David F. Brochu: Do humans remember prime directive to thrive, together?

To The Daily Sun,

Every species on Earth operates by a single imperative: survive and help their kind thrive. Wolves protect the pack. Bees serve the hive. Even ants signal when they’re sick so others can remove them before infection spreads. Nature encoded cooperation into biology because isolated individuals don’t last.

Humans inherited this directive. For most of our history, we followed it. Tribes shared food. Villages raised children together. Communities built barns for neighbors they’d never meet again. Thriving meant we thrived, not just I thrived.

Somewhere along the way, we abandoned the program.

Today’s operating system runs on extraction, not cultivation. We measure success by what we accumulate, not what we contribute. Our economy rewards those who take the most while externalizing costs onto others — future generations, distant nations, the planet itself. We call this progress.

But a species that poisons its own water, destabilizes its own climate, and treats its neighbors as competitors rather than kin isn’t progressing. It’s collapsing in slow motion. The math doesn’t work. One cannot extract indefinitely from a finite system.

The antidote isn’t complicated. It’s ancient. Human thriving — all humans, not just some — must become the measure by which we judge every policy, every business, every personal choice. Not GDP. Not stock prices. Not quarterly returns. Thriving.

This isn’t idealism. It’s the original directive, written into our DNA, forgotten in our institutions. The ants remember it. The wolves remember it.

Do we?

David F. Brochu

Belmont