The Hard Problem: Well-Being Across Our Individual & Cultural Differences
What does it mean to be Prosocial?
Is there anything more dangerous to the future of our genome and the planet than our ability to make harms look like social and moral goods?
The hard problem of human individual differences sits like a sphinx guarding the gateway to equality and well-being with a prosocial riddle, a gateway through which each of us must pass…
Here we are, befuddled by what it means to be prosocial, lost in the jungle of our DNA differences…
…each looking for a way out, each in a DNA prison searching for the key…
Every Night & every Morn
Some to Misery are Born
Every Morn and every Night
Some are Born to sweet delight
…William Blake
Thousands of years of political and socioeconomic conflicts over what it means to be prosocial have reinforced a global pattern of gene-environment inequalities that not only threatens the stability of democracy but has fueled climate change, creating a threat to the biosphere of the planet.
Beginning with the first complex surplus-producing societies, conflicts over hierarchy and inequality have paradoxically resulted in this: when a social hierarchy fails another one jumps up like a jack-in-the box to take its place.1
Today, there are individuals and groups, a relatively small percentage of the world’s population, whose exceptional advantages and privileges—income, wealth, status, political power, health and longevity—is the result of this pattern.
And now, here we are in the 21st century with the global power of the Internet and AI, manipulating environments and genomes in the service of social hierarchy and socioeconomic inequality.
The history of human civilizations is strewn with big men, chiefs, kings, tyrants, despots, oligarchs and plutocrats rising in power until that inevitable point in time when new generations of genes and environments would trample their pyramids of power into the dust.
All the while a daunting figure “Ozymandias” sits in the shadows of our failed civilizations and power hierarchies adding footnotes to earlier chapters on human history and evolution…social dominance, inequality, revolution, state failures and war…with a final chapter on the inequities of income, wealth and well-being, global resource depletion and climate change in the 21st century…a chapter that begins…
"Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
…Percy Bysshe Shelley
Last edited 8-10-2026
References
1. The ‘Jack-in-the-Box’ Pattern: Development and Influences
The following sources provide a range of historical, structural, and socio-genetic context for the concept…demonstrating the many dimensions of Jack.
I. Core Historical & Cyclical Influences
These works establish the recurring nature of hierarchical reset through violent “leveling” events and elite-driven disintegration cycles.
Scheidel, W. (2017). The Great Leveler: Violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the twenty-first century. Princeton University Press.
Turchin, P., & Nefedov, S. A. (2009). Secular cycles. Princeton University Press.
Turchin, P. (2023). End times: Elites, counter-elites, and the path of political disintegration. Penguin Press.
Wallerstein, I. (1974-1989). The Modern World-System (Vols. 1-3). Academic Press.
II. Structural Mechanisms of Systemic Failure
These sources identify the mechanical “tension” and specific vulnerabilities that lead to a failure or a reset of the hierarchy.
Scheidel, W. (2024). Beyond technology and wages: Power and the history of inequality. Oxford Open Economics, 3 (Supplement_1), 1212–1216.
Turchin, P., Currie, T. E., Whitehouse, H., François, P., Feeney, K., Mullins, D., … & Spencer, C. (2018). Quantitative historical analysis uncovers a single dimension of complexity that structures global variation in human social organization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(2), E144-E151.
Piketty, T. (2014). Capital in the twenty-first century (A. Goldhammer, Trans.). Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Tainter, J. A. (1988). The collapse of complex societies. Cambridge University Press.
Kennedy, P. (1987). The rise and fall of the great powers: Economic change and military conflict from 1500 to 2000. Random House.
III. The “Jack-in-the-Box” Replacement Dynamics
Khaldun, I. (2015). The Muqaddimah: An introduction to history (N. J. Dawood, Ed.; F. Rosenthal, Trans.). Princeton University Press.
Describes Asabiyyah (social cohesion) as the social force that allows a new group to replace a failing elite.
IV. Socio-Genetic & Genomic Evidence
These references provide evidence in the archaeological record of large-scale population change and the hereditary transmission of status.
Theory & Mechanism:
Plomin, R., & von Stumm, S. (2018). The new genetics of intelligence. Nature Reviews Genetics, 19(3), 148–159.
Polderman, Tinca JC, et al. “Meta-analysis of the heritability of human traits based on fifty years of twin studies.” Nature genetics 47.7 (2015): 702-709.
Causadias, J. M., & Korous, K. M. (2017). How are genes related to culture? An introduction to the field of cultural genomics. The handbook of culture and biology, 151-177.
Boyce, W. T., Sokolowski, M. B., & Robinson, G. E. (2020). Genes and environments, development and time. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 117(38), 23235–23241.
Population Turnover & Heritable Status:
Žegarac, A., Winkelbach, L., Blöcher, J., Diekmann, Y., Krečković Gavrilović, M., Porčić, M., … & Burger, J. (2021). Ancient genomes provide insights into family structure and the heredity of social status in the early Bronze Age of southeastern Europe. Scientific Reports, 11(1), 10072.
Allentoft, M.E., Sikora, M., Refoyo-Martínez, A. et al. Population genomics of post-glacial western Eurasia. Nature 625, 301–311 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06865-0
Gretzinger, J., et al. (2022). The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature, 610, 112–119.
Additional Notes
People who score high on Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) “tend to find hierarchies to be inevitable and legitimate because of their predisposition to perceive the world as a ‘competitive jungle.’” –Jylhä, K. M., & Akrami, N. (2015). Social dominance orientation and climate change denial: The role of dominance and system justification. Personality and Individual Differences, 86, 108-111.
“Our global summary…revealed that humans kill adult prey, the reproductive capital of populations at much higher median rates than other predators (up to 14 times higher), with particularly intense exploitation of terrestrial carnivores and fishes. Given the competitive dominance, impacts on predators, and other unique predatory behavior, we suggest that humans function as an unsustainable “super predator” which –unless additionally constrained by managers—will continue to alter ecological and evolutionary processes globally.” –Darimont, C. T., Fox, C. H., Bryan, H. M., & Reimchen, T. E. (2015). The unique ecology of human predators. Science, 349(6250), 858-860.
“Humans have supplanted large carnivores as apex predators in many systems, and similarly pervasive impacts may now result from fear of the human ‘super-predator.’” –Suraci, J. P., Clinchy, M., Zanette, L. Y., & Wilmers, C. C. (2019). Fear of humans as apex predators has landscape‐scale impacts from mountain lions to mice. Ecology letters, 22(10), 1578-1586.
“…although chimpanzees engage in war-like raids where larger parties target and kill much smaller ones, no non-human primate species engages in human-style war, with large numbers of individuals on either side of a conflict. Because hunter-gatherer societies do engage in such war, the presumption is that this predisposition is uniquely human and perhaps purely cultural, or derived from more basic genetic predispositions, such as insider favoritism (Otterbein 2004, Bowles 2006, 2007, Bowles and Gintis 2011).” –Gintis, H., & van Schaik, C. (2013). Zoon Politicon: The evolutionary roots of human sociopolitical systems. Cultural evolution, 25-44.
“When man developed his weapons, culture, and population sizes to levels that essentially erased the significance of predators of other species, he simultaneously created a new predator: groups and coalitions within his own species.” –Alexander, R. D. (1974). The evolution of social behavior. Annual review of ecology and systematics, 5(1), 325-383.
“The raising of livestock allows predation on a large scale and ensures continuity of food supply. By domesticating ungulates, much of the risk was removed from the hunting process. The development of traps and firearms enabled prey to be killed from a distance with little or no danger to the predator.” –Fleming, P. J., & Ballard, G. (2017). Homo sapiens is the apex animal: anthropocentrism as a Dionysian sword. Australian Zoologist, 38(3), 464-476.