The notion that the individual is at the center of things has entrenched itself to such an extent that it is beyond question by now. Individuals make choices, and everything in today’s society is geared toward influencing them in their choice-making one way or another. But there is nothing obvious, let alone natural, about this vision of society, atomized as it has become. The individual is a creature of the market. That is, capitalism. The family has thus become the protectorate of the church. But the family is only a recent phenomenon. Nuclear as it has become, it was unthinkable in many parts of the world even a few generations ago. The extended family with its patriarchal structure was the norm for quite a while. Each individual had a place in the extended family, and many of them had little choice, if any. That was the patriarch’s domain. Not long before, the prevalent social structure was the clan, and the clan’s elders made their choices in concert. The individual was a laughable notion back then. At the bottom of this evolutionary structure is the tribe of a couple of hundred individuals. Once again, the tribe’s elders held the helm and all the others had to fit in willy-nilly. Now, the tribe goes back at least a hundred-thousand years. At some forty generations per millennium, this adds up to about four-thousand generations. The human brain has evolved with the tribe as the social context. The individual as the center of things goes back to a hundred generations at most, and it is but a few generations old in most places across the planet. To wit, most social problems humans face at present have to do with the mismatch between the atomized social structure of global capitalism and the individual, whose brain is still tribal. Can this mismatch be fixed, though? Yes, but it would take an enormous amount of time—say, a thousand generations at least. Fat chance.