After years of working in community building, social services, and bottom-up social infrastructure, I have conceded to an understanding that many before me came to.
Humans are, at their core, individualistic. Their primary survival locus is… themselves.
They will participate in a tribe or community if their individual survival requires it. They will care for their genetic offspring if they have sufficient drive to do so.
But, basically, humans are most concerned with themselves and the concentric circles around them that they consider necessary for their own survival or success. They will only move as far from the self-centerpoint as necessary to achieve their survival goals.
They are programmed for competition, but will concede to cooperation when they must.
The research seems to agree. Academic work on commons found that cooperation rarely survives on goodwill alone. It needs monitoring, consequences, and visible benefit to the people participating. People don’t sacrifice for abstractions. Concern radiates outward in rings: self, kin, then the people you depend on. Kin selection and reciprocal altruism, it would seem, are critical components in the human social dynamic of relative selflessness.
I started out utterly nihilistic. But the deeper I go down this rabbit hole, the less cut and dried it becomes.
What about someone who willingly sacrifices themselves for another?
Parents go hungry so their children can eat. Soldiers die for the person next to them. Toddlers help strangers before anyone teaches them to. People pay real costs to punish unfairness that doesn’t even affect them. Disaster research consistently finds that people self-organize and help each other rather than panic or loot, even when their own safety is most uncertain.
It would seem that hardship makes behavior more variable, not uniformly selfish. Some people close ranks. Others become more generous than they’d ever be in comfort.
So I find that I may be conceding again. Perhaps competitiveness and cooperativeness are both native to us.
Which leaves me with one question: are we truly built to need each other?
What do you think?
