Often biological reasons are mentioned when people claim that people are „selfish by nature“. They cite the famous „selfish genes“ to give weight to this kind of argument.
But genes and people are not the same thing, even if the former are required to make the latter. It’s quite a good thing that genes are selfish. They can survive for many millions (or even billions) of years. Just imagine what would happen, if the genes coding for the proteins needed for the citric acid cycle in the cell were suddenly lost somehow (just imagine, as a gedankenexperiment): it would be the end of all life on earth.
Therefore we all owe our existence to this remarkable desire of genes to exist as long as possible.
But humans don’t live forever. A human life is actually an extremely thin layer in time which connects billions of years of past to a potentially almost infinite future. But the fact that our lives are so short does not mean that they are not important. It’s crucial that every single one of these thin layers of life, which are following each other - generation by generation - succeeds at making all the following layers/generations possible. It's like in a relay race: if one runner loses the baton, the race is over for everybody.
This sounds like a really difficult task. And, yes it actually is!
Let’s look at the life of an unknown woman, who lived about 155’000 years ago somewhere in Africa. Biologists call her „Mitochondrial-Most Recent Common Ancestor“ or also „Mitochondrial Eve“ but I will name her „Yvette“ for now.
Wikipedia defines her as follows:
„she is … the most recent woman from whom all living humans descend in an unbroken line purely through their mothers and through the mothers of those mothers, back until all lines converge on one woman.“
Therefore all living humans on earth descend from her! Note that this is not the case for any other woman born after her (by definition she is the most recent woman who achieved this). So this is a quite spectacular achievement! And, somehow, we all owe her our lives. She is our common „ultra grandma“!
Who was Yvette? Was she extraordinarily intelligent? A master strategist? Exceptionally hard working, focused and disciplined? Or was she just more dominant and more selfish than anybody else?
Of course we can’t know for sure. Apart from some small snippets of mitochondrial DNA, little is known about her. But it’s still very likely that she had none of the properties listed above, at least not in the sense we understand them normally.
But how then could she manage to achieve such a remarkable goal? Of course, she never consciously intended to achieve it nor was she aware of the existence of this goal. She just tried to live well and survive the day, like everybody else. But it’s also clear that to achieve this goal, an almost perfect strategy is required.
Where did it come from? There were no schools or colleges at the time which could teach advanced strategy.
The answer is remarkably simple, but a bit difficult to digest for modern humans:
Yvette always and without any exception did what she enjoyed most!
Her feeling of enjoyment, coming from her subconscious, was guiding her through all life. So for her it was very simple: whatever she enjoyed to do, was also the right thing to do. Her feeling of enjoyment was the reward signal coming from the subconscious strategy in her brain. It told her exactly when to drink some water, when to sleep or go hunting and when (and with whom) to make a baby.
„Always doing what I enjoy most“ is considered extremely selfish today. But exactly this behavior was once essential to secure the lives of thousands of future generations! Working for future generations and enjoying to the fullest was one and the same thing!
We all know: this sure doesn’t work anymore! Unfortunately.
What went wrong? Why do we have to force ourselves every day so terribly to do the right things, the things required to survive in our modern societies and to become valued (like schools, careers, „hard work“, self control and discipline).
The problems started about 12000 years ago when people started to believe that they had figured out the „grand scheme of things“. When they decided it was a good idea to depart from the „do what I enjoy now“ to the „suffer a bit now but enjoy much more in the future“. When they „invented“ discipline and investments. They started to cultivate land, settle down and build houses.
As we know now, it did not work. The promised huge future pleasures we hoped to receive as a compensation for all the hardship invested never became reality. The world has never been in such a sad state as it is today.
Where was (and maybe still is) the flaw in our thinking?
Let me explain this with a practical example:
Several times in my life I met women who complained about „modern men“. They would say „they all want quickly sex, but don’t want to have a baby with me!“. And each time I heard this, I was thinking the same thing: „I know what you mean, of course. But still, what you say sounds silly. Isn’t this the natural order: that you have sex first and then get the baby (and not the other way round!)“.
But I also understood very well. I also never wanted to have kids. But today, I find spending time with them by far the most satisfying activity: they are extremely funny, cute, inspiring, surprising and beautiful. I feel most happy around a bunch of laughing kids and I see every opportunity to experience this as a great privilege.
How could I not know this? How could I be blind for so many years until the day kids were (lucky me!) forced upon me?
The reason for this is rather simple too: we are not required to want kids, because - at least in all the million years before the invention of contraception - they always followed automatically after sex. So all we were required to want is sex. And then, when the kids are born, we are required to enjoy and love them (and this - of course - also always happens, also for men).
Therefore nobody wants kids because, even we if enjoy them a lot, such a „wanting“ was never required. Women (and to a lesser extent men) tend to develop some desire to have kids when they experience other people’s kids. But the more children vanish from public presence, also this desire gets weaker. And the result is ultimately a society where nobody wants kids anymore (e.g. South Korea).
For me this is pretty much the worst case for the development of a society.
The example shows, that we are not able to foresee what we will like in the future. Our brain simply lacks this kind of introspective capabilities. Our reward system, which determines which kind of activities we enjoy, is hidden deeply in our subconscious. The pleasures are meant to remain hidden until their time has come, to be released in a given sequence we cannot understand until our life ends. The only way to find out what we enjoy most is to live our life. To do what we enjoy, and trust, that our life will change in a favorable direction, revealing one by one more activities which we learn to enjoy.
And because of our inability to foresee future pleasures, planning life must lead to disaster. And worst of all: we might not even realize what sublime enjoyments we have missed!
One question remains to be answered: was Yvette more selfish than other women of her time? Was this the key to her success? Again, we cannot know for sure. But, considering her reproductive success, the number of her descendants must have grown in each generation following her life. As traveling was slow and dangerous at her time, her offspring must have been concentrated around the place where she lived. Therefore, as cooperation within the members of a group tends to increase the groups chances of survival, it seems more likely that the „feature“ which differentiated her from others, was rather her superior abilities to cooperate: it would have given „her“ group of people an advantage over others.
Image: Shutterstock. Artist: Rachata Sinthopachakul
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