Shared experience gives rise to common language that signifies friendship and the ability to work together. Common language allows for the creation of a common paradigm, where meanings are shared and informed by common experience – think memes. The ability to do work creates the potential for good or bad, relative to one’s point of view, but then also in the ultimate, progressive sense.
Sharing experiences leads to sharing meanings, creating the ability to communicate on a very intimate level, cementing friendship and the work towards common goals. If there was no intent to work together or develop friendship, an intricate and developed language would not be necessary. Communication would occur through much more aggressive means, as it still often does today.
Language evolved because humans living in close proximity together shared much the same experience and realized they could achieve more by working together. There was selection pressure for it. And the whole situation we have developed from there.
The creation of a common paradigm through language was probably the most important thing that ever happened to humanity. The ability to cooperate and coordinate that language allowed for transformed us from small groups of relatively low-level predators into nations and countries of apex predators in every regard. It is nothing for us to extinguish species, whether from hunting or disregard. Hell, we may even kill ourselves now! No other species has ever reached such auspicious heights.
However, there is a downside to this. In many ways, we have come to prey on each other. There has always been jostling between groups for resources. For whatever reasons, groups seem to have trouble cooperating beyond a certain number or threshold– read: many reasons. ALL the reasons we like to disagree.
Our ability to cooperate in numbers has always been the limiting factor in our ability to progress – individuals competing for resources became tribes competing for resources became kingdoms became countries became geopolitical blocks. Each boundary is defined by an arbitrary, self-defined threshold. It’s really quite fascinating, the study of human progress and development. Of course, within each unit there is competing for resources – there may be 3 guys on the team competing to be quarterback, but at the end of the day their team is competing against the other teams. With the world becoming increasingly inter-connected, more and more they are competing directly with all the other team’s quarterbacks as well.
Generally the groups are organized to compete with each other, until one group finds a way to cooperate with more people, forcing the rest to do so, in order to maintain their competitive status. An evolutionary pressure for forced collaboration in a competitive backdrop, or environment. It is important to remember that the competitive nature is driven by scarcity of resources, yet historically the best way to increase the resources available to any group has been through cooperation – trade and treaties. This is true on both micro and macro scales – whether it is labourers banding together in unions, different political parties or constituents working together to form a majority or NAFTA and NATO.
We are entering into an age where scarcity no longer has to be the main determinant for human behaviour. Technology and cooperation has progressed to a point where we could provide for a majority of humanity’s needs, if we were more mindful of our consumption. Of course, this is a tricky problem to solve; consumption drives economies, giving people jobs and a means to gain enough money to provide for their family. But as long as we are consuming for the sake of consuming, with no real end-goal in mind, we will maintain the conditions of scarcity. The desire to hold back from progress, to maintain the status quo, reflects a lack of confidence.
Throw something in the air and pay attention to its flight path. Humanity is constantly at the part right before the apex, teetering on slowing down and reaching a peak. We peaked once, in the Roman empire, and it took hundreds of years to make up the ground we lost in the following downfall before we could catch ourselves and make true progress again in the Renaissance. Our ability to see past our immediate selves, to cooperate and form alliances, bonds, with each other is what propels the bond upwards. We will transform the conditions of scarcity into abundance only by furthering the degree to which we work together; by advancing our common paradigm even further together.
Bringing it back to language, our ability to do this will be limited to our ability to conceive of different potential solutions and systems. Our ability to conceive is limited to the range of concepts that we know or can infer, which are all defined meticulously by language. The language we use in the stories we tell ourselves informs our beliefs and our perspectives on the world, having hugely tangible impacts from a pragmatic point of view. This is why education is crucial to progress – you need to give people the tools to believe a better future is possible in order for them to work to make a better future real.
It’s too bad we have also tended to take the competitive and scarcity-based approach to education… but we are slowly seeing the tides start to change with that too, with the amount of resources online and how easy it is to teach yourself how to do things and inform yourself on subjects for free. It will be a truly marvelous day all the paywalls on scientific knowledge come down; it will trigger a huge wave in human potential and progress, as the average useful output of individuals rapidly explodes. But again, we run into the problems of economy…not quite post-scarcity yet, but we will get there. Unless we get wiped out by the great filter first. Yet another reason why partisan politics is terrible!