The evolution of kindness

TL;DR: Despite the apparent awfulness and the suckiness of our humankind, we all need kindness and we're evolved to receive and spread kindness.

There is no deny that humans were evolved to be opportunistic and sucky. Picture two chimpanzees with different personalities living together. The first one is always content and satisfied with the world as it is, while the other one is perpetually paranoid and constantly striving to find better ways to get food and escape predation. As you may have guessed already, the first one is gonna get killed very very quickly while on the other hand, the 2nd monkey not only survives, but also thrived as it made better tools for getting food and forced other monkeys into serving it.

In the world of natural selection, suckiness ( not compassion nor goodwill ) is optimal for survival. In the early days of our human race, the first humans found themselves between a rock and a hard place. On one hand, their bodies were neither strong enough to defend themselves against apex predators, nor they were resistant enough to live with food shortages and harsh climates. Moreover, they never met more than 30 people in their lifetime and survival was their full-time job. Human traits that benefit our societies now were pretty much useless to hunter gatherers.

Not until we started to cultivate lands and huddle together in communities did we begin to appreciate the value of consideration and sensitivity towards others. We started to realize that humans can barely survive without love and care from another, let alone thrive. What is particularly great about commensalism is that mutual consideration or kindness alone promotes survivability of our human race just as much as Darwin's survival-of-the-fittest theory does. It has not yet been proved, but it is widely held that wolves became domesticated mainly by coexisting and working together with humans, where the wolves would pick up food scraps left by humans while they in turn provide protection for us. Overtime, wolfs became cuter and puppy eyes started to be apparent as the result.

This may seem like a huge digression, but cuteness and kindness both share one thing in common, and that is oxytocin. Oxytocin certainly has tons of functions in our bodies, but it is mainly responsible for rewarding social cohesion as well as accentuating our nurturing instincts. It is the very chemical that our brain excretes when we see cute babies and spoon someone we love. This is literally the very substance that enables kindness in the first place.

It is no doubt that spreading kindness is a difficult job. We all have negativity bias where we see upsetting bits of information to be more impactful and important than positive ones, and it is considered unintelligent and naive to always be happy and content. What's more, being kind towards others requires more mental and emotional effort than dismissing and ignoring someone, as it forces us to look past what people do and decide what reason may be that a person may act in such a way. Being empathetic may feel like a chore but once you get good at it, the rewards are gonna be staggering. Besides making things easier for us to work as collectives, empathy is low-key a soft skill in the business world.

In conclusion, kindness does not optimize survivability like the survival-of-the-fittest strategy but it is a solution for societies to survive in a world that punishes any kind of imbalance...ment :v . This is also true in many parts of a natural world, where a dominant species become extinct from overwhelming and extremely successful people become victims of their own successes. Machiavellianism guarantees the survival of the few at the expense of the masses, and eventually those people themselves.