Hiding in Plain Sight

In the fifth essay in this series, I consider how evolution helped make us victims of our own success.

The trick to perpetuating injustice, as any skilled propagandist can tell you, is to make what is entirely arbitrary seem natural and inevitable.

The politics of ‘us’ and ‘them’ and its ‘economy’ of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ derive legitimacy from the notion that life is innately competitive. According to this view, the strong triumph, the weak suffer, and excess appears in the midst of deprivation because that is nature’s way.

While your health is good and your services are in demand, such an arrangement may be tolerable; an appreciating asset portfolio can even make it persuasive. But it doesn’t take much mishap to reveal what Johan Galtung called its ‘structural violence’[1]. Faced with adversity we hope for a resolution which isn’t ‘red in tooth and claw’. And in any sane society that would be forthcoming.

What we call ‘the economy’ isn’t real in the way a jungle or a savannah is real. It’s formed of ideas, incorporated in institutions, laws and conventions by successive generations of the rich and powerful to suit themselves.

And it isn’t the ‘fittest’ by any useful definition who flourish in it. Effort and acumen might be factors, but no more than birth, luck, subterfuge and favourable connections. Selection may be involved, but it’s far from ‘natural’.

For its beneficiaries this is a problem. What isn’t essential can be changed. They would prefer us to believe ‘the economy’ is governed not by ordinary, fallible humans but by ‘natural’ laws. ‘Neoclassical’ economics tries to convince us by replacing the complexities and vagaries of human life with esoteric symbols in mathematical equations, the inexorable outcome of which happens to be ‘investor returns’.

But the bigger problem is that its central premise is false. The idea that competition somehow epitomises our human origins or the functioning of the natural world in general is a misappropriation of science. Competition is but one factor among many.

Rivalry and predation occur sporadically during lifespans of accommodation, partnership and mutuality, between species and within them. And this pattern is evident at the very foundation of biology.

At university in the 80s I became aware of the work of Lynn Margulis. She was the great proponent of symbiosis in evolution[2]. Her proposition that important structures within our own cells are descended from other formerly free-living organisms is now widely accepted[3]. Creative interdependence has been revealing itself in new forms to biologists ever since. But less so to the rest of us.

Our economies and institutions have been shaped instead around competitive individualism. It’s Darwin according to Wall Street, designed to justify extreme inequality and the suffering that inevitably ensues.

This reduction of evolutionary theory happened to fit quite nicely with capitalism’s challenge to the ‘divine right of kings’. Excessive personal wealth can now be ‘earned’ as well as inherited. But even in a very inequitable culture, competition between individuals is actually a poor summation of how humans naturally behave, aristocrats and capitalists included.

Who Are We, Really?

Empirical evidence shows we are biologically almost identical. We share 99.9% of our human DNA. And although it’s much harder to quantify, the same could be said of culture. Our common inheritance includes our languages and tool-making skills, the care and companionship we thrive on, and the music, dance, mark-making, storytelling, ritual, celebration, sports, and feasting which enrich every human culture.

But much of the DNA in our bodies isn’t even human. Without these organisms we would quickly die, never mind the myriad others which provide our food, make our world habitable, and feature among our cultural artefacts. To be human is to be a part of an enormous cooperative community most of whose members are not human. And as far as we know, it’s one of a kind.

The only known repository of DNA, in all its expressions including microbes, plants, animals, and us, is the small blue planet we’re presently attached to. We share nearly 99% of our DNA with chimpanzees, 90% with cats and even 60% with bananas. We and they and all the other beings we call ‘living’ owe our appearance to a common ancestor. We are family.

At the sub molecular level, our common lineage extends even further. If we accept the findings of astrophysics[4], apart from a tiny quantity of products of nuclear fission, most of it human-induced, there is hardly an atom anywhere on Earth which didn’t come from a sequence of primordial events at the dawn of time. And yet, while our bodies are formed from a common stock of raw materials, the specific combination we each call “me” is different every day. They move in and out of us constantly, still reverberating with primal energy, as we breathe, eat, sweat, shed, urinate, and defecate. A mere handful of the atoms we were born with are with us still.

And despite our apparent uniqueness, most of our atoms are only hydrogen and oxygen, largely in the form of water molecules, of which the human body is mostly composed. But even this much implied substantiality is highly enigmatic. The insides of atoms appear to scientific measurement as insinuations of mass and charge in formations which are more like clouds than the ‘solid’ objects we are accustomed to at human scale[5].

It seems the identities we cling to and the distinctions we bond and fight over are the merest superficial permutations of a shared material existence which in essence resembles a flickering hologram.

How absurd, then, are the existential hostilities expressed and sometimes animated on the basis of political, religious and even sporting affiliations by human beings who are otherwise virtually indistinguishable? And how long before some new despot harnesses this animus to winnow the human family in another horrific bloodletting? Yet how significant are these differences compared to our kinship with every other ephemeral life form on our tiny ark in the epic wilderness of space?

Life reduced to competition is like the ocean reduced to salt. And the consequences of this biophobic misconception of the ‘laws of nature’ are significant.

Sooner or later, you, me, the rest of our species, and the chimps, cats, and bananas will go the way of all DNA-based life forms. On our present trajectory, what would normally be a distant, gradual process will happen soon and quickly. We will leave behind a hot planet, poisoned rivers, razed forests, desertified pastures, dead corals, islands of waste plastic, decimated biodiversity, and accumulations of microfibres and toxic substances, including thousands of chemicals previously unknown to nature and stockpiles of deadly radioactive material.

No other species has ever wreaked havoc like this. But it’s hardly an essential human characteristic. Nearly all of it happened in the last 0.1% of our species’ existence and most in just the last fifty years.

The turning point was the incendiary admixture of capitalism and carbon energy. Once unbottled, that genie dramatically increased both the human presence, along with those of our crops, livestock, pets, pests and pollutants, and the average human footprint. But that’s not the whole story.

Humans weren’t innocent bystanders in that process, as if it all just happened like weather. Those factors have acted like giant levers, magnifying the effects of what humans were already doing. The same levers acting on different impulses might have produced very different results.

Why not an end to tyranny and poverty? Why the sixth mass extinction instead?

The Paradoxical Ape

Primatologist Richard Wrangham observed that among many features humans share with our close primate relatives is a propensity for violence against our own kind[6]. But it’s much less in humans than even among comparatively ‘peaceful’ bonobos.

For at least three hundred thousand years, our physiognomy has become steadily more gracile, reflecting a decreasing incidence of violent encounters within human communities. Wrangham attributes this to ‘self-domestication’, which like domestication in animals selects for reduced levels of reactive aggression.

It seems to have started when beta males learned to gang up and take down the alphas. But this had other grave consequences.

While reactive aggression may have decreased, we are now the species recordholders for proactive aggression. Rather than erupting defensively from the amygdala, proactive aggression is planned by the frontal lobe within cohesive groups, not just against individuals, but other families, clans, whole nations, and even other species. Organised conflict is a human speciality. Alexander III of Macedon is a prime example.

But there’s more.

Game of Mates

Paul Frijters and Cameron Murray exposed how Australia’s rich list is laden with the beneficiaries of political influence, rather than the innovators and wise leaders their public relations would have us believe[7].

While this has earned Australia yet another wooden spoon in global comparisons, it isn’t hard to see a high level of cooperation and coordination of powerful, moneyed interests right across the globe. In business, media, politics and at Davos and Bilderberg, global elites demonstrate remarkable restraint of internecine rivalry to protect the shared benefits of minority rule.

Few significant markets of any kind are ‘free’; most are at best oligopolies. Boards, senior executives and obliging public officials swap seats within what are in effect gated communities. Donors and hired lobbyists buy elections, dictate public policy, and quash transparency and accountability. And this entire class promotes itself through captive communications media, old and new.

We don’t need elaborate conspiracy theories to explain this; it’s simply our evolved capability applied in settings to which few of us have access. Edward Snowden recently opined[8] that the greatest conspiracies are those operating in plain sight. But the consequences can still be dire.

As webs of influence extend and harden, the usefulness of our institutions degrades. Functionaries are hired less for competency than conformity; efforts shift from achieving goals to managing perceptions; purpose recedes in institutional memory, replaced by self-preservation.

The eventual result is a medical establishment blindsided by a long-expected pandemic[9], emergency services facing fires and floods hamstrung by cumulative planning failures[10], and a political economy which responds to these serial disasters by magnifying the causes while there’s still time to profit from them[11].

Like organised conflict, capture is an unfortunate biproduct of the human propensity for small group cooperation. Both feature prominently in the collapse of civilisations. But again, like conflict, cooperation seems to be scalable, and this could offer a way out of trouble.

The Great Co-operator

Biologist David Sloan Wilson advocates for a multilevel theory[12] of natural selection. Put simply, cooperative groups fare better against those which fight among themselves. And this will apply selection pressure within groups for cooperative traits. But it may also favour groups which are outwardly competitive.

It’s therefore surprising there is scant evidence for violent conflict as the norm between groups until the late Neolithic[13], or in early population centres[14], and among remaining non-agrarian cultures today. But it’s equally surprising there are now 8 billion of us, mostly in very large agglomerations, and as Steven Pinker insists, the stats show we get along remarkably well[15].

While competition between individuals and competition between groups are clearly continuing factors in human affairs, the principal determinant of our collective circumstances is cooperation. Every day, people stroll freely and safely through cities of millions with access to food, water, and sanitation. The rise of civilisations, including ours, has depended on the ability to advance common purposes and suppress conflict beyond the scale of the small group setting in which we first evolved.

In the very ancient world, there would have been analogues of the partnership orders which have survived into the present, embodied in mosaics of mutual obligations sustained by intermarriage, gifting, mythology, ritual, and festivities. But there is also clear evidence of millennia of experimentation with hierarchy and delegation.

While very ancient cultures anathematised concentrations of wealth and knowledge altogether[16], once they did emerge, wise rulers married into rival houses and unburdened their subjects of debt with frequent jubilees[17].

But it’s still a big step to the modern megacity.

The Power of Myth

For Yuval Noah Harari, the essential reagent for cooperation at scale is story[18]. Spread by the power of story, abstractions such as justice, money, and nationhood, which exist only in the human imagination, have evolved into an extensible connective tissue which transcends place, time, and personal experience.

Story can enable us to empathise with strangers, even characters in a novel; it can compel us to self-impose standards of behaviour and encourage sacrifice for a higher cause.

Some of our biggest shared ideas have taken tangible form in institutions empowered to shape our circumstances: religion, science, government, the law. But like all great forces, myth can be misused. Neither Nazism nor neoliberalism could have flourished without it.

The stories which sustain partnership orders and those which organise nation states are very different; but both help to mitigate the risk of conquest and capture. Some societies, ancient and modern, clearly fare better than others, and these differences should be instructive.

Keeping The Bastards Honest

Even to an uninitiated observer, there are obvious reasons why Australian Aboriginal communities might be resistant to capture[19].

Firstly, they are firmly integrated with the natural world. There is never a question about whether to look after country; it’s imperative. Secondly, there is separation of responsibilities into men’s and women’s business, with serious consequences for violations. And finally, power and authority don’t seem to reside together in either individuals or groups. The adults who wield power need the sanction of elders, the custodians of deep cultural memory.

Constitutional law, the separation of powers, mandatory diversity in high office, and consultative and science-based policymaking are efforts in the modern era to protect against capture. But these are novel responses to centuries of depredations which followed the vanquishment of older, more traditional cultures. It’s still early days for cooperation on a grand scale.

The modern world is a kind of arms race, in which those who assert a common good seek to build mechanisms of accountability around renegade opportunists at concentrations of power beyond even the boundaries of the nation state. The solution most commonly proposed is to extend democracy. Is that sensible?

The Tethering of Power

Mary Graham once reminded me that Aboriginal cultures are not democratic in the usual sense. The trouble with our form of democracy, she said, is that it is inherently unstable; majority rule makes ‘winners’ and ‘losers’, undermining solidarity and inviting conflict.

Democracies are vulnerable to populism, which is like a mass-market version of the prisoner’s dilemma, swinging elections by offering part of the population advantages or special status at the expense of the rest. This is why John Howard’s gifts to his base left us with crises in housing and wages; but look at Labor pussyfooting around the coal electorates and it’s clear this is a bipartisan vice.

In Aboriginal cultures, as it's been explained to me, differences aren’t typically reconciled using 'one vote one value'. Some voices naturally carry more weight from earned respect. And the goal isn’t victory but consensus. Participants rarely get everything they want, but the intention is that everyone gets something they can live with. It's a more stable system.

But the bigger problem for Australia in general is that our politics don’t much resemble true democracy anyway.

An Idiotic Society

In ancient Athenian democracy those who didn’t participate in public life were classified as ‘idiots’[20]. The term acquired derogatory connotations from the risks non-participation posed to the integrity of the state. Democracies face those risks today. And it isn’t hard to see why.

The size of the gap between rhetoric and reality in neoliberal 'democracies' was made apparent for me by the writer Anna Mercury who observed[21] that almost none of the planning decisions which affect contemporary Americans are subject to electoral scrutiny, while their daily experience is shaped by the whims of bureaucrats, landlords and bosses who are almost entirely unaccountable to them. Professor Elizabeth Anderson calls this pattern ‘private government’[22].

Most Australians do nothing more democratic than choose every few years between two flavours of the status quo demanded by the big political donors. Many express little interest in policy, and often a fatalistic indifference to politics altogether, while they vote for personalities, along tribal lines or make an impulsive choice which can be influenced by advertising. Some only show up because voting is compulsory.

Meanwhile, more determinedly self-interested players have used the tradesmen’s entrance to infiltrate public institutions and impose conditions favourable to extraction, exploitation and wealth concentration. Where competition and oversight have dwindled, the public and private sectors have tended to merge.

Alan Kohler shows how the too-big-to-fail Australian banks now function as an arm of the state[23]. But a side-by-side comparison of opinion polls[24] with policy decisions reveals how many popular priorities go begging while the state attends to special interests, including high income earners[25], foreign governments[26], and global industries like fossil fuels[27].

This is hardly majority rule. But it does demonstrate the power of cooperation.

The Double-edged Sword

The dual potential of cooperation to help or harm is evident in our responses to two classes of pollutants which began to alarm scientists in the 1970s – ozone depleting CFCs, and climate disrupting greenhouse gases.

In the first case, a global cooperative effort overcame resistance from governments and corporations and CFCs were replaced; in the second, governments and corporations cooperated to undermine global efforts and emissions continued to rise. Why the difference?

CFCs were a niche product and big companies like Dupont saw competitive advantage in pursuing alternatives. Most of us barely noticed the transition.

Fossilised carbon, on the other hand, is embedded in almost everything we use, either as energy, material, or both. It’s in CFCs and their replacements.

Powerful people certainly have an interest in defending it. But this is shared by many other industries, their pet politicians, and all of us who enjoy the profligate consumption fossilised carbon made possible. If it’s a conspiracy, it involves a lot of people.

But not everyone. It doesn’t favour the poor, the future or the non-humans. Its beneficiaries are affluent humans born at the end of the Holocene. And this exposes an important principle. If CFCs or fossil fuels affected only part of the biosphere temporarily, we could leave deliberation to the people currently living there. But these threats are global and lasting.

For cooperation to serve the greater good it must function at the scale of its effects. When our circumstances are determined by people who don’t answer to us we have been captured.

Divide and Rule

A minority of humankind now presides over the fate of life on Earth. It’s an impressive example of cooperation but it doesn’t function at the scale of its effects. It consigns most of the threatened biosphere and much of its human population, present and future, to a far larger outgroup of dispensable victims. Despite the good intentions of some participants, climate conferences resemble gatherings of foxes professing to care for henhouses.

Their method, which custom attributes to Philip II of Macedon, father of Alexander ‘the Great’, is to keep the outgroup divided. It isn’t necessary to win our confidence, only to disable our resistance. Some of us are on the payroll, but carefully crafted messages have persuaded many others that the science is unsettled, the risks are exaggerated, technology will save us, some other group is to blame, or there’s nothing we can do because it’s too late or simply ‘human nature’ not to act responsibly. But these are stories. The fact we hear them constantly doesn’t make any of them true.

Billionaire Warren Buffet spilled the beans when he admitted there is a class war in progress and his class is winning. But it’s a curious fact of dominator systems that no one, even at the top, is truly free; those with hoarded power and wealth live in perpetual fear of rebellion and dispossession, as that other billionaire class traitor Nick Hanauer likes to remind his peers[28]. And none of us is beyond accountability to genuinely ‘natural’ forces.

Any dominator system, including a capitalist one, secures our compliance by supplanting the people and planetary ecologies we depend on. That pattern has spread during the last few millennia and pushed the biosphere to the brink of collapse. But for millions of years prior to the age of conquest and capture it was affinity with the greater human family and the more-than-human world which sustained us.

Gaagudju man Bill Neidjie put it this way: “...earth just like mother and father or brother of you. That tree same thing. Your body, my body I suppose, I’m same as you...anyone...”[29]

The Nordic Secret

Global cooperation is the existential challenge of our time. But we know what effective cooperation looks like at the scale of the nation state because we have contemporary examples.

Lene Rachel Anderson and Tomas Björkman make the case[30] that the stability, equity, prosperity and general wellbeing characteristic of the Scandinavian countries is a result of an intentional program of moral, emotional and cognitive development. This ambition originated in the German philosophical concept of Bildung which links individual maturation with the development of the nation state.

You can see its imprint in the much-lauded Finnish education system[31], where kids from rich and poor families attend the same world-leading schools; in the Norwegian justice system[32], where declining recidivism rewards national investment in rehabilitation; and in Iceland’s history of mass-mobilisation to exert the popular will[33].

The collective commitment to raising responsible adults is a characteristic Nordic social democracies share with healthy Indigenous cultures. There are others, including high levels of mutual support, participatory decision-making, and constraints on the extent to which personal wealth and power can steer society.

From the perspective of primate evolution, in these systems neither lone alphas nor beta coalitions can hold society hostage. And these comparable success stories from opposite ends of our ‘progress’ paradigm reveal some perennial truths.

Contrary to the mythologies of dominator systems, which extort indulgence for the few from the bondage of the many, collective responsibility and general liberty are mutually reinforcing; the more I warrant safety, sufficiency, and freedom for others the more of them I will likely enjoy myself.

Nevertheless, Nordic successes were also contingent on historical factors, including preceding centuries of oppression, cheap fossil energy and wealth transfers from the global south. They haven’t avoided corrosive forces. And the German philosophy which articulated Bildung exposed a landscape of paradox around notions of identity and free will[34].

In the essays to come I will explore this terrain.

[1] Galtung, J. (1969), "Violence, Peace, and Peace Research", Journal of Peace Research, 6 (3): 167–191.

[2] Margulis, L. (1998), Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution, US, Basic Books.

[3] Schaechter, M. (2012), “Lynn Margulis (1938–2011)”, Science, Vol. 335, No. 6066.

[4] Kaplan, S. (2015), “Scientists may have solved mystery of matter’s origin”, The Washington Post, Feb 26.

[5] Barbatti, M (2023), “We are not empty”, Aeon, Aug 24.

[6] Wrangham, R. (2020), The Goodness Paradox, UK, Profile Books.

[7] Frijters, P. and Murray, C. (2022) Rigged, Australia, Allen & Unwin.

[8] Snowden, M. (2021), “Why do conspiracy theories flourish? Because the truth is too hard to handle”, The Guardian, Jul 1.

[9] Nkengasong, J.N. “COVID-19: unprecedented but expected”. Nat Med 27, 364 (2021).

[10] O'Malley, N. and Chung, L. (2022), “The failures that left Australians facing floods alone began years ago”, The Sydney Morning Herald, Mar 19

[11] Denniss, R. (2023), “Australia’s 116 new coal, oil and gas projects equate to 215 new coal power stations”, The Conversation, Mar 21

[12] Sloan Wilson, D. (1975), “A Theory of Group Selection”, The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Vol. 72, No. 1, pp. 143-146.

[13]Ferguson, B. (2018), “War Is Not Part of Human Nature”, Scientific American, Sep 1.

[14] Graeber, D. and Wengrow, D. (2021) The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, UK, Allen Lane

[15] Pinker, S. (2011), The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined, US, Viking Books.

[16] Rogers, D. (2012), “Inequality: Why egalitarian societies died out”, New Scientist, Jul 25.

[17] Toussaint, E. (2012), “The Long Tradition of Debt Cancellation in Mesopotamia and Egypt from 3000 to 1000 BC”, Committee for the Abolition of Illegitimate Debt, Sep 2.

[18] Harari, Y. N. (2015), Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, UK, Vintage Books.

[19] Langton, M. (2018), Welcome to Country, AU, Hardie Grant.

[20] Jaqua, K. (2020), “The Idiot and the Community”, Interdisciplinary Humanities Centre, Aug 20.

[21] Mercury, A. (2022), “What Democracy Are We Trying to Save, Exactly?”, Medium, Feb 17.

[22] Anderson, E. (2017), Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It), US, Princeton University Press.

[23] Kohler, A. (2023), “Banking is a paradox at the heart of capitalism”, The New Daily, Mar 23.

[24] IPSOS Issues Monitor February 2023

[25] Hegarty, N. (2022), “Liberal MP says stage 3 tax cuts should be scrapped, as Anthony Albanese stands firm”, abc.net.au, Aug 29.

[26] Curran, J. (2023), “AUKUS is a giant commitment that’s never been explained”, Australian Financial Review, Mar 14.

[27] Moss, J. (2022), “To walk the talk on climate, Labor must come clean about the future for coal and gas”, The Conversation, May 26.

[28] Hanauer, N. (2014), “The Pitchforks Are Coming… For Us Plutocrats”, Politico, Jul/Aug

[29] Neidjie, B. and Taylor, K. (1989), Story About Feeling, AU, Magabala Books

[30] Andersen, L. R. and Björkman, T (2017), The Nordic Secret: A European story of beauty and freedom, Sweden, Fri tanke

[31] Loveless, B. (2023), “27 Surprising Finnish Education System Facts and Statistics”, educationcorner.com, Mar 9

[32] Editorial Team (2018), “Prisons in Norway: Inside a Norwegian Jail”, lifeinnorway.net, Oct 20

[33] World Service Inquiry programme (2016), “How did Iceland clean up its banks?”, bbc.com, Feb 10

[34] Herdt, J. A. (2019), Forming Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition, US, University of Chicago Press.