this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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living creatures that cooperate deeply will always outperform those that don't, rugged individualism may look attractive but you'll never reach the stars alone
I don't disagree with you, but why, then, did evolution land on making us so damn greedy and selfish?
Evolution has always favored survivors.
But realistically, we've been shaped by culture and community even more than hardwiring from survival. A lot of things we think are set in stone are in fact products of social conditioning. In places with community and social consequence, people are far, far more charitable and have very different values.
It's only been recently when we all started living in single-family homes and moving away from family and friends at 18 and chasing after individualist dreams that we started seeing this trend towards selfishness on a community level. There are always going to be some class of people who have the desire to accumulate power and wealth, but below those people have always been communities and societies, and it's in those societies that power is often kept in check.
We actually aren't that greedy and selfish when it comes to our immediate family or even a bit extended than that - our "tribe" if you will.
This makes sense. If your tribe thrives, you thrive. So you rub the back of those that rub your back.
But this kind of selflessness does not scale to the group sizes of modern society. People living in the same village or tribe before modern society would happily help a neighbour cause they know they may one day need the help of that neighbour themselves. People of today couldn't care less about helping the people that surround them, cause people rarely live the same place for too long and you interact (greedily and selfishly) with an immense amount of people who you do not consider your "tribe".
My point is that we are highly selective about who to be generous towards, and evolution definitely selected for that.
There's always a boundary of cooperation. Like, the wolf pack that cooperates among themselves but fights other wolf packs for territory. Our closest neighbours in the animal kingdom, chimps, fight brutal wars between different groups. And, even among groups that cooperate on the surface, there's often cheating behind the scenes. Like, birds are well known for forming pair bonds that last for life but apparently adultery among birds is very common. The best strategy for a society may be cooperation, but the best strategy for an individual in a cooperative society may be occasional cheating if you can get away with it. Even plants compete for resources like soil and sun.
A computer model of a civilization might show that the optimum result is achieved with 100% cooperation. But, we aren't computer programs, so we need to find a society that's as good as possible given the constraints of our animal nature. It's actually pretty remarkable that we've created countries containing hundreds of millions of people who feel some sense of shared identity, and are willing to cooperate at least a bit with strangers from that same country.
On the subject of "reaching the stars", the space race is the perfect example of competition. There's no way that Sputnik would have been put into orbit, or humans onto the moon if it hadn't been for a massive competition between the USSR and the USA. Within those two societies there was a great deal of cooperation, but humankind wouldn't have "reached the stars" from cooperation alone.
Does forcing people to do what you want also count?