Part 1: FEAR — an origin story

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

Before bludgeoning yourself with your own cave club, let’s begin with a silver lining to our current mishigas.

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

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)