Looking out for “number one,” is the default directive of the plant and animal kingdoms. So it’s not a shock that this knee-jerk reflex turns up in people. But, as Richard Dawkins insightfully pointed out, “number one” doesn’t refer to individuals, but to genes.
In a surprisingly large number of organisms, Dawkins’ selfish genes flip the dog-eat-dog world on its floppy ears, and create individuals who look out for each other, even at their own expense. Mostly, this occurs in ants, bees, wasps, and a few other bugs. But it also occurs in just two mammals — naked mole rats, and, us.
Our unusually close connection is created by a biological mechanism that is so familiar that it’s almost easy to miss. It’s our powerful and familiar drive to belong. This drive, along with an ability to inhibit our inclination to grab everything for ourselves and run, lets us put our own immediate needs aside in favor of group membership.
Seeking inclusion is, of course, still acting in our own self-interest. Our genes wouldn’t have it any other way. But it’s not just a cold, tit-for-tat calculation. To make this adaptation stick, natural selection has given us a genuine, visceral concern for others. This was part of the emotional horsepower we needed to get past the hump of our preexisting selfishness.
To make doubly sure that cheating and self-serving didn’t destroy our cooperative superpower, natural selection also equipped humans with a pressing sense of fairness, justice, and equity. In the small tribes of our evolutionary adaptation where everyone knew what everyone else was up to all of the time, we easily learned how to keep our inner assholes at bay.
In those small groups, with everyone’s eyes always on each other, there was almost no chance to cheat. And the blowback for selfishness wasn’t worth the risk. We got along and cooperated swimmingly with little or no self-serving. Nature had successfully retrofitted one of her standard selfish animals for trusting, intimate cooperation.
However, this radical evolutionary advance resulted in the massive technological boom that led us to displace ourselves from our own natural habitat. With that, we lost the small groups that kept us honest and new opportunities for selfish cheating grew, unlocking the cage door to our inner beasts.
The rise of our selfish beasts has been fueled by the excessive modern emphasis on individuality. Adding more gas to the fire is our desperate need to recreate the lost sense of importance we had naturally found in those small tribes. The result is that some of our inner beasts have gone a bit bat-shit crazy. Despite the surprising and reassuring fact that most of us are still exceedingly decent and moral people, even when no one’s looking, we’ve got a gigantic problem on our hands.
But it’s not a matter of a few bad apples. It’s systemic. If we sent the one-percenters to Mars, the two-percenters would quickly take their place, and so on. There is a pervasive profit-humping culture of self-dealing that makes it almost impossible for our leaders to not be immorally self-serving.
This culture is not only toxic to the world, but to the self. In order to rationalize their most outrageous and blatantly harmful behaviors, people have to close themselves off to anything that can challenge their self-deception. When they do this, they lose everything that lies outside of the tiny slice of the world that supports their self-deceptions, including their hardwired drive for connection, community, and love.
For this and other reasons, even the most successful self-servers among us are just as full of anxiety, anger, isolation, pharmaceuticals, and misery as the rest of us. Maybe more.
We are locked in an epic battle for the survival of our society, planet, and souls. To defeat destructive self-serving, we have two main weapons. The first is to modify the culture itself by publicly rejecting the commonly accepted zero-sum measures of success like wealth and position, and instead, celebrating the non-zero-sum metrics of service and satisfaction.
This is already happening, though the progress is slow and undulating. But, it will always be possible since it will always be in our biological nature to care for each other. And because the rewards for selfishness are an ultimately unsatisfying mirage glamorized in lore and media.
The second option is to organize our social worlds into groups within groups, to recreate the small, tightly woven, interdependent, accountable, and interconnected groups that not only put our selfish tendencies in check, but stand to do a much better job at satisfying our chronically unmet needs for true community and belonging.
We are hardwired to look out for each other and cooperate fairly. It’s why natural selection made it feel so good to do so. Cheating and self-serving appear to offer some fleeting benefits but they lead to an unsatisfying life. And there is no better way to lose our evolutionary advantage as humans, and our humanity itself. As well as our planet and lives.
If you liked this, you might also like this comic essay about the weird experience, but simple explanation, of consciousness.
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All comics ©2021 by David Milgrim
Just trying to feel okay, one comic at a time