our species as it now exists, in which we quickly and effortlessly form strong social bonds with others based on abstraction and opportunism. Moreover, that 7.7 billion would be far beyond the carrying capacity of the planet if we were solitary, since without our high degree of sociality, we wouldn ’ t have agriculture and distribution systems to grow the global human population past perhaps 10-100 million. Humans are not inherently evil or destructive and are aggressively egalitarian naturally with respect to consumption. 8586 The unusual climatic stability that began ~12 thousand years ago, combined with the disappearance of many large prey animals, allowed/caused some nomadic tribes to stop being nomadic and start producing food in a stable location, which in turn created the potential for storable surplus. This set our ultrasocial tribal tendencies and optimal-foraging instincts onto a new trajectory in which we began to suppress the wants and needs of individuals in lieu of the production of surplus for the tribe/village/city/nations. Ergo, we began functioning as larger units. As the size of this human "superorganism" grew, we increased in size and complexity and in our toolmaking capacity, all in service of surplus (initially agricultural). The advent of surplus eventually created many positive feedbacks, among them human hierarchy and a hunger for exosomatic energy (which will be the focus of the next segment). As individuals, we each subjectively experience consciousness, an ability to think abstractly about complex things, and some sense of right versus wrong. When thinking about groups of people – be they committees, organizations, or entire nations – we tend to imbue our mental models of those groups with something like the same qualities. This is a serious error because those qualities and abilities only exist within single brains. Groups don ’ t get smarter as they get larger; rather the opposite effect occurs, particularly where there is a requirement for “ fairness of representation, ” because the level of mental complexity which may be parsed by a large group declines rapidly as the group size rises. Past a certain point, the ability to consider and manipulate complex issues is lost entirely, and the only thing which all group members can agree on are the hard-wired feelings generated by their primitive gene agendas, played out in a simulation of “ fair process. ” The emergent result of this is that on large scales, humans function as a superorganism and in a globalized world of abundant resources, this superorganism functions with behavior similar to bacterial food-seeking tropisms (aka amoebas). Like a real amoeba, it
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