There are two distinct components to human nature: the social and the solitary. While most people are strictly social ... there are also quite a few loners, people who motivate themselves, derive their rewards directly from nature and whose only constraints are self-imposed.
The solitary part of human nature is definitely the more highly evolved, and humanity has surged forward through the efforts of brilliant loners and eccentrics. Their names live on forever precisely because society was unable to extinguish their brilliance or thwart their initiatives through social inertia.
On the other hand, our social instincts are atavistic and result far too reliably in mediocrity and conformism. We evolved to live in small groups of a few families, small enough to accommodate a few brilliant eccentrics, and our recent experiments that have gone beyond that limited scope seem to rely on herd instincts that may not even be specifically human.
When facing imminent danger, large groups of humans have a tendency to panic and stampede, and on such occasions people regularly get trampled and crushed underfoot: a pinnacle of evolution indeed!
--Dmitry Orlov, The Five Stages of Collapse, p. 5
