Our belief in moral superiority
„Apart from the sex drive, no other human need determines the behavior of humans as much as the desire for moral superiority“
„Neben dem Geschlechtstrieb bestimmt kein Bedürfnis das Handeln des Menschen so sehr wie die Sehnsucht nach moralischer Überlegenheit“
Franz Werfel
We saw in the last chapter that our cooperative behavior in groups is the result of an effort to try to compete with other groups. On a large enough scale it is therefore not cooperative. And even within groups we are carefully hiding the fact that we are competing with others and we are in fact sometimes acting against other group members (stealing, cheating, exploiting, suppressing etc.).
It is quite obvious to see that an exclusively cooperative individual would have a hard time to survive and reproduce in this world. To be able to act „evil“ seems to be a necessary property. Let us explore to which extent this is true.
People who only rarely have to act non-cooperatively against other members of their group (the people we call „good“) are therefore in no way better than others, but are rather just privileged: obviously they managed to get a position in their group where they can achieve their goals with only little conflict with other group members. As every conflict can be damaging for the involved parties, this kind of positions are desirable. To be „good“ is therefore more a sign of high social rank in the group. It is often the weaker members of a group who get pushed into risky „border“ work (think about the high percentage of black people among U.S. army soldiers) or who are forced into more conflicting behavior with other group members (the higher criminality rate of the black population in the U.S. could serve as an example). But the „good“ people need the noncooperative behavior of the border people against other groups to maintain their wealth. And furthermore it is quite clear that they would also show noncooperative behavior against members of their group if they were moved into less favorable positions within the group.
If a person is not forced for long time to do evil, the resulting good reputation in the group forms a valuable investment which should not be risked easily. This means that the barriers to do evil are now higher, but the person will be still able to act evil if this promises a high enough advantage.
This is true even for very evil behavior. In some situations it is unfortunately very effective to be extremely evil. It is known for instance that soldiers who raped a great number of women in wartime managed to produce a correspondingly large number of offspring. We don‘t like this but from natures perspective this is clearly a huge success. A hypothetical design of a human being without any such evil strategies would be on the long run (over many generations) at a significant disadvantage compared to other individuals who do implement them. It would sure not manage to spread its genes successfully. This is why „good“ people simply do not exist, even if we all try to make the members of our group believe that we are good (and maybe even believe this ourselves). And it is why we all have a vast arsenal of evil strategies inside us, mostly deeply hidden in our subconscious mind to make them difficult to be sensed by others.
An interesting example is the human ability to be cruel. Most people think that this behavior does not make any sense, but its benefits are in fact quite easy to explain. If you have a reputation to inflict great pain on your captured enemies, you might be able to conquer territories without having to fight, because your enemies will prefer to flee instead of fighting back. This is a huge advantage. This effect requires the ability to communicate which is the reason animals are never cruel in this way (cats practice hunting on captured mice but in this case the suffering of the mouse is an unintended side effect). Cruelty does not work for animals because they cannot have a reputation.
It seems to be clear now that we are actually all morally on the same level. Nobody is morally superior to anybody else. And if we all fall into the same moral category („evil“, we must say unfortunately), the categorization simply does not make sense anymore. We should stop using it to determine the value of people. And we are in the end all innocent because, as we are the product of millions of years of competition, there is no alternative to being evil. And this makes the categorization guilty / innocent meaningless as well.
This is a very important first result and will play an important role when building a new society: our feeling of moral superiority is an important driver behind violence. We are often justifying our aggression against other groups or people by pointing at their apparent moral inferiority (like „they are primitive cruel animals because they do XYZ, we should conquer them to bring our superior civilization to them or simply eliminate them“). The truth is: the other groups/people are not more evil than us, their evil is just different from ours. The difference makes the other groups/peoples evil perceivable. For europeans it is very normal to eat cows (which are often bred under horrific conditions), but for many people from India this is a barbarian sin. Europeans on the other side are looking down on India because of its caste system and on China because some people there eat dogs. I believe it is time for us to learn that such views of moral superiority are all a big nonsense. A careful analysis shows that we are - by our own current standards - all evil. But in this case we are also innocent!
I hope you begin to realize the enormous potential of becoming aware of who we are.