I’m pretty sure this varies substantially depending on context—in contexts that demand internal coordination on simulacrum level 1 (e.g. a marginal agricultural community, or a hunting or raiding party, or a low-margin business in a very competitive domain), people often do succeed at putting the shared enterprise ahead of their egos.
This may be true—desperation encourages in-group cooperation (possibly with increased out-group competition) and wealth enables more visible social competition. Or it may be a myth, and there’s just different forms of domination and information obfuscation in pursuit of power, based on different resources and luxuries to be competed over. We don’t have much evidence either way of daily life in pre-literate societies (or illiterate subgroups within technically-literate “civilizations”).
We do know that groups of apes have many of the same behaviors we’re calling “werewolf”, which is some indication that it’s baked in rather than contextual.
I’m pretty sure this varies substantially depending on context—in contexts that demand internal coordination on simulacrum level 1 (e.g. a marginal agricultural community, or a hunting or raiding party, or a low-margin business in a very competitive domain), people often do succeed at putting the shared enterprise ahead of their egos.
This may be true—desperation encourages in-group cooperation (possibly with increased out-group competition) and wealth enables more visible social competition. Or it may be a myth, and there’s just different forms of domination and information obfuscation in pursuit of power, based on different resources and luxuries to be competed over. We don’t have much evidence either way of daily life in pre-literate societies (or illiterate subgroups within technically-literate “civilizations”).
We do know that groups of apes have many of the same behaviors we’re calling “werewolf”, which is some indication that it’s baked in rather than contextual.