Thank you for that mysterious moment when “I” becomes “We”

There are a lot of things that a human being can accomplish as an individual.
There are so many more things humans can accomplish as a group or cooperative.
Cooperation is an amazing concept that we don’t see too much of since the “Me” era of the 80’s.
It seems most of us spend a lot of time tending to our own gardens and forgetting about the potential to expand that garden in a way that could benefit a whole tribe and yield so much more for our seeds and labor.
Although there are plenty of studies done on the barriers to cooperation, they mostly seem to be of the mind that animals and organisms only cooperate to benefit themselves in their individual evolution. Individual sacrifice merely for the better of the whole seems to be rare in most species (with, perhaps, a few exceptions, including “specialized” bacteria that appear to evolve just to keep specific cells alive).
But imagine a bee trying to create a honeycomb all alone. Have you ever seen an ant hill with just one solo ant standing on top yelling “I am the king!” Yeah, that’s rare.
Even procreation takes cooperation among genders—oops, another exception, those lizards that live in Texas, all females, only grow male genitalia at certain times during mating season. But again, quite rare.

Perhaps it’s true that most humans cooperate with others to benefit themselves as individuals, but in the interim, there is this magical moment when an individual is so much larger than a person, a split second when a squeaky little voice exclaiming “I…” turns into a beautiful soprano singing “WE…”. It seems to me that a song like that could become an anthem for human evolution. Even though we are not bacteria.

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~ by leakelley on October 21, 2007.