Thanks for the kind words, Polojko! They are very heartening to read.

You make some excellent points. I’ve wondered about the way we teach kids to cooperate and share. It’s possible that the culture is partly responsible for developing these skills, but the capacity still has to be there. I believe attempts to train other primates to cooperate like us have failed.

But I also suspect that kids might simply be too young to grasp these concepts or even to have the required executive functions to carry them out well. We might be helping bring them online earlier in kids, though I think adults needing to work together to survive would all realize and utilize such skills. It would be interesting to hear about studies of other cultures, especially modern hunter-gatherer tribes to see how this goes.

And, yes! I agree that we are emotionally tied together. Feeling totally fine while others nearby suffer might even be sociopathic. Today, we're all in the same boat and it’s in our own interest to make sure everyone is, at least, okay.

Thanks again!