Crabs trapped in a bucket mean no crab will crawl out alive.
I still wonder to this day how something so self-defeating gets encoded deeply in almost everything that breathes.
Watch it happen in real time. One crab gets close to the rim and the others below reach up to pull onto it as a way to climb out on top of the first crab, which unintentionally brings all of them down again.
Usually, people tend to ascribe an aspect of evil-ness to the crabs' behavior.
In actuality, there's no malice in the claw. It's purely mechanical, a stimulus response baked into survival wiring so old it predates the concept of other. Me, myself and I only matters in the here and now.
Elephants do something adjacent. A lone elephant separated from its herd will call out for the herd to redirect entirely to find it. Beautiful, yes. But watch a herd in distress and you also watch panic become contagious at the speed of a trumpet call.
I guess it's a double-edged sword of the same force playing two roles on opposite sides of the spectrum, with cooperation and chaos sharing a root.
The thinking for humans, when you trace it back, goes something like this: If I can't have it, the having of it by someone else becomes an offense. Nobody would say it out loud in those words, of course.
It's more instinctively practiced than verbally exercised. Someone publishes a book and their closest friends feel something complicated before anything generous. A family member escapes the bucket and the first instinct of the people still in it is to question the legitimacy of the climb.
The why underneath the why is scarcity thinking, I suppose. And scarcity thinking for most of human history was the correct read of reality. Resources were genuinely zero-sum.
But we're no longer a generation wrapped entirely within survival arithmetic.
Much of this was picked from a narration about extended family members beefing out the most excelled member of the lot to remember where he came from, as that's his one and only place he can belong. The beefing out is done indirectly, in subtle ways that will make you think these people are acting out from a layer that's not rationally accessible to them.
Human hierarchy, with its top-down gravity, will always tilt toward status contests.
Arguably, a race to the top only comes about when going down becomes very socially costly that nobody attempts the endeavour.
The race to the bottom, at its core, I think, is a coordination problem evolution never equipped us to solve intuitively. We have to learn to hijack ourselves out of our default wiring, especially when the attending conflict with belonging is greater than the comfort of standing still.
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