HUMANITY AS AN ANT HILL

All the talk about NSA, Google, and internet snoopers of all kinds gathering and using your personal data has caused me to think there must be some kind of principle involved. As a narcissistic society, individual rights take a central place in our thinking. We may live in a group but have the right to protect ourselves from deceit. To do that we must know what our neighbors are thinking and doing. Thus, we have the paradox; oxymoron really, “Is there such a thing as a non-narcissistic society, a group of individualists living and depending on one another?”

As a pragmatist, I see value as most people do in knowing their “neighbors”, in marketing for example, which seems to be the major driving force for use of private information as well as seeing value in the government knowing its citizens for use in protecting them. I want to know about what products are available, the best price, etc. I want the government to protect me from outside forces such as a foreign army poised to invade as well as a neighbor with a backpack full of explosives or a gun. It is interesting to expand the definition of government from self to family, kin, tribe, city, county, state and nation. I will fight to protect my self and my home for the same reason I will fight to protect my territory, my state, etc. It is innate.

Of course, it is not as simple as that. Disclosure has multiple meanings and implications; for example, revelation of private information to some kind of exclusive group: the CIA, FBI, local police, a marketing group, or even family and the other would be revelation of such information to the public. The nature of the group makes a difference. The agencies we embrace to protect ourselves are different from those that will use the information to make a profit. In the eyes of the individual, the level of tolerance as to how much and what kind of information differs from each group.

There is a biological line drawn by innate tendencies or gregariousness in establishing these groups or divisions; only the labels are man made. Without upsetting the premise implied by labels, self-preservation is the prime driving force, which guides both individual and group behavior and contributes to our survival. Groups fight to preserve themselves just as individuals do.

We can comprehend the danger to individuals resulting from disclosure of their deepest darkest secrets; terrorists, tax evaders, and drug cartel members but can we see it from their point of view. Who is right if one country invades another to protect its self? A person who steals a loaf of bread to survive, a classic story line, has this information given to the police. If that is wrong, is it wrong to tell the police the secrets of a “hunger” bank robber? We have tried to codify morality by writing laws since man learned how to write. We have stifled ourselves in that project by trying to define survival. Evolution has defined survival as unaided sustainability but we are happily working on changing that. We don’t yet know what the change will bring.

Our mentality is resetting the stage for redefining survival. In the most primitive sense, survival describes a change of state; thus, in the bestial sense, survival means passing on your genes devoid of a purpose or goal. You reproduce or not; nothing else counts. Conceptually, this introduces a sense of morality as well: life is good but to die is bad. However, in a modern sense, “quality of life” is playing a bigger and bigger role, which results in private information playing a bigger and bigger role in survival. Seven billion of us make it so that if one does not survive it really does not matter. True or not, for many of us that is an incredibly insensitive statement; like an ant colony; if you step on one do you worry about the colony? Others know as much as you know and can do as much as you do. The dissemination of private information contributes to survival of the group. This is the consequence of seeing humankind as one big mass and not as a world of nations, states, cities, tribes, families and finely individuals. This is, of course, the reverse of our natural history.

As a person interested in evolutionary psychology, I am compelled to take the gigantic leap from the big bang to now. Somewhere along the way humankind evolved. This means every living thing has an ancestor.  In fact, that means the earths biota has a “last common living ancestor” (LUCA), the most primitive living relative of billions of years ago—a mythical single cell wallowing about in primordial pools—something I refer to as biological zero; the beginning of biopoiesis. If you deny that life has a continuous line from the big bang or even from LUCA to yourself, then you will have to describe where that line was broken and restarted; there is not one scientific hint that ever happened. For creationists this is easy, “God” did it, which is the lazy answer. For everyone else, there is a continuous uninterrupted line, admittedly, with more braches then we can count, with ourselves at the end of one of the branches that, like all other branches, is still evolving.

The struggle we hear about on TV, read in newspapers, hear in speeches, and talk about over coffee is about the struggle between the individual and the group for survival. This conflict will rage on forever because it must. In the beginning, whatever that means to you, the individual reigned supreme—in a word, ‘greed’ paid dividends. Human kind is on a drive toward altruism with the understanding that there must be equilibrium between greed and altruism, between individual-interest, and group interest. We are trying to learn how to get along with each other, which might include reevaluating the meaning of individual survival; putting the group first, in other words, we may become just another anthill with the group coming first. Did you know that ants have been evolving for 120 millions years and we have been evolving for about 3 million years?

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