LET US LIVE WITHOUT HARMING!: LET US AVOID HARMFUL GREGARIOUSNESS

Strong gregariousness, a group spirit that divides the world into “us” and “them,” can cause a great deal of harm.

It is a trait inherent in our nature that we share with our closest relatives, chimpanzees. It is typical for males of these hominids to lie in wait as a group at the border of their territory; when an individual from a neighboring group approaches, they beat them to death.

In our species, gregariousness developed primarily when there was an increase in population density, generally in Neolithic agricultural villages or pastoral tribes, but also exceptionally in some Paleolithic hunter-gatherer bands.

Higher population density meant a reduction in resources per capita and greater competition for them, channeled through violent theft between groups. Consequently, from a certain point in the Neolithic, endemic warfare became widespread across all continents between peasant villages to steal land (and, in the process, women) and between pastoral tribes to steal livestock and water sources (and, in the process, women). This became the norm rather than the exception.

These struggles between groups could become extremely violent. In fact, the Yamnaya pastoralists who lived in southern Russia and Ukraine not only came to dominate from Ireland to northern India (which is why they imposed the Proto-Indo-European language across almost all of Europe and parts of Asia, which we continue to speak today in Latin, Germanic, and Slavic variants, etc.), but in much of Europe, they basically replaced the male DNA.

There is no evidence of exactly how it happened, but it is quite likely that the cause was the gradual genocide of men and the systematic rape of women, both of European peasants from Anatolia and of Europe’s indigenous hunter-gatherers.

To survive in such an aggressive world, successfully defending oneself and plundering other human collectives, it became necessary to form increasingly larger, better-cohesively organized groups—initially without a leader and later under the orders of a chieftain.

They became increasingly stratified and complex, moving from simple chiefdoms (petty kings of a single village) to complex chiefdoms (petty kings of several villages), kings (of larger territories resulting from the conquest or union of chiefdoms), and emperors (of vast empires, basically the result of conquering multiple kingdoms and chiefdoms).

With this evolution, new forms of plundering neighboring groups appeared: slavery and servitude. Instead of exterminating men or expelling them from the land, they were forced to work for free, which allowed for an increase in resources and an increasingly sumptuous lifestyle for kings, aristocrats, and clergy.

In that world ruled by the law of the strongest (until relatively recently), to be among the winners-dominators-abusers and avoid being among the losers-dominated-abused, success in wars of conquest was essential. To achieve this, they had to act as one, leading to the gradual development of group cohesion. This also led to increasingly complex rituals, traditions, and religions that unified the collective over the individual, as well as growing pressure for the individual to conform and merge into the group.

All of this resulted in genetic selection in favor of gregariousness and a follower mentality. This entire process was accompanied by the development of toxic mental mechanisms such as the following: