I’ve always imagined society as a kind of giant human—a living organism like each of us, only much bigger. When you’re a single cell in the body of a giant, it’s hard to understand what the giant’s doing, or why it is the way it is, because you can’t really zoom out and look at the whole thing all at once. But we do our best.
When the words we use become too loaded with historical baggage, they stop being useful for communication.
Part 1. Chapter 1: The Great Battle of Fire and Light
Most of Earth’s gene strands don’t last very long, and genes that weren’t talented enough at the immortality game are long gone. The genes on Earth today are the miracle outliers on both the motivation and talent front—such incredible survival specialists that they’re currently almost four billion years old and counting. Animals are just a hack these outlier genes came up with—temporary containers designed to carry the genes and help them stay immortal. But genes can’t talk to their animals, so instead they control them by having them run on specialized survival software. In simple animals, the software is an automated program that runs the animal on instinct. In more complex animals, the software also includes a number of feelings—higher-level behavior-manipulation tools like pain punishments, pleasure treats, and emotion manipulations.
Life on Earth is a long succession of temporary animal containers passing genes along to newer containers like a baton in an endless relay. It’s an odd survival system, but so far, it’s worked pretty well—at least for those genes still around.
The problem is that genes themselves aren’t alive, they’re just a force of nature—and forces of nature don’t give a shit about anything. Gravity wants to smoosh matter together, so that’s what it does. It has no concern for the well-being of the atoms it smooshes. If the hydrogen atoms in the center of the sun can’t handle the smooshing, they’ll fuse into helium atoms. Gravity doesn’t care. But the important thing is, atoms don’t care either. In the center of the sun, no one cares about anything, so everything’s fine.
When you have a relentless force consuming finite resources, something’s gotta give. In a star, atoms give, fusing into bigger atoms. In the animal world, animal species give, morphing into new, mutated species—or, more often, going extinct.
So genes are like gravity—but animals aren’t like atoms.
Animals woke up in the heat of a universe pressure cooker, playing an unwinnable game they never signed up for, and that’s all there is to it.
Through an accident of evolution, humans had gained superpowers.
They had gained the superpower of reason, which gave humans the ability to solve complex problems, invent fancy new technologies, design sophisticated strategies, and make real-time adjustments to their thinking based on changes in their environment.
Reason sharpened human thinking, introducing nuance and logic into the process. It also affected human motivation—by illuminating the distinction between true and false, reason made truth a core human drive.
Humans had also gained the superpower of imagination, making them the world’s first animal that could fantasize and tell stories and dream of places they had never been.
But the real power of imagination came when it was combined with communication. Humans now had the power to communicate with each other using a complex language full of sounds that represent things or ideas—human language is humans imagining together. Communication plus imagination is why humans can think in the big picture and make long-term plans in a way no other animal can.
These two superpowers produced a third superpower—one that, above all, makes humans human: empathy.
The human brain had grown a mind of its own that could think for itself. For the first time in early life history, an animal was more than just an animal—it was an animal plus…something else.
The Primitive Mind is endlessly greedy, completely untrainable, and the Higher Mind has learned the hard way that the Primitive Mind must be kept in check.