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We can think of individual communities as though they are individuals. The characteristics of the community would be their culture (what we might reasonably expect them to be doing or acting).
A community can decide among themselves to have any culture at all, any set of rules to live by and any level of tolerance or strictness of behaviour. But when you have competing communities, this dynamic changes. If another group has a different culture and *that* culture allows the competing community to: live better, be more productive, reproduce to become more numerous, use a greater portion of the nearby resources, etc; then there is a danger of one community overwhelming the other.
In prehistory this undoubtedly happened countless times. A culture that is being outcompeted has a choice: change their culture to become more competitive in the current environment, or leave the environment to an area that has less competition from other communities with differing cultures. This is how humans came to populate every area of the planet, by overpopulating a region, competing with each other for resources, then driving some of us out to a new area to start anew.
In all this, some ideas made us more competitive than others. Some general notions are held by all (or nearly all) cultures across the globe, even the ones that have been separated by continents and oceans for thousands of generations. It is likely that these common ideas were either part of the first community of humans or were ideas that spread to other cultures to make them viable competitors against those who already held them.
Marriage is one such principle. It is possible that stated rules about coupling in longterm partnerships allowed communities of humans to be larger than they could if early humans were promiscuous rather than monogamous. The explanation here is that a community that partnered in marriages (that were honored by ostensibly everyone in that community) were able to work together better due to less sexual jealousy issues. Working together better would have allowed for a larger and more numerous community and therefore be better able to dominate the resources of a region. This is one instance in which a cultural change (from promiscuity to monogamy) could have changed the fate of the world by allowing an entire community to become more competitive against its neighbouring communities.
One can then see how it is that making conscious choices about one's culture and how one shapes one's community can make that community better and more capable. One doesn't anymore have to dominate a neighbouring community to show that their cultural ideas are better. If the way we live makes us stronger as communities and as nations then these are the right choices for us as this time. One could look at WW2 in this same light (two competing cultures looking to dominate and/or defend against).
