Impudent thoughts on instinct, purpose, and successful societies

What does it feel like to be controlled by your genes? Let’s find out.

I’m going to tell you something about yourself.
You will probably want to deny it.
But instead, I want you to remain open for a moment to the possibility that it’s true.
Let the statement run freely through you.
And instead of focusing on the statement, I want you to focus on *how you feel* when you allow it to maybe be true.

Are you ready?
Here it comes.

You don’t matter.

Don’t think about, just let yourself experience it.

You don’t matter.
You are just one of over 8 billion people on one of billions of planets in one of trillions of galaxies.
Your influence over reality is of absolutely no consequence.
In a universe that’s billions of years old, your entire life is less than an eye blink, and you will disappear from everyone’s memory within a few centuries.
Indeed, most people will never know you even existed.

Now: how does that make you feel?

Some people will feel indignation or anger; others may feel fear or insecurity or despair.
I doubt many will feel good about it.

You feel that way because to consider seriously that you don’t matter runs counter to instincts that have been hard-wired into your brain by billions of years of evolution, and reinforced by social norms since the day you were born.

Those feelings, unpleasant though they are, came to you unbidden as a direct result of even just pondering the possibility that you are irrelevant.

Irrelevant things can be discarded without consequence.
If you don’t matter, then you could be safely eliminated.
And that will likely make you feel that your very existence is in jeopardy — regardless of your actual safety.

You feel this way because of self-preservation, the instinct that drives you to want to continue living.

Self-preservation is, I reckon, the oldest and most common instinct there is.
It’s an instinct we share with every other organism, regardless of its complexity.
The logic is inescapable: over time, species with little or no urge to self-preserve will have simply become extinct when competing for limited resources with species that do self-preserve.

Self-preservation evolved when organisms were too simple to work stuff out rationally; it was the only game in town.
The bits of DNA that coded for self-preservation have remained in every organism ever since.
Pretty much everything we do is driven, at root, by this instinct.
Think about it: what do you do that doesn’t, at some level, reaffirm to yourself that your survival matters?

It’s self-preservation that makes you think you matter.
If you act as if you matter, then you are more likely to survive.

And that’s what it’s like to be controlled by your genes.

You have children because you think you matter enough to warrant increasing the population with individuals carrying your genes, regardless of our suffocating overpopulation.
You love and protect them because they are your genetic immortality; they matter because you matter.
You wish them success because that will reflect well on you and prove your worth, and reaffirm that you, their (co)creator, matter.
You work to get money which you use to protect yourself and buy things you need to survive — because you believe you deserve it, because you think you matter.
We wage wars to protect ourselves from enemies, perceived or otherwise, because we think we matter (more than they do).

All these drives we have are perfectly natural and normal, albeit in a mechanistic, programmatic way.
They’re not anything you’re consciously aware of; they only manifest in feelings and emotions.
You feel better, safer, and calmer when you behave in ways that satisfy those drives.
When those drives are not satisfied, you feel anxious and stressed.

But just because they feel natural doesn’t make them adequate to ensure our long-term survival and well-being.
Self-preservation is no longer the only game in town.
Now, we can reason our way to a better understanding of our existence.

And what we’ve learned is that nature doesn’t care about us.
Nature is itself just a machine that runs on a set of rules that have absolutely nothing special to say about us.
We describe these rules with scientific laws: the Laws of Motion, the Law of Gravity, the Laws of Thermodynamics, and so on.
There is not one single law of nature that privileges or accommodates humans in any way.

I believe there is one Law of Nature that no one really talks about, that has been ignored throughout the history of science, and that we continue to ignore only at our own peril.
And that Law is: humans don’t matter.
It’s a law as real as F=ma.
There is overwhelming evidence to support it: no natural system, from the smallest subatomic particle to the most massive cluster of galaxies, will alter its physical response simply because of the presence of humans.

We need to stop thinking “we’re all that”, as they say, because we really aren’t anything at all.
The only reason we think we matter is that we’d be extinct otherwise.
And if there’s one thing that’s driving humanity to disaster today, it’s our stunning arrogance that we matter.
Our manic desire to matter is an addiction that triggers every war, every act of environmental destruction, every instance of road rage, and every tiny act of meanness.

Now, having written all of this, I don’t mean to suggest we should all just lie down and die. (Although some people do think that’s precisely what we should do, which highlights the dangers of logic unrooted from science.)

What we do need, is to reinvent ourselves and our societies.
We are not the greatest, most important thing there is; we are just one more natural thing, no better or worse than anything else.
We can balance the reality that we don’t matter with the reality that, since we’re here, we may as well make the best of it.
We can accept our pointlessness and construct a new way of being, one that uses our scientific understanding of reality to find our true place in the nature of things.

We already know how to do this, a bit.
For instance, we know from systems science, psychology, sociology, and evolution that we’re “better together”.
Humans evolved as social animals with a herd instinct.
Being kind and collaborative makes things better for everyone involved.
And I don’t mean just being kind to and collaborative with other humans; I mean being kind to and collaborative with the rest of reality, every other organism, and every other physical phenomenon.
Showing kindness and compassion to other humans and organisms isn’t a sacrificial act; we benefit physically, mentally, and emotionally just as much as those to whom we are kind and compassionate.

Collaboration has a multiplicative effect on outcomes; two social organisms working together can achieve more than than sum of what they can do alone.
This collaborative spirit appears in various ways.
I’m writing this in bed, with my two huskies sleeping happily on either side of me. I don’t “own” them; I’m their steward. I give them the best “dog’s life” I can, and in return, they provide a kind of loyalty, trust, and companionship that no human can provide.
I have no qualms writing that they give me as much as I give them. And all three of us benefit from the arrangement.
Another way that collaborative spirit benefits all humans, is in the benefits of cooperative housing: people living in coops tend to spend less and be both physically and mentally healthier.
(With the current housing crisis, concerns over rampant loneliness, and other societal ills, it’s a wonder that housing coops aren’t in the news. But that’s a topic for another day.)
Even just holding a door open for someone carrying heavy bags is an example of collaborative spirit.

Unfortunately, society is still structured mostly on a foundation that we objectively matter, and that some people objectively matter more than others.
And in a world of limited resources, the more resources you have, the more you matter, and the more likely you are to survive.
So the hoarding of resources has become a stand-in for a feeling of mattering.
CEOs benefit at the expense of workers because our society holds that CEOs matter more than the workers.
Rich countries refuse to share their wealth with poor countries because they think they matter more than their poorer “neighbours”.
Politicians lie and cheat because they think their position makes them matter more than mere voters.
The powerful exert their power to maintain their power because they think they matter more than the powerless.
Spouses lie and cheat to each other because they believe they matter more than the ones they (claim to) love.
Thugs bully weaker people because they are trying to assert that they matter more when they actually believe they matter less.

Our self-preservation has spiralled out of control, undamped by any mediating forces.
We’ve convinced ourselves that we’re invincible against nature, and that our only focus should be to combat one another to consume and reorder as much of nature as we can.
It’s bitterly ironic that our evolved instinct to survive may well lead to our extinction.
Wars and strife across the planet, climate change, our unwillingness to manage pandemics properly, wealth inequality, over-population, “alternative truths”….
All of these are indicators of the extent to which self-preservation has made humanity its own worst enemy.

We can’t just abandon instinct; in many ways they’re defining characteristics of Homo sapiens.
But we can direct them.
We can use science and critical thinking to find ways to help ensure humanity’s continued existence and well-being without endangering the systems that we ultimately depend on to keep us alive.

After all, we are just another part of the same system — is it really that surprising that harming nature ends up biting us in the ass?