For most of the 55 million years that primates have existed on earth, we’ve lived in a state of resource scarcity that has caused natural selection to encourage division over unity and strength over empathy. Our brains are big enough that some of us envision and wish for a different way to relate to one another, but we remain hard-wired to follow leaders we regard as strong, to splinter into opposing groups, to seize and guard resources and to enforce borderlines. That sounds pretty bad, but it’s possible that over the next several million years, some of that could gradually change to some degree!
