From The Descent of Man by Charles Darwin:
It has often been assumed that animals were in the first place rendered social and that they feel as a consequence uncomfortable when separated from each other and comfortable whilst together but it is a more probably view that there sensations were first developed in order that those animals which would profit by living in society, should be induced to live together. In the same meaner, as the sense of hunger and the pleasure of eating were, no doubt, first acquired in order to induce animals to eat. The feeling of pleasure from society is probably an extension of the parental or filial affections; and this extension may be in chief part attributed to natural selection, but perhaps in part to mere habit. For those animals which were benefited by living in close association, the individuals which took the greatest pleasure in society would best escape various dangers; whilst those that cared least for their comrades and lived solitary would perish in greater numbers. With respect to the origin of the parental and filial affections, which apparently lie at the basis for the social affections, it is hopeless to speculate; but we may infer that they have been to a large extent gained through natural selection. So it has almost certainly been with the unusual and opposite feeling of hatred between the nearest relations, as with the worker-bees which kill their brother-drones, and with the queen-bees which kill their daughter-queens; the desire to destroy, instead of loving, their nearest relations having been here of service to the community.
And from The Fatal Conceit by Friedrich Hayek:
Part of our present difficult is that we must constantly adjust our lives, our thoughts and our emotions, in order to live simultaneously within different kinds of orders according to different rules. If we were to apply the rules of the micro-cosmos (i.e. of the small band or troop, or of, say, our families) to the macro-cosmos (our wider civilization), as our instincts and sentimental yearnings often make us wish to do, we would destroy it (emphasis original).
The human animal has by the process of natural selection been crafted, so to speak, by the forces of evolution to live within a close society so that each individual may benefit from cooperation with others in that society. Over the process of human natural history, the societies in which individuals interact with have become ever more complex and have involved individuals cooperating with others that they may not even meet in the course of their lives. This has culminated in the modern social order defined by the competitive markets, what Hayek refers to in The Fatal Conceit as the “Extended Order.”
Man may be selected for a social existence, but his instincts are now no longer in sync with the rules now demanded for cooperation in the extended order. Cultural evolution has been the driving force of human existence over the past twenty thousand years and, especially within the last thousand years, the demands of culture are now in conflict with instinct. I could easily go on about how each human being must moderate the darker side of human nature in order to co-exist with their fellow human beings, but that was also true in the case of cooperation in the tribe just as it is true in the case of cooperation in the extended order, but I won't.
The far more pertinent conflict between instinct and the rules of conduct necessary for the extended order is the conflict between our instincts for altruism and the demands of impersonal cooperation. Within the setting of the tribe, or even the micro-cosmoi of modern society, each human being knows those that they cooperate personally, they know their needs and desires, and thus know how to act in order to best advance their chosen ends. This is simply not the case with cooperation in the extended order, there human beings cooperate with other human beings on the other side of the planet on a daily basis when they buy goods fabricated in Thailand or China. It is simply impossible for each person to personally be acquainted with each person that they cooperate with on a daily basis, let alone know how to directly advance the goals those people strive after. Within this environment, altruism cannot be a guiding rule of conduct because altruism relies on the altruist knowing how to better the lives of the people they held. When they cannot know how to better their lives, then their altruistic act may actually do more harm than good.
Within the extended order, social cooperation on the market has allowed individuals to condition their own actions on the desired ends of other people by the price-mechanisms. This impersonal manner of coordinating action has proven itself to be the most effective means of achieving human prosperity, and yet we must accept that this cultural rule of conduct is fundamentally alien to human beings. We see this every time that someone complains about a factory in China or any other perceived distributional error in capitalism: people want to supplant an order based on an abstract principle not designed by the human mind, the market-process, with a specific order designed by the human mind to advance the ends of those in question. However, to do so would mean to slowly dissolve the rules of conduct that make possible the extended order.
The human being is a social animal, but not all societies are the same. As Darwin noted, the instincts of man have been chosen for a society in which the rule of conduct was to help other people and in which the individual had the knowledge to successfully directly work towards the well-being of those he cooperated with. However, society has since changed while man's instincts have remained constant. In a world in which each person works towards the well-beings of others by maximizing their own personal profits, human instincts are a force which, if not kept in check, could easily rend that system of cooperation to pieces.
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