal, it tends to stay there unless something disruptive happens that breaks this conditioning. Likewise with people; when they are conditioned to behave in a certain way, they will tend to do so as a default.

But where people are different?

We can do something else, too.

We can break conditioning, in ourselves and in others.

Yes, it’s not easy; this is a deep, well-ingrained process that’s successful across pretty much every species on earth that has enough brain to exhibit behaviors more complex than “bite” and “fuck” - it’s a deep, deep mechanism, easy to invoke and very difficult to change.

But we can. We can recognize when a behavior is conditioned, and make the choice - frequently at some significant cost to ourselves, but it’s there - to break the pattern. To do something other than what we were conditioned to do. To make of ourselves something actually new.

So what defines humanity?

It’s not what we make. It’s not what we do.

It’s that we can choose to not.