James Giago Davies: Intellect isn't the only thing that helps us succeed

Wednesday, January 30, 2019

What really makes humans succeed?

By James Giago Davies
Native Sun News Today Columnist
nativesunnews.today

Nothing separates humans from the world of animals more than their ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. The historian and social observer Yuval Noah Harari has written two wonderful books analyzing this in detail, but I want to take his conclusions a step beyond, and apply his ideas to our West River world.

Other species cooperate, but not as flexibly as humans. What makes this cooperation so powerful is our ability to base it on created fictions. Animals can only react, however cooperatively, to objective reality.

No animals can recognize a state line, or agree a piece of paper covered with green ink has value worth killing for. We can.

But our created fictions don’t stop there. Since we require rationale for cooperation, only very profound and powerful fictions can get us to do things we would normally balk at, like soldiers going off to fight and die in Afghanistan, for a cause they don’t really understand, and against an enemy they don’t personally hate.

Why can a billion people follow the Pope, or a billion Muslims drop to the floor and pray facing Mecca five times a day? Both are created fictions that not only motivate billions to cooperate flexibly, they alter the very perception of the reality the humans operate in.

Let’s apply cooperation to something local. Little Wound recently drove over to White River, where their boys lost a basketball game, 77-73. It is obvious White River’s coach, Eldon Marshall, is a great coach. He has been to the Class B State tournament 13 straight years.

But is young MacKenzie Casey at Little Wound a great coach? Let’s see, he took on the undefeated LNI champ at their crib and barely lost. His coaching talent is obvious.

That game came down to one thing, cooperation. White River was better at it than Little Wound. Not much, just barely better, but it was critical, and translated into four points that won the game.

Driving through Rapid City we see a reality that our ancient ancestors would have marveled at, but we take for granted. One nuke from Ellsworth AFB could vaporize any city in South Dakota.

We used intelligence to create this technology, this power, but intelligence alone would have created nothing. The inspired genius it took to spark these ideas, to map them out, to make them work, comes from individual excellence. Geniuses tend to operate in tight groups. They are essential to progress, but intellect does not run the human show.