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Our Own Worst Enemy
How evolutionary hardwiring undermines us as individuals and as a society
We humans have a pronounced aversion to loss. Countless studies have shown that we’ll readily forgo the chance of gain in order to diminish the chance of loss. And this makes perfect sense, because for most of our evolutionary history our gains were very limited but our losses could easily result in death.
To see why this was so, let’s imagine we’re wandering around 50,000 years ago. There’s no utility in gathering more fruit than we can eat and there’s no utility in killing for more meat than we can consume. Without any ability to preserve food, any surplus was simply pointless waste. There’s no point fighting for territory larger than we can patrol. On the other side of the equation, however, things are very different. Loss of food can mean starvation. Loss of territory can mean loss of food and access to essential water.
Our fear of loss is therefore highly adaptive in terms of the world we used to live in. But since the development of an agrarian lifestyle some 11,000 years ago and especially since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve altered our environment out of all recognition. Consequently, our hardwired instincts and behaviors are very often now quite maladaptive. Worse still, these instincts and behaviors leave us vulnerable to…
