Fighting the Hydra - In the beginning
The origins of our behavior
Before going any further, it is important to be clear about the starting point for everything that I will be discussing later. The views I have developed did not begin with sociology, economics, or political theory. They began with biology. I do not believe humans were divinely created or somehow escaped evolution. I do believe that we are but one of many primate species that have survived to this point through adaptation, cooperation, competition, and violence. Strip away our technology, customs, and toys, and what remains is a naked ape, shaped by pressures that reward survival and reproduction above all else.
As I discussed in my post announcing this series, I believe that most of humanity does not understand what actually drives the evolution of our societies or what lies behind the major events and trends we experience or see repeated throughout history. We remain focused on leaders, movements, and conflicts while largely ignoring the deeper forces that determine why those leaders emerge, why those movements resonate, and why certain conflicts repeat across time and place. We focus on the players and miss the meaning of the play itself.
The foundation for my viewpoint is simple. All human behavior, whether expressed individually or collectively, is an extension of our evolutionary inheritance. We are fundamentally social, tribal animals with large brains and fragile bodies, shaped by millions of years of evolutionary selection that favored cooperation within groups, competition between groups, sensitivity to status, and a propensity for violence to defend and advance our interests. Modern language, morality, and institutions all sit on top of this inheritance, but they do not replace it. Instead, they channel it.
A useful shorthand for these pressures is what I call the four F’s: fighting, fleeing, food, and fucking. They describe the basic problems any organism must solve to persist long enough to reproduce, and they shaped the structure of the human nervous system long before abstract reasoning or ethical reflection came about.
Fighting and fleeing describe the response to a threat. When danger appears, organisms must either confront it or escape it, and evolution favored those that could decide quickly. In humans, this circuitry still dominates our behavior under stress. The threats are no longer usually physical, but the brain does not make a clean distinction between physical danger and social threat. Challenges to status, belonging, security, or identity still activate the same fight or flight mechanisms. The result is behavior that feels certain and justified from the inside, even when it is reactive, defensive, or disproportionate. Reason, if it arrives at all, often arrives later, serving to explain the decisions our instincts have already made. Humans are the ultimate storytellers, and we tell ourselves the biggest whoppers to justify our own behavior.
Food represents the pressure to secure the resources we need to survive. For most of human history, this was the central problem of daily life, and still is for a large part of the world’s population. It shaped migration, cooperation, hierarchy, and conflict, and continues to do so. While modern societies have insulated many people from direct scarcity, the instinct remains intact. It now expresses itself through accumulation/hoarding, conspicuous consumption, anxiety about loss, and heightened sensitivity to perceived unfairness. Our environment has changed, but the machinery within us has not.
Fucking is the reproductive drive in its most direct form. It governs attraction, mate selection, competition, signaling, and status. Across social species, access to mates is tightly linked to the individual’s position within the group, and humans follow the same pattern. Ambition, dominance, display, and alliance-building are inseparable from reproductive incentives, even when they are disguised as achievement, virtue, or ideology. Cultural rules may constrain behavior, but they do not eliminate the underlying drive. From Solomon’s 1,000 wives and concubines to tech billionaires’ hoards of children from multiple women, not much has changed in human behavior. Men who can afford to will do their best to spread their genetic legacy.
The point of starting here is not to reduce human life to something crude or simplistic. It is to establish a clear baseline. However complex modern society becomes, human behavior is still shaped by these pressures from our basic biology. What has changed is not what drives us, but the number of ways those drives can express themselves. Modern life multiplies the outlets, amplifies the consequences, and obscures the origins, which makes the patterns harder to recognize even as they become more powerful. Any serious attempt to understand how societies evolve or what drives events has to begin with this reality rather than pretending we are not the animals we are at heart.