this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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I'd say it's not reasonable.
Yes, there's the perception bias that makes absolute evolutionary sense when you deal with the 'lion or stone' problem.
However we as species dominate the planet because we cooperate. Religions, national states etc. are all imaginary sets of rules to ensure even more efficient cooperation in large groups. And here's the problem: If you meet a new person with distrust he/she becomes more likely to actually act according to your expectation. Given that premise is true an individual distrusting each an everyone weakens its evolutionary fitness as it misses out many cooperation opportunities.
Another point: If we want to counter the assholes plan of monoplizing this worlds ressources in their few hands we urgently need to learn cooperation outside of state controles rule sets again... this sentiment is one of the core problems why the US is just taking Trumps shit and its population is far away from taking action: They're devided and told to not trust anyone anymore. On this basis no revolution can be build.
These are valid points. Cooperative groups outcompete non-cooperative groups and humans have evolved around that. But that aspect of human nature evolved in a radically different context to the modern world. Cooperation evolved when humans lived in small groups at the scale where everyone knew each other and "bad" actions were always known about by everyone in the group and usually punished/discouraged in some way. People outside that group were always viewed with suspicion and wariness. The human brain is hardwired to identify and categorise everyone into "us" or "them" groups.
When human groups grew to the size where it was normal to interact with strangers then that radically changed the way that human cooperation had to work, the rules are very different than the ones we originally evolved with. As you said, organised religion and governance specifically grew out of the need to manage this. In a large society with ubiquitous anonymity, it is much more feasible to be non-cooperative and still be successful in an evolutionary sense (i.e. have plenty of surviving offspring). Modern human societies, with specialisation of labour and market economies, enable this and I think can be argued even encourage "bad"/non-cooperative behaviour in many ways.
I completely agree. But it's difficult, because forming trust with a bunch of strangers goes against human nature. You need to find a way to get people's brains to identify those strangers as an "us" instead of a "them".