Our Inescapable Nature: Why Politics cannot save us from Ourselves

Humans, the master problem-solvers. It seems like throughout history, whatever obstacle opposed us, we have managed to overcome it with our cunning and intellect. Whether it be transporting giant rocks over great distances, thousands of years ago to build monuments like Stone Henge and the Egyptian Pyramids, to genetically engineering plants to produce larger crop, we have conquered the problem using reason.

Nowadays our society has become a vast, complicated network of organisations and people spanning the entire globe. The problems facing mankind are no longer posed by what we call “nature”, but by mankind itself.

Many people would point at capitalism as the core root of some of our biggest problems. The idea being that the free market deems things like green technology and a highly educated and cooperative population – things which could save humanity – unprofitable. The opposing system, socialism, is also flawed in that it doesn’t reward hard work as well and can encourage apathy and complacency, making entrepreneurship and innovation less worthwhile. So for a long time we have been in a sort of balance, a struggle if you will, between these two opposing ideological forces. Some great ideas for alternatives and variations of these ideologies have been designed over the last few hundred years but they all seem to neglect one factor: Selfishness.

“Selfishness” comes across as a sort of dirty word, but here let us define it as “caring more about yourself than the greater good of humanity”. With there being over 7 billion people in the world, and humans having a propensity to think in the short term about things that immediately affect them and their close surroundings, you can hardly blame people for being selfish. Selfishness is actually a survival mechanism that has been ingrained in us through evolution, and is itself inescapable.

So the question is about whether it’s possible to design a political system that allows for selfishness and is incorruptible by selfishness. What we would like is a system in which the people deem it completely fair and just, from the people at the bottom of the hierarchy, to the people at the top. With the admission that selfishness is inescapable and the need to reward hard work, there would have to be a hierarchy of sorts. The chance to progress is actually what motivates most people, and is also an evolutionary desire; the further you progress, the better selection of mating partners you have.

Without a New World Order, the system would also have to have advantages over capitalism so that capitalist countries would end up converting to the new system for their own benefit. This perceived benefit would have to come from noticing that everyone inside the new system is happier than them, not necessarily richer.

Herein lies the problem. Different things make different people happy. Although we have things like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and a good understanding of the neurochemical reactions that give the feelings of joy, comfort and reward, we cannot control what triggers these emotions. Some people get satisfaction from helping others, some people get satisfaction by dominating others and accruing a large amount of personal wealth. This is mostly dependent on genetics, hormone balances, and random events that happened to the person which cannot be controlled.

The people who enjoy dominating others are not wrong for doing so. This is yet another evolutionary program that is as natural as any other behaviour we exhibit. A system that prevents people exhibiting this natural behaviour will leave them feeling that the system is unfair and circumnavigating the system or ending up in jail. We could try quashing this desire with drugs but that would be pretty much impossible due to the fact that the people involved in the program would have no incentive to take the drugs. The clever ones would in fact avoid taking them and enjoy the benefit of a more docile population to dominate. The same can be said of a genetic engineering program.

So the case may be that the system we have now is actually the best we can do. It caters not to the happiness of everyone, but a global network of neurochemical reactions in our brains that have been put there by billions of years of evolution. Each persons different perspective of how the system could be improved to better suit their needs, is in fact a stance put there by the human genome.

Our destructive course to failure could actually be planned. How else do we evolve when we have solved all problems outside of mankind? Evolution is the force which is driving us down this path, and it’s force we cannot oppose because it is what created us, our views on the world and our conscious experience as a whole.

I am not advocating that we stop trying to improve the system and reduce inequality, that will always remain one of our only chances of salvation. I am saying that we might want to focus on what evolution is trying to achieve and consciously work our system around that so it is not always fighting against us. The goal of evolution is to drive us into a difficult situation where we are forced to evolve, we may just have a chance to choose which situation that is. Currently it is looking like it will be climate change induced famine and mass civil unrest, maybe there is an alternative.