I wasn’t trying to say only survival matters, just that there’s a hierarchy of needs, the physical needs being almost always primary, psychological needs secondary and desires tertiary.
All of them are more/less important, just that generally speaking, the former shouldn’t be sacrificed for the latter, nor should we sacrifice all of nature, or much of it, for the sake of our desires, we should repress some of them, many of them, or find ways of satisfying them or diverting them that aren’t as harmful to our health as individuals, as a society, and to life itself.
As for the social insects, I don’t think their way of socializing is any better than ours.
Insects are only as social as they are, because all members of their colony are biological sisters, and brothers.
Human beings in a society aren’t as related to one another, or as specialized, and there’s good and bad in that, as we can still function independently as individuals when need be, and we have the benefit of adding our individuality to the collective, helping it to evolve, rather than stagnate.
Procreation has, pros, and cons, if there’s not enough resources to go around, it can be bad.
The idea is not to have as many offspring as possible, but not to exceed the environmental carrying capacity.
Also, the more offspring, the less you can give them special attention, animals that tend to have lots of offspring, tend not to care for them, and so the vast majority of them die off, sometimes they all die off.
I’m not sure if insects are more successful than mammals, or if any particular species of insect, is more successful than human beings, from a survival standpoint.
You can’t compare insects or say ants as a whole to humans, because that’s comparing an entire class or order to a single species, the correct comparison would be a species of insect, like a particular kind of ant, like a fire ant, to human beings.
Even if there’s trillions of fire ants and only billions of human beings, ants are a lot smaller, in order to determine who’s more successful from a more objective standpoint, I would compare the total weight of fire ants to human beings.
Success is fleeting thou, I wouldn’t be surprised if humans offed themselves sooner than later.
From a survival standpoint governing a whole society isn’t necessarily successful, or from an offspring standpoint, Alexander the great died young without an heir, but then some dictators have harems and hundreds of children, so it depends.
Polygamy has advantages and disadvantages too, the less wives there are to go around, the more civil unrest, and in any case, how many rich and powerful men today have harems?
From both a survival standpoint, and a happiness or health standpoint, it makes little difference, whether you’re a CEO, president/prime minister, or middle class person, even from an influence standpoint, a president isn’t responsible for all that much, and can easily be replaced, in many cases they’re just figureheads or puppets, so much is decided by the thousands of men who’re ‘under’ them, and support them, as well as legal precedents, corporations and so on.
What I"m trying to say really is just that great wealth and power, fame and fortune are totally unnecessary, yet our society worships them, as many others have.
What really matters is that you and those who you’re responsible have their needs, especially physical, but psychological too, met, and you need to be very wealthy to do this, everything else is superfluous, and can sometimes do a lot more harm to us as individuals and as a whole.
Everything has a cost, what can be done without shouldn’t be risked for what can.
I think we’d most of us might be better off if we adopted more ascetic or minimalist values.