The chimera of altruism

By FERNANDO ALVAREZ
It may well be that, as stated by Nicholas Humphrey, we, human beings, are just objects to each other and subjects endowed with a conscience only for ourselves. What is in each person's mind is not forefront in the minds of others, and we only communicate through narrow gateways.
Evolution has installed in us some privileged bridges such as empathy, which underpin our shared lives. The brain, upon reaching an advanced evolutionary stage, created language, which is a gigantic labelling system for objects in the world around us, used with varying degrees of fortune. There are very precise words such as winning or losing and other less effective words such as inflation and corruption. On the island of Bali there still exists a very primitive system for labelling people's children, which, instead of a giving a child a chosen name, use birthing orders.
Language evolved, allowing us to talk about things that are distant in time, either in the past or towards the future. An additional evolutionary step came with the appearance of fiction, allowing us to create shared stories, tales and myths, and consequently collaborate with great masses of strangers and fans of the same myth (Yuval Noah Harari). An example of collaboration around a shared myth could include the final of the Champions League (Real Madrid-Atlético de Madrid) which was held in Milan (Italy) in 2016, and was watched by 11,642,000 viewers in Spain, evidently strangers to each other.
In addition to allowing us to enjoy football, the development of the cerebral neocortex has also given rise to something, which in general disgusts and tires us and which has resulted in a technological civilization, such as abstract thinking, which we can see working every day in our individual brains.
Since every one of us is a subject of oneself and an object to all others, there is a somatic state of loneliness that lurks within throughout our entire existence. This is how Orhan Pamuk puts it to us in The Museum of Innocence: "This is how we discovered instinctively that, in order to feel more deeply the pleasure that would unite us, we should all live it by ourselves; while on the one hand we embraced each other with force, without compassion, even with thirst, on the other hand we began to use each other for our own pleasure ".
Each of our brains carries a thorough and detailed accounting plan, in which there are open individualized accounts for each of the objects we interact with. A standard accounting plan will generally have, by way of example, an account for each of our parents, for our spouse, for each of our children, our boss, co-workers, mother-in-law, brother-in-laws, the president of the government, and possibly even our pets. In other words, up to a maximum of 150 accounts, which seems to be the number of individual contacts that we can control at the current technological level.
At the end of each day, the mood in which each subject will go to bed with will depend on the weighted sum of the positive or negative balances that he/she has had with each of the objects he/she has interacted with. A positive balance (receiving more than giving) leads to a good mood, and a negative balance takes us to bed full of bitterness. Getting away with being a thief, a fraudster, a rapist, or exceeding speed limits on the road, or collecting unemployment benefits without being entitled to them, produces a pleasant feeling at the end of the day, finishing the day with a positive balance in the I win/I lose accounting system; a traffic ticket will usually have the opposite effect.
Due to evolutionary pressure, human accounting has an important asymmetric bias; losses weigh more than profits. The organisms that responded most reactively to the threat of losing, rather than the opportunity to win, are those that have survived (Daniel Kahneman). We, human beings, are amongst these survivors. This bias determines that, in any long-term relationship (marriage, children, siblings, partners, friends), the cumulative balance appears tendentially negative for all participants.
Were a hypothetical external auditor to carry out a comprehensive accounting of the losses and gains of a marriage over a lifetime, and conclude that the result had been balanced for each of the spouses, they would be surprised to see that, in the individual accounts of each spouse, the result would be loss in both cases, due to the differential value between losses (greater value) and gains (lower value). This cognitive bias, which leads us to accumulate bitterness and resentment, is nevertheless likely to have had important advantages in crowning us as kings of planet earth.
Penny Skipins, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology of Human Origins at the University of York, makes a suggestive hypothesis about the unexplained speed with which humans have colonized the globe from a certain point that began 100,000 years ago. According to Skipins, from this time on, the evolution of the human mind has reached a high level of development leading to the identifying and punishing of those who cheat in the group. As a consequence of these new skills, the level of collaboration of tribal groups increased. But what determined the rapidity of the colonization of new empty lands was the inability to maintain long-term pacts within the hunter-gatherer groups, with betrayal becoming common within the small human tribes of the time. Faced with the inability to solve internal conflicts, the alternative was emigration to, and colonization of new lands. We dislike losing much more than we like winning, and act influenced by the immediate emotional impact of gains or losses, without taking into account medium and long term consequences.
This is why, from Skipins' hypothesis, it can be deduced that the groups of hunter-gatherers were destined to be in conflict, and that, just as occurs nowadays, long-term relationships of any kind, as opposed to short term ones, tend to be a chimera. Today, in Western countries with consolidated democracies, divorce rates exceed 60%. After all, our DNA, which is responsible for creating our brain, continues to think that we live in a savanna and that we are hunter-gatherers. The fact that we cannot stand each other must be something positive in evolutionary terms, something that our genes (our masters) are revealing to us in chapters. One of the most elegant warnings formulated by our genes uses Miss Blanche DuBois as spokesperson: "Whoever you are, I have always relied on the goodness of strangers".