A Game of Giants — Wait but Why

I’ve always felt hope when writing about our struggles at the individual level, and I feel hope in this series too as we look at what’s going on a few floors up on the elevator. But we have a pretty daunting task in front of us—because innate tribalism is only the beginning of what we’re contending with today. Somewhere down the line of human histo... See more

Pretty soon after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals. If you look around, you’ll see them everywhere—schools of fish, packs of wolves, colonies of ants, waddles of penguins. Groups like these represent... 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.

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.

The evolutionary sweet spot probably wouldn’t have been kindness or empathy or compassion or cooperation—it would have been to have these traits on a toggle switch. To be micro-kind and macro-ruthless.

For the human genetic line, sustenance was a survival requirement, so we evolved to be hungry. Reproduction was a survival requirement, so we evolved to be horny. Not falling off a cliff was a survival requirement, so we evolved to be scared of heights. Tribe well-being was a survival requirement, so we evolved to be tribal.

We can be like spiders sometimes and like ants other times. Our independent life form makes trips up and down Emergence Tower’s elevator.

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.

If we want to understand why people are the way they are, we should try thinking the same way. A human isn’t simply a perfect survival creature—it’s also just the right element of a perfect survival tribe. Examining the traits of a perfect survival tribe can help us see the specs for human nature, not only illuminating who we are, but why we’re tha... See more