One of the most unsettling ideas explored in Civilized to Death by Christopher Ryan Phd is also one of the simplest. Locusts are not a different species from grasshoppers. They are the same insect with identical DNA.
Under ordinary conditions, grasshoppers are solitary. They move independently, consume modestly and coexist with their environment without overwhelming it. But when conditions change, when population density rises, food becomes scarce and stress hormones spike, grasshoppers undergo a transformation. Their physiology changes and their behaviour changes. They become locusts.
This is not metaphorical – it is biological. Crowding triggers a cascade of neurological and hormonal shifts that turn a relatively benign insect into a hyper-consuming force capable of devastating entire ecosystems. Once transformed, locusts swarm, strip landscapes bare and move on, leaving devastation behind them.
Maybe humans are not so different
Ryan uses this phenomenon not as a curiosity, but as a warning. Under the right conditions, organisms that evolved to live sustainably can become destructive, not because they are evil or flawed, but because their environment has pushed them beyond the parameters they evolved to handle. Humans, Ryan argues, may not be so different.
For most of our evolutionary history, humans lived as hunter-gatherers in small, mobile groups. Our lives were socially rich. We spent significant time resting, socialising, and playing. We shared food and we raised children communally. Status differences were minimal and usually actively resisted. Survival depended on cooperation, not accumulation of power, influence or wealth. Intimacy was not controlled, it was shared.
Then came civilisation. Agriculture allowed population density to increase dramatically. Permanent settlements emerged, hierarchies formed and surpluses accumulated in the hands of a few. Competition intensified, inequality widened and humans became crowded in ways our nervous systems were never designed to tolerate. Much like grasshoppers in dense conditions, humans began to change. Same DNA, different creatures.
Ryan’s argument is not that civilisation made humans bad. It is that civilisation placed us in conditions that activate traits we evolved to use only in emergencies.
The locust does not swarm because it wants to destroy. It swarms because its environment forces adaptation. Likewise, humans did not become anxious, aggressive, acquisitive, possessive or disconnected because these traits define us. We became this way because our environment rewarded them.
Modern life has a lot to answer for
Modern life is crowded, competitive, and relentless. We live surrounded by people yet often feel profoundly alone. We are exposed to constant stimulation, comparison, and threat perception through media and technology. Our nervous systems rarely return to baseline. In this state, consumption becomes a form of regulation or an anesthetic.
We consume information, entertainment and endless material goods and equally seek our more and more status and validation not because we need them, but because they momentarily soothe our overstimulated systems. Like locusts, we keep moving, keep taking, rarely pausing long enough to ask whether the behaviour itself is essential or pathological. The tragedy is that we then moralise the process. We call people greedy, lazy, entitled, narcissistic, or broken. We blame individuals for responding exactly as organisms do under sustained pressure. The grasshopper does not choose to become a locust. It is crowded into it, just as we are.
And in the midst of all this we lose access to intimacy and sight of its value. Intimacy with the simple pleasures in life, nature around us, the elements, our senses, each other.
Ryan’s argument is that many of the things we treat as human failings may actually be symptoms of civilisation itself. Civilisation, Ryan says, promised safety, comfort, and progress. In many ways, it delivered however, it also dismantled social structures with natural intimacy and replaced them with isolation and disconnection from each other. We became more productive, but less openly intimate. More efficient, but less alive.
The locust metaphor is relevant because it reframes the problem. If destructive behaviour emerges from environmental pressure, then the solution is not punishment, control or moral condemnation. It is environmental change. Grasshoppers do not need discipline, they need space. Humans may need something similar. Not just physical space though, space to be human even for just a short while to recharge.
Being pragmatic …
This does not mean abandoning civilisation or romanticising the past. It means recognising that endless growth, density, competition and consumption may not be compatible with human happiness. We know we can’t escape it. We can’t change the world but we can change our own world firstly for a few hours of stepping outside of it, then little by little over time changing our perspectives when we are back in it.
Yes it’s a strange leap to connect locusts with being Intimate Apes but if we want to look into ourselves for deeper personal values we need to be aware of the pack mentality of those around us and how caught up in it we can get.