The undomestication of humans

Why are we so afraid? Why are we so paranoid about not fitting in, not belonging? Sure, millions of years of evolution proved that staying with the “tribe” will dramatically increase your chances of survival (without them, you could have quickly become dinner for some other predator). But why are we still doing it?

I was watching a short interview with Oliver Sacks, and he mentioned the same condition. The bottom line was this: this condition in humans is a relic from fish (something to do with breathing underwater, which uses three types of muscles in the equivalent of mouth, neck, and lungs). The interesting part is how many leftovers like these we have from previous stages of evolution. We are not talking 10,000 years or 40,000 years of communal living of the homo sapiens, but millions or ten, hundreds of millions of years as primitive aquatic mammals. Which explains why we have so hard time changing anything: Our biology doesn’t help our psychology.

Which also explains why we are going backward in time. As technology advances, our tribal behavior regresses by hundreds or thousands of years. We don’t understand technology. We can’t really grasp it — at least, not at the pace fed to us. So, we go back to what we know, what we are familiar with. And what we are familiar with is the “stuff” we used for very long periods of time, way way back when. The individual unconscious reverts back to things it was trained for many years by the collective unconscious: tribal behavior that didn’t change.

Domestication to the max.