I am sure you have already heard this parable at least once. An elder is explaining to his grandson an epic battle raging inside every person between two wolves: one that represents anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, greed, arrogance, resentment, lies, ego, and fear; the other, joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, empathy, truth, and compassion. “Which wolf wins?” asks the grandson, and the elder replies: “The one you feed”. While frequently attributed to Native American culture, its origin is unknown; it is more commonly linked to Christian evangelism or self-help movements.
This memetic tale resonates with much philosophical debate on fundamental human nature. From the opposing views of Mengzi and Xunzi in 3rd – 4th BC century Confucian philosophy to the opposite views of Hobbes and Rousseau in 17th – 18th century Western philosophy.
This debate is reflected in many political doctrines in the Western world over the last two centuries. One excellent summary is “our capacity for justice makes democracy possible; our tendency toward injustice makes democracy necessary”, attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr, an American Protestant theologian. Much of the political debate can be reduced to this: humans “naturally” behave well toward other humans, versus humans “naturally” behave poorly toward other humans. Whatever “naturally” means, and this is where much political debate locates.
But one fact seems unquestionable: our species exhibits social traits, such as empathy and cooperation, as well as antisocial traits, such as aggression and exploitation. We are not alone in this: a famous meta-analysis published in 2014 confirmed that chimpanzees, a highly social species, exhibit interspecies lethal aggression, a fact that cannot be explained by human impact on their habitat and thus represents an adaptive strategy (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature13727).
Humans exhibit capacities to understand others’ goals and help them as young as 18 months, as do chimpanzees (https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1121448). This suggests that social traits are the result of evolution rather than cultural indoctrination.
Where do these conflicting impulses come from, evolutionarily speaking? The honest answer is that we do not know for certain, but let us speculate a little.
Early in their evolution, primates developed social traits. Living in groups improved vigilance, reduced individual risk, enabled collective defence, and, in some species, facilitated the hunting of larger prey. The emergence of empathy reinforced this evolutionary push toward social behaviour: sensitivity to others' suffering encouraged care, cooperation, and mutual support (https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10601; https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn.2017.72).
Much earlier in evolutionary history, vertebrates had developed anticipatory motor control, helping them compensate for delays in neural transmission by predicting the consequences of movement. In primates, increasingly complex brains expanded the possibilities for prediction, allowing individuals to assess situations, mentally simulate possible actions, and choose among their likely outcomes. These capacities could also support a more calculated pursuit of personal advantage. When directed exclusively toward one’s own interests, without regard for anyone else’s, such calculation becomes an instrument of selfishness. This may sound like too much speculation, but it is called “phylogenetic refinement” and was described already a few years ago (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01760-1).
Empathy and selfishness can therefore pull us in opposing directions. Yet evolution does not follow a coherent design: different selective pressures can favour conflicting tendencies within the same species—and within the same individual.
It is easy to say that selfishness is frequently short-sighted, and that, in many cases, selfish behaviour yields a small short-term benefit in exchange for a large long-term loss of social support. But this type of long-term reasoning governs social development; evolution operates at a much lower, more instinctual level.
My point is that empathy and selfishness are both fundamental instinctual pulsions rooted in our evolutionary history. Assuming that humans are “naturally” good or bad toward others is wrong. We are fundamentally good AND bad. What matters is social development and education, driven by the awareness that humans are instinctually good and bad.
