The human Primitive Mind isn’t any nicer than the spider or ant Primitive Mind—but it is a bit more complicated. Unlike spiders and ants, whose independent life form never changes emergence floors, humans are a kind of hybrid creature that inhabits a range along Emergence Tower, not a single floor.

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

But when Higher Minds work together, the effect can be just as powerful: the group as a whole gains superhuman abilities in learning and creativity and discovery.

Sometimes it shows up as an affinity for social hierarchy—a deference to authority and the inclination to suck up to those in power.

Many of the most tribal traits come in the form of “Us > Me”—as if the tribal mindset is in direct competition with the me-first selfish mindset.

There are classic “Us > Them” traits, like our respect for loyalty—the feeling that being loyal is a critical virtue and nothing is worse than being a traitor.

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.

Combining both emergent properties made the human tribe an incredible survival machine that allowed the species to stay afloat and thrive in a relentless natural world.

In Chapter 1, we discussed how each human has two “minds”—the Primitive Mind with its fiery flame and the Higher Mind with his orb of clarity and consciousness. So when humans band together, they can generate a double emergence phenomenon.