The conflict between the needs of the self and the group did not suddenly appear one day. Our biological ancestors evolved a fear of abandonment, a terror of isolation long before we were human. The attribute evolved because, at least in part, we are so weak that as individuals in the world we stand no chance. We have no teeth that matter, no claws or wings, no bark to protect us from fire, no fins to move us through the water, no fur, no feathers, no fine ruff, no gills nor capacity to eat the sun. We have very little of distinction really, but we do have each other. It is to the group and its social dynamic that we owe the possibility of our lives.

Despite our general mediocrity with respect to specialized survival equipment, one power we do have is that we can tell when something dangerous is near and we can specifically relate the nature of that danger to others, whether that danger is past, present or yet to come. This skill, which is actually a set of interrelated communication skills which include language but are not limited to oral-aural linguistic ability, develops through the primate and hominid line as we evolve greater abilities to read nuances in the faces and bodies of each other, to tell if others thought things were fine, or if they, by the tension in their hands or shoulders, knew that some form of danger was near (whether it be from someone outside the group or from someone inside it). We need the information as a hedge against what we cannot singly run from nor fight with any reliability. Without each other, alone to face what is both stronger and faster, we would die, but what we cannot face alone we can face as a group. The body evolved to know this. It evolved to know the group is essential to life because those of us that clung to the group, that learned to live within its limitations, did not die unproductive. With each other, by being able to read the world in the face of another, we had a better chance, and our children had a better chance.

The body knows the nature and existence of the other and it impels us to honor that knowledge through our feelings. Knowledge surfaces in the terror of abandonment; in the horror of isolation; in the need for the group and its symbols to be eternal, to be forever there in case of need. It is emotion that originally drove the evolving hominid body, developed the primate social engine. It is emotion that has made us human, made us cling together, made us fight each other, made it possible for us to work out rules by which we could coexist (as well as decide which of us should die) and manage the mutable social world. It is the emotional systems of the brain that told our ancestors—without the group we die. In both terror and joy our ancestors obeyed the brain’s dictate by becoming one of the most socially adept species currently on earth.

But feelings, unmediated by reason, have their cost as well as their benefits. Terror makes running when exhausted possible. It makes us pay attention whether to a “real” threat or to that of a dream or story, but in a world of diffuse and ever present stress unrelieved terror leads to heart attacks and mental breakdowns. Knowing that your kin react poorly when a certain form of stranger comes around may save your life if the stranger is a rabid dog, but this same skill, this adaptive strategy that makes the social world possible, also causes a great deal of trouble. If, for example, the stranger is another kind of human with some marked physical or cultural distinction, then the situation is likely to end badly for someone. The fear of being shunned, excommunicated from the group, refused entry, refused help and kindness, these fears make us emotionally ready to do nearly anything to ourselves or to others so that we may stay within the group.

Of course are not all feeling and drive; we are also story and reason. We construct stories to tell ourselves why we should do whatever it takes, regardless of the pain or cruelty, to belong. And it is these stories, those calming rationales, those short-cuts to hard decisions about what to do in the face of terror, it is these stories of my way or the highway, of my country do or die, that become for us more real than the original fear of exclusion and abandonment that precedes it. We kill and die, in other words, because of the same mechanisms that evolved to enhance our chance of our group’s survival. Here’s a famous example of how this works:

Published for the first time in 1963, but conducted in 1961 (a year after the Adolph Eichmann trial), Stanley Milgram conducted an experiment that would be called Obedience and Authority. He wanted to know under what conditions obedience to authority would countermand our unwillingness to hurt others. Would we “just follow orders” as so many German people had claimed they did resulting in the atrocities we now know as the Holocaust. Briefly, his answer was yes, people will do horrible things to another to please someone in authority. What Milgram concluded was this:

The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

The experiment was really very simple. There was an actor in a separate room where the subject could hear the screams but not see the person screaming. The subject was told that this was an experiment to gauge the effects of punishment on learning. The subject was told to shock the subject if the subject got an answer wrong. The subject was given an example of what the shock would feel like and in some cases even told that the “participant” (the actor) had a heart condition. With each “wrong answer” the voltage of the shock was increased—at least in the perceptionof the subject. The experiment stopped if the subject refused to administer further shocks in the face of four separate authoritative prods by the experimenter or when the subject had administered three shocks of 450 volts in sucession. 450 volts.

Milgram, before he conducted the experiment, asked his colleagues what they thought people would do. They believed only a few (1/10th of 1%) would reach the maximum 450 volt level. There is a deep seated belief that abhorrent behaviour is the practice of the “unnatural” or the “evil” and not of the ordinary man and woman. What actually occurred in Milgram’s experiment is that 65% of the subjects administered the maximum voltage and no one—not any subject—refused to stop before they had administered 300 volts.

All it takes to reenact Milgram’s experiment (and many further studies were done, all confirming his findings) is a difference in power between people, a need to be acceptable to those in authority and a willingness to use power to force others to conform to one’s own particular fiction. In other words, Milgram’s experiment is reenacted every single day.

This is what it means to be human and why the development of disobedience and the ability to say “no” is so important to the development of a workable human ethic. It is essential to understand why we do the things we do. We must understand that we are animals, primates, that we have a biolgical inheritance that underpins our desires and behaviours. We need to know this so that we can use other aspects of our inheritance (for example, compassion) to work against this tendency to obedience.