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It’s Better To Walk Through Walls Than To Build Them
Why all of us need to cultivate empathy rather than invent more reasons to cut ourselves off from others
We humans evolved in the context of small closely-knit inter-related hunter-gatherer groups numbering rarely more than one hundred and fifty individuals. For 98% of our evolutionary history we had to cling together in order to combat predators, hunger, and other groups of humans seeking to encroach on our precious territory. Not surprisingly, our brains are highly adapted to see life in terms of who’s in our group and who’s on the outside.
Although today our groups are much larger and more diverse, so than a single person may be part of a family, part of a work organization, part of a sports club, and a member of a religious organization, our brains remain entirely as they were before the accidental development of agriculture led us to settle down and live in increasingly large and increasingly complex societies. This is why we see life so frequently in terms of oppositions. Our company must beat our competitors! Our sports team must triumph over the others! Our god is the only true god!
Unfortunately, as our modern complex world doesn’t lend itself to such simple reductionism, we generally find ourselves making catastrophically poor…
