Book 148 - A Year of Magical Learning (Part 2/2)

Reflection Title: 90% Chimpanzee, 10% Bee!

Book – The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Reflection 2/2)

Book Description: In The Righteous Mind, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explores the origins of our divisions and points the way forward to mutual understanding. His starting point is moral intuition - the nearly instantaneous perceptions we all have about other people and the things they do. These intuitions feel like self-evident truths, making us righteously certain that those who see things differently are wrong.

Haidt shows us how these intuitions differ across cultures, including the cultures of the political left and right. He blends his own research findings with those of anthropologists, historians, and other psychologists to draw a map of the moral domain, and he explains why conservatives can navigate that map more skillfully than can liberals. He then examines the origins of morality, overturning the view that evolution made us fundamentally selfish creatures. But rather than arguing that we are innately altruistic, he makes a more subtle claim - that we are fundamentally groupish. It is our groupishness, he explains, that leads to our greatest joys, our religious divisions, and our political affiliations

Reflection:

The single biggest new piece of knowledge I gained from the Righteous Mind that will stay with me forever was the thought that humans are, as Haidt puts it, 90% Chimpanzee and 10% Bee.

What does that mean exactly?

Chimpanzees are individually brilliant, but as Haidt shares, “It is inconceivable to ever see one chimp helping another chimp carry a log…it just doesn’t happen.” Chimpanzees don’t work together, and probably never will (at least not for a long time on the evolutionary timeline). They have all the other traits and tools we do, just not our ability to join forces to produce something beyond what they can do individually.

Bees, on the other hand, are the ultimate one for all and all for one analogy. Everything that they do individually is for the greater good of the hive. They don’t have a selfish bone in their tiny little insect bodies. It is always about the collective hive and only the hive in their world.

Humans are somewhere in-between on this spectrum of selfish and groupish and that is what makes us so unique.

The reason why this is so impactful to me is how I plan to use it to build out our own hive that I like to call “ClubAny”.

We all need a hive to belong to that has shared top-down values that everyone can agree to is important to the collective hive. Religions, Nation-States, Corporations, and all other “super organism human structures” in this world operate with this as their basis. This is not new and is essential to hive operations.

However, in these hives, often times the individual is lost. We are given a role to play, a specific job to do, values directed from the top to live by, and asked to play our part. All to often, we are treated like worker bees. We all know how this feels and it results in a loss of individual purpose that we so crave. We aren’t bee’s!!! This model works for awhile until our 90% Chimp kicks in and we want to express our own brilliance and create. We get mad, leave to go find a new hive, and the cycle repeats.

So how do we appease both our inner bee and chimp to form a better collective super organism that aligns to our unique human needs?

Well, our solution is ClubAny! ClubAny will be a one-of-a-kind ecosystem that can satisfy both the inner Bee AND Chimp simultaneously!

We’ll have a Hive with a top-down mission (Balance), shared infrastructure, shared securities, and shared values that everyone must agree to and live by to enter. In most human super organisms, this is where it ends. You’re assigned a role in this shared hive and told to play your part to stay in it. With ClubAny, the big difference is how we treat our inner chimp. Instead of giving them a role to play like a bee, we are going to embrace our inner Chimp and let their individual brilliance shine. No one will be given a role, a job, or a function ever. What we are going to do is to help each of our Chimp’s understand what THEY VALUE most and then give them the space to create based off of those individual values. Should the output of those values align and overlap with another chimps…they can work together. This is when the real magic will happen and a bunch of organic little mini-hives will spring up in the bigger hive.

That is the ClubAny in a nutshell!

If you are tired of being a worker bee, want to express your inner chimp, and STILL want to be a part of something bigger than yourself than come on and join the ClubAny tribe.

Trieu and I have a lot of work to do, but it is going to be a blast!

Question: Do you have somewhere that you can express both your inner bee and chimp at the same time?

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Links:

What is The Year of Magical Learning? An Introduction

YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon

YOML Bookstore - The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion