A Game of Giants — Wait but Why

When I started thinking about modern tribalism as I wrote this series, it hit me that this has a lot in common with other posts. Because a society’s struggles aren’t that different from each of our personal struggles—just like two families fighting isn’t that different from two brothers fighting. Society and the people who make it up have a fractal... See more

Sometimes it shows up as a love of conformity. A literal “selflessness.” The inclination to fit in at the expense of your individuality. A susceptibility to groupthink over individual reasoning. A fear of standing out or being disliked and a disdain for those who diverge from group conformity. A very ant-y way to be.

When I look around, I see evidence of this toggle switch everywhere. Notice how easily people who are normally compassionate drop that compassion when thinking and talking about members of a political party they hate—the “Them” political party? How these people are all about forgiveness with people they see as part of “Us” but are fine with permane... See more

So while kindness, in all its manifestations—care, altruism, compassion—was an important survival trait in a world where well-functioning groups were necessary for survival, universal kindness probably wasn’t a great survival trait. Inevitably, other tribes would be selectively kind, shedding all of that kindness when dealing with other tribes. And... See more

For most early humans, forming into giants with other humans wasn’t just an advantage, it was a necessity.

Human evolution has probably been influenced by the entire human emergence range. We were shaped partially by our spider interactions as we competed with neighboring individuals and partially by our ant interactions as our tribes competed with neighboring tribes. In other words, to survive through human history, it makes sense that our genes had to... See more

So they figured out a cool trick. By joining together with other single cells, they could form a giant creature that had all kinds of new advantages.

A single cell is itself a giant—a magical living giant made up of trillions of non-living atoms—and an animal is a higher-level giant made up of trillions of cells. This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it as a tower.

Or the way we view others. Our tendency to lionize members of Us and demonize members of Them.