For
the last millions of years the wildebeest have been migrating every
year from Serengeti in the south to Masai Mara in the north in search of
new grass. Primarily it’s their genes that drive the wildebeest as well
as hundreds of thousands of zebras, gazelles and assorted other herbivores to
set on the round trip to Mara. This annual ritual not only guarantees
food to the herds but also safety in their sheer numbers. Straying out is a
sure recipe for death for the outliers either by starving or becoming one for
the carnivores. So it makes immense sense to a Wildebeest to join the
stampede.
More
often we humans don’t exhibit traits any different from the
Wildebeest in our natural instinct to follow the herd. Farmers of a
particular topography tend to grow the same crop year after year. Students
flock to the most popular course in the campus and entrepreneurs set up the
businesses which attract most subsidies and investments. And you bet sure it
pays. In the short run that is. For the fact that the basic economics principle
of the Demand and the Supply dictates that in the long run the glut
result in falling demand and thereby diminish the incentives to the entire
herd.
Why
would a stampede guarantee uninterrupted survival to a species for
millions of years but diminishing returns to the other? What makes
humans so different that the natural law of the animal kingdom fails to protect
the most advanced species on the planet? How come a mere economic
principle defies the fundamental law of the nature?
This
seeming paradox has a simple answer. Humans are greedy. It is not a case
here to debate whether greed is good – as Gordon Gekko declares in the movie
Wall Street - or evil but simply to investigate if it indeed plays any
role in stampedes actually being unprofitable in the long run to us Homo
Sapiens.
And
for that investigation we will have to take a detour. A rather long detour
through some two and a half million years of evolution of the
Mankind. I am not an anthropologist. Neither am I a sociologist. I would
still like to venture into this unfamiliar territory to ferret out an answer
that is not just plausible but convincing and logical. History has witnessed a
very skewed evolution of humans over the past two and a half million years.
Let's
take a look at the archaeological and the historical progress of mankind.
Archaeological / Historical Period*
|
Year from
|
Year to
|
Time elapsed
(in
yrs)
|
Percent (%)
|
If the last 2.5 mn years were just one day
(in seconds)
|
Stone Age
|
2,500,000 BC
|
3300 BC
|
2,496,700
|
99.8680
|
86,286
|
Metal Age
|
3300 BC
|
600 BC
|
2700
|
0.1080
|
93
|
Historical
Age
|
600 BC
|
1400 CE
|
2000
|
0.0800
|
69
|
Renaissance
|
1400 CE
|
1800 CE
|
400
|
0.0160
|
14
|
Industrial
Age
|
1800 CE
|
1975 CE
|
175
|
0.0070
|
6
|
Digital
Age
|
1975 CE
|
Present
|
41
|
0.0016
|
1
|
(*
the Archaeological / Historical ages represented here may not be accurate or
precise but are mentioned only to elucidate the argument being put forth in
this article. Similarly mention of Digital Age and its beginning in 1975
is arbitrary )
The
above table is self explanatory and it will be obvious to the reader that if we
were to imagine that the total time it took for us humans to evolve from being
just apes (or whatever else we were) to 2016 were one day then the mankind has
rapidly progressed from the Metal Age to the present only over the last 184
seconds or just about 3 minutes. What is more amazing is the fact that the real
explosive evolution to the modern times has happened only in the past 7 seconds
since beginning of the Industrial Age.
How
come a species meanders for 99.86% of its evolution at a
languid pace and suddenly shakes off its stupor and rolls at a break neck speed
in a fraction of that period. I can’t think of a better explanation than the
greed of humans. Greed to possess more meat, more cattle, more gold, more land,
more comforts. Somehow there must have been a dramatic genetic mutation that
made Man use metals, bronze and later iron, to augment his abilities and the rest is history.
Somewhere along that greed must have evolved into an urge to possess finer, non
material aspects such as curiosity, knowledge, creativity and of course in
modern times energy. The greed has helped us rush from the Metal Ages to
the period of Renaissance to the Industrial Age and to the current Digital Age.
It has also shrunk the time humans are taking to propel themselves
into more advanced forms of civilizations one after the other.
As
every coin has a flip side, sure does the greed too. The human evolution
is not as smooth as the above table would make us believe. And more relevant
to our discussion, it hasn’t been without hiccups either. Greed has its faults
and it certainly extracts its price. Mindless greed has caused flops at
the best of the times and disasters at the worst.
Charles
Mackay in his classic book ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of
Crowds’ has chronicled several follies committed by the peoples of Europe
in 17th and 18th centuries. These
were the result of the hysterical societies which seemed gripped by
mass hypnosis. They simply seem to have suspended reason and joined the
bandwagon because everybody else was doing so. So the 17th century saw Europe
engulfed in Tulip Mania which at one point shot the prices of Tulip bulbs to
hundreds of thousands of pounds at the current value. Needless to say that the
market for the Tulip bulbs eventually crashed sending several into
bankruptcy. But we don’t need to go that far back to discover the perils of
such hysterical bandwagons. Dot com bust around turn of the century and
Subprime debacle of the last decade are proof enough that human greed has no
expiry date. This also explains otherwise confounding phenomenon of
entrepreneurs herding around wallets, hyper local, on demand businesses
in India in spite of obvious downturn of fortunes due to overcrowding.
So
while wildebeest will continue their stampede into the future forever, our
species will have to keep inventing newer ways to satisfy its greed.
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