This is part 2 of a series of blog posts. Please read part 1 first.
As mentioned in the previous post, at the time when evolution „invented“ the „compassion solution“ to allow humans to cooperate, they lived in small nomadic groups where cooperation almost always was the optimal action choice. These hunter-gatherer groups were mostly busy fighting against nature (infectious diseases, dangerous predators, harsh weather, lack of food etc.). Conflicts between groups probably existed but it's likely that groups would in - most cases - rather peacefully exchange information when they met.
This changed dramatically only a few thousand years ago with the invention of agriculture. As a result of this important milestone in human history, the population density increased dramatically.
Now it’s important to understand that our brain is still mostly the same as it was 12’000 years ago. This timespan is very little from an evolutionary perspective and it can cause only a minimal shift of the human genetic code (including the part of it which contains the code for our brain). We are therefore still „designed“ for the nomadic lifestyle which characterized much larger timespans before.
And while the „compassion solution“ was very successful for nomadic hunter-gatherers, it is - to our great misfortune - not very suitable for modern societies.
While in the hunter-gatherer society cooperation was the clearly dominant optimal strategy, things are different in societies with very high population densities. Now competition becomes effective. A high reproduction rate and (at least in times of good harvest) low death rate meant that there were simply too many people and they started to compete with each other.
I think it is worth to look at this process in more detail. In the hunter-gatherer society, the decision to help your fellow human was almost always also an effective decision. This changed as soon as resources (like land) started to become scarce. Now people started to hope for the neighbor to perish in order to be able to take over his precious resources. It was simply not a promising strategy anymore to support everybody. Of course cooperation was still required but it had to be applied selectively: it was now focused mostly on family and maybe a few friends. Of course a tendency to prefer this subgroup must have been already present in humans (evolution theory predicts it on a fundamental level) but it was now elevated to a much more dominant behavior.
As mentioned above, the human brain had not enough time to adjust to these new conditions. Therefore the new „functionality“ of „selective cooperation“ had to be implemented using culture, which can develop over comparatively small timescales.
This was not easy to achieve: we never felt really good when we had to deny other people our help.
Consequently, the age which started then is an age of suffering which lasts to the present day.
This is the reason why we tend to see compassion today as something highly regarded, but also very difficult to achieve. This is because compassionate people have to be able to endure the pain of other people while having to suppress the urge to help them.
And, as people in pain are much more common today, a mental feature which was once easily discovered and eagerly used by young people (because it allowed the experience of very high levels of shared pleasure) had become a problematic and painful relict which most people must learn to deactivate during childhood to a large extent. Compassion was soon cultivated only among a small group of monks, who lived in self chosen (i.e. artificial) poverty which provides a pretext for them to ignore the urge to help. True compassion has been relegated to a kind of circus attraction.
Over thousands of years humans developed an impressive number of complex cultural structures to enable „selective cooperation“ (and mitigate their unavoidable bad feelings at the same time):
- Religious beliefs which served as justifications for society to become stratified (cast systems for instance).
- Moral rule sets which regulated the use of cooperation. Because they also regulated and justified non-cooperation, they helped to stabilize society. This includes things like racism, meritocracy and nationalism which allow the exclusion of some arbitrary people from cooperation.
- Laws which helped to enforce religion and moral.
The new regime also had profound psychological impact on humans. While the hunter-gatherers felt protected by the whole large group the new farmers could count mostly only on their close family. While cooperation was almost guaranteed in the hunter-gatherer society, cooperation was always fragile (even inside the family) as competition poisoned human relations profoundly. Homo homini lupus.
As a consequence, humans developed the desire to secure their future (and the future of their beloved offspring) with means beyond society. While in the nomadic (=„travelling“) hunter-gatherer society neither a large amount of tools nor land and house could serve as a storage vessel for efforts, these were available now for the farmers. If your neighbors were unreliable in their help, a large warehouse full of grains could compensate for this. And having control over a large area of fields was a good way to secure the future of the descendants.
Over time, religion, moral and laws adapted to these new needs: because these needs were so common in the new fearful society, people agreed on rules which protected ownership of goods and property. Especially in the case of land (and other natural resources) this is surprising: these things were not even created by humans! It must have been only the increasing feelings of fear among humans which made society agree on making them ownable.
The new rules had a self reinforcing effect: unlike a cooperative society, which can - in a way - guarantee a family unlimited social support far into the future, the same thing (i.e. safety into the far future) requires infinite resources in a society which allows (and requires) ownership.
This is how greed was born.
And the more some members of society begun to hoard land and other resources, the more scarce they became for others. This - of course - incentivized many more to start hoarding too. As a consequence hoarding soon started to become the norm and was socially accepted.
Now there was a strong conflict between hoarding and helping others: helping would deplete the hoarded resources and therefore reduce peoples's ability to help themselves! This limited their means to help strangers and created a lock-in situation.
Hoarding was soon so accepted that ownership was even extended to ideas and knowledge: patents and other intellectual property rights and the new habit of hiding useful information (like trade secrets) from others. This is very surprising, as letting more people benefit from an invention brings no additional costs for the inventor. IP can only be understood from the perspective of competition: having created the inventions should give the inventor the privilege to exploit the others, to make them perish before himself. We ended up accepting artificial scarcity in the hope to prevail in the competitive society.
The invention of money, an easy to carry and fine-grained substitiute for land and goods, later allowed to implement the concept of ownership at an unprecedented scale.
Helping others was - at some point in time - completely replaced with earning, buying and trading.
At some point in time many started to realize that the newly implemented rules were not in their interest. Especially the IP laws let a small group of humans monopolize the benefits of automation. The results were catastrophic and led to widespread poverty of the masses not long ago.
But instead of questioning the competitive system, people invented the mechanism of redistribution: the rich should be forced to share a part of their hoarded wealth with the less wealthy.
Unfortunately this idea had a self reinforcing effect on hoarding too: people, when deprived of the means they thought required for long term safety, started to even increase their hoarding. And it is a fact, that even in Switzerland - one of the richest countries in the world - it has become almost impossible for an average citizen to pay for the living expenses of even a single friend in need: people's incomes are drastically reduced by taxes and social security charges and living expenses have become very high due to mandatory health insurance and the like. Today, even if you really want to help somebody substantially, it has become almost impossible.
While social systems can maybe solve the problem of poverty on a technical level, they cannot change our minds still designed for the life of hunter-gatherers: our human feeling of safety and protection cannot come from hoarded wealth or the abstract promises of a government. It can only come from a large group of people who are ready to help us personally with all their available resources. Most unfortunately, this group does not exist anymore.
In the next blog post, I will try to sketch a path to a future where humans can be as happy again as we once were.
Stay tuned!
Image: Shutterstock, Neil Bradfield
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