Note: I want to reiterate the warning I gave you at the end of page 1.1. I’m going to be talking here about human evolution. It’s an interesting story I’ve got to tell, even exciting. But the implications of this story are dark.

When you go down to the bottom of the human operating system, that’s where you find the source of human evil, and that’s where any hope for our future dies.

So if this page becomes more than you’re ready to handle or want to handle, please feel free to bail out. You can get all the major benefits of this site without this page.

If we were going to save our species, we’d need to…

Transform our tribal past into a trans-tribal future.

How we handle this challenge is what will determine our fate. If we can make this transition we’ll have a chance at a future. If not, then not.

And the odds are not looking good. When we humans are scared, we sometimes rise to the occasion and take action to solve the problem. But when we are very, very sacred…

We become a danger to ourselves.

The secret to our success as a species is that we’re a social-group species…

We do better working together.

By contrast, orangutans live mostly solo lives and as a consequence their numbers have remained small throughout history.

The principle of doing better together is confirmed when we look at insects. As a class, they’re remarkably successful. There are so many species, we haven’t been able to count them all. Estimates vary wildly. Maybe a million, maybe more.

But among the insects, it’s just a small number of species that are the most successful in terms of numbers of individuals. We’re talking now about ants, bees, wasps, and termites.

And what’s special about them?

These are the social insects.

And just like with us, their sociality has given them a very big advantage.

That much we have in common, but then there’s a profound difference between us.

Their togetherness is…

Based on instinct.

It’s pre-programmed, which is why their societies operate in smoothly predictable ways.

But we humans, have transcended instinct…

We make decisions.

Day by day we have to decide…

How much do I give to the group, and how much do I take for myself?

And because these decisions are relational, because they’re about how we treat each other, that means they are…

Moral decisions.

Sometimes, in some instances, moral questions are easy to answer. But on the whole, they’re…

Dilemmic.

And that means trouble. Lots of trouble.

Evolution has designed us so that we have a very strong drive to put ourselves first in a basic completion with other humans.

And it’s designed us so we have a very strong drive to identify with our group, and to take care of our group so it can take care of us.

These two drives, though they’re sometimes harmonious, are, at the most fundamental level, in conflict with each other. And the conflict is often not easy to resolve.

In our relationships and our communities we’re always dealing with the core human dilemma…

Me versus we.

We have to decide again and again…

How much do I cooperate, how much do I compete?

Dilemma is built into us. It’s deeply rooted in our genome It’s our nature. It’s definitional for our species.

This means we can’t ever get rid of dilemma. The best we can do is to master the art of…

Living into dilemma.

And yes, this is the source of trouble. It’s one of the things that makes being human so hard for us and hard on us. And yet, there’s a benefit, too. As we wrestle forthrightly with our moral decision-making day after day, we develop…

Moral virtuosity.

And this leads us to a discovery that is worth the effort.

To explain what I mean, let’s take a look at the dilemmic continuum. At one end is behavior characterized as…

Me-first.

A person who is anchored there focuses pretty much entirely on himself. His concerns are selfish, He takes from his community as much as he can get away with.

At the other end of the continuum is behavior characterized as…

We-first.

This means the individual is merging with the group. He is self-sacrificial. He puts the welfare of the group before his own welfare with pretty much every decision he makes.

When people retreat to one end of the continuum or the other, they’re attempting to escape the core human dilemma. I’m thinking about the me-first hippie communes in the 60s and 70s which imploded because everyone was so busy getting their personal desires fulfilled there was no group cohesion.

And at the other end, I’m thinking about rigid, religious, we-first communities like the Amish and Mennonites where individuals were submerged into the group. Personal development was not allowed, let alone encouraged.

But right in the middle of this continuum is the most interesting, exasperating, compelling, scary place. The name we give it depends.

We could call it…

Bitter territory.

Because it’s where my personal needs clash with the needs of my group, and if there’s no resolution, this becomes a bitter, painful place.

But what if we challenge ourselves to do better than that?

What if we bring our spirit of moral-fight to this challenge?

What if we decide to put the needs of the individual and the needs of the group first, at the same time?

What if, instead of thinking in terms of a trade-off, of either-or, we go for…

Both-and.

What if we turn that bitter middle of the dilemmic continuum into…

The sweet spot.

In theory, that’s where we make a 100% commitment to ourselves and at the same time a 100% commitment to our group. We don’t sacrifice ourselves to the group or the group to individuals.

In practice, of course, we can never make a perfect integration of me and we. But why not try for the best balance of the two that we can pull off?

Dilemmic decision-making is always a balancing act. We’re always adjusting, always trying to do better. And maybe we can take some comfort from the fact that the more we wrestle with the dilemmic nature of moral decision-making the better we will get at transcending the difference between me and we.

The bigger version of the core dilemma.
The relationship between our tribes and our species is dilemmic, too. At this level…

“Me” means my tribe.

And…

“We” means us as a species.

And the challenge is to bring our tribes into a profound, sustainable, trans-tribal commitment to the well-being of our species as a whole. But we’re not meeting this challenge.

There was a time in human history when we first invented sacredness. And then applied it to our tribes. We decided we weren’t just better than those other tribes, we were holy. We weren’t just good people, we were demigods. Our enemies weren’t just bad people, they were demons.

And just that quickly we opened the door to unrestrained slaughter. We were now prepared to go nuclear on each other, because if our enemies were less than us, if they were actually less than human, and worse, if they were dangerously demonic…

That made them an existential threat.

So if we engaged in no-limit violence against them, even pre-emptively, that counted as righteous action.

In the very moment we turned our enemies into imagined demons…

We turned ourselves demonic for real.

As bloody as our tribal way of life has been, if we focus only on the quantitative bottom line, namely the total number of humans populating the earth, it’s been a grand success.

But our numbers have not just soared, they’ve mushroomed out of control, changing the rules of the game we’re in. Actually…

Reversing those rules.

What we’ve done in the past is exactly the wrong thing to do going forward. From now on…

We need to identify with our species first, not our tribe.

And this is the best thing we can do for the welfare of our tribes.

We need to develop mastery of a trans-tribal kind of togetherness. That’s what we need, but what have we got?

Paranoia.

It’s inherent in our historic tribalism.

If we believe that only the people in our own tribe are trustworthy, that means every other person in every other tribe is to be feared.

This was bad enough in our hunter-gatherer days, when our worlds were smaller and we were only in contact with a limited number of other tribes. But now we’re in contact with a global population of billions.

If, apart from our own group, however we define that, everybody else on the face of the earth is our enemy, either currently or potentially in the future, that’s a whole hell of a lot of people.

And if enemies and possible enemies make up the great, great majority of our species…

Why would we fight to save it?

We need to flip our script and take a revolutionary leap forward and become species-oriented. But instead, what’s the strategy we’re following?

Regression.

When we feel threatened, our first impulse is to retreat even deeper into our tribal fiction, because…

It feels like security, it feels like salvation, it feels like home.

And regression answers the puzzle of why large numbers of people are able to vote eagerly against their own best interests. And why they’ll stick with a political leader who pushes policies that make them poorer and make their lives harder. And why they remain desperately loyal to leaders who hurt them. It’s not stupidity.

There’s a simple rule at play…

When you get very, very scared, go more tribal.

Obey the ancient drive to belong…

No matter what you have to sacrifice to do that.

No matter how crazy you have to get or how self-destructive.

And we could call this…

Tribal fundamentalism.

Around the world, nations are taking a hard right turn into authoritarianism, fascism, and totalitarianism. All of these political forms are based on…

Moral abdication.

Individuals give up and merge into the crowd, into the totality, giving over responsibility for our future to leaders who seem to care only about their own egos and power and nothing for the sustainability of the species.

So here we are caught up in a…

Paradox.

Belonging to our tribe is more important to us than survival, because for most of our history, tribal belonging has been the…

First requirement for survival.

What feels best to us is now what’s worst for us. For most people, trans-tribalism, if they consider it all is a pale, intellectual vision. And as much as we activists might try to inspire a passionate relationship with it, still, in the meantime…

Our tribalism is a vivid, visceral compulsion rooted deep in our genes.

And this means we’ll never fight for our species in the same fiercely instinctive way we fight for our tribes.

And if we keep on indulging ourselves in our tribal fundamentalism, our species will die—and ironically, every last one of our tribes with it.

The pain of facing extinction is too much for most people, so it’s no wonder our mass society prefers to live inside a made-up social reality that’s now slipping its mooring from real reality to an astonishing degree.

Our tribal psyches, despite the hopeful brilliance of our big brains, are quite capable of…

Trapping us inside a dumbed-down, dangerously explosive, self-defeating fiction.

Our psyches are capable of walling us off from the truth, and doing so with the kind of denial that’s so adamantine it can withstand pretty much any attempt by anybody to break through.

And maybe it feels like we’ve only recently made a sudden shift into a post-fact era, but our tribes have been living inside fictions for millennia. And it’s long been the case in human society that…

A lie counts as the truth if we need it to make our tribal story work.

It doesn’t matter if we know we’re telling ourselves a lie. It doesn’t matter if our whole story is a lie. It doesn’t matter if that story is self-destructive. If we believe we need it, if we believe it to be our salvation, we’ll grab it and hold onto it, ardently, doggedly, grimly, until it kills us.

And so it’s come to this. Our tribal stories now have the power to incinerate our species…

A species we all belong to but have never really bonded with.

4.3  Despair so deep it erupts into rage