It is not fashionable nowadays to go to a party and exclaim loudly your belief that Darwin’s theories, in their corrupted forms, have had a disastrous influence on human society. It is generally held that we are, by our nature, competitive creatures, and that competition is the foundation of nature itself. It seems that many have forgotten the ideal of Jolly Cooperation.
Humans have survived because they form social groups. Hobbes is a fool and an Englishman; our nature is not individualistic survival of the fittest. If it were so, we would all have been dead millennia ago, killed by much more powerful predators. Human beings were prey. They were prey that gathered together so hard and so well that they became predators. It's a remarkable thing. Social Darwinists are missing the point to such an extent that it's a wonder their heads aren't simply falling off their necks. Evolution is not about becoming stronger as individuals; it is about adapting, as a group, to a niche. Our individualism is a bastardization of our nature and our destiny. We have been corrupted by the devil of Mammon into believing personal wealth and personal success to be the goal of our lives. This is why we are turning the world into Hell! It is because we are all little Devils, and Hell is the only place for such creatures.
Our form of government, our style of production, our financial system, are all founded on greed, where defeating your enemies is #1 and helping anyone out is #26. We have taken the idea of competition as entertainment to such an extreme that athletes are the new role models, and a life well lived is one in which not only are you better than others at something, but are watched being better than others at something.
Many argue that without this all-encompassing competition, no one would struggle to improve, and humanity would stagnate. Well, stagnation is not the end of the world. I haven’t seen ducks invent anything new in years, and yet they’re still flapping around just as healthily and beautifully as always. Where does this desire for incessant progress come from? What is the appeal of this marching ever forth toward an unknown abyss?
I will not speculate as to how and when we were corrupted. I will say that it is a recent phenomenon. Not as recent as you think, but also not particularly far in the past, if you're looking at time from a grand enough perspective (i.e. you understand that Plato was alive yesterday.) I will only go as far as to say that the majority of our written tradition dates from after the advent of our trend toward destruction. But that isn't saying much at all.
Nowadays, the word "tribalism" is often used pejoratively, and not without some reason. Political tribalism exists primarily as an us-vs-them mentality, the prime importance being the maltreatment of the "them," rather than the thriving of the "us." In such cases, the "us" often exists only as a vague umbrella hanging over people with no true associations, but who share a common irrational hatred of a "them." This form of tribalism is a bastardization of the concept, yet it seems to appeal greatly to our individualistic society due to its competitive basis.
What is missed in this modern conception of tribalism is that the essence of a tribe is the "us." When you are living in a tribe, the majority of your time and effort is spent in supporting those within it. The "them" is outside, out there; they are not generally your concern. They exist primarily to serve as a limit to the "us." If there is no limit, the whole thing has no meaning.
The basis of a tribal relationship is a common support of the welfare of the whole community; that is, each individual member. All is shared, including effort — if someone is in need of repairs for their house, everyone lends a hand, and it gets done. The reason you do so is because you know that, when your house needs fixing, everyone will help you. This unconditional support (the only condition you could say, would be being a member of the community, however we will take that as a given) has another name: Love. The love we share with our families, our partners, and friends are tribal. We would drop anything to support our best friend — we would not do so for a stranger. The reason being that there are simply too many strangers, and they have too many motives that do not align with yours. When you are in a community, your motives align perfectly — being the common good, i.e. the commonwealth — thus there is no need for duplicity. You don't need to trick and scam people. There's no room to be selfish. So when someone in your community asks you for something, you give it, because you know that when they ask, it's because they need it, and helping them is good for everyone. It means when anyone else needs help, they will be able to give it. They wouldn't be able to do so if they were, for example, dead, or if their house were collapsing in on itself, leaving them in despair.
Whether or not you are efficient or even particularly helpful when you show up to build your neighbour’s house is not the point; the point is only that you are there. Pooling your currency together to pay for the building of a house, or collectively building up a store of robots that build houses, while better than nothing, lacks the emotional quality of actually building the thing. This is where large-scale communism, particularly the industrialized kind, can fall apart. A kiss on the cheek is worth a thousand golden rings, and doing the dishes is worth more than a car. It is the effort that makes the bond; note the myriad ways in which people are mutually reliant in our current age, while at the same time feeling atomized and alone. This is because our effort is put toward helping ourselves; the fact that our jobs help anyone else is secondary and often subliminal.
The foundation of a community is of course, in the end, unconditional love. Unconditional love! it is the most powerful force in the world; yet, it is a limited resource. A human being is simply not capable of loving every other human being unconditionally. I have tried, and determined it impossible, to love all the human beings on this planet. In order to love someone unconditionally, you have to be confident that they will not betray you. When I look around and see the ways in which people are betraying each other, I find this confidence impossible to achieve. I can, however, unconditionally love a small group of people. I can accept them exactly as they are, try in no way to change them, and support them in any endeavor they choose to strain themselves towards. Let me tell you: it's a beautiful feeling. It makes me sure that Jesus must have been the happiest person on Earth.
In fact, this is what makes God so powerful as a concept. Unconditional love is God's greatest superpower. Omnipotence, omnipresence, etc — you can throw that all out of a window. Jesus did not have any of that; and yet, he is still God. He is God because, despite being the Son of Man, he is capable of unconditional love. This is why he is an object of veneration. It’s a powerful story.
In Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, we see the case of a man with infinite trust and infinite patience, thrown into a world in which he has no roots. He is betrayed, not only by scoundrels, but by all who he meets, because they see him as a means to an end, instead of an end in himself. To me, the key here is a lack of community; Myshkin (like many of us) is a man without a tribe. Our cities, being masses of people with little in common, are a complex of trustworthy and untrustworthy elements that require a level of sophistication to be navigated, a level of sophistication that Myshkin, in his purity, lacks. Myshkin would thrive in a community of mutual cooperation; he would be the most beautiful man in the world.
Since we are not all Gods, but only human, there can never be such thing as a true global community. This is not to say that we can't all be friendly, or at least, not totally hate each other. This is also not to say that such a global community might not be a good idea, were it possible. But I believe that it requires a human heart much more powerful than the one we have been given. We become spread too thin, our love becomes diluted, and our strength becomes null. We need to be together, physically and mentally and spiritually, in order to feel the true essence of community.
Our communities nowadays are de-localized and asynchronous. Some people in my community might not even know they're in it. Some people in my community have never met others in my community, and likely never will. However, all this does not mean that the spirit of the commonwealth is dead. It's changed, and it's weird, but some inkling still remains in the DNA of true friendship and loyalty.
The underlying foundation of human knowledge and understanding is LOVE. We began to learn about the world and ourselves in order to preserve the lives of our loved ones. We learned, in this way, to love our world and our surroundings, because in that lies the basis of the survival of our loved ones. This is the root of science, of philosophy, of religion. We learned to love in a wholly unselfish manner. That is why the extreme end of love is always self-sacrifice. Self-sacrifice is not paradoxical to human striving; this only seems to be the case when you consider individual survival to be the ultimate end. As I have mentioned above, such thinking misses the point. Keep your heads on your necks. LOVE is life for the sake of others. LOVE is Jolly Cooperation.
& Engage in Jolly Cooperation!
Glad to have you in my tribe