In the great majority of people, the vanity instinct is overwhelmingly powerful.

Vanity has more strength and more endurance than even the strongest primordial instincts.

When a primordial instinct somehow manages to break out and defy vanity by accepting public condemnation, we marvel at its overpowering intensity.

But vanity, the relentlessly competent guard who thwarts ten thousand jailbreaks for every one that succeeds, gets no recognition. It is part of the institution of reality. It doesn’t even occur to us to admire it.

It might be vanity that has made human beings cultural. And if being cultural is the essential humanity of human beings — and I think it is — that suggests vanity might be the most human instinct. Some would argue that on that basis, vanity is not a vice, but a virtue.

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We’ve got this really weird situation on our hands, now, thanks to the romantic exaltation of instincts and naturalness. We are vain about having or lacking certain “natural” instincts, which puts us in the position of having to dissimulate what which on principle is not dissimulated.

We want to be natural, but we want to be natural in some particular way that is not natural for us.

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Let’s look at an example. Suspend your disbelief, and try this thought on for two minutes, long enough to trace out some consequence. What if this is true?:

In most women, if the the maternal instinct exists at all, it is dwarfed by the vanity instinct.

The maternal instinct sees everything in terms of “what will benefit my child?”

The vanity instinct, though, sees everything in terms of “what kind of person do I seem to be, and will that win me approval?”

Until the mid-1960s when women asked “what must I see to be to win approval?” the answer was “the kind of woman in whom the maternal instinct is the strongest.”

The message was not: “women should strive to care about their children”, but “normal women care about their children.” Because of this, the maternal instinct appeared to be part of the standard-issue human nature, despite the fact that few women had much more than an occasional urge to procreate and a compulsion to dote on cute things, and many had a strong instinctive impulse to be anywhere but suffocating in ammonia fumes or having her soul sucked dry by attention-demanding toddlers. By the 70s women had begun immunizing each other against feeling guilt over their natures, and began to decide for themselves how much or how little energy to dedicate to parenting their children.