The Human Being
The superorganism is an emergent phenomenon of the animals that comprise it. Us.
Human beings are related to ALL other creatures on Earth. We are the product of an unbroken chain connecting to the first life, which means that hidden beneath our stated motivations of what we do every day in industrial society, we are driven to pursue the same neurochemical brain rewards our ancestors pursued. This has huge implications for our behaviors, our economies and our futures:
The challenge of this section of the film was covering 8 discrete aspects of human behavior all in one short segment - we added a couple seconds of silence between the different concepts to make it more coherent - but recognize this section covered A LOT.
Reaching for our phone to see if someone liked our Facebook post or to see if Bitcoin is up or down aren’t really our goals. We are in reality just seeking the same brain rewards that led to success for our hunter-gatherer ancestors.
This is an obvious, but controversial point. Until recently, social sciences assumed humans were born with ‘blank slates’ - where education, parenting, culture, etc. imbued us with all of our skills, knowledge and temperaments. We now know that we are born with mental modules in deep brain structures, conserved over thousands of generations. We are born with brains prepared for learning in certain ways and averse to others. Evolutionary psychology can go too far in explaining ‘just so stories’ of how humans are, but there is now rich and deep scientific literature on how our brains are as much a product of our evolution as our bodies are.
Dopamine is a molecule that in animals - and humans - leads to motivation and action.
In a materially rich modern world, the habituation to the action of “consumption” leads to the WANTING of things - culture wide - being stronger than the reward we get from HAVING them. This is a fundamental problem for an economic system that’s turning billions of barrels of oil into microliters of dopamine.
What we tried to show here (with difficulty!) was that the neurotransmitter dopamine motivates us to do some activity that our brain correlates with (previous) reward. It’s not the reward itself that produces the dopamine but the anticipation. The graphic is intended to demonstrate that our dopamine levels are highest when in pursuit of something - shopping, a business deal, etc. but then after the ‘conquest’ they recede. On a planet-wide consumer growth culture, this ends up with people accumulating things that don’t bring long lasting satisfaction - and the need to buy more to get the same feeling.
As a carryover from ancestral tribal life, we are highly tuned to social signals, comparing ourselves to others, seeking approval, acceptance and jockeying for status. With material- and digital - wealth as today's primary status signal, consumerism is now largely based on having as much - or more - than those around us rather than focusing on what we may actually need.
I ask my students if they would rather make $60,000 per year after graduation if all their peers make $75,000 or make $55,000 if all their peers make $50,000 and the majority choose to make less, as long as it’s more than others. Increasing research shows that we respond to our ‘rank’ of income/wealth as opposed to absolute levels. In an economic system centered around consumption (as opposed to community, ecology, kindness, creativity, etc), there is an important difference between our ‘absolute wealth’ and our ‘wealth relative to others.
Modern humans are still tribal beings. We staunchly support those in our ingroups and easily ostracize outgroups -from trivial divisions like sports teams, to political affiliation, race or nationality. Our evolution has primed us to blame other humans for situations we don’t like or understand.
We have rich, creative and colorful imaginations that reside in the virtual worlds of our minds. The human brain can imagine – and verbalize– limitless combinations of physical impossibilities -sustainable outposts on Mars, self-perpetuating energy machines, and an economy based on physical consumption growing continually for centuries.
In ancestral times these virtual worlds overlapped with the physical world we inhabited, making us more content and effective as a tribal unit.
But in a culture of vast material wealth, information overload and social media, it’s increasingly difficult for us to separate fantasy from reality. When these individual virtual worlds connect with the virtual worlds of others, the result is widespread shared beliefs - that money is real, that our current wealth is due mostly to our cleverness, and that technology will lead to limitless growth.
When we look to others to try and understand our complex modern world, as social beings ‘who said it’ becomes more important than logic or the quality of the evidence. Celebrity and group affiliation now matter more than truth.
The implication here is we can string words together that ‘make sense’ but are divorced from our physical reality - which is a large barrier in discussions of feasible future pathways.
Our stone age brains are no match for the social media algorithms constantly hijacking our attention. Modern media outlets prey on our evolutionary inclinations for novelty and in-group defense via capturing our attention and turning clicks and shares into consumption.
Polarization might seem a separate risk than climate, energy, resource, growth risks, but without a shared sense of what's true or not, we can’t possibly have real discourse on the paths ahead. Growth, for all, has created a large ingroup with shared objectives. Yet as growth becomes more sporadic, or disappears completely, ‘shared objectives’ will be one of the most important challenges to address for our culture.
Humans are creatures with finite lifespans. The future isn’t a priority to us emotionally - instead we are focused on the very short term: this weekend’s plans, this quarter’s earnings, this term’s election,- the next set of compelling images we’re urged to scroll to.
We often promise to make big ‘changes’ starting tomorrow, until tomorrow becomes today, and the cycle repeats, delaying any actual change.
This is the psychological concept of ‘impulsivity’ and the economic concept of ‘hyperbolic discounting’. This time preference not only applies to individual behavior but also to cultural choices on energy.
Like other biological organisms, humans seek gains and are averse to losses. We look for undervalued stocks to invest in, sales on new shoes, or 2 for 1 cocktails at happy hour. Unlike squirrels and cheetahs, we are an extremely social species. We coordinate as families, small businesses, corporations and nation states to maximize our virtual surplus -dollars - which we then spend on real things.
In biology, optimal foraging theory shows how, ceteris paribus, animals optimize for higher energy payoffs. Even if we were to somehow jettison capitalism as an organizing system this drive to ‘invest a little and get a lot’ would still be present in us as biological organisms. This behavioral tendency also works in reverse - we are super sensitive to losses. The positive neural experience of going from a $10,000 investment to $11,000 is outweighed by the negative experience of going from $11,000 to $10,000. In ancestral times, getting extra food when times were good was fine, but losing out on food when times were tough might have been fatal. So ‘loss aversion’ was conserved.
Our core economic and environmental challenges stem from a mismatch of hunter gatherer minds inhabiting a competitive consumer growth culture. Together, these human universals have led to incentives and behaviors which have created a metabolic superorganism, whose objective is disconnected from the well-being of its parts (us).
It is tempting to look at how we live today and conclude that this is how humans are. But modern society is only a single brief example out of thousands of successful arrangements in human history. Humans alive today don't "choose" to be hierarchical or greedy - many of our choices are constrained by the economic system we were born into.
We don’t so much have environmental or energy problems per se, but they are symptoms from a mismatch of 8 billion hunter gatherer minds in a consumer growth culture. What’s happening is ‘no one’s fault’ but most of us are complicit. Learning about the superorganism can be a bit daunting - and overwhelming - because it imbues a sense of loss of agency - but it also clarifies our situation and the possible paths ahead.
Our current high consumption, high inequality, high technological distractions and low levels of daily connection are a direct product of the carbon pulse.
Though human brains don’t change quickly, under the right circumstances, behaviors and cultural norms can move at lightning speed. Our species is incredibly adaptive when challenged.
The way we’ve been living is an anomaly. But we take it for granted, because as individuals it’s all we’ve ever known.
Going forward, a lifestyle adapted to lower energy use will reconnect our virtual and physical worlds. By necessity our lives will become less global, more interpersonally engaged, and more tethered to natural flows.
As a species, a global superorganism is not our destiny. Who we are has brought us to this precipice. Who we are capable of becoming -as individuals -and as a society -will be the question of our time.
