Capitalism, Cancer & Altruism: How can humanity survive?
There seems to be an intricate relationship between cancer and capitalism. And extreme altruism is the way out. The thought started with a professor of mine asking what selection pressures could drive the human population to evolve into a new species. I, someone who is often very restless in my head and blurts things out, blurted out that nature’s selection pressures have a relatively low effect on humans compared to other organisms. Factors that contribute to high selection pressures in the wild often have little to no effect on human populations. For instance, a low sperm count and a large number of abnormal sperm would create a severe selection pressure in wild populations, but humans can mitigate this through assisted reproductive techniques, propagating these traits further until a situation arises where no humans can conceive without artificial intervention.
Now you must be thinking: how is all this related to cancer, capitalism, and altruism? Let me lay it out and make it apparent for you. Regardless of how much humans try to bypass the laws of nature, we are still affected by selection pressures of various kinds and are continuously evolving like any other life form on Earth. A more accurate and evident selection pressure in modern human populations would be the financial status of each family. You could argue that this isn’t traditional Darwinian selection because it’s driven by economics, but the demographic outcome of the process is functionally parallel to Darwin’s selection. It is apparent from the decline in fertility rates in Japan and many other parts of the world that, because it is not economically logical to bring a new life into this economy, people choose not to have offspring.
Selection intrinsically depends on differential survival and differential reproduction. Even if we take out the differential survival aspect, the differential reproductive aspect shall still be accounted for. Now I want you to look at Elon Musk, who wants a legion of kids before the civil war and already has 14 offspring. The selection pressure should be apparent by now. When financial status dictates who can afford children, it acts as a modern, cultural iteration of selection pressure operating on a global scale.
To understand the next layer, we must look at a different aspect of multicellular evolution: Cancer. As long as mutations, the basis of evolution, exist, cancer will never cease to exist. Cancer can never be permanently eliminated from multicellularity because it is an intrinsic byproduct of multicellular life and cell division. Cancer stems from the exact same evolutionary mechanisms that allow a species to evolve and adapt over generations; they are the exact same mechanisms that cause an individual’s cells to occasionally develop “driver mutations” that lead to cancer. To permanently eradicate cancer from our biology, we would have to fundamentally rewrite the rules of how DNA copies and mutates, which would effectively freeze our ability to evolve and adapt.
But innately, cancer itself is a breakdown in cell cooperation. For cancer to exist, an organism must be made of multiple cells that work together, share resources, and suppress their own individual growth for the survival of the larger body. When particular cells behave selfishly for individual benefit, it ultimately becomes cancer.
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Looking at this from an ecological and evolutionary perspective offers a clear parallel. There are solitary animals, and there are social animals. Solitary animals are often unconcerned with the fitness of others and focus solely on individual needs. However, in highly social, altruistic animals, a massive level of cooperation and inclusive fitness can be observed, which contributes to the survival of the population or species as a whole. This is precisely what happens in multicellularity: cells share resources and contribute to inclusive fitness — the survival of the larger body. However, when individuals within a population become selfish and monopolise resources, cooperation shatters, ultimately leading to the demise of the entire group.
In nature, this ecological conflict is manageable when resources are abundant, allowing dissenting parts of a population to migrate and thrive elsewhere. But that is no longer the case for humans. Humans have occupied a vast majority of terrestrial habitats, converting and depleting most of them. Furthermore, humans have a deep-seated tendency toward tribalism — forming groups and acting for the benefit of their specific faction at the expense of others. In the modern world, equivalents of tribalism could include patriotism and dogmatic religious polarisation.
The connection to capitalism lies in how highly cooperative populations inevitably generate “defectors.” A defector is an individual who acts selfishly to maximise individual fitness at the expense of cooperators. In human society, cooperators are analogous to the working class, while defectors are analogous to hyper-capitalists maximising resource extraction regardless of systemic collapse.
It is about time we talk about the future. The human population has reached a scale where humanity as a whole cannot survive without an extreme level of cooperation and altruism. What can be presented as a potential path? The ideology at its core, shall puts forward the concept of a society without defectors — a society without private property, where major resources and the means of production are owned by the collective. It aims for a classless society by removing the gap between the rich and the poor, eliminating the structural niche where defectors thrive.
We have to look toward a future defined by extreme cooperation. Much like the cells in a multicellular body that relinquish individual competition to sustain the larger organism, humanity must function as a cohesive whole. This can only be achieved through an extreme level of mutual cooperation between individuals — a state of collective coordination where a centralised, coercive state can eventually be abolished because it simply wouldn’t be necessary anymore.
As the human population continues to push against planetary boundaries, it is very apparent that for humanity to survive, we must evolve past our primitive, tribalistic instincts. We have to move beyond being religiously divided or blindly patriotic, and transition into radical cooperation — eradicating the social cancers and economic defectors that will otherwise drive us into a population collapse.
How long until humanity depletes all its resources? A systemic or economic collapse could easily occur within the next 15 to 25 years, largely driven by defectors who continue to hoard while the host body starves.
It is about time we started thinking from a completely different perspective.
