Baron Max said:
But what ye're trying to do goes against the very nature of the human animal ...which is greed, selfishness, gluttony, revenge, ...not to mention the highly emotional aspects of hate for those that harm us. You just ignore all that ...how?
Greed, selfishness, gluttony and revenge are indeed part of our instinctual preprogamming. But as a pack-social species we also have balancing instincts that keep them in check. The survival of the pack depends on it. Primitive human tribes, which are essentially large extended families, are
not in constant danger of disintegration from internal turmoil. Their balancing instincts to live harmoniously and cooperatively for the good of the pack prevail and they focus those negative instincts on competing packs.
Civilization is an endless struggle of the elders to teach the youngsters that we live in large packs now and so our survival depends on expanding the range of our positive instincts.
It has prevailed for thousands of years and is robust enough to survive the lack of complete success. I will wager that you, Max, our resident spokesman for our inner caveman, do not manifest the slightest atavistic tendency toward greed, selfishness, gluttony and revenge against the strangers who live five blocks away and share the same roads, against the strangers you line up behind at the grocery store, against the strangers at PTA meetings who want tax money spent on lacrosse equipment instead of a new piano or vice versa. I'll wager that you live in peace and cooperation with at least tens of thousands of people you've never met whom you nonetheless regard as a community, that if one of them steps on your $100 sneaker in a movie theater and fails to apologize you don't feel a primitive urge to exact revenge, that if you see one leaving his car unlocked you'll hail him with a reminder rather than rifling through it for things your children need.
You have successfully evolved your pack-social instincts for harmony and cooperation a full two orders of magnitude beyond that of your Mesolithic ancestors. If I hadn't put you on the defensive I'm sure you'd proudly admit that you've actually gone at least four orders of magnitude and live pack-socially with a couple of million people and that you'd be insulted if I suggested that you'd cheat, physically attack, or plot revenge against any of them.
You focus on humanity's negative instincts. They're there all right. But we have another set of instincts that balances them, and over the centuries that balance has clearly been prevailing. You yourself, who have not just overcome our enmity for the next tribe down the river but have evolved to get along with people whose names you don't even know--in just a few short millennia--are living proof of that.
Yes there are people who have not made it as far up the evolutionary ladder as you and I have and they are a pain in the ass. Occasionally they do real damage. But civilization has muddled along, healed the damage, and continued to evolve to the point that we're one step away from being a single globe-spanning pack.
Our last big challenge is certainly facing us. The Abrahamic religions, which have consistently coaxed people into manifesting their caveman instincts of intolerance and revenge, have given birth to entire armies of wackos who threaten to wrestle control over entire nations and pit their packs against each other with nuclear weapons. Yet within those nations are throngs of more civilized people who struggle to resist the call of the Neolithic. It seems very likely that our own Caveman-in-Chief will be sent packing and his hateful, bible-thumping, mouth breathing hordes will disperse from lack of leadership and go back to their cockfights and creationism lectures. The equivalent movements on the other side are not insubstantial and with a little help from fate they too may continue the trend toward secularism and democracy that is still alive in the Cradle of Civilization.
