Individual Stage 02/12/20
Modern human instinctive behavior reflects billions of years of selective breeding governed by survival. Humanity's history and future can be organized neatly in stages of growing cooperation. Before our ancient ancestors started cooperating with each other adults competed with everyone and everything else for survival in the anarchy of the Individual stage.
INTRODUCTION
Of the eight stages of social evolution, the Individual stage precedes social behavior being based on lethal competition and involving no sustained cooperative behavior between adults.
For billions of years our ancient ancestors, like most life on Earth today, lived in a constant lethal competition for survival. This is the pre-social or Individual stage where there is no sustained cooperation between adults at all. These instinctive behaviors were bred into our DNA then and appear in modern societies today. It was only a few million years ago that our ancient ancestors began to cooperate with each other in early social behavior. In the Individual stage lie the origins of our least desirable instinctive behaviors.
Everywhere we look in nature, in life, we can see that the dominant survival strategy is lethal competition between individual organisms. They are all competing for survival resources. The winners survive long enough to reproduce and pass their genes to the next generation. The losers get recycled. This competition for life itself is pretty clear in the conflict between predators and prey. It is less clear but no less lethal in the subtle survival struggle among plants and herbivores for life sustaining resources. This long standing competition to determine the most viable organisms and species ultimately gave us the biggest, strongest group of life forms ever: the dinosaurs.
Since the beginning of life on this planet, the priorities have been the survival of individual organisms, species and life overall. For billions of years our ancient ancestors were selectively bred for instincts that supported their survival. Individual stage survival is a violent, brutal process. Every living being competes lethally with other beings to stay alive. The Individual stage of behavior precedes social behavior and extends from the dawn of life to today. After billions of years its instincts survive in our DNA.
If a society is a group of adults in sustained cooperation then the Individual stage of social evolution is not a social stage at all. The Individual stage is what came before society.
It is critical to understand this pre-social survival stage because its behaviors have been selectively bred into our DNA for billions of years. These competitive instincts are the original source of violence and other anti-social behavior. In spite of this, these instincts can contribute to the success of any society when properly restricted and managed, when subordinate to the primary society. Examples of supportive Individual stage behavior would include any one on one contest. Examples of Individual stage behaviors toxic to cooperative societies would include violence, stealing, bullying and neglecting. Toxic Individual stage instincts do provide an important function as a mechanism for recycling failing societies.
PRIMARY BEHAVIORS
The primary behavior of our most ancient ancestors seems to be quite similar to most life on earth: everybody for themselves! This is a pre-social stage since there is no sustained cooperation between adults. These instincts go all the way back to the earliest life on earth, billions of years ago and we all have residuals of them in our DNA.
Toward the end of the Individual stage our ancient ancestors were a very minor species since they were physically weak and their principal defense seems to have been climbing trees. This may be why many of us feel such an attraction to being around trees. It is comforting to know that we have many choices to climb away from danger. For our ancient ancestors it was the closest thing they had to safety.
Even though they were weak and slow, the strongest and the fastest were more likely to live long enough to breed children who lived long enough to breed children – long enough to pass on their genes. The stronger could take food from the weaker. The faster could leave the slower behind to distract predators. The species barely survived as a selection of the strongest. Sharing and cooperation between adults were unknown.
Universal behaviors in the Individual stage probably included the origins of hoarding (take as much as you could when there was food) and vandalism (destroy anyone else's cache of food after you ate all you could; “destroy anything that isn't mine” hurts the competition.)
Taking is part of predation and the opposite of sharing. Taking food from a weaker being was easier than getting your own. Taking life from a another animal keeps a predator alive. The universal instinct to take may go back to the first plant stealing sunlight from a weaker plant.
Bullying is taking something you don't need from another. It is part of the culling process and part of the survival of the strongest process. It starts in childhood and is a universal behavior if not restrained by training.
REVERSION
Whenever modern humans are extremely frightened or have no identification with those around them or have no trust at all or are just truly desperate they can abandon social behavior and revert to the primary Individual stage of basic, individual survival. Panic is an example of this. “Every man for themselves” and “don't panic” are cliches. The Individual stage reflexes also provide a deep safety net for the survival of the human species in the event of catastrophic social failure. It would be our first and last chance at surviving as a species.
ORIGIN OF SOCIETY
It seems like the origins of cooperation and social behavior fall in the midst of the violence of the Individual stage. It happened when a parent stayed with her child or brood rather than abandoning it. This simple behavior seems to be the rooting of cooperation, conformity, tradition, retained knowledge, intelligence and society itself. Even if the parent did nothing more than wait for the child to follow, the child's survival would be strongly improved by imitating what the parent did. Without that guidance young would have to start from only their own instincts and figure everything out on their own. The better they were at learning from the parent (INTELLIGENCE) the more likely their genes were to survive. The more likely the child was to survive (EVOLUTION) the more likely the parent's genes were to be passed on reinforcing the parenting behavior. When these children allowed their own children to follow them around, they were not only passing on what they had learned in their lives but what they had learned from their parent and tradition (KNOWLEDGE) was initiated. As the individual parents (if there were two parents it would be a Family stage society) learned to feed and protect their children the survival of their genes was enhanced again. This also provided the bridge to the Family stage when the other parent cooperated with the single parent.
INDIRECT SURVIVAL BENEFITS
Every action taken in the Individual stage contributes to the survival of the individual organism except for reproduction. The process of reproduction takes energy and attention away from immediate survival. In return the process supports the survival of the individual's genes and the species. There are species who mate and then die. There are even species where the mating process is lethal for the male.
When adults cooperate with their children to reach self-sufficiency, the survival of their genes and their species is enhanced. The parent in this behavior is usually the female. Although parenting lowers the survivability of the adult as they have to devote energy to feeding and protecting children, the increased likelihood that the children will live long enough to reproduce provides a net survival benefit. Even if the parent is less likely to survive the increased viability of the children raises the likelihood that the parent's genes will survive.
There seem to be two basic benefits from parented children. One is that parented children can afford longer and more complex physical and mental development. The second benefit is that children raised around an adult can imitate the adult's behaviors. They don't have to start learning how to survive from just their instincts. This encourages the development of intelligence. Furthermore, the parent's behavior reflects what they learned in their life time plus what they learned as a child from their parent. Passing on retained knowledge seems to be the origin of tradition (knowledge retained from one generation to the next) and one of the essential elements in humanity's rise from a marginal species to a dominant species.
PROGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR
A society advances from one primary stage to another thorough bridging behaviors.
There likely were two bridges here. One was the cooperative relationship between the mother and her children. That behavior was essential for the survival of the species and it may have provided the roots of all following cooperation.
The second bridge was when a male stayed with the female after impregnation rather than wandering off. Although they were probably not conscious of it, the two of them together had a significantly better chance at surviving and a much better chance of their offspring surviving to create more offspring. This was likely the first committed social behavior our distant ancestors exhibited and it clearly worked. Their genes prospered. This behavior was likely an offshoot of the relationship between a male child and his mother. That cooperation experience could carry forward to his relationship with a mate.
MODERN IMPACT
In modern societies Individual stage behaviors make many contributions. The violence is carefully restricted but heavily regulated competition is often used in the same way nature uses unregulated competition: it is a grand laboratory of experimentation. When we are not sure of methods, tactics or even goals we encourage competitions to clarify them. Rules and umpires support regulated competitions which motivate people to make their best efforts. Casual regulated competitions provide recreational activities.
Lethal competition is limited to armed forces and law enforcement but it is still carefully regulated.
When people lose all faith in their society and future they tend to regress into the unregulated lethal competition of mobs and rioting. Avoiding and suppressing such behavior is the goal of all government.