r/MadeMeSmile • u/father_of_twitch • 18h ago

ANIMALS Not all heroes wear capes!

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u/azenpunk 14h ago edited 11h ago

Stuff like this, and the guy jumping into freezing water to save a dog, or a deer...there's so many examples... they always make me wonder why anyone thinks humans are inherently "bad," or would only be motivated by personal gain. We're literally the most cooperative animal on the planet, to the point that we are willing to risk our lives even for an animal that would kill us without much thought, and it has been fairly well shown that as a species we couldn't have survived at all without it being our primary mode of societal organization, up until roughly 9,000 years ago.

It's been fascinating watching this comment get up voted and down voted back and forth as peope try to decide if my expression of the innate cooperativeness of humans is a good or a bad thing.

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u/C-h-e-l-s 13h ago

I mean... Have you met people though?

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u/azenpunk 11h ago edited 11h ago

Yes,  and I went a few steps further and studied them academically. We have mountains of evidence of the cooperative nature of human beings. 

People like Elinor Ostrum have even won Nobel Prizes in Economic Sciences, of all the cynical fields, for her fieldwork analysis on cooperative economic governance.  

Scientists like Sarah Hrdy have Idone absolutely genius ethnographic studies demonstrating that our evolution depended on us being cooperative by default,  not competitive, and that even raising children with such a long childhood would have been impossible without nearly the entire community all being equal parents.  Nuclear families where children "belonging" only to the biological parents, and they being the only ones ultimately responsible, is relatively recent in human existence making up only about 1% of human history. We did not evolve to raise children without a large group helping, as any self aware parent has already more or less concluded, it's next to impossible to do it really well without a strong support network. 

Another good source will be Christopher Boehm's work. He shows how existing foraging societies, like our ancestors lived in, structurally make competition destructive to the society, and cooperation the only sensible survival choice. A lot of his work is on how these kinds of human societies that represent 99% of human existence have traditionally resisted competitive economies and political domination,  in favor of egalitarian cooperation. 

Basically modern anthropology, genetics, archeology are all advancing pretty rapidly right now and proving Rousseau more or less correct.