How We Humans Became The Rulers of Earth
Humans are today the world’s most dominant species. I always had this question how everything on this planet is centered around the Human species despite we sharing this planet with several other species. Whereas this was not the case, seventy-thousand years ago, when our ancestors were insignificant animals and the most important thing we know about prehistoric humans is that they were unimportant.
How did we manage to turn ourselves from an insignificant ape, minding its own business in one corner of Africa, into a species which rules the planet Earth?
The answer to this key question lies in the fact that we Humans control the planet because we are the only animals that can cooperate both flexibly and in very large numbers. And our language, alone of all the animals, enables us to talk about things and sometimes about things that do not even exist. Now, you might think about other animals — like the social insects, the bees, the ants — that can cooperate in large numbers, but they don’t do so flexibly. Their cooperation is very rigid and it is basically just in one way through which a beehive functions. And if there’s a new opportunity or a new danger, the bees cannot reinvent the social system overnight. They cannot, for example, execute the queen and establish a republic of bees, or a communist dictatorship of worker bees.
If we look at history, all the huge achievements of mankind whether it’s building the pyramids or landing on the moon, have been based not on individual abilities, but on this ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. We humans can work together even though we don’t know each other, to create this global exchange of ideas. The very idea of this platform Medium which is a global company which has several different people working is also possible because of the ability of we Humans to cooperate flexibly in large numbers.
So, the next logical question is how are we humans able to cooperate flexibly in large numbers? The answer is our imagination. We can cooperate flexibly with countless numbers of strangers, because we alone, of all the animals on this planet, can create and believe in fictions and fictional stories. And as long as everybody believes in the same fiction, everybody obeys and follows the same rules, the same norms, the same values. To make it simple, take the case of Money it is in fact, the most successful story ever invented and told by humans, because it is the only story everybody believes. Everyone on this planet irrespective of their religious or political views believe in the idea of money.
On a concluding note, we can say that we humans control the world because we live in a dual reality. All other animal species live in an objective reality. Their reality consists of just objective entities, such as rivers, trees, lions, and elephants. We humans, also live in an objective reality and our world, too consists of rivers, trees, lions, and elephants. But over the centuries, we have constructed on top of this objective reality a second layer of fictional reality, a reality made of fictional entities such as societies, corporations, and money. This has made us the most dominant species on the planet such that we control the fate of all other species of animals and the objective entities.
Note — This article is inspired by the works of Jim Holt, SN Goenka, and Yuval Noah Harari.
