A German friend of mine at the start of the Corovirus pandemic said to me the problem is now that the concept of trust has been entirely eroded and people no longer have faith in the experts or national and international bodies but believe what they read in their internet bubble and this leaves them not only mistaken but also encourages bad behaviour. In truth, the pandemic is like every crisis, it undermines trust in authorities, damages cooperation and often brings out the worst in human behaviour.
When the world should have been co-operating to ensure the defeat of Covid-19 through herd immunity across all populations, national vaccination programmes soon became political and we saw an aspect of unfortunate evolutionary behaviour: when individuals and societies feel threatened they tend just to protect themselves at other's expense. People will seek selfish advantage over public togetherness and sacrifice for others. The evolutionary focus for survival is about short term gains regardless of the effect on longer-term futures. This mechanism has been labelled as 'the survival of the fittest'. As humans rush to look after number one, this behaviour emphasises social inequalities. Such an analysis is, of course, a generalisation and there are many acts during a crisis that challenge this selfish dynamic but overall the pattern to care for one's own welfare at the expense of others is anthropologically predictable.
Evolutionary behaviour that originates in our prehistoric past has been mitigated by moral elements of human culture so that 'women and children first' is a longer-term strategy for cooperation and survival. What anthropologists understand, however, is that human cultures are not stable and their ability to survive successfully depends on various levels of trust. This trust, however, is often fragile, especially when it comes to resources and access to them. Though we tend to think of trust as a moral quality, in reality, trust is an economic imperative when it comes to sharing resources. In turn, economic trust is linked to the level of resource and the size of the group ('tribe') competing over them. This tenet has been clearly manifest when it has come to the availability of vaccines to combat the Covid-19 pandemic.
Therefore, what we observe again and again is that when human societies are under threat they rush to look after themselves at the expense of the other. During the Coronvirus pandemic, we have seen this both at the individual and tribal level from the panic buying of toilet rolls to the banning of exports of vaccines. Such behaviour not only destroys trust but defies logic - for example, denying vaccines to others even when they are not even being used because of vaccine hesitancy.
As I have observed above in a crisis the focus is all too often on short-term gain rather than the advantages of a longer-term strategy of cooperation. When such a reclusive stance is taken, people will cling to sameness, reject difference, spurn change and prioritise selfish behaviour over cooperation, even though history constantly demonstrates such a retrograde position is flawed.
Once there is scarceness the habitude is for social trust to collapse and for societies just to invest in their own culture at the expense of others – once again you can think of the contemporary example of the spate between the EU and the UK over vaccines. The selfish competition for resources is an evolutionary trait but not a given. It may be difficult to overcome such embedded behaviour but human culture is complex and trust of the other can foster displays of altruism and cooperation.
There are evolutionary advantages to sharing: for example, sharing is both an important practical and symbolic means of attachment. As mentioned above societies are not in a steady-state and attachment and social alliances come and go and the evidence of who belongs and who is an outsider can be linked to the size of social groups, which have a tendency to split or collapse after a certain number. In an earlier blog, I did write about the Social Brain Hypothesis and how the scale of human relationships work: https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/big-brains-and-social-groups
Social media has in many ways challenged previous concepts of belonging and not belonging, with new and different patterns of social alliances. While modern communications have created a global village, the reaction has been for people to withdraw into their social bubbles and echo chambers. The internet, rather than bringing disparate groups together has often tended to emphasise difference. A consequence has been that social trust has diminished and factionalism and popularism have thrived. Selfish competition all too often trounces cooperation, so how can trust across humanity be re-established?
Back in 1973 the economist E.F.Schumacher wrote a best selling book, Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. It is time we reasserted this understanding of
the importance of scale. Often, executives, managers and administrators argue pooling resources to create larger institutions and organisations saves money but again and again amalgamations and mergers fail because they do not take into account the scale at which human relations need to operate. In reality, integration and social cooperation are the keys to our species survival, not selfishness and lack of trust in the other, the alien, so we need to re-establish trust in our institutions and in our experts through a scale of human relations we can all identify with. Trust can then percolate up through the social layers to national and international levels.
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