A group of chimpanzees lived together in Gombe, Tanzania. Jane Goodall observed them for years as a single community that shared territory, groomed each other, and cooperated to hunt. In the seventies the group split. Those who had once been allies began patrolling invisible borders and ended up killing each other in what later came to be called the Gombe War.
The "us" is a moving border: it expands or contracts depending on whether a threat exists to justify it. We share this mechanism with our closest evolutionary relatives. This isn't a poetic image. It's a regularity that shows up in primates, in national football teams, and in everyday political debates, always with the same architecture underneath.
What happened in Gombe wasn't an isolated event. It corresponds to the same process that operates in parochial altruism: babies just days old show a preference for what's their own and approve of punishment toward whoever they perceive as different. The circle of "us" isn't born fixed. It's built, defended, and, above all, it can be expanded.
Some researchers have spent decades documenting this expansion and contraction. Robert Axelrod developed models of evolutionary cooperation showing how individual selfishness and group cooperation are the same strategy at different scales. First comes the self. Then comes the immediate "us" of family or nation. That "us" only grows to encompass humanity when something emerges that threatens the entire species.
Liu Cixin states this bluntly in his trilogy Remembrance of Earth's Past: humanity will only unify when it faces a danger coming from outside the planet. As long as threats remain internal, we'll keep splitting into factions like the Gombe chimpanzees. The idea is uncomfortable, but it explains why almost all large-scale cooperation has emerged as a response to shared risk rather than as a voluntary decision.
Unemployment reveals the flip side of this coin. It hurts less from the loss of money than from the fracture of the belonging that gave it meaning. Populism occupies exactly that void: it offers a substitute "us" defined against a "them." Marie Jahoda, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Hans Zeisel documented this in Marienthal in the 1930s. When the factory closed, what first tore the community apart wasn't hunger but the gradual loss of the fabric that sustained collective identity.
Why do we almost always need a threat to feel part of something bigger? Because it's the fastest route and the most studied one. But there's another path, slower and less dramatic, that depends on sustained exposure to difference rather than shared fear.
I grew up between French and Mexican cultural frameworks. From an early age I learned to merge two distinct value systems in my assumptions about courtesy, time, and family. That early expansion of my "us" turned differences into opportunities for growth instead of threats.
How can a person expand their own "us" without waiting for an asteroid? The answer lies in reversing the order: deliberately choosing exposure to what's different as a daily practice. Traveling not to consume a place but to let yourself be transformed by it. It's an exercise in individual awareness that carries both its limits and its genuine possibility.
This fragmentation also appears in how power blocs organize themselves. The United States and China today converge on dominance in frontier technologies like artificial intelligence. That convergence sustains geopolitical divisions which, in turn, justify tighter internal control on each side. Division isn't always an evolutionary accident. Sometimes it functions as a tool of management.
This connects to explorations that appear in Stones Don't Lie, a work still in progress. Those who govern frequently keep the population divided into tribal identities because it's harder for people to organize and demand structural change that way. Gamifying social awareness emerges as an experiment in response to this dynamic, which Liu Cixin presents as nearly inevitable. I'm still not sure whether it's possible to completely eliminate the need for an external threat. I keep exploring the question.
After observing this regularity across different contexts, one thing becomes clear: what you do doesn't affect only you. Throwing away a cigarette butt, running a red light, or paying a bribe seem like isolated acts, but each one normalizes the tearing of the collective fabric. The broader "us," humanity as a species, doesn't activate only in the face of cosmic dangers. It can also grow, more slowly and more fragilely, through the accumulation of acts that acknowledge their shared impact.
Can we build institutions, cultures, and even games that train this awareness without requiring a common enemy to force it on us? The Gombe chimpanzees never had that option. We, at least in theory, do.
