Do we humans differ very much from other animals? Our DNA says no, it's mostly the same. Our behavior doesn't either.
An experiment with monkeys locked in neighboring cages showed how jealous these animals are. Terrible!
Have you ever tried to take the bone that your neighbor's dog is currently biting? Probably not. Dogs and other animals have a very clear idea of ownership. If it is not respected, they can quickly become confrontational.
Humans are no exception, even if it's not so much about bones to nibble on. For this species, one's own car or cell phone is a sacred thing that another person had better not touch or even take possession of. Experiments with communal property, in which everyone owns everything and no one owns almost nothing, have regularly failed.
What is special about chimpanzees is their group affiliation. If you have no or only belong to a small group, you are pretty much screwed: You'll be bullied and the bulls won't let you near the feeding places. When another horde approaches a well-populated group's feeding place, the alpha animals decide to take on the fight, mainly encouraging the upcoming generation of beta animals to give the others a good beating and chase them far away – provided that the enemies are still able to walk. For the leaders, this has clear advantages: the foreign horde is gone, several of the contenders who wanted to join or even replace the alpha animals themselves have died for the good cause, and for the time being there is peace both externally and internally.
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In the animal kingdom, there are other forms of territorial defense. Birds, for example, chirp and sing. A peaceful and very civilized way of marking your living space. Birds are descendants of the dinosaurs. And the dinosaurs appeared on our planet more than 245 million years ago. But mammals only 45 million years later. Somehow they are more developed than we are, the dinosaurs or what is left of them. So we still have some time to catch up in our behavior. At least there are signs of progress: in football, for example, the referee can already assert himself with a whistle in front of 22 players and a crowd of angry spectators. And many people in Europe are blowing the whistle on any cucumber king of the Kremlin, and his claim to bring us all under his thumb.
In the long periods of time I am describing here, the few millennia since humans have settled are, of course, ridiculously short. Therefore, it is basically unfair for me to express criticism or sarcasm about it now. But I dare to do so anyway, in the vague hope of shortening the time for the conditions to improve.
So the humans, a previously wandering mob, have settled, built houses, erected fences. Invented rules about who should own which land. Sowed seeds, kept animals. Land became culture land. And culture developed in other ways, too, only a little differently everywhere. Language too.
For example, I have observed how Germans and Romanians eat bananas. The Germans pull the peel off at the stem. Romanians peel the peel on the other side of the stem and then pull it off. What is interesting in this context is that monkeys usually simply bite into the fruit and spit out the bitter peel on the floor.
Two centuries ago, territorial claims and cultural customs led to the formation of nations. But this division is not yet fully established. Actually, you can only call your nation secure if you have nuclear weapons or a good friend who will use them for you in the event of an attack, and if you don't let anyone into the country who eats bananas differently or speaks an incomprehensible language and could thus fundamentally question your own cultural superiority.
Well, to make a long story short: as with most vertebrates, territory, group and ownership are extremely important to us in relation to third parties. And since goods, except for air (still, but we will see), are scarce, envy of the grapes of others - and also among ourselves - plays a not insignificant role in our attitudes and views.
And that is exactly what our alpha animals have been exploiting over and over again since we became sedentary, to keep us ordinary citizens in line and thus consolidate their power over us. Like the trick of the magician who shows us something with one hand and thus distracts us from the fact that he is hiding the rabbit behind the other hand, which he supposedly conjures out of a hat – so we are made to ignore, with battle cries of national and tribal pride, ownership and envy, that the alpha animals are only concerned with power and a lot of money – and that these things, which we defend for them doggedly, are basically completely meaningless to them. Because they don't need them anyway in their dominant position.
You can watch the amusing video of the envy experiment with the capuchin monkeys at here. And the delightful children's novel by Christine Nöstlinger, “The Cucumber King”, whose text is even understandable to adults, can only be recommended time and again - see here.
