Comment by mcdeltat

> We are nice to people because cooperative societies out performed the non-cooperative ones on the macro level

I.e. biology gets what it wants... We want to survive, mother nature wants us to survive, society wants to survive.

I am absolutely not suggesting that outright jerkish behaviour is acceptable (although to suggest jerks have no social success is probably untrue; plenty of people who are attracted to jerks). I am arguing that if there was no personal advantage whatsoever to being social and nice to people, we wouldn't do it. We'd be lone animals, spread out across the land rather than concentrated in towns and cities. There's a spectrum of selfish behaviour, right? We are somewhere in the middle because it's advantageous to be.