Cave Man Principle

I found a very interesting passage in the book Physics of the future by Michio Kaku that reflects exactly what I meant when writing about that car-on-fire-incident, it’s called “Cave Man Principle”:

“[…] I conjecture that people largely rejected these advances because of what I call the Cave Man (or Cave Woman) Principle. Genetic and fossil evidence indicates that modern humans, who looked just like us, emerged from Africa more than 100,000 years ago, but we see no evidence that our brains and personalities have changed much since then. If you took someone from that period, he would be anatomically identical to us: if you gave him a bath and a shave, put him in a three-piece suit, and then placed him on Wall Street, he would be physically indistinguishable from everyone else. So our wants, dreams, personalities, and desires have probably not changed much in 100,000 years. We probably still think like our caveman ancestors.The point is: whenever there is a conflict between modern technology and the desires of our primitive ancestors, these primitive desires win each time. […]”

You could also change “modern technology” and put in “modern society rules” or other “modern” things. The oldest part of our brains win over the new ones, because there function is to make us survive, and biologically that’s the most important thing.

Or as Bertold Brecht put it: “Erst kommt das Fressen, dann die Moral” (First the grub, then the morals).