Tribeless

All work requires energy. Thinking is work. Therefore, thinking requires energy.

Organisms conserve energy. The more energy you spend, the more food and rest you need.  If you don't conserve energy, you might die. Energy conservation has a clear evolutionary benefit.

Humans are no exception.  Tribes have to think about the energy it takes to support their members. The more members a tribe has, the more work has to be done to care for them. Some people require more work than they can contribute. Others may misuse the tribe's work. Humans have evolved safety measures that help them and their tribes conserve energy.  

It's worth pausing here to note that humans didn't evolve in cities. Our minds and instincts are still those of hunter-gatherers. Many of us live outside of the environment our species is best adapted for, and some of the ways we tend to think and behave confer less benefit to us now than they did millennia ago. 

Every thought and feeling you have happens because of events that occur in your brain. All of these events are work, and they require energy. We naturally conserve attention, affection, and care. If we gave every adult the same level of attention and care that we gave to infants, we would be bad at caring.  

When you experience something, what you're experiencing triggers events in your brain that determine how much work you have to do to pay the best attention to what's happening. This is a safety measure. When you go into the supermarket, you don't give every product and display the same amount of attention that you give to the products you intend to buy. If you did, you wouldn't be able to shop.

Care is just as valuable as attention. Imagine how hard it would be to think about what you were going to eat for lunch if someone nearby were screaming for help. Think of what you would do if you had to choose between acknowledging your friend and looking at a brick wall. How you care about others is a matter of work, and you don't have infinite energy for mental work any more than you have infinite time or resources to help everyone.  The price of our attention may be the energy it takes a stranger to show themselves worthy of it.  Energy tolls are part of tribalism.

I submit that there are people who, through no one's fault, can't press our attention triggers as well as others can. They don't tend to elicit our care, even when they pay energy tolls. Even those who want to commit care and attention to these people can find it difficult and exhausting to do so because they have to expend extra energy to fight the impulse to ignore them. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, which is very recently, people who couldn't elicit care would simply have died.  Now, many of us live sedentary lives, stacked very close together, with resources more available than ever. The tribleless can survive, but I suspect they're no more likely flourish.

Because the ability to elicit care is important for survival, having it confers status.  Not having it puts tribeless people at a status deficit that makes them even more invisible, perpetuating a cycle of neglect.  I want to draw attention to these people, but it's hard. No one wants to pay attention to them. Their suffering can show us something about the way we ration care and attention. Some believe no such rationing takes place. They'd claim that everyone has the same access to help because attention is a matter of will, which they believe they completely control. We can look at tribeless people and see the ways in which attention and care are not matters of will. You don't choose whose company you pefer or what impression anyone leaves on you.  How difficult it is to invest in someone else has to do with electrochemical signals moved through your brain by processes you, as a measure to conserve energy, do not govern. External stimuli, your neuroanatomy, previous brain states, and physical energy needs effectively predetermine how you will respond to people. And there will be people you'll never really see. As good and as fair as you may intend to be, that you physically cannot commit all your attention to every person guarantees that you will always seem superficial to someone and that, as long as you are social, somebody will suffer. It's worth considering what this can say about the human condition.