As we continue down our path of intentional empathy, the inner caveman will inevitably have some complaints. He’s also great at getting us to listen to our basic instincts without stopping to ask reasonable questions. We don’t want to just shut him up, though. He still occasionally has some valuable input related to our survival, after all. So I think it's worth asking the question: What's wrong with relying on our instincts? That's part of what evolution is supposed to be improving right?
As our prefrontal cortexes have evolved, our understanding of how our choices impact others has too (ie. our empathy). It's getting harder and harder to pretend that our actions don't affect the other people we share our planet with. We've begun to recognize the uncomfortable fact that instinct and reason don't always align. In fact, our most unempathetic, and ultimately self-sabotaging choices usually originate from the inner caveman’s tribalistic “us versus them” mentality.
To our instincts-driven friend, people are divided into two easy categories: those who are with "us” and those who are "others". Whenever he faces a complex problem, he's learned that he can gain a sense of control by first simplifying the matter as much as possible. First objective: Quickly determine who is the ally and who's the enemy. Objective number two: Dominate or destroy the enemy. End of plan.
This oversimplified strategy, though often gratifying, backfires any time the inner caveman's perception of who the enemy is isn’t 100% accurate. Since we can only ever see the world through our own narrow perspectives, the domination strategy ends up backfiring quite a lot. At the end of the day, adaptive and empathetic decisions will almost always require us to push beyond the inner caveman’s gut feelings.
That's why one of the greatest parts of being human is our ability to combine both instinct and reason. That's how we make adaptive decisions; how we keep evolving. Without either of these two vital components, our choices will eventually become dysfunctional. Too much reliance on our instincts leads to chaos, hoarding, and violence. Too much reliance on our cognitive reasoning leads to ambivalence, anxiety, and emotional repression.
Our best chance at collaboration (and ultimately, survival as a species) is through finding a balance between instinct and reason to inform our decisions. Michael Karlberg articulated this well in his 2012 TEDx about the problem with having a society built on competition. He says, “the culture of contest undermines our efforts to solve the increasingly complex problems we’re facing on this planet. Solving these problems requires the highest degrees of cooperation among people with diverse insights, experiences, talents, and capacities. The culture of contest sets such people against one another. In the process, it confounds our ability to solve complex problems together. So the culture of contest, for both of these reasons, is inherently unjust and unsustainable.”
Racism, nationalism, sexism, and really any of our major societal issues, clearly demonstrate our "culture of contest". Although loving and protecting one's own group can be admirable, the inner caveman’s obsession with drawing “us versus them” lines in the sand takes protection to a frightening extreme. By fixating on archaic notions of supremacy, our inner caveman doesn't see other people groups as equals, but as rivals.
Despite mounting evidence that cooperation is essential to our collective survival (see climate change, world wars, water insecurity, etc), many of us are still clinging to the inner cavemen’s outdated dog-eat-dog mindset. Peaceful coexistence seems laughable when we're stuck in our brutal, hunger games-esque competitions to see who will come out on top. Annoyingly, we keep doubling down on rivalry when any reasonable person could see that competition and hierarchy is exactly what's tearing us apart.
Humanity’s collective origin story is all about us having to fight for our survival. That self-empathy can help us understand why the inner caveman is so obsessed with establishing dominance. His competitive urges are explainable, true, but they're no longer adaptive. As we collectively keep pretending like we're competing to be the ultimate ninja warrior, we’re missing out on the next evolutionary step that our species could be taking.
Fortunately, we are not slaves to our instincts or to our inner caveman. Our gift of reasoning has given us the ability to evolve. Listening to our instincts AND our reasoning is the only way to push beyond these maladaptive habits and finally find out what might be possible. So when are we going to quit acting like cavemen?
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