This is part 6 of a series of blog posts. Please start with part 1.
In the last post of this series we have seen how humans are capable of tolerating large amounts of stress without actually feeling bad. But an unusually challenging environment might also trigger changes in our behavior.
To be able to answer how this works, we must first study the nature of evil. What is its purpose? Why did nature invent it? Now you might feel uneasy about this question. If something has a purpose, it must be required, or? And if something is required, then there is no way to avoid it (and this would be terrible).
But we have to make an important distinction now. The purpose we are talking about now is the purpose evil had during our millions of years long history. This does not mean that it must have still purpose now.
But we also cannot ignore it. As we will discuss in detail soon, humans show evil behavior in certain environments. Understanding the original purpose of evil behavior will help us to create an environment where people don’t feel the need anymore to behave in an evil way. And from this moment, its original purpose will not be required anymore.
Evil will be rendered superfluous as soon as we will have acquired the skills to shape our environment adequately.
But, again: to reach this state of awareness, we must first dare to understand evil.
What purpose did evil behavior have in nature? Some might say it’s a consequence of our natural egoism. But this is a far too simple view. Humans are highly social creatures. We cannot survive alone. Therefore, the survival of the group we live in must be prioritized over the survival of the individual. This priority is also reflected in our behavior. Humans are often willing to engage in dangerous activities which mainly serve the interests of the community. An example of this kind of behavior is taking enormous risks while hunting large animals or defending the group against enemies. Individuals also tend (or, at least tended in our past) to invest any surplus energy into their community. Of course, this might benefit them indirectly. But often the expected benefits for the individual are much smaller than the value of the energy invested.
The reason for this behavior is, that the people in a group (and humans in general) are genetically very similar. This means that under normal circumstances cooperation clearly dominates over competition. Normal was an environment where it was difficult for humans to maintain even a minimal population density. But of course this was not the case everywhere. In a river delta with lush vegetation and rich wild life, survival was much easier. In such areas the population could reach high densities quickly. If food became scarce, the whole population in the area would be endangered as the weakened humans would become susceptible for diseases. Then, an epidemic could eradicate a large fraction of the population anytime.
Of course nature made us aware of such dangers. As humans are the top level predator, there was no other animal which could regulate our population density. Therefore, nature gave us the will to resolve the problem ourselves: „Homo homini lupus“: man had to become a wolf to man. It made - at some point - humans perceive their fellow humans rather as a burden than an asset - and it made us take action.
Remembering the previous blog post: it is clear that in this case humans must even enjoy killing other humans, because under such circumstances (!) reducing the population density became an important primary goal.
Accepting the origin of our desire to harm other humans does not mean that we have to let it cause damage today! Humans also have the ability to survive under extremely harsh conditions which require strictly cooperative behavior. Such an environment could be found - for instance - on south pacific islands, where human losses due to hurricanes and fishermen gone astray were so high, that humans built highly cooperative societies.
Therefore it should be possible to influence our behavior by shaping our environment! We are not doomed to languish forever in the current hell of competition and war.
But let’s have a closer look at how evolution shaped our behavior. It must adhere to the following priorities regarding the wellbeing of…
- …the species
- …the group (family, tribe or larger) the individual belongs to
- …the individual
The reason for this is simple: any item on the list cannot exist without all the items on top of it. To explain this let’s look at another example of evil behavior which is often defamed as useless: cruelty. But cruelty - like any other human behavior - once served an important purpose.
When the Huns invaded Europe, a large part of the people living in the invaded territories decided to flee. The reason for this reaction was - of course - the realization that the Huns would - to say the least - not treat them well. Both behaviors - threatening with cruelty and fleeing - offered advantages for the respective groups:
- The Europeans could avoid getting killed and tortured
- The Huns could gain territories without even fighting (i.e. without any human losses)
But what’s the benefit of this behaviors? It seems to be a zero-sum game: the Europeans lost some land, the Huns gained it. What was the benefit of fear if it only makes us lose? Some imagined completely fearless human „race“ (e.g. resulting from an imagined genetic mutation) could then resist all attempts to exile them by using cruelty.
Such a race would always choose to engage in war instead of fleeing. But is this really effective behavior? If there is no place to go, fighting makes indeed more sense than fleeing (and was in such cases also chosen because it is the only possible strategy).
But very often there was a place one could go to. It was land which was either inhabited by people who could not stop the fleeing people (or had no intention to do so) or it was land of inferior quality.
Now we can see how the behavior serves the species: instead of fighting war over the few territories of highest quality, people were forced to inhabit less suitable territories. To be able to do so they had to adapt their way of living to the new environment.
Therefore it was human cruelty which allowed humans to spread over the whole planet (including arctic and alpine regions). This indeed served the species, as this ability to live in many different natural environments (with the resulting human presence all over the planet) greatly enhanced the survival chances of the human species.
And this is why the cruelty/fear behavior pair became part of all humans. The Huns themselves were certainly not fearless too. As they inhabited territories far away from Africa (the origin of humankind), their ancestors must have fled themselves a long time before they started their invasion of Europe.
To go back to the list above: while our willingness to engage in wars is a result of the priority of 2. over 3., the cruelty/fear pair is a result of the priority of 1. over 2./3..
All human evils can in fact be explained by similar arguments. Evil is a result of the fact, that a human life depends on the survival of its group and the whole species. This means that individual wellbeing always had to be compromised in certain situations to ensure the survival of the group or the species.
The living humans form an extremely thin layer in time, separating many millions of years of history (including our non-homo ancestors back to the first cell) from a potentially infinite future. It’s of extreme importance that we do our job of survival and procreation. If one runner in a relay race drops the baton the race is lost. Evolution did a perfect „job“ giving us all the behaviors required to succeed. Everything we do is ultimately intended (!) to serve this purpose (even if we think that „we just do it for fun“).
Therefore, all the evils done in our distant past (let’s say before the invention of agriculture) were in fact - if we like it or not - required to get the human species to the point where it is today.
But today we do have a problem: human ingenuity has not only led to a huge increase in population. It has also restructured our planet, our living conditions and our society so heavily that they hardly resemble the conditions of our distant past anymore.
This made a huge amount of natural human behaviors obsolete. Unfortunately, not only rather harmless behaviors like lazyness are affected: evil behavior, once invented by evolution as ultimate means to insure the survival of groups or the species, has become rampant and completely pointless.
It even threatens the survival of humanity, the entity it was originally designed to protect.
Is there a way out? More about this soon….
Image: Shutterstock / ArtMari
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