Going Mad (Food Poisoning for Thought Reprint)

(*Reprinted from Food Poisoning for Thought as part my ongoing process to unify my web presence.*)

I want to argue that civilization is the primary cause of depression and mental illness today.

My argument stems from an assertion I'll make which claims civilization is at odds with how the human brain is hardwired.

Some background. The human species adapted itself to a hunter gatherer lifestyle over one hundred thousand years ago.

Before becoming hunters however, humans were prey. And even as hunters, humans had their own predators.

Both before and after adapting to a hunter gatherer lifestyle, the primary survival strategy of our species was social cooperation.

A good description for humans through much of our existence would be a social primate sitting in upper middle of the food chain.

This is still who we are. Evolution shaped us over two hundred thousand years as homo sapiens alone. Ten thousand years of civilization is a coffee break by comparison.

We are limited by the adaptations provided by natural selection. We are limited in our thinking by the physical realities of our brains.

Civilization is constructed to suit the needs of civilization, civilization acts like a super organism, much like a bee hive or anthill, and thinks of individual humans as resources to be used and as cells of the civilizational body.

This is not to say civilization is bad. But it does mean civilization is not designed for or interested in meeting human needs any more than a beekeeper is in meeting the needs of her bees. That is, as a secondary concern addressed only so far as necessary to keep them productive.

Civilization then obviously will only grudgingly adapt to our needs and thus we are tasked with adapting ourselves to civilization. Which poses a problem.

Civilization is an experiment in scale, growth is a literal measure of success. And yet the human mind is wired to empathize with only one to two hundred people. Anyone else is a stranger, registering in our ancestral prey mind as a possible predator.

To counter this, civilization has developed the rule of law, which is used to persuade humans that strangers are not a threat and can be ignored while you do your work growing civilization.

Religion is invoked to add a moral story driven reason to follow the rule of law. Love thy neighbor etc... This effectively hacks our minds. We are wired to think in stories after all.

But we are still prey living in midst of millions of potential predators. And we are social creatures hardwired for small scale tribal societies and the egalitarianism necessary to run such societies.

But modern civilization quickly moved from a scale of thousands to millions and the systems of a small scale egalitarian tribe simply didn't work in this scale. Hierarchies were established. Kings and presidents appeared along with chains of command and cults to experts.

These experts act in our stead. And as a result, civilization leaves us as prey in a sea potential predators dependent upon faith in the rule of law to protect us and bereft of our power to enforce any change or administer any discipline (which has been passed on to those various experts).

Is it any wonder we're drowning in mental illness?