Social Success, Part 3B: Individualism and Democracy
The capitalist gene, America's fortunate break, and the biological tension between progress and conservation
Welcome to the concluding post of the series, where we will take a brief glimpse at individualism as manifested in humans and human social systems.
Like most of the posts in this series, I'd like to emphasize a final time that we'll start from a biological foundation. Discussions in the social realm often lack a scientific basis and build instead off of ideology. Like a balloon lacking an anchor, the currents of idealism can carry well-meaning social scientists up into the clouds of political fiction. A biophysical perspective allows us to ground ourselves, tethering us to reality. Sure, us humans are different from other species. But we are not divorced from the natural world. We have not transcended it—we depend on it. We were produced by nature and produce by nature.
What will follow is an exploration of the genesis of America to try and get a sense of the conditions conducive to fostering a democratic and capitalist political system. We’ll touch on the risks associated with allowing unregulated within-group exploitation, and follow with an examination of how unregulated global exploitation impacts disadvantaged nations and species. To conclude, I’ll leave you with an alternative perspective on the biological foundations of conservative and progressive behavior, and why political skirmishes between the two political poles may be seen at the very least unsurprising—perhaps even reassuring—rather than distressing.
Let’s begin.
The capitalist gene
Quick disclaimer, within this post I’ll use the word capitalism interchangeably with the biological tendency to capitalize on opportunity. I am not necessarily referring to the human political system, although it falls under this umbrella. We’ll try to think bigger picture here, beyond just humans, so we can distance ourselves from the politically charged discussions that invariably hinder fair judgment.
To capitalize on opportunity is baked deeply within our DNA. You exist today because your genetic forebearers prevailed in the ongoing competition to convert energetic and material resources into offspring. From back to when life was a primordial sludge floating around the ocean gobbling up sunlight; to primates gobbling up fruits and nuts; to humans who gobble up just about anything with a Joule. Biological adaptations arise to equip biological agents with better ways of capitalizing on available resources.
Genetic adaptation and capitalism are intertwined and inseparable.
Every biological organism, a carrier of genes, is engaged in varying degrees of competition with other gene-carriers over finite resources. And survival and reproduction within the organic arena is contingent upon exploiting others and avoiding being exploited. I'm not exactly sure what life would look like if resources were infinite, but there would surely be no need for competition. But alas, we live on a planet with finite resources and a universe governed by the laws of physics.
The conservation laws state that energy and mass are neither created nor destroyed, just converted from one form to another. And since energy and mass can neither be created nor destroyed, it must be transferred. The two options of energy and material transfer for biological agents are either to take or to give. In or out.
The perpetuity of life often involves organisms taking resources from other organisms to serve genetic proliferation. It also involves giving resources in some cases, generally to either their own supporting cellular systems or a genetically related organism (family and offspring). Sometimes there are mutually beneficial give and take arrangements that can be made amongst unrelated biological systems, such as your cellular system giving nutrients to the microbiota occupying your intestinal tract, a crocodile allowing an Egyptian plover to clean its teeth, or humans who pay taxes to support public infrastructure.
Nevertheless, when we consume energy and material say, in the form of food, we're necessarily capitalizing on an advantage and exploiting the life of another organic being; we are taking their energy and material. Even when we obtain inorganic material, such as water or stone or metal, we're taking inorganic matter which could be valuable to organic competitors. In this sense the relationship is zero-sum, as governed by the conservation laws, as long as we’re prudent about including everything within the system of interest into consideration, which includes all organic and inorganic matter.
At large scales these rules still apply. Nations, for instance, are an aggregation of humans that form a superhuman of sorts, or what I call a superorganism. What does any organism need to survive? Energy, material, and intelligence. When all three of these conditions are satisfied the primary objectives of life can be fulfilled: survival and reproduction. Energy, material, and intelligence surplus provide conditions conducive to biological reproduction and self-preservation, especially when that surplus is greater than those of competitors. For a superorganism composed of humans, resource surplus reassures the underlying population, allowing them to feel secure enough to settle, survive, reproduce. Conspicuously displays of resource surplus also attract migrants—productive and reproductive fodder for the superorganism. There is therefore an everlasting competition amongst superorganisms for more energy, materials, and the intelligent use of both energy and materials (technology).
Cause and effect
With the biological basis set, let’s narrow our focus to Homo Sapiens.
We saw that a communist system works exceptionally well for a system of group-interested agents (like the organization of cells composing an organism or a hive of bees), as does a capitalist economic approach for solitary self-interested agents (like tigers)—so long as you're the fittest individual. The best economic approach for Homo Sapiens, a species who live in complex societies yet possess individuated genetics, lies somewhere between these two extremes.
In the previous post, I proposed that to be a communistic or democratic country is not a choice, but a natural consequence of the environmental conditions that groups happen to find themselves in. I argued that countries that adopt collectivist policies tend to be preoccupied with a greater struggle for survival and thus have to compensate by becoming a better organized group. This normally involves leaning into pro-social policies that discourage socially regressive individualistic behavior; individuals are forced to sacrifice their personal liberties for the greater good. Generally, ensuring this degree of policy enforcement at monumental populational scales requires commensurate monumental authority, hence communist countries tend to be burdened with authoritarian rule.
What about the countries who place more value on personal liberty and democracy? What conditions arise that allow democratic social organizations to take root and flourish?
The American Dream
My suggestion is that groups who experience a lesser struggle for survival have the luxury of relaxing the demands for individual sacrifice that would otherwise enhance group function. Let's examine the history of America to put this idea into practice.
When the French and British colonies happened upon the North American continent, they stumbled upon a cornucopia of natural resources with little competition. Europeans arrived to America with a substantial technological and immunological head start over their competitors; the fortunate beneficiaries of being born in a region where early agriculture, animal husbandry, and civilizational expansion flourished.
The bustling population density of the Fertile Crescent bred a flurry of inter-group competition amongst Eurasian empires, which in turn bred a host of technological advancements such as warships and guns. These technologies were produced by the ongoing struggle for survival in the imperial evolutionary arms race. In fact, all technological advancement, be it the wings of a bat or the shell of a turtle, is fueled by biological competition; there would be no need to advance and improve without it.
The large human population densities within Eurasia also served as breeding grounds for germs, generating sophistically adapted viruses that were incredibly harmful to humans who lacked the genetic adaptations to resist them. Those whose genetic lineage was unexposed to a history of civilizational plagues (such as the sprawled indigenous populations of North America) found themselves at a supreme immunological disadvantage.
In the Origin of Species, Darwin reported on the general phenomena of invasive species. When species hailing from a region bustling with dense biodiverse competition are introduced to an isolated, less biodiverse, and thus less competitive environment, the invading species tend to out compete the indigenous species. Examples of invasive species are plentiful, one of which being the brown tree snake of Southeast Asia, which was inadvertently introduced to the island of Guam after World War II. As a result of having no natural predators and an abundant food supply, the brown tree snake population exploded, leading to the decimation of many native bird and reptile species on the island.
This of course also applies to humans and the pathogens who adapted alongside (and inside) them. Therefore, due to technological and immunological advantages the first European humans and their pathogenic passengers arrived in North America with significant adaptive advantages over the local indigenous human populations. Of course there would have been no shortage of collaboration between Europeans and the Indigenous, after all, Europeans were entering the unknown and there was ample opportunity to trade technology in exchange for valuable local wisdom. For the most part, however, the European colonies leveraged their technological advantages and decimated the Indigenous populations so that they could establish populations of their own, as is typical with invasive species.
The early European settlers of the Americas now found themselves occupying a resource abundant continent, insulated from the east and west by expansive oceans, thus insulated from imperial threat. The shared latitude and thus similar climate to the Fertile Crescent enabled adoption of the domesticated crops and animals that had flourished in Eurasia for the previous millennia. A broad east-west axis bulge meant North America could profit from relatively consistent latitudinal climate conditions, which enabled those crops to spread.
In South America, the north-south axis and other various geological conditions slowed agricultural expansion, which slowed the development and expansion of the Spanish colonies, which allowed for America to pull ahead technologically, making the southern land border of America easier to defend. The end result was an expansive North American continent fecund with opportunity, and there was more than enough to go around (if you belonged to the invasive species, that is).
The genesis of the United States presents a rare example of a group of humans stumbling upon some fortunate and favorable initial conditions: resource abundance, a temperate climate, and relative freedom from the existential threat posed by neighboring human groups. With these conditions satisfied, the struggle for survival was consequently reduced. America now had the luxury of establishing democratic governance, where personal liberties, which we self-preserving humans crave so dearly, could be prioritized.
America also had the fortune of leveraging the benefits of within-group capitalistic competition, exploiting the expansive local environment, to develop its technological portfolio, rather than the Eurasian colonies who were in perpetual imperial conflict and thus had a greater reliance on intergroup competition (war) to fuel technological advancement.
I see many who praise the founding fathers of America for their ingenious drafting of the constitution, claiming that they were ahead of their time. I'm of the opinion that they were right on time. I don't doubt that they were very intelligent, but I'd place more weight than is typically offered on the notion that, at that time, the particular conditions America found itself in allowed for more individual-centric policies to even be considered in the first place.
Historically, human groups were in constant competitive conflict. This meant group fitness took priority, so that the governed (individual) served the government (group). The idea that the government (group) should instead serve the governed (individual) was not a new idea, biologically self-interested individuals have always craved for personal sovereignty. The American’s of the 18th century simply found themselves in a privileged position where group fitness was satisfied and individual fitness could be prioritized; the struggle for survival had finally softened to a point where the demands for democracy could be seriously considered.
Within-group capitalism
Capitalism can be a double-edged sword when it occurs within a group. When a group exploits members of another group, within-group fitness isn't necessarily threatened. But, when you allow members to exploit each other, it isn’t hard to imagine how it can have negative impacts on overall group fitness.
But, it’s important to recognize the benefits of within-group competition. As we established earlier, we are a genetically self-interested species, so competition is in our blood, rooted deep in our mammalian evolutionary history. For this reason, restricting competition will always be met with some resistance. Allowing competition naturally harmonizes with our selfish and groupish nature.
We also saw that biological competition is paramount to motivating technological adaptation. Promoting within-group competition allows that group to leverage the technology generating benefits of competition without having to rely on intergroup competition (which carries more risks, i.e., war). And improved technology tends to translate into a greater ability to predict and control one’s environment, so overall living conditions tend to improve.
Greater ability to predict and control one’s environment, however, applies to fellow group members as well. Societies adopting capitalist economic systems thus run the risk of allowing self-interested individuals that amass influence to exploit the populace. We can see this in action in the United States, for example, which is littered with companies that employ physiological hacks (sugars, fats, nicotine, cannabinoids) or psychological hacks (variable reward, negativity bias, cosmetic filters) to provoke public dependence on their products, which eventually degrade physical health (heart disease, diabetes, cancer) and mental health (anxiety, depression) of the collective that consumes those products.
Unregulated capitalism is socially regressive, whereby the many sacrifice sovereignty so that a few powerful exploitative individuals can flourish. We saw previously that pure communism is individually regressive, whereby individuals sacrifice sovereignty so the many can flourish. But for humans the many is represented by an authoritarian government led by self-interested humans, so the many just ends up being represented by a few powerful exploitative individuals. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Global capitalism
Unregulated capitalism is also socially regressive at the global scale, if we expand our view to include the entire global community of Homo Sapiens. Coordinating regulation at the global scale, however, requires substantial collaboration and trust among many sovereign nations, which doesn’t come easy to our groupish species. It also necessitates that powerful nations relinquish their exploitative practices and reduce their economic growth, which (I believe) will never be done voluntarily.
Humans—any biological species, for that matter—are loss averse; pain from losses tends to loom larger than pleasure from equivalent gains. The aggregate effect of this are human groups that desperately hold on to their advantages and avoid threats, no matter if the advantages are preposterously unequal relative to other groups. Losing hurts. Like corporations that desperately advertise pro-social trends like diversity and inclusion and sustainability while slyly exploiting the vulnerable, avoiding taxation, and escaping regulation, advantaged nations are predictably going to exhibit those same qualities at the global scale. We’re human, after all.
Countries of the Global North tend to be democratic, while those in the Global South tend to be stuck with authoritarian rule. This is reflected by the discrepancy between the struggles of survival between the two regions. Many of the democratic nations have the privilege of embracing democracy and the perks of economic capitalism because they get to dodge some of its socially regressive risks by imposing those disadvantages on others. The Global North profits off of the Global South, piling them into factories and mines under abhorrent conditions so that privileged consumers can indulge in the latest fashion trend or refinance the latest SUV. The luxuries of life in the Global North rest upon human slavery.
And as an entire species, the free-reign capitalism of Homo Sapiens is regressive to all other species. We exploit the biosphere, domesticate animals and plants for slaughter, devastate the habitats of wild animals and plants, and combust millions of years worth of concentrated sunlight (fossil fuels) in a matter of minutes. Once again, our privilege as a species rests upon the backs and stems of all other species inhabiting the natural world, who are unable to speak for themselves. Though, Nature will eventually make itself heard in other ways, as we are starting to become aware of.
It’s a supremely uncomfortable reality to reckon with; a natural consequence of a species of self-interested individuals conglomerating to form self-interested societies. Our selves are selfish, thus our groups are groupish. I’m not sure what remedy to prescribe here, other than to be cognizant of one’s privilege. Be wary of pride, it is bred by ignorance; instead be gracious and humble. Be wary of blame, it is also bred by ignorance; instead improve your understanding of the causes and effects that create harmful outcomes, and try your best to make a positive impact.
The next time you inevitably feel the urge to complain, be it about costs of living or traffic or the weather, remember how trivial your complaints would sound like to those who are really suffering. Wake up.
Progress and conserve
Speaking of complaints, in an effort to conclude this series on a positive note, I’d like to leave you with a different perspective surrounding the complaints and criticisms and arguments that often crowd dualistic political discussions in democratic countries.
Political parties in democracies tend to branch into two factions: progressives and conservatives. Progressives are representative of progress and adaptation. Conservatives are representative of conservation and consistency. Both of these themes, progression and conservation, have deep biological roots.
Life is all about evolving and adapting to changing conditions. It is hard coded within life to genetically mutate, to slightly alter genetic profiles in service of survival and reproduction in an ever-changing environment. We are all progressives. But keep in mind that the genetic alterations are slight between generations; organisms conserve much of their genetic profiles, they don’t carelessly do away with them. Too much genetic mutation increases risks of biological incoherence or maladaptation, leading to premature death. We are all conservatives.
The incessant political battles between conservatives and progressives are cultural manifestations of biologically foundational traits that have been battling for four billion years. Both are necessary. You don’t want to live in a society that refuses to adapt alongside the changing world, it will fall behind; cowardice leads to ossification. Nor do you want to live in a society that does away with tradition and treads carelessly into the unknown; recklessness leads to chaos.
When political plights are plaguing your social environment, remember that we require both the courage embodied by progressives and the wisdom embodied by conservatives. Instead of viewing it as a political battle, view it as a delicate dance between two biological necessities. Enjoy the show. Life is beautiful.