Remember, we are the apex beneficiary of nearly 70 million years of contiguous neurological evolution, which left us perfectly designed for our last and final incarnation as interdependent, small, hierarchical communities of 20-50 hunter-gatherers. That ended 7000 years ago. They teach us in school to measure time in BC vs AD but if it’s the dawn of civilization we’re talking about then, sorry Jesus, we should be talking BA vs PA — ‘before agriculture’ and after. Screw quantum and AI. The advent of agriculture has been our defining moment to date.

To understand the gravity of this revolution, remember again life, ‘BA’: Fitting neatly between our 70-million year origin as social organisms and our transition to agriculture 7-thousand years ago, is when early humans began operating as hunter gatherers approximately 7-million years ago. Look at your watch. That’s 7-million contiguous years of human beings performing the same daily grind of both finding food and jockeying for favor in the pecking order. Two distinct skills that were both predicted by hyper critical thinking: Reading the room politically, and reading the land economically. It’s how and why we became such he-said-she-said Yentas, and why we can break down a Rubix Cube. Information has always been power — especially when it impacts survival. Remembering where to find fruits in spring and roots in winter is why we love Jenga and Tetris. Our brains are wired for memory games and patterns of advantage and reason.

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And then when we returned from our daily grind, we navigated the politics — keeping a close eye on the alpha’s mood, his confidants and shit listers. And at night — every night for half-a-million years — we sat around a tribal fire posturing for food dibs and info. Likely the cause of why we love stories so much, every night was show-and-tell — reading the tea leaves on who we should trust, who was rising and who was falling. Trust and alliances were life — so much so that you can take any early language from any isolated civilization around the globe and notice that all the words a simple five-year old would consider as good — like ‘generosity,’ ‘kindness,’ ‘smart,’ and ‘creative’ — were good for the group. While words that fell into the bad column — like ‘greedy,’ ‘mean,’ or ‘selfish’ — were bad for the group at large. A never-ending balance of safety in numbers versus taking care of number-One.

The end of innocence is how many interpret the Adam & Eve allegory, which is patently mirrored in the Sumerian myth of the Huluppu Tree, Mesopotamia’s Epic of Gilgamesh, and Greece’s Pandora’s Box — recognizing a temptation away from simplicity all within a millennia of each other. One could argue ‘we left Eden as beggars’ — ditching the hunter-gathering grind for more guaranteed grain.

But the transformation was as profoundly psychological as it was just logistics. People had to merge into large populations for the first time, in fast-forming centers of agriculture. Villages quickly became city-states and a new form of power was born: Alphas controlled resources and power centralized in what we now call government. Instead of dancing with us in a balance of trust and symbiotic consensus that evolved over eons, the alphas were now too-big-to-fail or be challenged internally. The insatiable dynasties we’ve all come to know from documented history were built on resources. (In fact, the Sumerians were first to coin ‘currency’ as an equal weight of barley known as a ‘shekel.”)

If “normal” is defined by the average, then this — our current shared paradigm — is not normal. We live in the bubble of our individual generations, cultures and moments — unable to see that we’re actually in the middle of a seven-thousand year old, relatively brand-new spin-cycle — a "hard-fork" from normal, and maybe reason for why we all feel so lost. At least with Uncle-Alph — the boss and bully of our band of scavengers — we could navigate our clan and its limited number of chess pieces and feel we belong. We could endorse an alpha and gain a modicum of safety and control in return. As simple as it was — we had agency.

It’s taken nearly 7000 years before we got to experience ‘group will’ or anything smelling like democracy again. And as we’re all hopefully beginning to see, the middle class and an effective democracy are not naturally occurring events. They’re a balance of markets and forces. A psychological operating system that took 70 million years to develop — we dumped overnight. Fish out of water … birds without feathers … rats in a barrel — all pretty accurate depictions of how the masses have been feeling since that first “liberation day.” It’s no wonder that religion grew like social media today — an explosion of higher collective purpose and meaning than just toiling for pay — but that’s a subject to itself.

As much as we love to blame the last generation or the ‘Man’ for all of our problems, there’s no one to blame but our stomachs — and maybe that last tribal boss-man who made us quit hunter-gathering and head for the city — but make no mistake — we’re not just lonely from the isolation. Our transactional ties are frying the part of us that craves meaning and recognition. We’re a collection of now individual Dorothies, stuck in a world of new ups & downs that our brains need another 70 million years to adjust to. So no, it’s not just you.

Conclusion: The only thing you’re ever stressed about is security so the only thing you’re ever depressed about is people — and the perceived security they’ll bring us — an obviously outdated motherboard. In fact, we could argue that survival today is best served cold — immune to social norms and personal dependencies with an ability to game a system to take care of number one. But we’re more than stomachs – we’re drug addicts, remember? We used to get our neurosteroid fixes naturally and daily from simple group dependency. Leaving Eden didn’t create shame, it just complicated it. We’re still alcoholics but now left dry with only rock bottom vape carts to get us by. The first step in Twelve Step is to accept that we’re not in charge. But by accepting the addiction, we also own the decision — that we’re more than just neuro-wiring and sycophantic addiction.

So in taking inspiration from The Island of Lost Souls — our next stop will be our next question: “Are we not men???” (said by the chained and still half animals).

, )

We hope to see you right back here next week.

—mink (us/we)

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“The world is awful … the world is much better … and the world can be much better.”

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Those are the words of Max Roser, renown researcher and the creator of Our World in Data (2011) who summarized his analyses of the deepest and oldest troves of human data ever compiled. Yes, the world looks horrible from where we sit right now, but when we get out of the ups and downs of our news cycle and even our generational prisms, we can see that — from the beginning of civilization — we are: killing each other less, living longer, surviving less starvation and disease, seeing consistent increases in equality and education — the list could go on. The only two things trending negatively in the big, big picture are global warming and the gap between the rich & poor. Everything else has been improving steadily for millennia.

The takeaway? — No, not that we should just look on the bright side, but that we are incipiently arrogant! We sit in front of our Netflix screens irritated by our faulty earbuds, forgetting that only a hundred or so years ago most of us were still subject to an annual culling from exposure, war, or food scarcity. We take wifi, AC, and the Crocs on our feet as a birth-right today with zero appreciation for the speed in which we got here. Point is, while we haven’t evolved a drop in the last thousand years, our realities have transformed.

Now let’s go back 8000 years — right before our literal Adam and Eve epiphany when, practically overnight, we dumped our Naked & Afraid, hunter-gatherer glamping for the first fast-food option known to mankind called agriculture. That moment right there ended our unique hundred-million-year evolutionary march to emerge as the most dominant apex predator on the planet with one critical superpower: cooperation.

This is where our origin story begins, way back even before your mother and father had the same mat of chest hair … way before you first stood on two feet shaking like constipated dog … to right about when you could grow back your lost tail and still ate your sister if you hatched first. Picture yourself right there, sitting on the jungled coast of a now-buried tectonic plate with family names ending in things like ‘aurus and ‘ops and eating anything you could squeeze past your dislocating jaws. That’s when our miracle happened.

Instead of playing 1-on-1 death tag, a tag-team was born — the first animals intelligent enough to cooperate for greater protection and predation. That’s where your brain began … literally.

Our brains, but not all brains. As we began to evolve from mammals, we broke ranks. Our close cousins like beavers, bears, and orangutans still found advantage in solitude, only seeking out their own with seasonal horniness. The rest of us — from meerkats, to elephants, to gorillas & bonobos — decided to sell our souls to: ‘join the club.’

From where we started nearly 70 million years ago, every social animal across the entire mammalian spectrum — ended up in the exact same social structure: 20-50 animals living in a hyper-obedient, social hierarchy where a singular alpha decided everything.

We’d like to ask you to stop here and shout out the proven, repeated simplicity of evolution. While we try to navigate our current and future legacy, which is now only 7000 years old — 70 million years of unbroken group evolution is our literal and obvious origin story. This dependency on each other — and being liked — is what we were designed for.

As much as we’ve grown to hate it, Fear emerged as the perfect pre-language operating system to keep everyone in line — ostensibly by nature, so the group could survive. The only game in town was brute survival, so as soon as we became dependent on gang kills, there was no going back: Excommunication was certain death. Playing the game to get along and get ahead (of your cousin) became our principal need and obsession — steadily evolving more sophisticated and nuanced social behaviors and paradigms — aka Drama. If we want to fully understand what ‘getting good at our operating system’ looked like, we first just have to go on a little safari.

Lions evolved into prides because they found prey out on the open plains where numbers were needed to pick meals off from a herd. A tiger, on the other hand, is a solo creature wired for stealth and jungle ambush where even two became a crowd. Based on their resulting psychology, you would think these were alien species but any visit to a third-rate zoo in Asia with bastard Ligers on display proves they are the same beasts beyond their coats & OS.

Now let’s pick up OUR journey from there. Imagine being a tiger cub born to your dutiful single mother in the silence of the jungle. You are so off radar that even estranged Tigger dad would kill you if he showed up looking to knock up our mom again. When mom returned, she’d swarm us with face pounds and wet laps, eliciting a cocktail of oxytocin and serotonin — addictive neurosteroids that keep us coming back (to safety) for more.

Now let’s creep over to the jungle’s edge and spy on our cousin Simba out there on the plains. You’ll notice immediately that he’s not alone. When he was born, mama-Nala wet face-pounded him, too, but moving just past her legs — Simba hits traffic … very complicated traffic. There’s Mustafa, and Scar, their lieutenants, and their rivalries. Dozens of subordinates vying for rank and favor are tuned to every change in the pack like a crackhead. Our cousin Simba may even represent a challenge to Scar one day — and so the drama begins. Which family would you prefer being born into?.

If we don’t realize the crazy-town designed in our neurological wiring, then we’re never going to see our own forest from the trees — that social animals are crackheads: obsessively consumed by our interpersonal politics, which was survival. In fact, in addition to the normal cocktail of neurosteroids pharma reinforcing safety and connection, we and Simba got addicted in the womb to powerful neuropeptidal jolts from the likes of allopregnanolone, DHEA and endorphins for social confidence and approval. Little tigger in the jungle with his sexually liberated mother had no such neuro-toxic exposure to shame or ostracization.

Now, let’s take that 70-million year old, fine-tuned, crack-based OS and merge it with the brains of higher primates (that’s us, sis). Watch a nature show on chimps or gorillas and you’re watching basic reality TV: highly sophisticated sycophantic ass-kissers, tortured and squirming to each other like endless performative preschoolers. So sophisticated that no one is safe. The alpha, no matter how powerful, can be challenged by anyone who gains the trust of the community — proving Democracy was not man made. There were checks and balances. If the alpha was ineffective or abusive, We’d abandon him and he’d get eaten by hyenas on his own. Without the many facets and dimensions of fear, social groups would devolve quickly into dysfunction — losing their Darwinistic advantage.

Conclusion: Our collective origin story and our proposed skeleton key to our current dysfunction is Fear — a now woefully obsolete operating system. As brutal as it may have been, fear not only got us through nature, it enabled us to escape it through complex cooperation systems. Next, we’ll see what happened to us 7000 years ago and how our obsession with fear and sycophancy — is powering every collective problem we face with each other today.

Step 1 in the Humanity 2.0 Intervention: We are still freshly-wired animals. And, no shame. We were just drawn this way a long, long, long time ago.

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We hope to see you right back here next week.

— mink (us/we)

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Depression has been described as ‘anger-turned-inwards.’ If we look around we can pretty much corroborate that nearly everyone we know is either angry or depressed at the moment.

We know, we’re all feeling it_, wondering ‘what the fuck’s going on and who’s gonna fix it??’ That’s the rage: an obviously broken playing field with no hero in sight. Something fundamental is breaking. We feel it at work, in society, our relationships — everywhere. But what if this were part of a bigger picture? What if there were a through-line connecting all of our crumbling dynamics, and what if we could actually spotlight the simplest and singular source of every problem? This is a series about organizations of all kinds: what fuels them and then what tears them apart (like clockwork).

This series is about markets and relationships — the two universal underpinnings of human civilization — and the recurring cycles that we can see dictating them as algorithm.

Most importantly, this series is about us: ALL of us, and what really matters to ALL of us so we can make that our conversation, our north-star, and our destination (without fear).

WHY NOW

More than a shit-load, there’s a shit-storm going on and whether we have the energy left to follow it, it’s still going on and rising at scale daily — at the same time we feel the most powerless. Bad combination.

Take for a second the perspective of a baby — an infant abandoned and wailing in distress (that’s been you for a while now). The longer your cries go unresponded to, the more desperate you get — rising and rising … (until you stop).

The instinct to cry is matched to our adult instinct to want to run and quell that distress but as the crying drones on with no one rushing to the rescue, our child begins to shut down and desensitize. Crying is an instinct to raise alarm, but no one responds, we will eventually stop crying but we’re in purgatory — swallowing it all internally. Uncertainty and suspense generates unbearable tension, like a water-boarding of the human spirit.

So getting to source of the problem will require getting to us — individually & collectively: how we’re wired and tick (and tick, and tick — until we pop). After finally accepting that no cavalry is coming, our hope is to draft a plan together. We, collectively, are now the adults in the room, and by stepping back together, we’ll see that we, collectively, are actually in charge. Like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, we can go home anytime we want once we cool our heels and see the big picture first.

LET’S BEGIN WITH A RIDDLE

*(for those who know the answer — please don’t share til the end.)

You come to consciousness in a circular dark room and you hear a voice:

“Prisoner. You are being offered a chance to determine your own future. In front of you are two doors. One will open to immediate and blissful freedom and the other to an immediate and excruciating death. Beside you are two guards: One guard who will always tell the truth and the other who will always lie. Your guards know which door is which, but you don’t know which guard is which. You are permitted to ask one guard one question, to which they will answer to the best of their ability. You have 3.5 years.”

Despite the dystopia, I’d bet at-least some of you heard a 50% chance for a pure and blissful future — something odds-makers aren’t even giving us right now — an homage to ‘the magnitude’ of it all.

But now let’s put a spin on it. Let’s imagine this situation was real. Yeah, we’ll get to that ‘3.5 years’ thing soon but given that amount of time, rest assured, you would find the solution when confronted with life or death. Pure logic and deduction will eventually lead to the source of the problem.

What’s the reason for this mind-game? Mainly because the following conversation will ask you to question everything you think about yourself, your civilization, your core identity and your rational perception to see the world as it really works. There’s ample evidence that we as a species may still not be ready to abandon our reptilian cortex impulses and recognize this seismic elephant sitting on our chests, but spoiler alert, there is no boogieman. It’s us. And that’s where the hard part starts: the big picture: Us.

And to do that, we’re going to have to forget about our-selves for a moment — forget about our careers, our political views, our religions and relationships that we see as our own lives. Our arrogance is that we’re just a few hundred years out of nature, when disease, food scarcity, weather and war determined our every outcome, but we take even our problems for granted today and treat every current normality as a birthright. That’s something we call The Power of Less — a vestigial instinct we’ll get into because it consumes a myopically vast amount of our minds for the benefit of no-one anymore. Simply put, self-obsessive self-interest is not getting us much anymore because post ‘Mother Nurture’ is asking for something very different and much more difficult from us all now.

Don’t worry. We promise not to make this a philosophical lecture, hyperbole or conspiracy — there’s no time for that. We’ll lay everything down with plain-as-day facts that you won’t see much to dispute. What will be in doubt is our ability to see the patterns, the dominoes, and our own heads stuck in holes, conditioned to not see ourselves clearly.

We don’t start this conversation lightly or without confidence that we have a very real and radically simple new perspective to offer you at the end of the tunnel along with a big fucking quantum suprise that will be worth the wait, but to get there we’ll have to go back 7000 years to the most seminal singular event in your post-genetic history — which has determined every moment cascading us to exactly where we are today — on the brink of systemic destruction.

The good news?: If we can play the (semi) long game, there’s a solution to this situation waiting for us with certainty, but it’s going to require us to accept the rage of living in this straight-jacket for a little while longer and not shut down. That unbearable tension comes from nature, too, but is currently our worst enemy. We’ve got one chance to get this next chapter right and reveal a new ‘opening’ — hopefully thanks to the help of a little genie we have to offer, which again, we’ll share with you at the end.

SERIES OVERVIEW:

IN PART I - we’will go back to the beginning —of who we are and literally how we were made. how we emerged from an apex class of creatures to not only dominate like no other, but also evolve into the most enigmatic and ‘pavlovian’ sycophants on the planet (it’s ok — it takes one to know one).

IN PART II - we’ll trace our footprints after we were cast violently out of a 40 million year old, unbroken cycle of social evolution only seven-thousand years ago — into our world today where the alphas have become too big to fail. cast out of our small simple gardens of 20-50 hunter-gathers — into cities, and towns, and a new governance system, which was invented overnight, and is still with us today.

IN PART III - we’ll zoom in you … and on me… and show us the reality of how and why we do everything today — locked in a purgatory of sophisticated primordial wiring of risk and reward designed for alpha-heirarchical small tribal life where where being liked determined your ultimate life and death — but also where our innate collectivism gave us the ultimate control of our destiny.

IN PART IV - we’ll explore the inevitability of collapse as a feature, not a bug, of evolution. a distinct series of rebirths of civilization has been our legacy since the beginning of civilization, so understanding where we are in the cycle will help us know when the time is right to strike. (‘don’t pull your punches and you can’t push the river — v Morrison).

IN PART V - we’ll take stock of how we got here today, and it is not a surprise. humanity is like a train keeping a very tight schedule. we seem to be arriving at the final station for this final go-around right on time as could be predicted. breaking that down will help you see the forest from the trees and begin to see a light - of logic and possibility for change in the shorter term that you may be ready for.

IN PART VI - we’ll grieve as we release possession of today and accept it as scientific destiny. we will explore the “power of less” and why it took us so long to act (dw, it always does). we will compare our collective journey to a 12-step recovery: first ‘we’ have to accept rock bottom.

and last, IN PART VII - we’ll show you the only inevitable next step but with a twist. an introduction to a whole new little dragon that will be emerging from its womb far sooner than AGI to give us a head start and show you that a truly bright and collective future is incredibly close … just beyond our (current) finger tips … and right behind the right door.

Each article stands on its own but together, they will form a map of where we are, how we got here, and the only logical next amazing direction we’re heading if we have the guts to see it.

We hope to see you right back here next week.

—mink (us/we)