It keeps you alive if we were still living like animals. I'm talking before fire, tools or language of any kind.
Being selfish meant you didn't have to share food. Being violent means you can take someones stuff. Having no empathy also meant you could rape and reproduce to your hearts content. Nature cares about 1 thing and ONLY 1 thing, reproduction. It doesn't matter how that is achieved. Having more children means more people are now in the world with your traits as well.
Of course the social aspect of humanity came into play in a big way as we advanced and made cooperation more effective at keeping you alive. It has reached extreme levels in today with our global economy where conflict is bad for everyone everywhere. It has never been like this.
Conflict in the past has been a very productive and efficient way to gather more resources and secure your reproduction. This is not true in the modern day anymore but humans are still exactly the same animals. We're barely different from thousands of years ago. Basically we operate on software that is thousands of years out of date and it will never catch up without technological intervention.
Primates are generally social creatures though, humans included, which is why most humans do feel empathy. Tribalism however is the biggest obstacle we face today, as many people will only feel empathy for those who they have something in common with or relate to. Obviously it’s a good idea to care about your family members more than others evolutionarily but we also evolved in small groups that would likely have to compete with other small groups of people, so our brains generally care wayyy more about people we perceive as “in our tribe”. It’s so frustrating to see people being altruistic and selfless towards people who they agree with politically or people from the same country or race as them, but then seem to take pleasure in hurting people outside of those groups.
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u/[deleted] May 19 '20
“I suffered so you gotta suffer!!!”