Our Tendency To Take — why do we have it and what can we do about it?
We all claim to prioritize others over ourselves, but in reality, we all subconsciously operate on a zero-sum reality, and fail to embrace the wholeness of the positive sum reality we live in today.
Lets start at ~ 1700 AD, a time where we had a zero-sum reality:
Welcome to the time of the great European explorers and conquistadors invading the foreign lands for the riches for their nations. The idea was, the more they rob from their colonies, the richer their countries become. For you to get more, someone else has to get less. The concept of growing yourself back then was through parasitical means — one party (yourself) is benefitted, while the other is harmed. It is a zero sum because everyone was battling for the same pie. There’s only one pie, and if you get more slices, someone else gets less. This also seems logical to us because for the history of human existence, until very recently, we have been living in a reality like this one. However, this is no longer the case.
What world do we live in now, and what has changed since then?
In a positive-sum world, every time you grow yourself, others don’t have to give. The taking can be mutual as well. This may seem confusing at first, but it makes sense the more you think about it. We make investments and provide services and make products for others’ ease of use, but, in the end, we profit from these actions. The more we trade and establish peaceful relationships with other nations, the more our nation grows, since we have more economic and political partners. However, we often like to get defensive around this topic as this is a new reality that has only existed for a few decades, not even a century of our existence. However, by learning and embracing this new lifestyle, we can learn how to take from others and grow our own empires without worrying about harming others — a now outdated psychological wiring built into us to make us feel guilty about moving forward.
Let’s see this in action:
Let’s assume a situation where you start a business. Your business grows far and wide, and the common presumption of such a growth is that it removes the jobs of smaller workers who were doing the same thing on a much smaller scale. However, you are also creating many more paid jobs for them to join and become employed. The situation here is like feeding worms to a bird. Sure, you’re killing the worm, but you’re also feeding the bird. And the bird is bigger and mightier than the work was, which is likely to die within a few weeks anyway. A small sacrifice for a comparatively large benefit. Furthermore, it also benefits yourself, since you are increasing your income with the profits. It is not a flawless system, but the argument that by expanding your empire you are shrinking the empire of others is no longer valid like it was so many years ago! So, march on, and reach great heights without worrying about ethics. It’s all taken care of by the positive-sum world that we live in today. It is possible to become a well respected person while becoming rich and successful — not all rich people grow through exploitation. They are merely growing their empires, and -growing others along with them in their wake, due to the wonderful positive sum world in which we live.
Despite our new society, we are instinctively wired otherwise, but realizing this is the first step toward changing that.
I had a personal experience to help prove this. I take a cooking class in my school, and in that class, they had an extra sandwich. The second the wrapper was detached, people began scrambling around the sandwich to get the best piece of the sandwich. This reminded me of a flock of birds scrambling to eat a bag of chips thrown into a pond. The behavior of these birds is shockingly similar to the behavior of my classmates during that time in my cooking class! The reason for this goes back to the zero sum game — one pie, take what you can, and the more you take, the less others have. As our technology grew, our instincts couldn’t catch up, and in our modern society an instance of this happening on a more intellectual level, such as work situations, or even in friendships only makes a person selfish. However, we are not all doomed to remain this way. We must all collectively understand this fact that we live in a positive-sum world, and merely having this awareness will allow us to control our instincts better, and make us better navigate the vast expanse of the world in which we live.
In short, our tendency to take is a natural part of who we are, so long as we have awareness of the new reality we live in.
Thank you for reading this blog entry.
-Vishal Janamanchi