Why Are People So Selfish?

BY SOFO ARCHON

This is the transcript of a spontaneous talk.

Why are people so selfish? Why are they so competitive and acquisitive? Why are they so violent and hateful? Why do they commit crimes or make wars?

Many theories have been proposed to explain for that. Perhaps the most prominent one comes from evolutionary psychology. That theory essentially says that people had to develop strong traits of selfishness during hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. And with time those traits became ingrained in their psyche and in their genes.

That theory says that for hundreds of thousands of years, people had been living in conditions of scarcity. In conditions where there were not enough resources for everyone. So people had to fight tooth and nail with each other in order to survive and reproduce. And those who were better at fighting, who were better at competing for resources, who were better at outdoing others, were those who were most likely to survive and pass on their genes.

Now, what if I told you that this theory is rubbish? What if I told you that it is unfounded? What if I told you that there is no actual evidence to support it?

In the 20th century, several anthropologists visited some of the few remaining immediate return hunter-gatherer tribes across the world. And they stayed with them for quite some time, and they studied them. They did that out of curiosity to find out how people in prehistoric times were living, because those tribes were living very similarly to how people in prehistoric times did. Those people were living as nomads, so they would move from place to place. They were hunting animals or gathering food from plants, and they would not store food with them. They would not accumulate resources.

What those anthropologists saw was very surprising to them. They saw that those tribes were for the most part living very much at peace, and this surprised them, because they were brainwashed by our modern culture that those people are savages, and so they were expecting to see them fighting among each other and with different tribes.

Those people were living in a place of abundance. Food was for the most part readily available for them. So since food was available for everyone, why would they have to compete? It makes no sense, and there is no other reason why they would compete. Why would anyone from those tribes fight with the other members of the tribe? Doing that would mean committing suicide because those people depended on their tribes. If they fought against other members of the tribe, those members would fight with them and possibly kill them or expel them from the tribe, and who would want to be expelled from their tribe? Being expelled from the tribe most probably means death, for as you can imagine, it is extremely difficult for a person to survive alone in the wild. It would also mean psychological death, because those people were identified with their tribe. They would see themselves and their tribe as one body. They were feeling so connected that when a member of a tribe was sick, people would say that the tribe is sick. So connected they felt, so strong was their sense of belonging.

And why would any tribe fight against another tribe? As I said already, those tribes did not accumulate resources. They would not accumulate food because, since they were nomadic people, they wanted to be as light as possible, so they did not want to carry a lot of stuff with them. Plus, food was readily available pretty much everywhere they went, so there was no need to accumulate food. On top of that, why would they accumulate food for more than one or two days? That food would rot, so it makes no sense. So why would another tribe want to fight against them? What would it get out of that? Nothing. And considering how skilled hunters those people were, it would be suicidal to fight against another tribe. Who would want to do that? For what reason?

People in those tribes were sharing with each other. They were sharing activities of hunting, gathering, they were collaborating. Everyone’s health and well-being was contributing to the well-being of the entire tribe. People wanted their fellow men and women to be well because they knew that, as long as other members of the tribe were well, they would be well too because they would be supported by them. So they were very generous and helpful and giving. Altruism is what helped those tribes to survive, not selfishness, as that theory of evolutionary psychology suggests.

So, then, why are people so selfish nowadays? Why are they hoarding resources? Why are they so competitive and jealous and violent?

Well, according to historians, something very big happened about 12,000 years ago. That was the time when people started to transition from a nomadic lifestyle to a settled one. People started to settle in specific places around the world, and they would take on agriculture. They would start to cultivate the land, and they started to see themselves as deserving the fruits of their labor. If they cultivated a particular piece of land over generations, they would see that land as belonging to them — which, by the way, is something that hunter-gatherers would never think about, because to hunter-gatherers people belong to the land, the land does not belong to them.

Once people started to take on agriculture, the notion of private property was introduced. Some people would possess that piece of land, others another one, and so on and so forth. And with that, economic disparities were created over time. Resources were not freely available for everyone. Some people had more, some less. Then, on top of that, money and markets were introduced. People were starting to sell and buy stuff to maximize their economic self-interest. And over years upon years, economic inequality increased more and more. At some point, you had the poor and the rich. The poor were competing against everyone else in the markets, but collectively they were also fighting specifically against the rich. Then the rich created police to protect themselves from the poor. Entire nations created armies to protect themselves from foreigners.

So there you have the perfect conditions for selfishness, conditions of scarcity that demanded competition and hence the development of selfish traits. People really needed to compete for their own survival. And we modern humans are still living in similar conditions, in conditions of scarcity. Not everyone has enough, although our planet is plentiful and still has enough to go around for every single person alive. Resources are not distributed fairly. A few have so much and most have little to none. Billions of people are struggling to survive. They barely have any food to eat, and wealthy nations waste about half of the food that is being produced. A CEO of a successful multinational corporation earns in only a few hours of work as much as most poor people earn in decades or even their entire lifetime. The top 1% possess as much wealth as the bottom 50% of humanity.

In those conditions of scarcity, is it any wonder that people are so selfish? They have to be. The systems that we have in place demand them to be. People constantly need to compete in the market to make a living. People need to deceive other people to get their money. People are destroying the world for profit.

And people are programmed to be selfish from a very young age. They are sent to school, where they learn to compete against their classmates for grades and validation. They are programmed to believe that success means having more money than their fellow humans and having as many material possessions as they can. So they’re constantly comparing themselves with others. They’re feeling jealous toward others. They feel unworthy, they feel inadequate, they feel unimportant. They think that accumulating more and more material possessions is going to bring them joy, when true joy comes from sharing, from healthy, genuine, intimate relationships, from friendship, from living at peace with people, from feeling a sense of belonging like the hunter-gatherers that we discussed felt. From feeling connected with the world, with nature — those are the things that bring us true joy and contentment.

So, the big point that I’m trying to make is that selfishness is pretty much the result of the conditions that we live in. If the conditions require us to develop strong, selfish traits, then that’s what we’re going to do. But if they cultivate and reinforce traits of altruism, then those are the ones that we are going to cultivate.

I’m reminded of a powerful Native American story which goes like this:

Once upon a time, there was a grandfather with his grandson, to whom the grandfather said, “There are two wolves within you, which are fighting a battle. One of them is selfish. It is competitive. It is jealous. It is hateful. It is violent. The other one is loving. It is kind. It is generous. It is compassionate.”

Upon hearing that, the grandson asked, “And which wolf is going to win?”

And the grandfather said, “The one that you feed.”

So the question is, which wolf are we feeding? The selfish one or the altruistic one? Which part of ourselves is our culture and the social systems that we have set up and maintain, cultivate and reinforce? I think anyone with a little bit of brain knows the answer. It’s the selfish one. Therefore, if we would like to transition from a selfish, competitive, violent society to a truly loving, altruistic, compassionate, collaborative one, then we need to stop feeding the selfish wolf and start feeding the altruistic, loving one.