Human Beings: A Story
A brief tale about our roots, where things went wrong, our current awakening, how we can fix absolutely everything, if we can find the courage to rise to the challenge, and what that future might look like.
Edenic Origins
For most of human history, we have lived in close-knit communities of related families. We hunted, gathered and reproduced prodigiously, relying on cooperation for all of it in order to thrive together in a hostile world. We did these things because we understood that if we didn’t, we wouldn’t survive from threats we didn’t yet understand but always seemed to encounter, regardless.
Trust—the stitching together of tangled relationships within each community—was the glue that cemented our well-being. And our ability to confer trust had limits, because trust flowed from feelings of intimacy, and intimacy could only be built and maintained among so many people.
Today we refer to that limit as Dunbar’s Number, and that number tops out at around 150 human beings.
The Fall From Grace
Then, 10,000 or so years ago, a funny thing happened. A few inspired humans, driven by the discovery that they could bend Nature…
