We Have It All Wrong

Humans will never outsmart nature

The Shift

Ten thousand years ago, humans experienced a significant shift. Something – some things – happened that drastically altered our evolutionary path. Many believe that a shift toward lootable wealth, generated by increased proficiency in agriculture, storage of surplus, and larger community size, marked the infancy of civilization. This growth over the next 5,000 years led to Egypt, patriarchy, colonialism, and unprecedented hierarchies of power.

The Story

Many speculate that this was inevitable. That human nature is inherently greedy, selfish, and even evil. Hobbes, whose thinking has dominated since Egypt, argued that life was brutish, nasty, and short. Literature, government, and religion all suggest life on Earth is much better now and would have been intolerable for the entirety of human existence. 200,000+ years of suffering. We are told this is ‘just how it was’, or ‘just who we are’, with little or no explanation about why humans choose evil. We are told to be thankful for the things we have today – medicine, air conditioning, and iPhones – because life is so much better than it ever has been.

But that’s never made any sense to me, maybe because life doesn’t seem as wonderful as I am supposed to believe. Yes, I appreciate lower infant mortality, vaccines, and reduced global hunger. But I question our abuse of the environment, dependence on destructive resource extraction, and tendency toward patriarchal and colonial civilization structures. Perhaps my training in Ecology forces me to see the big picture. Maybe because I’ve had experiences with psychedelics that have permanently connected me to the Earth. Maybe because I’m neurodivergent, I have a greater capacity to see how all the moving parts interconnect. Or maybe because it’s hard to accept that a species so genuinely adapted for cooperative community connection could abandon that adaptation and call it progress. Natural selection doesn’t make mistakes like that and expect to survive. Right?

No, something else is at work here. The story we’re told about how we should be happy with what we have because it is so much better sounds a lot like coercion or persuasion. The narrative reeks of something you’d hear in an abusive relationship to justify the offense. The story we are taught of who we are – before we can consent – feels like gaslighting; a slow insistence that, despite what our guts are telling us, the world is technically different from how we feel. Someone is trying to sell us something, and by all indications, we have accepted it. Everything we have been taught about human nature and our capacity to coexist as civilizations has a vested interest in us believing it. The sales pitch is incentivized from the top down. And we continue to play the role of passive follower. We are the obedient, subservient pawns in a modern game of us-versus-them. 

Cooperation Gone Bad

The story of humankind was designed to keep us under control to support a power hierarchy that didn’t exist 10,000 years ago. The designers created a new human story built on lootable wealth, hoarding, and power that wasn’t a part of human society for the first 95% of our existence. Modernity is characterized by a repeated pattern featuring dichotomies between haves and have-nots. Those in power make the rules, hoard the wealth, and perpetuate their own kind, while those at the bottom follow the rules, create the wealth, and enable the system’s persistence despite their subservience. A sort of artificial selection maintained the imbalance over at least 5,000 years.

Perhaps the worst element of this top-down rule is that we ‘regular people’ at the bottom are still good people. It is our good nature – the cooperative nature that likely got us through the first 95% of our evolutionary time on Earth – that is being exploited. The very mechanism representing the peak of primate evolution, that we can cooperate as a single unit to achieve things individuals cannot, became the ultimate power grab. The ultimate source of power itself. What gives power value isn’t the power itself — it’s the obedience of those without it. The same principle that makes food and money scarce – that drives true ecological competition – makes hierarchy possible. Perhaps the key to understanding the 10000-year problem is viewing it as cooperation gone bad – dark triad personalities kept at bay for hundreds of thousands of years saw an opportunity and intentionally took advantage of our cooperative nature to ensure we stay complicit. Egypt et al work BECAUSE we are cooperative.

Nature Knows Better

I’m not making a philosophical argument here. I’m making a Darwinian one. Despite the prevalence of the Hobbs vs. Rousseau arguments and all that has followed, I don’t think there is much of an argument, and neither did Hume when he said:

“Nothing appears more surprising to those, who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.”

Rather than consult my own subjective mind, I look to nature for evidence. To me, natural selection is a more objective mechanism of determinism. Who we are, what we see, and what exists on Earth is here because Nature deemed it fit. At least those elements that persist through time.

In this view, it is easy to understand why cooperation will be preferred over competition. Sure, competition works in the short-term and allows alpha male hierarchies to find reproductive success and even generational success. But the evolutionary endpoint of a primarily competitive species is that there will be a single individual left. I can even imagine the tragic end where an alpha male kills the last remaining female rather than reproduce with her because his drive to win is too strong. The evolutionary math is simple. Competition results in a single winner. Cooperation ends with a thriving community. Nature has always known which one persists.

The Homeostasis We Lost

I believe that cooperation IS our nature, despite what Hobbes says and others continue to believe. Further, I believe the insistence on our competitive and evil nature is part of the system designed to maintain the modern hierarchy. In either scenario, you will find that, despite the poor behavior by a select few individual humans, the majority of us simply can’t help but be good. Dark triad, competitive, even savage leadership is a minority condition that, under the right circumstances, has been amplified beyond its natural proportion. And our persistence was due to the former, and our extinction to the latter. And none of it would be possible without the innate, natural cooperative nature of most of us. 

Before the rise of dark triad personalities to leadership, humans existed within a gorgeous homeostasis — like our blood buffering system. As narcissistic, Machiavellian, and psychopathic personality types vied for power, societal mechanisms like shame kept them in their place, threatened abandonment, or ignored them altogether. Groups of humans maintained more peaceful, cooperative, and egalitarian structures because it made the most sense and benefited the greatest number of individuals. Sometime between 10 and 5,000 years ago, this original way of being together got disrupted, and we’re only now paying the price. For a time, we called it success, but it wasn’t. It was a system running on borrowed time, because it was never natural to begin with. Physiological homeostasis is maintained within narrow parameters — shift it too far and the system fails, but it can look fine for a while before the collapse becomes visible. You’ve been living at a pH of 7.1 for 5,000 years, calling it civilization, and only now are the symptoms so intense, so far beyond what can be maintained artificially, becoming undeniable.

What kept us alive for over 200,000 years is cooperation. What is threatening us now is the systematic suppression of cooperation in favor of extraction and domination. The thing that saved us is being dismantled by the thing that is killing us. This isn’t natural selection running its course. This is artificial selection producing an outcome that natural selection would never have arrived at — and nature is now correcting, as it always does, just at a scale and speed that may take us with it.

What Now

The house of cards wasn’t built to last. What we’ve built depends on the extraction of finite natural resources, creating more damage than benefit in the long run. We built systems that aren’t sustainable, hierarchies that aren’t equitable, and consequences that aren’t acceptable. Modernity delivered real gains for a time, but the consequences are no longer deniable.

Fortunately, because cooperation is our nature, we can return to it. The future is not about learning anything new — it is about remembering who we were. It is about believing in what makes us good and staying honest about our capacity to be led astray.

It starts with you. Before we can rebuild cooperative communities, we have to show up as the best versions of ourselves possible. That requires practice — the slow, unglamorous work of actually knowing yourself. Meditation, journaling, physical activity, and genuine communication with the people around you aren’t soft pursuits. They are the foundation of human capacity to be present, to cooperate, and to resist the systems designed to keep us compliant.

Cooperation then builds outward. From the individual to the family. From the family to the neighborhood. With each honest interaction, we rebuild the habits of trust and the connective tissue of community.

This isn’t utopian thinking — it’s evolutionary logic. Before the rise of dark triad leadership, humans coexisted within a gorgeous homeostasis. Now that we understand what happened, we can return to our natural state. We can cooperate, together, to redefine how we live and who we follow.

This is the 10,000-Year Problem. The next question is what we do now that we know, and the answer starts closer to home than you might think.