Evolving Beyond Man's Predatory Instincts

This post was inspired by a comment I posted on a prominent steemian's blog a few weeks ago. In their video they were positing the idea that we are like gazelle, and that to find success you should be a lion. An analogy that is limited in its very nature of classifying humans in such narrow terms as either predator or prey. After all, how does the lion think?

Does the lion spend days/weeks/years building strategies to trap and limit the pray to build a vast store of carcasses that it could never eat in a million years?

Does the lion withhold resources from the hyena pack to maintain a position of dominance over the whole prairie?

A lion understands instinctively how to hunt and maintain balance in its environment. All of the traits I listed above are human predatory behavior. Humans are both a social animal and a predatory one - with the lack of any other creatures to focus that predatory instinct on, we now turn it on each other.

The validity of this type of metaphor, that places humans in a position of a predator or prey animal is far too simplistic. I've seen that type of 'so called' motivational writing all over the internet for a long time and it is providing simple concepts of success and failure that don't address the inherent complexity of the human condition, usually with the writer painting themselves as a lion who has all the answers of how you can be one.

The car, the house, the job, the 401K, the crypto cash stack, the motivational blog, the Instagram fame... all someone's definition of success.

But there are other definitions; those who tread lightly upon this planet and do NO harm, that is a successful existence IMO. Someone who limits their impact upon this planet, at this point in time when it is becoming increasingly obvious that we are destroying it, is a successful modern human being.

You can not take your wealth with you, and more importantly your achievements mean nothing unless they improve things for more people than just you. And, unless they improve things without harming on the flip side of the coin. This is no more evident than in big business.

You will often hear the Bezos' of this world say things like 'I create jobs and industry where before there was none. I put food in peoples mouths.'

Sure, at the cost of keeping people in poverty through the process of sourcing cheap foreign labor to maximize cost savings. The currency of misery is always the last thing people like that want to talk about.

Here's the thing. The reality is, if you are going to believe the narrative of someone telling you about what success is, you are buying into their story. Similarly, people buy into society's idea of success, or those people around them, or their family... whoever is selling you their idea of success, they will all tell you that this is reality.

Intelligence is the key out of this uroboros of self-destruction that we, as a species, perpetuate. Our continued repeating of history, stems not from an immutable compulsion of nature - as some philosophers would have it - but from humans trying to act as predatory animals in a world where the only prey we haven't completely subdued is our fellow human beings. This is why we war.

Yet, it's a business that some humans thrive on, and it all comes down to competition, and our need for competition due to our defunct human predatory nature.

As with the lion and the gazelle analogy which is limited by its very nature as it buys into only what has gone before, and not what we have the potential to ultimately BE.

We often compete because that is our PAST instinctual behavior. Thinking outside of this box is essential for us as a species to find an evolution of thought, which is the only way to evolve the human animal moving forwards.

Decentralization and crypto gives us a chance at a different dynamic, it is still a competitive dynamic, but it has the potential to remove a certain amount of the negative influence of power.

Decentralization has the potential to remove the tools that humans use to steer everything they build toward their own self interest, including political structures. I don't care if this would cause chaos in the short term as the long term is much more important. Changing behaviors on a global scale is the only thing that will save us, and our planet, from ourselves. I think that decentralization, and the technologies that emerge from it, could be a vehicle to achieve fundamental evolutionary change.

I guess what I'm trying to say in this blog is.... think for yourself. Don't believe someone else's definitions of what success is and forge your own path.