kindredmedia.org · 13 hours ago

No, This Is Not Human Nature. It’s Deep Conditioning. – Kindred Magazine

Jeremy Lent challenges the assumption that human destructiveness is inevitable, tracing our current crisis not to fixed nature but to "deep conditioning" - a specific historical trajectory that began when agriculture gave rise to private property, hierarchies, and what he calls the "wealth pump" of accumulated power. For ninety-five percent of human history, our ancestors lived in nomadic bands where hoarding was unthinkable and domination was actively resisted, values that echo today in Indigenous wisdom like Ubuntu's insight that "I am because you are" and in humanity's great spiritual traditions. Drawing from evolutionary biology and living ecosystems, Lent proposes an "ecocivilization" built on three principles observed in nature itself: mutually beneficial symbiosis, fractal flourishing where each part's wellbeing supports the whole, and integration that honors diversity rather than flattening it. What emerges is not a utopian fantasy but a return to our deeper inheritance - a recognition that the behaviors we've been taught to accept as human nature are actually departures from what we evolved to do, and that another way of organizing collective life remains possible.