The history of human society as moulded by emotion: past, present and future

Abstract

The basic operational modes of emotions were determined when they evolved as animal software for coping with problematic situations presented by the wild environment. This wilderness rationality of emotions became somewhat warped when humans developed a large, organized environment of communities. Human emotions differed from those of animals in one critical respect: humans tended to apply new solutions to new problems and thus they touched off an evolution-like process for artefacts, the accelerating nature of which eventually produced the contemporary human society where innovations occur with inordinate speed. Contemporary society is fraught with dangers despite its material abundance and the nearly equal social status of its denizens. A cellular societal structure is suggested as a possible solution to this problem.