Corona Virus—Survival of the Fittest?

Oh my god, it’s completely survival of the fittest. People are hoarding food and cleaning supplies and oh my god, the young and healthy, they’re out there on the beaches. They’re conspiring to get rid of all as old people, and it’s clearly nature revealing itself that it’s all about the selfish strong that are gonna survive. And well, all I can say is, get your shotguns and protect your toilet paper. Or… or science. Or science suggests that there’s other ways in which we are going to survive that aren’t all about selfishness and survival of the fittest, and that’s what this week’s video is all about. So stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So if it’s not survival of the fittest, if it’s not a dog-eat-dog world and that hoarding your food and recklessly having behaviors that are selfish in nature, if that’s not the solution to this problem, then what would science suggest is the best way for us as a society to get through what is genuinely a crisis of you can only say epic proportions? It’s the biggest global crisis that probably has ever happened in my lifetime, and probably for most of you as well. And the science is really clear. If we looked at evolutionary theory where we sometimes confuse it as saying it’s survival of the fittest, dog-eat-dog, that’s not in fact what the science would suggest.

We can look to many examples in nature. Beehives, for example, where to protect the hive, worker bees will sting a threat and give up their own life. Or in yeast, and all kinds of other organisms demonstrate that selfless behaviors tend to be advantageous, and that is true for humankind as well. Clearly there are egotistical and individual occasions when selfish behaviors are rewarding, but if you look at the course of the evolution of our species, it is the nature of us as tribal animals that we do best when we cooperate. Darwin, Charles Darwin, called this the sympathy hypothesis, and basically, he said groups with many altruistic members, people who are generous and give willingly to the other members of the group, will out survive and prosper relative to groups with many selfish members. And it makes a lot of sense for a tribal animal.

So what Darwin was really looking at is where you see communities that have lots of compassion, altruism, generosity, and cooperative behaviors. Those ones will prosper. Those are the ones that will get through this. Even game theory, which is a relatively new study, demonstrates very clearly that where the people cooperate in the game, the collective gets further ahead, and individuals as a result often get further ahead as well. Where the world comes together cooperatively, whether it’s defeating the Nazis in the Second World War or whether it’s dealing with acid rain from the 1970s due to poor management of the environment, when the world comes together and deals with things, we do quite well. The same way that individual communities, when they come together and cooperate and look after each other, they do quite well.

We can see examples all over the place in the world right now, and they run in stark contrast to the much-publicized examples of people hoarding and very selfish behaviors, which make some sense given people’s fear that they’re having right now. But think of these examples: people around the world are serenading healthcare workers. It began in Italy where people were singing and playing instruments and playing music as a salute to healthcare workers. And then even here in Canada, where I live, we’re seeing examples of people doing that. Again, at 7 p.m., they’re going out and making music or making noise on their balconies and breaking out of socializing isolation to thank and cheer on our healthcare workers. And they’re doing it at 7 p.m. because that’s when the shift changes occur at the hospitals.

If you look, for example, at the volunteer brigades that are starting up around the world, where people are getting together and becoming organized to help their neighbors to deal with situations in their community, where only through volunteers are we going to get the kind of societal sharing, cooperation, and frankly, compassion that we need for all our members. There was another good example in Canada recently where natural behavior, when they told us to socially isolate, meant people weren’t going in and donating blood. And so the word went out that they needed blood donors, and record levels of people started going and looking to donate blood. And you can see that this compassionate, altruistic behavior arises in us just as naturally as the selfish behavior sometimes arise.

And so I want people to, when listening to this video, take a little pause right now. You can actually go and do a little survey, an accurate way of assessing your own altruistic behaviors. And it’s gonna be at the link below. You can do a little gut check, a little check, and say, “How am I doing in terms of my own altruism?” And it be natural if you had some level of selfishness kind of running amok right now. So go ahead and take this little quiz, figure out where you’re at, and then have this little pause to assess what’s gonna be the best for you and your community going forward.

And I guess if I could make one more little comment about this, the natural reward for altruism, biologically programmed into our bodies, is to feel good. That when we behave altruistically, we’re happy. We get endorphins and dopamine, pleasure centres or pleasurable chemicals and hormones in our bodies that make us feel good. So there’s a real numerous number of ways that we should be engaging in altruistic behavior. So not only we’re helping each other getting through this coronavirus epidemic, pandemic better, but we’re also feeling better in the meantime. And I’ll say one last parting thought on this.

We know from science that altruism is often coupled with both gratitude and forgiveness. And that without gratitude and forgiveness, altruistic behaviors tend not to be present. We’ve got resentments that are built up, and we’re angry at the world. We’re less likely to be selfless, even if being selfless has an advantage for us and others. And if we’re not grateful, if we can’t see the good things that we’ve got going in our lives, well, we’re less likely to be generous. So go ahead and do the little quiz to see where your altruism is at, and reflect a little bit on your own gratitude and the degree of the resentments that you’re holding on to. And if you can get this trifecta of gratitude, forgiveness, and altruism going, not only will you feel great, I think the science would suggest you’re going to do better in the midst of all this crisis.

So, I hope that’s helpful this week. If you liked the video, click the like button, share it widely with people that you think might benefit from it. And if you like this kind of content, please subscribe to my channel. I’m Paul Krismer, I’m your happiness expert. Thanks very much for watching.