A while back I was talking with a gallery owner, a painter himself, someone whose whole life is built around seeing things freshly. I shared an idea from Being Jonas Wilder: that we're a species, that nature is our origin, and that for two million years we existed in complete interdependence with everything around us, long before civilization arrived.
He smiled and said something like: "Well, it's complicated. The world is full of civilizations that disagree with each other. And humans have always been good with the flint blade and spear."
I've thought about that exchange a lot since. Not because he was wrong about the flint blade and spear. He wasn't. Human beings have always been capable of violence. That's true.
Even his opening line gave it away before the flint and spear did. He said the world is full of civilizations, plural, each one at odds with the others. Not the world holds one connected species that civilizations came later and divided. Civilizations was the only unit his mind reached for, the same reflex, one sentence earlier.
What struck me is that I never said otherwise. I said we're a species with a two-million-year origin. He heard a claim about peacefulness and answered that instead. The conversation moved fast, and it moved somewhere I hadn't actually pointed it.
The Swap Happens Almost Instantly
Here's what I think is really going on. When you suggest to someone "we are a species that existed for two million years before civilization," you're not handing them a history lesson. You're asking them to notice something about how they see themselves. Most of us were raised to understand ourselves as civilized people first. A species with an ancient biological inheritance that civilization sits on top of, recent and thin by comparison, isn't typically the first self we reach for.
So the mind does something efficient. It doesn't sit with the discomfort of the actual claim. It reaches for the nearest available counterpoint and responds to that instead, usually without anyone noticing the swap has happened. "Humans have always been capable of violence" is a real fact. It's also not a response to "civilization is ten thousand years old and our biology is two million years old." Those are two different ideas entirely.
I don't think this is a flaw in intelligence or curiosity. It happened with an artist, someone whose chosen role is fresh perception. I think something else is going on, something older and quieter than any one person's habits of mind.
What Actually Shifted
For most of those two million years, the evidence we have points to something specific: connection was the rule. Competition between people who knew each other tended to be playful, mutual, even useful. People co-regulated. People belonged with each other in ways that didn't need defending or negotiating. That was simply how the species worked, the way breathing is how the species works.
Civilization needed something different. It needed people willing to do things that real connection would have made unthinkable. Take land that was occupied by someone else. Build wealth off the labor of people they'd never meet. Follow written laws instead of the judgment of people they actually knew and who knew them. None of that runs smoothly through a fully connected nervous system. So the perception underneath it had to change first.
And it did, not in one generation, but across many. Told and shown and repeated until it wasn't a belief anymore. It was just what people were. A few generations of that, and the memory of connection wasn't a memory people were choosing to set aside. It was gone. Most people today don't experience themselves as living inside civilization the way a fish lives in water, aware there's something outside it. They experience themselves as being made of it. Not in civilization. Of it.
That's the actual shift underneath the flint and spear reply. It's not really a disagreement about violence. It's the sound of someone answering from inside a perception so complete they can't feel its outermost edges anymore.
That Part Is Where I Find Hope
Here's what I keep coming back to. If that perception was installed through repetition, through generations of example and story and law modeling separation until it became identity, then it isn't set in stone. It was built the way anything gets built into a species that learns through story and imitation. Which means it can be built differently, the same way, one example at a time.
That's the quiet premise behind everything in my work, the songs, the books, the show, and these small pieces of writing too. None of it is trying to argue anyone out of anything. Arguing rarely moves a perception that runs this deep. What might move it is simply encountering the connected view often enough, in enough different forms, spoken and sung and told and lived, that it starts to feel familiar again instead of foreign.
This article is one of those small repetitions. Not a case being made. An example being offered.
One Thing Worth Trying
You don't have to accept any of this to try something small with it. Just curiosity's sake, take the flint and spear, the wealth built on broken backs, the whole record of human harm, and look at it once through the other lens. Not the civilized one you already know by heart. The connected one.
What if you looked at that same history through the perspective of connection, just for curiosity's sake? What might you actually see?
This idea sits at the center of The Lens That Changes Everything*, and it's one of the questions Jonas Wilder spends a lifetime asking in * Songs in the Key of Return. If it's the kind of question that stays with you, Being Jonas Wilder brings it into the room, live.