The most ferocious and competitive species do not survive. Those who cooperate with each other do.
It is solidarity and mutual support that win. It is natural.
The future of our species depends on it.
Many of us have grown up internalizing since primary school Darwin's postulates and his formula of the fight for survival among species as an irrefutable truth. Kropotkin's "Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" provides another view of what some thinkers call the "Darwinism misunderstanding": The fiercest and most competitive species do not survive. Those who cooperate with each other do. It is solidarity and mutual support that win in nature, and therefore, in human societies. It is a spontaneous trend. It is natural. The future of our species depends on it.
A brief synopsis of this work clearly sums it up:
“In its informational version, Darwin's theory of evolution usually comes to us filtered by capitalist ideology, which has appropriated it to scientifically justify its assumptions. Thus, the victory in the famous "fight for life" has become the patrimony of "the strongest" in the Western imagination. However, this self-serving simplification did not appear as such in Darwin's theory, who leaned more toward the idea of "the fittest."
"The fittest" do not have to be the strongest or the most individualistic, but the ones who best adapt to the environment. And the species that have the best chance of survival are those that know how to find in solidarity the best weapon to ensure their future. This is how the notions of "mutual support" and "mutual aid" appear.
[...] The animal species in which the fight between individuals has been reduced to a minimum and in which the practice of mutual aid has reached its maximum development are invariably the most numerous, the most flourishing and the most fit for progress. [...]
Drawing the appropriate anthropological and political conclusions, he will extend his reasoning to human society as a whole. In this way, he will identify the historical circumstances and processes that demonstrate that it is through mutual support and help -and not through the ruthless fight of "all against all"- that human societies have been able to spread and establish themselves, identifying the periods of greater expansion of this idea with those in which the human being has managed to give the best of himself as a species and as a group of individuals."
Based on this reflection, in commemoration of the International Human Solidarity Day, from Solidary Wheels we set ourselves to put forward solidarity not as something extraordinary or punctual but as a daily attitude of reciprocal and horizontal support. An invitation to walk as a species towards “the nature that we are”.
Without charity. For the sake of justice.
Needed in front of the mirror of knowing we are equal in an unequal world: Perhaps, by pure chance, we are economically or legally on the side of privileges. It is quite an opportunity to use them so that we are closer to levelling off.
Integrated as a way of being in the world, each and every day. Regardless of time or money, status or entity. Integrated in every daily attitude breathed.
Enjoyed. For we know we are connected, supported and held affectionately… possibly by people whose names we will never know.
Some call it magic. Others, "Darwinian fitness":
“But it is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind. It is the conscience --be it only at the stage of an instinct-- of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity, which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own.”
Piotr Kropotkin, Introduction to Mutual Aid.
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