A Game of Giants — Wait but Why

The Primitive Mind is all about making giants. In fact, one of the Primitive Mind’s central talents is the ability to instinctually merge with other Primitive Minds, combining each of their individual primal flames into a raging survival bonfire, making the group stronger and more powerful than the sum of its parts.

If you pay attention to the world around you, and to your own psychology, you’ll spot the elevator in action. Ever notice how countries in one region of the world will often despise each other, focusing most of their national dickishness on each other—until there’s a broader conflict or war in play, at which time they put aside their differences? H... 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.

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

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

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

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

Billions of years ago, some single-celled creatures realized that being just one cell left your options pretty limited.

In other words, on the ancient landscape—the one we were designed for—the human being wasn’t really the independent life form of the human race. The tribe was.