In his book; ‘The Selfish Gene’ Sir Richard Dawkins cites Maynard Smith’s concept of Evolutionary Stable Strategies; the strategy for how aggressively members of a same species can be toward one-another in their competition for sustenance and to spread DNA.  If too many members are too aggressive, then conflicts between members cause so many injuries that it does unsustainable harm to that population of a species.  If too many members become too passive, a few aggressive members will exploit the situation thereby necessitating more members to become more aggressive.  Ideally population will oscillate around an evolutionarily stable mean.

Humans, as well as all other animals, evolved in an environment of competing for scarce resources needed for daily survival and to ensure the viability of genetic offspring.  Competing for status within the hunter-gather tribe could be tantamount to a life or death struggle, sometimes immediate death, but often the slow death that results from alienation and neglect.  Participants had to be aggressive enough to compete for resources and status, but not so aggressive as to destroy the tribe on which survival was dependent.  Rules, social norms, hierarchies and customs have all developed to deal with the balance of scarcity and aggression; these are Evolutionary Stable Strategies and this is a dynamic that we share with just about all other social animal species.

For much of humanity, and to varying degrees, the ‘crisis of scarcity’ existence has since been replaced with a ‘crisis of abundance’ but that’s not how we evolved.  The intertwined emotions of lust and envy are driven by our primal desire for esteem within society and are two primary motivators that shape our actions, hopes, dreams & aspirations.  In a world of abundance, with our immediate physical needs largely met, we sometimes transpose the same urgency on our phycological needs; safety, belonging, esteem, self actualization, etc. 

The phycological needs/necessities has led some people to strive hard and achieve great things in art, science, business, heroism, etc.  Others exploit the world of abundance with predatory behavior.  And still others, simply overwhelmed and unable to cope with abundance, allow it to become an enabler for self distractive lifestyle; gluttony, substance abuse, addiction, etc.  Most people’s behavior covers all three but tend toward one; abundance has changed the calculus of our species, giving us more freedom and opportunity to achieve or to fail.  Are the Evolutionarily Stable Strategies, programed into our DNA from a world of scarcity, effective and sustainable in dealing with our current reality, a world of abundance?