Summary:
• Many people secretly struggle with self-hatred—they hide it behind an outer identity made of appearances, accomplishments, and possessions. Civilization often worsens this problem by weakening the unconditional love and emotional support that humans once depended on.
• Before civilization, humans lived in small hunter-gatherer tribes where survival required close cooperation, selfless devotion, and unconditional love. Life was difficult and dangerous, but most humans were probably emotionally healthy because they always felt emotionally supported and needed.
• In comparison to the millions of years of evolution, civilization is extremely recent. So recent that our emotional instincts as a species have not had enough time to adapt to the artificial environment that we call civilization. The invention of farming, permanent settlements, and economic competition transformed how we lived: people began judging themselves and judging others based upon achievements, status, and material success. That made love increasingly conditional, causing many people to suppress their natural instincts for compassion.
• Civilization’s demands often encourage anxiety, depression, addiction, and a constant chase for stimulation or status. Many people today do not realize that their lack of inner contentment is unnatural, caused by living in an environment that evolution did not prepare us for. Civilization provides physical comfort, but it does not necessarily provide emotional health.
• Conditional self-love is based on the ego; it cannot create lasting happiness. Conditional self-love is a form of self-bribery based on appearance, success, or status. By contrast, people who find inner peace tend to define happiness as contentment and love rather than as amusements and material possessions. True self love must be unconditional.
• Spiritual teachers throughout history have warned us against worshipping materialism. They have urged us to practice love, forgiveness, and compassion. Civilization cannot fix its own problems. Only we as people can do that, acting with love, forgiveness, and responsibility.
Please try this experiment. Stand in front of a mirror and then, in your mind, put aside all of your accomplishments, your appearance, and everything that you admire about yourself and are proud of. Now you see only yourself—with nothing. As you look at yourself in the mirror, say to yourself, out loud, “I love you, I love myself!”
A great many people struggle to say this to themselves because they actually hate themselves. Not even their closest friends and relatives may know how much self-hatred they possess. They hide their self-hatred behind a carefully crafted self-identity which they present to others. That self-identity is an outer image, sort of a mask in the form of behaviors, appearances, and possessions. But behind the mask is self-hatred, and it affects the person’s daily decisions, priorities, and relationships.
Now imagine that you were born into a natural environment full of dangers. Those dangers could severely sicken you, or injure you, or even kill you. Imagine, also, that you were raised by a family as large as a tribe. Imagine that every member of your large family knows you and all of them love you—unconditionally. They accept you the way you are, totally, despite all of your flaws and failings. They love you, you love them, and everyone in the tribe loves everyone else. They love each other because they need each other, and they need each other because they love each other.
Now ask yourself, if you were raised in that extreme environment and if you received that much unconditional love and total acceptance, would you be the same person that you are today? If not, would your emotional and psychological health be better than it is today?
If you believe that your emotional and psychological health would be better, then your life today has suffered what is wrong with civilization. Civilization did not invent selfishness, or loneliness, lying, greed, theft, violence, bullying, betrayal, misogyny, bigotry, racism, child abuse, and neglect. But thousands of years of civilization have made these problems worse.
Although many religions have a story of Creation, there is no religion that teaches that everything that we associate with civilization—including farms, houses, towns, and cities—already existed before humans existed. Humans invented civilization. As a result, civilization includes the mistakes and misunderstandings of countless human lives across thousands of years as people tried to make civilization perform in ways that they wanted.
Before civilization, our early ancestors, thousands of generations of them, evolved in a natural environment very different from how most of us live today. They lived in what we now call hunter-gatherer societies because, for food, most human males hunted animals while most human females gathered fruits and vegetables. Their natural environment included constant risks to their lives, including the risk of starvation. Farming did not exist yet, and so our early ancestors constantly migrated in search of new lands to hunt animals and for more fruits and vegetables. Selfless cooperation was essential because nobody could survive without help. As a result, our ancestors evolved very strong instincts of love and intimacy so that together, as families and tribes, they could survive. Everyone needed enormous emotional support—and they received that support from each other. They had each other and they loved each other, unconditionally.
Life before civilization was enormously difficult, but most people were probably emotionally healthy.
Your psychological health is related to your biological health. Your body consists of trillions of tiny cells, each containing biological instructions that make you a human being. Those instructions are your DNA, also called your genes. Their total number is called your genetic code. As a human, your DNA is nearly identical to the DNA of every human who has ever lived. The physical differences between humans are due to only minor differences in their genetic codes. Most of those differences involve a human body’s exterior traits, such as height and skin color. Natural evolution occurs across immense periods of time, typically thousands of generations, as each generation (parents) passes along into the next generation (their children) physical traits and instincts that adapt the descendants to the local environment. The bodies of our ancestors gradually adapted to different local environments. Evolution did not weaken their brains, however. Wherever our ancestors went—migrating across hot deserts, humid jungles, windy prairies, frozen tundra, or huge oceans—they needed to be intelligent to survive. And they were intelligent.
We inherited their intelligence. We also inherited their need for emotional support.
When our ancestors invented farming, they invented civilization. Most anthropologists believe that our ancestors invented farming about 13,000 years ago. That may sound like a long time ago, but 13,000 years covers less than one percent of the roughly six million years of natural evolution of our earliest human-like ancestors, called primates. Our own sub-species of primates, called humans or Homo sapiens, has existed for about 300,000 years. If you could squeeze six million years into a single hour, then humans would emerge only in the last three minutes. Civilization would emerge only in the last eight seconds. In the timeline of natural evolution, human civilization has emerged quite suddenly, even abruptly.
Natural evolution is sometimes called “survival of the fittest,” but the process is so slow that one person’s fitness has no effect on the human species as a whole. The process is so slow that to change the entire human species (not only individuals or groups) takes natural evolution far longer than the entire history of human civilization.
When our ancestors invented civilization, that created a new social environment—an artificial environment. Farming provided humans with enough food to last beyond the next meal, perhaps for months or even longer. To do that, farming required our ancestors to build permanent homes where they could plant crops and care for livestock. People could stop migrating. As food became more plentiful, some people had more time to do activities other than farming. They could make products. They could become craftsmen and artisans, and many did.
Farming did not eliminate all problems, however. Our ancestors faced famine whenever their farms failed. When that happened, they faced a temptation: seize somebody else’s land and food supplies. There is a scientific theory that this was when humans first began to wage war—when men stopped being hunters and became soldiers as well. This theory is somewhat controversial, but it is plausible.
Civilization also created some problems in times of peace. As economic trade emerged, so did economic competition. Competition caused people to become more judgmental. People judged other people (and they judged themselves) based on how well a person can do something, or produce something, or represents something. Those judgments have consequences—because they make basic respect increasingly conditional. That forces love itself to become conditional.
The establishment of the first permanent settlements led to the existence of neighbors. That was a new phenomenon. Earlier, in hunter-gatherer societies, there were no “neighbors”—people living separately within the same community—because everybody migrated together, everybody knew each other intimately, and everybody shared the few resources that each person could find. The physical distance created by houses with closed doors (or even without doors) led to emotional distancing between neighbors, and therefore between people.
Civilization has forced emotional intimacy to compete with image, envy, gossip, and judging people according to their economic value. Today, we live among civilization’s material comforts and conveniences. However, because we live in an artificial environment, the demands of civilization are not always healthy for our emotional and psychological needs. For example, the demands of civilization sometimes cause us to suppress our deepest natural instincts for compassion. Consequently, we sometimes treat unconditional love as naïve, or improper, or even dangerous. This does not mean we should live without civilization, but we need to always remember that what we call civilization does not necessarily encourage love, kindness, and healthy behavior.
People who experience intense fear, depression, and anxiety—usually rooted in self-hatred—tend to define happiness in terms of achievements and enjoying material things. They are emotionally vulnerable to becoming addicted to anything that stimulates them, physically or intellectually. By contrast, people who experience a lasting inner peace tend to define happiness in terms of contentment and love. They can feel happy without constantly trying to collect and possess material things.
When trying to live up to the demands of civilization, perhaps the most difficult challenge every person faces is unconditional self-love. True self-love must be unconditional because conditional love is not pure love. Conditional love is “love” for (actually, an addiction to) a particular condition, such as physical beauty or professional success, but it is not love for the person who possesses that condition. To love someone because that person represents a particular condition is actually a self-deception—because the person is not loved, the condition is loved. Conditional self-love is nothing but a mental bribe, extorted from yourself to bribe yourself, trying to compensate for your self-hatred in exchange for amusements, achievements, appearance, or status. But it is not lasting happiness because it is not permanent contentment. It is only a fleeting pleasure, a very temporary euphoria at best, but paid for with bribery—bribing your ego. It is an addiction to material things outside of yourself.
Before civilization, most people probably felt inner contentment because from birth until death they always felt the unconditional love and support of their family and tribe. Since the invention of farming and civilization, however, most humans have lived in an artificial environment, and natural evolution has not had enough time to adapt our species to this very different environment. You do not need to believe in evolution to see the consequences. Despite the benefits of civilization, too many people have not felt unconditional love and they have not received constant emotional support. Many people do not even know that their lack of inner contentment is actually unnatural, because their artificial environment is unnatural.
For thousands of years, our wisest moral and spiritual sages have warned us against worshipping materialism, even if we do not call it worship. Worshipping materialism is a form of idolatry. They did not tell us to abandon civilization, but they urged us to love each other, to be forgiving, to be charitable, because civilization is not perfect. It can provide material comforts and conveniences, but civilization is not the solution to its own consequences. We created civilization. We—including you—must be the solution.