A Game of Giants — Wait but Why

The Primitive Mind is all about making giants. In fact, one of the Primitive Mind’s central talents is the ability to instinctually merge with other Primitive Minds, combining each of their individual primal flames into a raging survival bonfire, making the group stronger and more powerful than the sum of its parts.

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

The downside was a major loss of individuality but the survival benefits made it worth the sacrifice, and the multi-celled organism thing stuck.

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

But the tribal quality that I find most fascinating is what I might call selective kindness.

Pretty soon after cells started joining together to form animals, some of the animals discovered that they could go up another level of emergence and form even bigger giants made up of multiple animals. If you look around, you’ll see them everywhere—schools of fish, packs of wolves, colonies of ants, waddles of penguins. Groups like these represent... See more

Or reverence for self-sacrifice. The feeling that the most noble thing someone can do is sacrifice their life in service of Us as a whole or in order to save another group member. And deep contempt for anyone who looks out for themselves in battle or behaves selfishly within the tribe.

Combining both emergent properties made the human tribe an incredible survival machine that allowed the species to stay afloat and thrive in a relentless natural world.

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.