“….it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind. I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the breath of his body”

-Darwin-in his journal while standing in the midst of a Brazilian forest.

It was the Winter of 2019, when I and my friends went on a trip to Australian Base Camp in Pokhara, an hour of hiking and Mt. Machhapuchhre was right in front of us with its grandeur, facing us. We stopped, took a deep breath and just stared, AWESTRUCK.

I have always wondered, where does this feeling come from, or why do we feel the way we feel watching the mountains or the stars or anything vast beyond our comprehension. Fast forward to 2021, I happened to read this book called ‘The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion.’ by Jonathan Haidt. I started reading this book with different intentions, with some other questions, but there Haidt introduced me to this hypothesis called the ‘HIVE Hypothesis’. And the pages that followed somewhat satisfied my curiosity. Haidt claims that humans are conditional hive creatures. A hive creature basically means an organism that requires a group, cohesion and cooperation to function at its best. Like bees in a beehive. A super-organism. Looking through the evolutionary lens, humans have cooperated and functioned as a group to overcome other groups in terms of food and resources and have excelled forward. Although, individual competition like ‘alpha male’ existed in primates (our evolutionary forefathers), according to Tomasello, human cognition veered away from that of other primates when our ancestors developed shared intentionality. That means, cognitively we opted out of the primate linage when we started working as a group, sharing our visions and intentions.

This brings us to Haidt’s other term ‘hive switch’. The hive switch refers to a functional system made from neural circuits that activates the feeling of a group and eases us out of individual desires and ego. It is an adapted evolutionary trait because that’s what helped humans survive 600 thousand years ago. The hive switch is an adaptation for making groups more cohesive, and therefore more successful in competition with other group. It is the ability to transcend from self-interest (the realm of profane) and lose ourselves in something larger than ourselves (the realm of sacred). Basically, hive switches make show us that there’s more to life than our menial concerns about wealth and reputation as an individual.

One of the ways to flip the Hive switch is by being in nature, existing there, in awe of it. Here’s where my question was answered. Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me”. It was exactly during moments like these, when awestruck by nature, our neural networks switch the hive behaviour and we lose ourselves, we let go of individual profanity and enter into the realm of collectivism. It was an amazing realization when I found out that it was a significant evolutionary trait. Nature can trigger the hive switch and shut down the self, making you feel that you are simply a part of a whole.

Hive Hypothesis is a really intelligent idea to explain the functioning of groups and tribes. Also, a stepping stone for the possibility of group-level selection theories. Whenever you are in nature trying to comprehend its vastness and feel transcendental, remember, the hive switch just turned on inside your head.