A Game of Giants — Wait but Why

If we want to understand why people are the way they are, we should try thinking the same way. A human isn’t simply a perfect survival creature—it’s also just the right element of a perfect survival tribe. Examining the traits of a perfect survival tribe can help us see the specs for human nature, not only illuminating who we are, but why we’re tha... See more

Many of the most tribal traits come in the form of “Us > Me”—as if the tribal mindset is in direct competition with the me-first selfish mindset.

Or the way we view others. Our tendency to lionize members of Us and demonize members of Them.

For most early humans, forming into giants with other humans wasn’t just an advantage, it was a necessity.

A single cell is itself a giant—a magical living giant made up of trillions of non-living atoms—and an animal is a higher-level giant made up of trillions of cells. This concept—a bunch of smaller things joining together to form a giant that can function as more than the sum of its parts—is called emergence. We can visualize it as a tower.

We can be like spiders sometimes and like ants other times. Our independent life form makes trips up and down Emergence Tower’s elevator.

There are classic “Us > Them” traits, like our respect for loyalty—the feeling that being loyal is a critical virtue and nothing is worse than being a traitor.

But when Higher Minds work together, the effect can be just as powerful: the group as a whole gains superhuman abilities in learning and creativity and discovery.

The human Primitive Mind isn’t any nicer than the spider or ant Primitive Mind—but it is a bit more complicated. Unlike spiders and ants, whose independent life form never changes emergence floors, humans are a kind of hybrid creature that inhabits a range along Emergence Tower, not a single floor.