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Inexorable Consequences
Why we always end up rushing down the road to destruction
We humans evolved under relatively simple conditions, as a marginal species clinging on at the edges. As we lack powerful muscles, razor-sharp teeth and claws, and bone-crushing jaws, we are necessarily a group species, relying on our membership of the group for our survival. Moreover, we evolved in a state of near-constant competition with other groups of desperate humans in what was for more than 99% of our evolutionary history a zero-sum game. One group’s conquest-based gain — of territory, resources, fertile females — was another group’s loss.
Not surprisingly we’re evolved to be distrustful of anyone who isn’t part of our own group, and we’re largely incapable of grasping mutually beneficial scenarios.
Even though, over the fourteen thousand years that separates us from the end of the last ice-age, we’ve accidentally developed agriculture and trading systems and social hierarchies that support mutual gain and increasing specialization that confers enormous economic and personal benefits, we’re still trapped in a mental world of suspicion, zero-sum, and a hardwired predisposition to support our group whenever we feel threatened. Technological progress may have carried us very far from the savannah of Africa and the primordial forests of Eurasia, but our…
