Just like, for example, wolves, elephants and geese, man is a social being, and relationships between people are what interest us most. All films, novels and plays must be about relationships between people, such as love, friendship, enmity and rivalry. Robinson Crusoe would not be the same without Friday.
It is often said, that everyone is just trying to rake in for himself. Humans are born selfish and care only about their own interests.
Conversely, one can hear from supporters of the political left, that it is natural for individuals to feel solidarity with people from far away regions of the globe, whom they have never met and do not know at all.
Neither of the two statements is true. We are genetically designed to operate inside the framework of a manageable group of familiar faces. Man is a social species just like other social animals like apes, baboons and wolves. And it does not mean, that individuals automatically love others, they don't know, only because they are humans.
The genetic aptitude for social behaviour is an integral part of man, which we have acquired in the course of our biological development. We are social, whether we like it or not. Just in the same way as we are born with two legs and two arms, we are also born with a predisposition for social skills. Should there somewhere exist a human individual, who is decidedly non-social, it must rely on a kind of deformity.
Charles Darwin 1809 - 1882. Photo Wikimedia Commons.
Darwin's "The Origin of Species" was published in 1859. Darwin's theory is based on two factors, which have always guided livestock breeding. Namely, that the offspring usually inherits their parents' characteristics, and that there are nevertheless considerable variations within each species, which are randomly combined in different ways.
In livestock breeding, the development of the species takes place because the farmers select the individuals with advantageous combinations of characteristics for further breeding.
In nature, it is the "struggle for life", which identifies the most appropriate individuals for "further breeding." Only the best survive and get offspring, which mainly inherit their parents' characteristics and hence the ability to survive.
In a later work, "The descent of Man", Darwin explicitly used his theory on humans. The message of the book is, that the species humans through several million years have evolved from the same original type as the monkeys, and ultimately all animals, including humans, have developed from the same organism, the first living organism on our planet.
Some animals are social, some are not. If two tigers meet in the jungle of India, they will probably start a fight. Tigers are not-social animals, and in general, they cannot stand each other.
Humans - a social species. Foto Quora.
The development of the inborn non-social behaviour has been an advantage for these species. The individual's natural disgust for each other has helped them to spread out over large areas and thereby enabled them to exploit the food resources better. Therefore, their genetic predisposition to incompatibility with each other has been passed on to their descendants.
But gorillas, wolves, baboons, elephants, dolphins, geese, dogs, and also humans are social beings. If two humans meet in the jungle, they will try to come to a kind of understanding. They will present themselves, and seek to unite their forces in a common effort to survive in the hostile environment. Unconsciously, they will naturally also seek to determine the ranking in their small group, who is number one and who is number two. Without a kind of organization, the new small group will not work.
The cooperation in groups has been an advantage for the development of the social species. The community in the hunt and in the upbringing of children made them able to survive better and for this reason, their advantageous aptitude for social skills and feelings were passed on to their descendants.
Konrad Lorenz 1903 -1989 - he is followed by goose chicks, who think he is their mother. Photo Youtube.
Dogs can recognize each other by the smell; they are able to distinguish between hundreds of different individuals simply by sniffing. Humans have a unique ability to remember and recognize facial features. We can meet somebody on the street, which we have not seen for decades, and suddenly remember, that he is this and that person, who has been our classmate in the tenth grade in basic school.
Konrad Lorenz had a tame badger, about which we know, it belongs to the group of non-social species. Often it woke up its owner in the middle of the night by poking around in his books and notes. When he told it off, it stopped for a moment looking at him, then it continued messing around. It had no specific social emotions, and therefore it could not understand, that the owner of the books was angry. Moreover, probably it would not have cared very much, even if it had understood.
A social animal, for example a dog, would have reacted quite differently to that its owner had scolded it. It would have understood the emotional message and pulled back whining to its corner.
Dogs and humans can be very close to each other because both species are social. We understand each other, so to speak.
Irenaus Eibl Eibesfeldt 1928 - 2018. Photo Alchetron.
Between humans, everywhere on Earth, from New Guinea to Funen, a smile is a message of joy and friendly feelings. A dog would interpret a smile as we show teeth, and we would like to have a fight. But for humans, it is quite the opposite.
A German etolog, I. Eibl Eibesfeldt, has found, that people of all races laugh when they are happy and cry when they feel sorrow. Babies smile after a few months by contact with the mother. Eibersfeldt showed, that even deaf-blind thalidomide children, who never have seen a smile or heard a laughter, laugh and smile when somebody play with them. He also showed, that among all races and cultures kisses were exchanged between loving couples. Laughter and crying are our inborn emotional communication software. This is evidence that man belongs to the group of social species. From the hands of nature, we are designed to operate within the framework of a manageable group of familiar faces.
Buchenwald concentration camp. Photo Wikimedia Commons.
All the great stories tell about friendship and unity among men. Just think of "The Lord of the Rings" by Tolkien or "Im Westen Nichts Neues" by Remarque just to name a few. The big stories are of course also about love for women, but we must return to this some other time.
There exist a lot of reports about military units, ships' crews, polar expeditions and similar groups, who in spite of countless difficulties have survived thanks to their unity and ability to work together. Numerous soldiers and sailors have sacrificed themselves for their comrades for the group to survive. We all know, that this is true, and therefore we cannot with any fairness claim, that man is selfish by nature - apart from this that everyone is responsible for themselves.
Once I spoke with a survivor from the concentration camp, Buchenwald. He had been sent there because he had distributed illegal papers during the war. I asked him, what he remembered most from the camp. He said, that what has been most important for him, was the unity and friendship between the prisoners. But the horrors in the camp, which befell prisoners with whom he was not attached, he became quite cold to as time went on, he said. He always wept, when he spoke of the camp, perhaps at the thought of the fate of many of his comrades.
Royal Irish Riffles at Somme Juli 1916. Photo Imperial War Museum Wikimedia Commons
After in twenty-eight years having studied the Great War the American general medical service put forward a thorough analysis of the experience from the Second World War. The section on neuro-physical damages concluded: "The most valuable experience in military psychiatry was perhaps the understanding of the small battle group or some of its members' impact on the individual soldier. What is alternately described as the "friendship" system, "group identification" or "leadership". This also worked in non-combat situations. Time and again it appeared, that the absence of its support, its inadequacy or its dissolution during the fighting was the prime cause of mental breakdowns during combat. These groups and community events were the explanation for the significant difference in numbers of psychiatric collapse in different combat units that had been exposed to the same intensive stress during battle."
Being in prison in a solitary confinement is considered a particularly cruel punishment. It is hard for a man to endure the loneliness year after year.
British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew lost their ship in the Antarctic pack ice in 1915. The 28 men drifted for months on ice in small lifeboats until they finally spotted the uninhabited polar Elephant Island. Together with four crew members, he then sailed for help in a small lifeboat the 1,300 km across the Southern Polar Ocean to the small island of South Georgia, where they found the Norwegian whaling station Grytviken. By a miracle, all expedition participants survived. Photo Frank Hurley Wikimedia Commons.
If we humans deep in our hearts had been such fierce asocial egoists, then a stay in a solitary confinement would not have been any particular problem. But we are not. We are social by nature, and we need daily interaction with other people.
It is often said, that elderly people can become strange and difficult to get around with. But the fact is, that elderly people often become lonesome and isolated for one reason or another. Then they will miss the daily social interaction with other humans, and this lack of daily emotional exercise can make anybody strange and a little out of tune. So the point is, that they don't become strange because they are old, but mainly because they are lonesome.
I believe that the common statement that man is essentially selfish was mainly created as a justification for the socialist critique of capitalism.
In essence, the claim is that everyone will just rake in without regard for others if given the opportunity, it is human nature, for example, if he is successful in business and becomes a capitalist. Therefore, it is necessary for the workers to organize themselves in trade unions so that they in that way can scrape up their fair share inspired by a kind of collective selfishness and thereby create a balance in the mutual distrust embodied by a contract, a contract.
Such an organization, based on a balance of mutual mistrust, based on an assumption of a selfish human nature, is very different from the historical organization before the industrial revolution, which was more like a marriage, based on love and mutual trust in recognition of common destiny and common interest. The ancient king Rolf Krake was famous for his generosity, which he sworn men reciprocated with their ultimate loyalty.
As you know, Elon Musk can't stand unions. I have never spoken to him, but we can guess that he feels that the very existence of a union in his companies contains an unspoken accusation against him that he is in reality a greedy and selfish capitalist who puts his own interests far above those of his employees , and he cannot recognize himself in this picture.
But, however, we cannot deny that the claim about human selfishness contains some truth. Because everyone is responsible for himself, and if he cannot take care of himself, it will generally be difficult for him to be something for others. It won't be natural to simply throw yourself on the street and say here I am, I can't do anything about it. It is not my fault.
The development in tax payments. Public spending as a percentage of GDP from 1871 to 2013 in Europe and the United States - Photo Cato Institute.
Over the last half century, tax payments in European countries have steadily increased to the unprecedented level of around 50% of income. Many feel that it is not fair and they would like to keep more of the money that they have earned for the benefit of their family and loved ones, instead of paying it to the "Community", which mainly represents transfer income to people that they don't know.
"True solidarity and true community must embrace the whole of humanity", I once heard a socialist politician say. He seemed to think that all people in the whole world should have the same value for us. An African schoolboy or a Bolivian coffee grower that we don't know; their welfare should be just as important to us as the welfare of our Danish neighbours.
The idea that we have an unconditional moral duty to sacrifice our own interests, the interests of our loved ones and the interests of our own people in order to help total strangers is a kind of unnatural modern religion that has no basis in the natural feelings of man.
We don't have to be selfish or racist simply because we love our own family, colleagues, friends and neighbors and people of our own kind rather than complete strangers. It is a very basic feature of human social nature.
Eibl-Eibesfeldt, (1975) - "Det Præprogrammerede Menneske"
Lorenz, Konrad, (1963) - "Das Sogenannte Böse"
