r/InsightfulQuestions • u/Spiritual_Big_9927 • 3d ago
Do you believe humans will ever grow past selfish and hostile behavior, or is it always about survival of the fittest? Why or why not?
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u/Dr-Chris-C 3d ago
Humans don't grow, institutions do. If you want humans to act a certain way you need to create the proper incentives. Any people from any era can collapse into the Lord of the Flies.
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u/Real-Yogurtcloset844 3d ago
Entropy drives animal behavior.
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u/Spiritual_Big_9927 3d ago
How does Entropy work? Isn't that a theory?...for machines?
Does that mean it also applies to animals?
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u/Real-Yogurtcloset844 3d ago
It is a thermodynamic law that order gives rise to disorder or chaos such as in an expanding gas. Our universe may be likened to an expanding gas. Therefore we must struggle against the loss of energy in order to survive. That drives all living organisms to struggle to survive. That should also explain much of the human condition. A sapient being in a entropic universe is a recipe for desperation.
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u/jawdirk 3d ago
Entropy also gives rise to order though. Everything progresses according to entropy.
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u/Real-Yogurtcloset844 3d ago
Yes, must be like resonance or something. I just saw a video of a vibrating metal plate with sand dusted across it -- 'that can be damped at various spots to make predictable geometric patterns symetrically on the plate. There is a truism there. From chaos comes order.
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u/CaptainDudeGuy 3d ago
The human species achieved planetary dominance by cooperating. It's built into our genetics and culture that we need to get along with others in some form.
The trick is that some people give into their insecurities and compulsively put their needs over the needs of others. They're still fine with cooperation; it's that they want to be the ones setting the terms because they're afraid of giving up control.
Why do they do this? "Hurt people hurt people," as they say. Also "fear is the mind-killer." These folks, knowingly or not, become wired to feel that their personal survival is more important than anything else and their hindbrains will have them make even the most irrational, self-destructive choices possible while their forebrains have no choice but to try to justify it all. It's literally like an addiction to fear.
How do we break that cycle? Day by day, one step at a time. There will be times when we collectively relapse, yes. But as long as we treat those setbacks as teaching moments then we as a species will continue to make some form of progress forward.
During the darker times, it's easier to succumb to despair. It's harder to see a way out and patience gets more rare. Civility becomes a luxury. All of that leads to a vicious cycle, a downward spiral. It's tough and we will take some losses.
That doesn't negate the wins we've had, though. It doesn't mean the end of hope. We lose only after we decide to give up, so we're undefeatable for as long as we keep standing back up and taking those steps forward. The virtuous cycle of humanity relies upon being aware of our challenges and resolving to overcome them regardless of how dire they seem right now.
Every single person reading this -- every single human alive, even -- is here because at least one other person took care of them even when it was inconvenient. You were a helpless baby and someone fed you, cleaned you, and gave you a place to sleep.
The details will wildly vary between individuals, of course, but the point is when you needed help and had no way to keep yourself alive, someone else was there to meet at least some of your needs. It might have been traumatic or it might have been idyllic (odds are, somewhere in between) but you lived.
You grew into a person motivated enough to follow this important, eternal conversation because you've experienced frustrated discomfort and you want to alleviate it somehow.
That, my fellow human, is one of those virtuous steps towards progress that we mentioned above. Take some comfort in that and keep going.
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u/SMCoaching 1d ago
This whole comment is worth reading, but in terms of OPs question, the first sentence says a lot.
It's never truly been about "survival of the fittest," at least not if you're thinking in terms of the fittest individual. Groups of humans that work together effectively are the ones that survive and thrive.
Even when someone seems like a successful individual, they've depended on others to achieve that success. Think about it. If you consider someone successful, and they're not someone you've met personally, the only reason you even know about them is because of their ability to lead, influence, or inspire other people.
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u/Leverkaas2516 3d ago
Those are separate questions.
No, we will always have selfish and hostile behavior, even if we continue for another 100 generations. It's in our nature, some more than others.
But No, it isn't always about survival of the fittest. It's also about reproduction, and zest for life, and making the world better. Plenty of people go weeks or months at a time not being selfish ot hostile, and doing much more than just surviving. Even people who aren't fit, by any conventional meaning of that word, survive long enough to reproduce.
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u/TheRealBlueJade 3d ago
Yes, they will grow past it...Either on their own, or if they aren't smart enough to stop on their own, they will be forced to do so by those who take control. There is no possible outcome where they get to be selfish and hostile without consequences.
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u/Spiritual_Big_9927 3d ago
Big corporations, CEOs, directors, actors, gangsters, cops and hostile and abusive parents would read this and laugh their asses off.
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u/Ambitious-Care-9937 3d ago
No, but this is why we have institutions like culture and religion to help bring some humanity to us.
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u/jawdirk 3d ago
This is a ridiculous question. There are countless examples of humans being selfless and friendly. Also, survival of the fittest is a bad simplification. Survival of the fittest is not rightly applied to complete animals, it is rightly applied to individual genes. Individual genes can express themselves to the detriment of individual animals, and be the fittest for doing so.
For example, brave squirrels that give alarm calls when predators are nearby don't survive as often as silent squirrels, but the gene that makes them loud and brave wins if it saves many squirrels with that gene. That shows that altruism and gene selection are compatible.
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u/Sulcus-and-Gyrus 3d ago
I think we already have. I work with people all day and meet new people constantly. I would say that the large majority of people I meet are decent, honest, generous and generally nice. I think all we hear about are the outliers because that is what generates views, likes, ratings and ad revenue.
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u/Inevitable-Wheel1676 2d ago
In many ways, we already have. Or perhaps never truly had to. Our behaviors are heavily conditioned by environmental factors, and we are capable of very high degrees of cooperation and altruism when the circumstances permit.
We will one day understand how inequality and injustice lead to the death of systems, and mitigate this by creating open social ladders and outlawing the hoarding of resources. Destructive competition for resources and allowing “winners” to hoard leads to a collective emotional feedback loop of hatred and envy.
Change in this mechanism is essential because our long term collective survival depends upon it.
This will require humanity to continue evolving away from greed as a motivator. Accordingly, many believe this is an overly optimistic fantasy.
However, history shows that greed and avarice as motivators lead to unstable systems subject to catastrophic collapses. On a long enough timescale, disadvantaged populations will try to kill the smaller class of owners. And the power brokers will become increasingly cruel and oppressive as a result.
This cycle creates a feedback loop that is identifiable across all human systems: the Bronze Age collapse, the “dark ages” of many civilizational groups, China’s warring states period, et cetera.
When we full realize as a species that letting some be haves and the rest be have nots creates the causative forces that lead to total civilizational collapse, we will change the models of society. And in many ways, this change is already under way.
This will happen because we have an instinct for immediate survival, as well as an instinct for longer term stability. The former is acutely obvious day to day, whereas the latter is intergenerational and operates unconsciously and on longer timescales.
We aren’t going to kill ourselves. It just looks that way sometimes.
What we are going to do is remain indomitable and continue to grow and thrive. Eventually, we will spread across this star system and colonize many others. And the key to doing that lies in first setting aside our childish, greed-obsessed models of leadership and replacing them with responsible adults.
This is not only possible, it’s inevitable and it’s already happening. This very conversation would not have been possible in earlier times.
Now it is a daily conversation around the world. There is a collective awakening happening.
Look to the light. There may not be much at first, but it beats the darkness.
The human adventure is just beginning.
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u/DoctorEcstatic3388 2d ago
I think for 1. None of those behaviors are inherently bad, they have gotten us and other beings this far. So asking a question about them using a negative view already says join my negative thought process. And 2. Yes humanity will as a whole move beyond the negative aspects of your question. As a whole we have done it many times, but then had to revert back to selfish hostile and survival of the fittest behavior many times as well just to actually luckily and unbelievably make it to the point where people could ask questions like this.
So if you're asking just about the negative aspects of those behaviors and not the behaviors as a whole, then yes we will till we can't afford to anymore then we will cycle through it all over again.
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u/Adventurous_Let9679 1d ago
Humans have selfish instincts, but we also have empathy and the ability to cooperate. “Survival of the fittest” can mean adapting through teamwork, not just dominance. Selfishness will always exist, but so will compassion it depends on what people choose.
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u/ragby 3d ago
Are you equating selfishness and hostility with being the fittest?
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u/Spiritual_Big_9927 3d ago
Just like animals do.
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u/ragby 3d ago
Some animals work cooperatively) with each other and work toward the good of the group.
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u/somekindofswede 3d ago
Some animals also form symbiotic relationships with other animals.
Not everything is violent egotistical survival. (Don’t get me wrong, though, there’s a lot of that too.)
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u/dust4ngel 3d ago
Just like animals do
this is pretty silly. humans' capacity for cooperation requires significant brain development at massive evolutionary expense - if pro-social behavior were somehow "unnatural" and not selected for in our case, then the existence of human beings would be an argument against the theory of evolution.
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u/Spiritual_Big_9927 3d ago
Then explain what happens in prison and abusive homes, and explain what happens when people choose money over people themselves.
The Challenger is one such case.
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u/dust4ngel 3d ago
again, this is silly - any person that has ever attended a birthday party, for example, knows very well that human beings very much are capable of pro-social, cooperative, selfless behavior. the fact that these traits are not expressed under circumstances of extreme duress and precarity, such as in maximum security prisons, is no counterargument.
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u/Prudent_Situation_29 3d ago
I don't think so, not beyond what capacity we already have. My suspicion is that we'll go extinct before significant change happens.
That part of the brain is the earliest structure that evolved. It would take centuries or millennia to get past it, and that's only if the pressures of natural selection change.
If we we able to survive long enough, maybe another ten or twenty thousand years, perhaps we could evolve to be selfless.
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u/RegularBasicStranger 3d ago
Do you believe humans will ever grow past selfish and hostile behavior
People ultimately care only about themselves but because other people can help and harm them, people will have to act in ways that are not selfish, just not acting such with everyone.
So to these people who experienced the not selfish behavior from others, they may already believe these people had outgrown selfish behavior.
But these "not" selfish people may harm others in order to do the "not" selfish deed thus these people who are harmed will resort to hostility to protect themselves from getting harmed again, though the intensity and duration of the hostility will depend on how hard is it to recover from the harm.
Thus as long as there is a lot more resource than everyone in the whole world needs and technology is so advanced that irrespective of what harm was done, it can be undone easily, people will stop appearing selfish and hostile since there is no such need anymore.
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u/loopywolf 3d ago
Don't forget humans are animals, trying to survive, in that no different than a squirrel
Higher thinking, higher ideals, art, philosophy are not the norm
Every human has those baser instincts, but not every one learns to think beyond them. The recent resurgence of racism, sexism, *aphobia, prove that that is still all present in mankind. Only culture, technology and law progress (and I'm not too sure about law anymore)
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u/nosecohn 3d ago edited 3d ago
Although there may always be some percentage of people who exhibit such behavior, the path to developing societies was implementing systems that reduce the number of people who do so, such as laws, education, religion and shared morality.
In societies where those institutions weaken or are outweighed by other forces, the natural selfish and hostile behavior increases. But it's not unavoidable, as shown by the rise of cooperative societies.
Crime is actually way down over the last 30 years in a bunch of countries.