It’s all about me

If you’ve ever watched anything that relates to zombies or the dystopian future then you realise that, as human beings, we are in this for ourselves. Disaster hits, we form groups and then we all destroy each other. It’s survival of the fittest or succession of the savvy. Eventually, we’ll destroy everyone who we cannot control.

And we don’t just do this in stories. Will Storr tells us that we all want to be the hero of our own story so much so that we re-write our memories.

Our lives revolve around ourselves

One of the first things I say, when I’m talking to work experience students, goes along the lines of “as human beings, we’re incredibly selfish – our buying decisions are driven by us subconsciously asking ‘What’s in it for me?’ and ‘Does it elevate my position in my society?’”. And why shouldn’t we feel this way? We’re mammals and there are multiple examples out there of mammals battling over their positioning. Even dairy cows have a “boss cow”:

“When a new animal is added to an established group, the boss cow generally will approach the new animal with head lowered, threatening to bunt. If the newcomer accepts the challenge, physical fighting occurs, generally with head pushing against head in a battle of strength. Once an animal gains advantage, it will then attempt to dominate completely its opponent. Sometimes a win occurs in just one encounter. Other times there may be a series of encounters lasting several days. Once a cow retreats, either from a threat or after a physical encounter, she becomes submissive to the other cow and ranks below her on the social scale.” (Lamb, 1975, p. 1631)

Is this not how some people act within meetings? Strong handshakes and all that!

We move in tribes

Patrick Hanlon talks about the fact that we’re tribal beings who are programmed to gravitate towards like-minded others. If we “stray from the pack” we will not survive (Hanlon, 2006). So, we’ve survived by living in “tribes” and continue to do so (my tribes include Ted Baker, 2Bobs and Blur) for our own protection.

What if our driving force was this self-focused? What if, subconsciously, everything we chose to do was decided by how it benefited us? We give to charity because it makes us feel better about ourselves. We stick in packs for our own protection and to control others. We buy things to signal to others where we stand within our social structure.

Survival of the fittest

We have normalised the assumption that we are hard-wired to compete and live in tribes. However, in his article “what if Darwin was wrong?” Stout puts forward a strong case for us also being wired for collaboration:

“If we think human nature is fundamentally competitive and tribal, then the point of education (and our system of government) is to restrain our baser impulses, to provide some boundaries to enable us to function as a collective.” (Stout, 2020)

And Favini explains that this idea of “survival of the fittest” is potentially a belief created by Darwin’s schemas and bias:

“Yet, like all humans, Darwin brought culture with him wherever he traveled. His descriptions of the workings of nature bear resemblance to prevailing thinking on human society within elite, English circles at the time. This is not a mere coincidence, and tracing his influences is worthwhile. It was, after all, the heyday of classical liberalism, dominated by thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume, and Thomas Malthus, who valorized an unregulated market. They were debating minor points within a consensus on the virtues of competition. In an especially humble (and revealing) moment, Darwin characterized the principles underlying his thinking as naught but ‘the doctrine of Malthus, applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms’.” (Favini, 2020)

The need to connect

Human babies are among the most vulnerable babies in nature. They are born helpless. If no-one cares for them then they will die. They are only able to sit up at around 6 months old – a baby giraffe can walk within a couple of hours of being born. However, they are ready to connect as soon as they are born, and adult humans will sacrifice their own survival to keep a baby safe.

If the idea of “survival of the fittest” in humans is correct, then why are there countless examples of empathy being shown within ancient “tribes”?  In the article “Ancient bones that tell a story of compassion” (Gorman, 2012) we learn of “Burial 9” – a paralyzed boy who lived 4,000 years ago. There was evidence to suggest that he couldn’t care for himself, but was looked after by the rest of the tribe. And then there was a young woman who lived to around 18 years who possibly had polio (or a similar debilitating condition) and whose teeth were full of cavities, suggesting that she was fed dates.

“Perhaps to make her happy, they fed her a lot of sticky, gummy dates, which eventually just rotted her teeth out, unusual for someone so young.” (Dr. Martin, cited in Gorman, 2012).

The article mentions that there are 30 known cases from archaeological digs that span tens of thousands of years where the evidence points to a tribe caring for others. There was no benefit for ancient tribes in feeding an extra mouth, other than wanting to care for them.

The takeaway

In his speech “The empathic civilisation”, Jeremy Rifkin (2010) puts forward a compelling argument that we are in fact joined by empathy:

And if we take this stance – the idea that we are all actually connected by “Mitochondrial Eve” – we can start to move away from polarisation and start looking forward to the idea that we are all connected. We are one big tribe. I know, I know, it’s not going to happen … but … if we re-position our understanding of being in tribes because some of us are driven by empathy then it makes the world a more pleasant place.

This also raises an interesting approach to marketing – do we split our messaging to resonate with people who are driven by control, empathy or simply by a need to belong?

When creating content, one of the first questions we ask is “who is this for?” with a slight tweak, we could ask “who am I doing this for?” and apply this to the rest of our lives.