Humans Never Learned to Cooperate

How Our Greatest Strength Became Our Most Destructive Weapon

Humans never learned to genuinely cooperate. They simply became good at forming tight clans, mobilising their members against other organised clans, against the planet, and ultimately, against all members of the clan who refused to “cooperate”.

Despite all sights, sounds, and events over the past few thousand years demonstrating that humans are an evolutionary dead-end wrapped up in a self-destructive civilisation, there are countless new apostles springing up each day who preach the exact opposite: how compassionate we are when we come together in groups at times of crisis, and how, if we all just had 10 minutes to focus, listen to their sermon, sign up to their online course, and come to our senses, we could unite with other humans and save both ourselves and this planet.

At least this is what the brochure looks like. Meanwhile, the real story on the ground is that this civilisation is very quickly ending itself in more ways than you can count on one hand.

Of course, these apostles are not a new phenomenon. Just like our timeless anthropocentric delusions, snake oil salesmen have existed for thousands of years in the form of shamans, preachers, advertisers and technobroligarchs. Their public appearances are always guaranteed a full house, while those who warn about humanity’s inherent cognitive shortcomings have their audiences running for the door. That’s because the audience is just as deluded, supremacist and anthropocentric as the preaching apostle. They deserve each other. We all want to believe convenient lies, but that doesn’t mean there’s a single ounce of truth in them. All lies are in fact convenient, and hope is the most convenient and irrational of them all. We all want to “hope” even when there is no logical reason whatsoever to have hope other than hope itself. To most people, somehow this ludicrous logic makes sense.

But out of all the lies and fake hopes I’ve heard recently by sustainability apostles, there is a specific one that has become very popular: the unfounded belief that during times of crises humans don’t antagonize each other, but come together and cooperate. I want to unpack this fully, because it is yet another convenient lie that has been dressed up within a truth.

Yes, we are indeed masters of collaboration. We can put our minds together, and sometimes we can be kind and compassionate within this context of collaboration, if it serves the ultimate objective. But collaboration does not guarantee compassion, because these are two different things: one is a survival tool, the other one is an emotion. Cooperation skills developed first and foremost as a survival strategy, not an ethical code. In biological terms, cooperation is a behavioural pattern – not an altruistic pursuit. It was selected by evolution because groups that cooperated most effectively killed more enemies, found more food, and were able to specialise and form complex societies – giving them an unparalleled advantage to other tribes. People cooperated so they could build the pyramids of Egypt, send a mission to the moon, and discover the structure of the nucleic acid code. They also cooperated so they could drive countless species to extinction, create the world’s first atomic bomb, and attack other nations who were also cooperating amongst themselves, and towards a common enemy. Israelis cooperated with each other so they can make the Palestinian nation extinct. For Palestinians, this was extermination. For Israelis, it was cooperation and compassion: the power of people coming together in unity towards a common goal. So, the idea proposed by many that, in times of crises, we tend to pursue “good” forms of cooperation, finds me diametrically opposed. In a time of crisis resources dwindle and competition tightens. It is not a time to make friends, unless they come with benefits.

It is in these perilous moments that humans form groups and alliances. What is important to recognize is that we only ever collaborate when there is a reward – either a personal one, or for the group that we are part of. Either way, there is a benefit to us personally, directly or indirectly. The closer we are to the end reward, the stronger our willingness and affinity for collaboration with the rest of the group.

And here is the catch: people don’t form groups and alliances as a form of peace-making. They are organising themselves to survive against real or perceived threats. Human civilisation became a dreaded Mafia state in the ecosystem, exactly because of its incredible propensity for cooperation: this allowed the formation of tightly knit, exclusive groups that embezzled natural resources, blackmailed other lifeforms into flight, kept all profits in-house, and killed all the competition. We are collectively the biggest Mafia that has existed on the planet.

We are also the only species with countries and borders. Within a single country, one can praise peoples’ ability to come together and cooperate under a flag, religion, or purpose. But when you look at the big picture, cooperation is nothing but a weapon: it is constantly misused, abused, and mass produced. This is one of the uncomfortable truths one discovers when they stop looking at civilisation as a triumph of culture, and start looking at it as a biological phenomenon, as I do in my book The Biology of Collapse. Cooperation is biology in action: it evolved for a reason, and was shaped by competition.

But above all, the counter-intuitive truth is that cooperation is actually selfish, and this is why it never lasts: given that everyone joins a group in order to reap a reward, cooperation sooner or later becomes a competition on who can grow the longest arms to reach the bottom of the cookie jar. An individual will continue to work collaboratively within a group only when they are getting something back. Those in charge of the group – be it leaders, clerics, employers or economic hegemons – are living on borrowed time, unless they find a way to blackmail the rest of the group, or keep it hostage with salaries and other mechanisms. This is what they’ve been doing for thousands of years.

So, there is an incredible mismatch between how today’s “cooperation apostles” talk about cooperation, and what takes place in practice. Cooperation has never been selfless, but this is exactly the type of cooperation we need today. I want us to talk about coming together in completely selfless ways: for other humans on the other side of the world. For other species. For the planet. This is what positive cooperation means. If we could see the whole planet with all of its species as one clan, a single group, then it would conceivably be possible. Furthermore, there is a reward, for all of us: a future.

Can our biology accommodate this?

Thank you for reading. You may have noticed the paywalls on my newsletter.

They are not there to deprive you of insight, turn my readership into an exclusive club for the wealthy, or demonstrate how greedy I am.

They are there for a much simpler reason: the paywall is what pays my electric bill and allows me to continue writing.

Those of you who have become paid subscribers deserve the exclusive access to my archive that you have. Without your support, there would be no newsletter at all.

Thank you.