Deserve: the deadliest word

“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”
Thomas Jefferson

Maybe we should stop expecting so much from our fellow hairless apes.

A well-written, thoughtful, post.

I agree yet disagree. I believe we’re akin to bonobos, so that sociality and compassion and empathy are born into us. However, for due to reasons of humankind’s cultural evolution I won’t go into (which largely involves the development of war and economic inequality) human societies indoctrinate youngsters into believing that down is up, war is peace, and slavery is freedom. Always at a cost, to be sure, to themselves as individuals and to society at a large, but to a benefit to the few at the top.

Heck, forget selfish, people who won’t even look out after their own self-interest, or even understand what it is.

Much of the difference in what people think of as evil and good is the difference between short-term and long-term self-interest. One of the attractive things about hunter-gatherer societies is that essentially all their social relations are long-term. You’re in contact with these people for life; so if you cheat them, defraud them, or lie to them the truth about you becomes known and you suffer the penalties for doing so. In “advanced” cultures short-term relations abound, and a type of social distance is introduced. A thief who robs someone, or a con artist who defrauds someone, can usually count on never having to meet with them again or have to deal with the consequences of his misdeeds. In short: in hunter-gatherer societies good behavior is rewarded because it is obviously “rational” for reasons of self-interest, in “advanced” cultures evil behavior is often rewarded because, in the short term at least, it too seems “rational” (though in the long term, it’s not really as there are adverse long-term consequences).

The supremacy of capitalism as the world’s only economic system for “serious” thinkers is the reason we’re in this mess. Capitalism, as its propagandists like to tell us, is “good” because it breeds insecurity–even if you’re at the top, you can’t rest on your laurels. But what does insecurity breed? Why, short-term thinking behavior! When you don’t know if or where your next meal is coming from, you eat your seed corn, for what matters *now* is more important than what could happen in some far-distant future. And as I said above, much short-term thinking leads to evil behaviors: greedy, grasping, take-it-while-you-still-can behaviors?

So–under capitalism–is it any wonder that we’re willing to destroy the planet for the sake of next quarter’s profit margin? Ian, you yourself wrote a very accurate blog on how companies today are “burning down the house” to make those profits. Why not the whole planet too?

While acknowledging the achievements of FDR and others in that time: going back to the New Deal isn’t a solution. FDR *failed* because he tried to save capitalism. His patches on the capitalist system didn’t hold; progressive taxation was rolled back and regulations were peeled away, one by one. The problem with the New Deal was a belief that you could restrain the beast by caging it; but what history has shown is that the beast will break out of any cage you devise. You must kill the beast once and for all in order to progress.

And to promote personal and social good, such an economic system must provide a high degree of security. When people are secure, when they know that today’s necessities will be met, then they are free to plan for the long term. When they plan for the long term, when their calculus for what they will do hinges on long-term consequences, then they act better both as individuals and as members of a larger society. What that system might look like is open to argument; my preferred system would entail a system of small privately owned mom-and-pop businesses and large worker-owned cooperatives where economics of scale dictate large size, as well as government-guaranteed necessities such as health care access, food, and shelter.
But I don’t have all the answers on that, save to know that having great wealth (and hence great power) must be prevented.

-StewartM

Bacteria placed in a petri dish will expand to consume all resources and then die of famine amidst their own wastes. The question for humanity is “Are we collectively any smarter than bacteria?” So far the answer is “no.”

Man, I feel this post. The contempt just circles out, out there, and winds back into the self, to self-contempt.

What is it that is marked by this self-contempt? It is surely not innate or natural – I cannot conceive that we were thrown up by this Earth-organism, successfully at least until we became “clever,” as such contemptible creatures, but that may be merely a failure of my conceiving, my cleverness. One does not have to look far into Nature to see the hard and soft cruelties of the natural cycles of life…

A fellow that I am reading at the moment is making a great case for the idea that post-Enlightenment social Darwinism has deeply, and intentionally, infected our education as children. Exacerbated by the appearance of ubiquitous fuel – coal and oil are seen as equalizers that encourage overproduction by the clever masses, thereby threatening the special place that elites enjoy as monopolizers of wealth.

The hierarchical drone-ism that seems so innate in these times can arguably be seen as a direct consequence of this diabolical mis-education – perpetrated by social-engineers-with-means (the wealth class.) It is here that the author veers uncomfortably (for me) into Tea-Party territory – withdrawal from the social contract and homeschool the young ‘uns, among other righty-libertarian responses, these are the responses that are most easily within reach of shallow thinking, the sort of shallow thinking you would expect from we, the mis-educated.

My point is here that when I look deep into my own self-contempt – which cannot be avoided if one is to fairly ponder the poor behavior of the species as a whole – I encounter certain knee-jerk impulses that actually feel quite alien to me. For example, I have spent my entire conscious life inculcating, and proselytizing at any opportunity, an independent view that holds that the Calvinistic imperative for work is a scam – yet it often takes an heroic effort to retain esteem in the face of unemployment.

If a committed iconoclast like myself is still being jerked around by these, I can only imagine what it must be like for those of “weaker character,” as Ian puts it.

I was about to write that maybe I’m wrong, and that’s why the guilt persists. But, goddammit, no. The guilt is testimony to the insidiousness of the propaganda. I think I can stand on that.

@jcapan:

Private aircraft.

Thanks Petro, that had escaped my not-rich brain. I was thinking in terms of the so-so rich/1st class types, though it wouldn’t surprise me if they had an out too.

“Even flying first class you avoid the worst of it, I’m told, by a friend who does so.”

Wow, Ian. If that doesn’t reveal the bankruptcy of the whole process… as if a serious actor couldn’t gather up the scratch for a first-class ticket.

Too bad for us that we don’t have more Naders and that he has gotten old. Ralph Nader from the Truthdig link cited above:

“Seven hundred thousand people demonstrated in London. But where are they the next day? And where are their adversaries? The next day their adversaries are on the job. Where are the 700,000 people? They are out of there. How many organizers are on the ground in the 435 districts? Could labor unions have been organized without organizers? Could the suffragist movement have been organized without organizers? Could the anti-slavery movement or the civil rights movement been organized without organizers? If you don’t have organizers on the ground you know ipso facto that your demonstration is going nowhere.”

And they announce “one-day protest”, “two-day strike”, and so on. Strikes have worked when the strikers said, “We will strike until our demands are met,” not “We will strike for a day to ‘send a message’.”

@jcapan
“Me focusing on one little tree, but how do they avoid the heavy petting?”

Not heavy petting, but somewhat similar…. During the 2001 hoof-n-mouth scare, my wife and I were on a flight from Calcutta to London. We were flying club class on British Airways – we were up in the ‘bubble’ of a 747. After they closed the doors, the aircrew announced that they were going to go throughout the plane and ‘spray’ everyone to guard against the disease being carried to England. I thought “oh fucking great!” So we waited to be sprayed but no one ever came up to the bubble. We could hear them spraying below; even smell the spray – it smelled like the Raid ™ I used to spray flies with when I was a kid, but we never got sprayed. So that, more or less, is how the moneyed classes avoid the shit through which the rest of us have to wade; they buy their way out of it.

Formerly T-Bear

All too often “American Heritage” magazine produces tracts better described as ‘free market propaganda and disinformation’.

History is not, as Henry Ford said, “bunk”. But history, like art, is at best a perspective limited by the available data and widely-held beliefs of the time of authorship; at worst out-and-out propaganda in the service of a political cause. The historiography of, say war guilt in WWI or the US Civil War, are good examples of this. In fact, WWI and its outcome influenced Civil War historiography for the next two decades. One sees the past in reference to one’s present.

Many comments being made seem to overlook the basics of human behaviour, that of dominance within the social group. Decades have passed since Desmond Morris wrote about “The Naked Ape” followed by other sociological studies of dominance characteristics, the ‘Alpha male/female’ of humans and other related species.

If I am understanding you aright–uh, no.

Humans have no alpha males and females. Late-surviving hunter-gathering groups which have been studied do not support that contention. Or, as Marvin Harris put it (Our Kind):

“Then let me hear no more of our kind’s natural necessity to form hierarchical groups. An observer viewing human society shortly after cultural takeoff would easily have concluded that our species was destined to be irredeemably egalitarian except for distinctions of sex and age. That someday the world would be divided into aristocrats and commoners, masters and slaves, billionaires and beggars would have seemed wholly contrary to human nature as evidenced in the affairs of every human society then on earth”.

Hunter-gatherers do have leaders, “headmen”, and often more than one, but it’s a thankless job. You get the status by merit; by repeated examples that you’re good at what you do and know what you’re talking about. Even then, you issue no direct orders and lead by example and by platitude. Even if you’re the hunter who brought in the kill, you shrug and say you were lucky instead of boasting about it (boasting being bad form in egalitarian societies) and you might have to eat last after everyone else has eaten. You’re often the first one up in the morning to make the fire, if there’s a job to be done you’re the first one to pitch in and to start doing it. Their job has been compared to being an overzealous scoutmaster at an overnight campout.

A better explanation than biological rationales for human leadership roles then is a desire for status and acceptance, which overlaps with our need to be loved. In hunter-gatherer cultures, status can only be gained by showing that you merit it; there is a tight connection between responsibility and what little ‘power’ you wield. After the Neolithic threshold was crossed, and the switch to more settled, horticultural lives made it possible for “big men” to increase productivity by getting others to work hard along with them so that they could play the role of “great providers” (but still at no tangible benefit to themselves) they at least got to brag about their status. With “chiefs”, the position starts to be more managerial and possibly hereditary and the lifestyle of the “chief” begins to become elevated above those of commoners (though still, little in the way of direct power). But still, the job of all of these was to provide materially for their peoples, and woe could befall any that didn’t live up to his job.

As people don’t willingly surrender their autonomy, the transition from chiefdom to state with its kings, emperors, and pharaohs required a particular set of circumstances. One, it required storable wealth–in the form of a crop that could be stored. This meant that some people, by hard work or good fortune, could accumulate wealth and become richer than others. For hunter-gatherers, with no storable wealth, one’s associates are one’s “bank account”–you do good for them with the expectation that when you need help, they will likewise do for you. While no tallies are kept, one “banks” against a “rainy day” by doing helping others. The growth of inequality in wealth and was an important development, as it grants one independence from the necessity to do good to others.

A key requirement was water. The first “pristine” states evolved where agriculture was facilitated by irrigation. Having storable wealth meant, over time, that rich people could become “chiefs”, and becoming the chief meant, among other things, managing the water supply. As population density increased, eventually such areas could not be productive *without* irrigation, and then the chief by managing the precious water become the arbiter of life and death itself. Their supply or storable wealth in turn allowed them to hire thugs (ur, “armies” and “police”) both for self-defense and to control the locals. Contributions became taxes, and chiefs became kings. Eventually, in all the areas this occurred (Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, India, and Peru) the life-and-death power over water allowed the kings to become emperors, divine beings on earth who demanded worship and that commoners grovel on the ground abjectly before them. Statehood changed religion too, alleviating the leader from any responsibility for providing for his people in the here-and-now (which is something that every head man, big man, and chief had to worry about) and transferring rewards into an afterlife.

As for the commoners? As disastrous was this turn of events for them, they couldn’t run away–their population had increased to the point that the surrounding, less hospitable, countryside could not support them. They were trapped–hence the term: “hydraulic trap”, coined by Karl Wittfogel. This also explains why any pharaoh-wannabees among the chiefs of say Germany or Scotland or Saskatchewan or elsewhere failed–their agriculture wasn’t irrigation-based, and no one controls rainfall. Hawaii is an interesting test case, there its pharaoh-wannabees had many of the prerequisites but lacked among other things, storable crops. Their staple, yams, wouldn’t keep more than a few months, which meant that pre-European Hawaiian states were always unstable and fell apart.

The reason for this long explanation is this: if the biological explanations of human inequality were correct, if we were truly a species of alpha males and alpha females, then you’d expect the Hanna-Barbera cartoon image of prehistory that many of us grew up with to be correct: that of a chief in a grass skirt, advised by his witch doctor sporting a bone through his nose and flanked by his warriors, with the commoners groveling before him, exercising arbitrary life-or-death decisions over his people and whose word was law. But the reality is that you see nothing of the sort; the opposite, in fact. Hunter-gatherers are not led by Hitlers or Stalins or Henry VIIIs or Qin Shi Huangdis. Not only are their overzealous scoutmasters unlike them, people who behave like these–grasping sociopaths who life is all take and no give–run into trouble in their cultures and are even killed as “crazy people”. I suspect that a tendency towards sociopathy and dominance might be to some degree inheritable, but it is a tendency only rewarded in derived cultures, not basal ones.

The myth of the human alpha male/alpha female is instead a creation by derived cultures themselves. Cultures who give most of their people a raw deal also create mystified creation stories to explain how reality came to be, in which the message is “This is the best deal you can hope for, no better deal is even possible. Live with it”. Likewise, the sociopaths who came to lead derived cultures were all-too-eager to embrace biological explanations for inequality and that gosh by golly, *someone* is “naturally” destine to be in charge and wielding the iron fist (so why not them?). In the West until relatively recently the bias has been to disparage primitive cultures as being brutish tyrannical hellholes (Hobbes, Hegel) and that instead the uh, the apogee of liberty was to be found in Hegel’s Prussian state.

It wasn’t until the colonial period, when commoners sometimes ran away to live with Native American peoples did some learn the truth: instead of a society where by law how long they should take at meals, what clothes they could and couldn’t wear, how long they should work, what time they should get out of bed, and the smallest choices of conscience and sexuality were tightly controlled by some Lord Asshole; they discovered a society where by contrast the personal freedom and autonomy were unparalleled to anything they had known and the work requirements were minimal. You can almost imagine their reactions in today’s vernacular: “Wow. Awesome”. It’s why the English in the early colonial period were alarmed at the prospect of their indentured servants running away into the woods and “going Indian” and why they killed any whom they caught doing so (which in turn is also why they eventually turned to a system of African slavery vs white indentured servitude). Even then, some scholars like Bruce Johansen maintain that Europeans did not have any idea of what a free society might look like until they contacted Native American peoples, and that these influenced Enlightenment ideas and those of American thinkers.

Finally, even in biology, if one wants to draw on primate models–bonobos don’t have alpha males. Alpha females, perhaps, but not alpha males. Most of the work detailing “alpha” status is done on less closely related species to us, and I believe the reason why for this too is influenced by our cultural biases. It’s like sexuality: Disney shows us that footage of pairs of birds-mated-for life taking care of their offspring and there’s of course The March of the Penguins, meanwhile ignoring the bonobos over there having the orgy. They do this even though we and bonobos uniquely share key similarities related to sex while we and those other species share almost nothing in common. Our cultural mores about “how life oughta be” doesn’t fit well with bonobos for those desiring naturalistic explanations of human inequality and current society, so they’re less utilized.

-StewartM

would doubt your credentials non-the-less

I doubt all credentials. They speak nothing of effectiveness, or accuracy. Credentials amount to nothing more than one’s fellow backslappers heaping praise and recognition for both bolstering the Orthodoxy and presenting the proper social/political etiquette….meaning not rocking the boat and tipping the apple cart.

Does anyone have a link to the transcripts of the interviews with our Hunter-Gatherer ancestors where they tell us about their Egalitarianism?

I both agree and disagree. It’s true that humans have not acquitted themselves very well on a grand scale and, yes, most of us are weak.

Having said that, I know a lot of people who are inherently decent. Take my family (not me). The part in rural Appalachia during the depression. Didn’t have two dimes to rub together. But pretty much anyone who stopped by their little patch of dirt got fed. It’s why there’s a mural over the fireplace – an artist wanted to “pay” them. I am constantly astounded by acts of decency and kindness routinely. People going out of their way to help others in small and large ways. A colleague who gave up part of his liver so someone else might live, for example.

My own theory is that our society has advanced in ways we aren’t really capable of dealing with. It’s evolved faster than we have. The effect modern day propaganda has on us is, I suspect, both deeper and something we don’t really understand or process in a rational way.

We live in a huge corporate state and we’re not really equipped to maneuver within it in positive ways. For example, I’ve known quite a few relatively high executives at federal agencies and departments. The number who don’t seem to understand the politics around them is actually quite large. Only a few truly see the bigger game. Most are just trying to do their jobs and go home to their families. And, of course, those out to corrupt the system take advantage of those things.

Add to that a centuries old effort to marginalize and disenfranchise people, which never seem to go away. From ballot access laws to voter registration restrictions, the country is designed to keep people from participating in a meaningful way. Yes, people could rise up and fight that, but there’s a lot of pressure not to from debt slavery to employer background checks. Not an excuse so much as an explanation.

So I’d say we both do and don’t deserve what we’re getting. Or rather those who deserve it least will get hit the hardest. Those who deserve it most will not.

Deserve

“Night after night, I sat there dreaming. Dreaming when I would be inside – getting ready. I was alone. I don’t like to be with people – and I can never stand any kind of fighting.

“One night when I was going home, I saw two men fighting. They were drunk. I can’t stand people who are drunk! One was big and the other little. The big man was hurting the little one. I went up and pulled on the big man’s sleeve. Asked him why he was doing it. He looked down on me. I was eight years old.

“That’s all right. You can go now. Here’s your little daughter.’ Then I ran away. I wasn’t his little daughter.

“It’s just the same today. If I see an accident or hear two people quarrelling, I am just sick all over. I never fight myself and I won’t do any fighting in pictures.

http://www.greta-garbo.de/interview-with-greta-garbo-photoplay-1928-ruth-biery/index.html

(FRIENDLY ACTION) ESCALATION OF FORCE RPT %%%/A–%%% AFAR IVO (ROUTE ): %%% CIV WIA

WHEN: 011430JAN09

TIMELINE:

%%%: UNIT WAS CONDUCTING MOVEMENT FROM CP %%% TO %%% WHEN A FEMALE LN WALKED IN BETWEEN THE FIRST AND SECOND MRAP. THE %%% MRAP INITIATED EOF PROCEDURES BY YELLING AND USING HAND AND ARM SIGNALS TO ATTEMPT TO GET A LN WOMAN ( %%%) TO MOVE OUT OF THE ROAD.

THE WOMAN BEGAN PRAYING IN THE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD, AND THE %%% AT HER TO DEMONSTRATE HIS INTENTION TO USE DEADLY FORCE.

THE WOMAN CONTINUED TO MOVE TOWARD THE VEHICLE AND IT CONTINUED TO BACK UP. THE PL RADIOED FORWARD TO THE LEAD VEHICLE THAT WAS NEAR AN ISF CHECKPOINT, VIC THE INTERSECTION OF RTE %%% AND RTE %%%, TO GET THE %%% TO ATTEMPT TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE WOMAN. THE IPS ATTEMPTED TO GET THE WOMAN OUT OF THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET. SHE REFUSED TO COMMUNICATE WITH THE IPS, AND BEGAN YELLING LOUDER. THE IP MOVED AWAY FROM THE WOMAN TO INCREASE STANDOFF.

THE ELEMENT ATTEMPTED TO GET ASSISTANCE FROM %%% WHO WERE AT THE CHECKPOINT AND THEY STAYED AT THE CP. AFTER THE IP MOVED TO COVER BEHIND THEIR VEHICLE, THE WOMAN THEN BEGAN MOVING TOWARD VEHICLE TWO AGAIN, ALL THE WHILE THE CREW WAS GOING THROUGH EOF PROCEDURES, WHEN SHE GOT APPROXIMATELY %%% AWAY FROM THE VEHICLE THE PL ORDERED THE %%% THE WOMAN WITH HIS %%% AS THE LAST STEP IN THE ESCALATION OF FORCE. THE ELEMENT DETERMINED BASED ON TERRAIN AND CLOSE VIC OF %%%, THERE WAS NOT A SAFE AREA TO FIRE A WARNING SHOT. AT THIS TIME THE %%% LN FEMALE SUSPECTED OF BEING A SUICIDE BOMBER WITH %%% X ROUNDS OF .%%% FROM HIS %%%, RESULTING IN %%% X LN WIA.

AFTER THE WOMAN WAS ENGAGED, THE IP IMMEDIATELY PICKED HER UP AND PUT HER IN THEIR VEHICLE. THE ELEMENT ATTEMPTED TO STOP THE IPS THROUGH VOICE COMMANDS TO DETERMINE IF THERE WERE EXPLOSIVES ON HER OR ANYTHING ELSE SUSPICIOUS. THE IPS DID NOT STOP AND DEPARTED THE AREA QUICKLY WITH THE WOMAN. AFTER FURTHER INVESTIGATION THE WOMAN WAS TAKEN TO THE %%% HOSPITAL BY THE %%%. CURRENTLY %%% AND %%%/A ARE CONTINUING TO INVESTIGATE, IN ORDER TO LOCATE THE WOMAN AND DETERMINE IF SHE IN FACT HAD ANY EXPLOSIVES ON HER PERSON.

THE A BTRY COMMANDER IS CURRENTLY AT THE %%% HOSPITAL , GRID %%%, WHERE SHE IS BEING REPORTED TO HAVE BEEN TAKEN TO. SHE IS REPORTEDLY A %%% FOR THE %%% STATION. HER NAME IS . %%% REPORTED AS HAVING SURGERY TO REMOVE HER LEFT KIDNEY AND IS IN STABLE POSITION.

THE BN COMMANDER,%%%, IS WORKING WITH THE %%% BN COMMANDER AT THE %%% AT JSS .

%%%: PER PHONE CONVERSATION /%%% AT JSS %%%-THE %%% DIV CDR CAME TO JSS %%% AND RELAYED THAT HE WENT TO THE %%% HOSPITAL TO QUESTION THE WOMAN. THE %%% DIV CDR STATED THE WOMAN WAS INTENDING ON COMMITTING SUICIDE BY JUMPING OFF THE BRIDGE WHEN SHE RAN %%% THE CF PATROL. UNDERSTANDING OUR EOF PROCEDURES, SHE THEN TOOK THE ACTIONS STATED EARLIER WITH THE INTENT OF GETTING SHOT. %%% DIV CDR %%% THE EOF AND STATED THAT THE PLT %%% DID THE RIGHT THING. THE IP DIV CDR STATED THAT HE WOULD ALSO GO TO THE MEDIA TO CLEAR THE STORY UP. NEXT %%% IS ATTEMPTING TO GET WOUNDED LN TO %%% CSH IN THE IZ FOR BETTER TREATMENT.

SUMMARY:

%%% X EOF
%%% X LN WIA
%%% X DMG

//CLOSED//%%%

http://wikileaks.org/id/92C2418B-423D-4561-53D7A158D5B5C640/

We asked Oucha Mbarbk what he would do if he had more money. He said he would buy more food. Then we asked him what he would do if he had even more money. He said he would buy better-tasting food. We were starting to feel very bad for him and his family, when we noticed the TV and other high-tech gadgets. Why had he bought all these things if he felt the family did not have enough to eat? He laughed, and said, “Oh, but television is more important than food!”

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/04/25/more_than_1_billion_people_are_hungry_in_the_world?page=full

http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9

“For example, I have spent my entire conscious life inculcating, and proselytizing at any opportunity, an independent view that holds that the Calvinistic imperative for work is a scam – yet it often takes an heroic effort to retain esteem in the face of unemployment.”

Low demand for countersignalling. http://zhongwe2.serverpros.com/cs/

Anyway, for the third time in this thread, solution is here: http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9

Great post. No false hope here. Just the bitterness and the rage, which everyone should feel but so few sadly do.

@ StewartM

with the 1964 tax cut cutting the upper rate from 91 % down to 70% (most commentators seem to miss the connection that this was when the US started to have a persistent inflation problem…hmmm).

84% of the general public thinks inflation is bad. Only 18% of economists think the same way.

Then again, mainstream economics has no logical explanation for why people earn money, and then proceed to not spend it when they have more money than they could ever conceivably spend on daily needs. The use of wealth as a standard of success means that possessing money has utility regardless of the ability to exchange that money for products and services, but also means that productivity increases will lead to depressions and unemployment when people who have money stop spending it, due to oversupply of labour. In other words, by fixing unemployment there is no longer any need for continuous inflation to ensure a society’s economic health. http://pastebin.com/Q86Zhgs9

@ Formerly T-Bear

Many comments being made seem to overlook the basics of human behaviour, that of dominance within the social group.

This comment does not overlook that aspect.

The desire to achieve can be harnessed for positive change, by defining standards of achievement that benefit society.

@StewartM

Eventually, in all the areas this occurred (Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, India, and Peru) the life-and-death power over water allowed the kings to become emperors, divine beings on earth who demanded worship and that commoners grovel on the ground abjectly before them.

One emperor of China changed his name to make it easier for people to comply with a naming taboo.

Hunter-gatherers are not led by Hitlers or Stalins or Henry VIIIs or Qin Shi Huangdis. Not only are their overzealous scoutmasters unlike them, people who behave like these–grasping sociopaths who life is all take and no give–run into trouble in their cultures and are even killed as “crazy people”.

It hardly needs to be said that the areas that hunter-gatherer cultures were in were invaded and colonized by people from more complex societies, not the other way around. Perhaps they would have benefited from having more “crazy people”, after all.

Disney shows us that footage of pairs of birds-mated-for life taking care of their offspring and there’s of course The March of the Penguins, meanwhile ignoring the bonobos over there having the orgy. … Our cultural mores about “how life oughta be” doesn’t fit well with bonobos for those desiring naturalistic explanations of human inequality and current society, so they’re less utilized.

Why do you have an expectation that TV programs about nature describe any kind of objectives of a human society? Or TV programs about anything for that matter?

@The Other Mike

The common good is no longer common
Or very good

If the US’s GDP goes up, is that good?

If the US’s consumption of oil goes up, is that good?
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/ene_oil_con_tho_bar_dai-oil-consumption-thousand-barrels-daily

It hardly needs to be said that the areas that hunter-gatherer cultures were in were invaded and colonized by people from more complex societies, not the other way around. Perhaps they would have benefited from having more “crazy people”, after all.

“Benefited,” indeed. Perhaps humanity is one, and there are larger, epochal, lessons to be learned. Time will tell, I’m sure – I only hope that someone will still be listening…

Well Ian, take comfort in two possible outcomes to this nearly complete failure of a species.

Either the rather more egalitarian and “just” societies (usually, as already noted, taking the form of the “hunter-gatherer” type) will survive the sins of the complex “civilizations”, assuming any have survived the arrival of the complex “civilizations” to date.

Or, regardless of any esteem Homo Sapiens holds itself in, the Earth itself will survive just fine sans Humanity – much less with or without its current menagerie of species – and in due time some other intelligence will arise to take the vacated pedestal of supremacy tens/hundreds of millions of years from now.

Quite likely to learn some lesson from the ruins and bones we leave behind.

General Washington PERMALINK
July 6, 2011
Quite likely to learn some lesson from the ruins and bones we leave behind.
===================================
Hmm, there is scant evidence to support that assumption/conclusion. We’ve done this too many times in our short history and the outcome is always the same; fail.
However, your second surmise is the only reasonable eventuality; Gaia will of course continue to it’s natural conclusion without us. Or, IMO, at least a minuscule remnant of the remaining hominids…

The desire to achieve can be harnessed for positive change, by defining standards of achievement that benefit society.

Who gets to do the defining? Therein lies the rub.

Fuck reading books and bones. Read the tea leaves. It ain’t a pretty story.

Misaki:

It hardly needs to be said that the areas that hunter-gatherer cultures were in were invaded and colonized by people from more complex societies, not the other way around.

That’s purely due to demographics. Hunter-gathering cultures can only exist at very low population densities: << 1 person a square mile. Once a neighbor, any neighbor, passes the Neolithic threshold, their population density explodes. That means: 1) they can't go back to being hunter-gatherers, for sheer numbers plus as agriculture requires driving away game and involves simplifying the ecosystem; and 2) they will either subsume or drive away any hunting-gathering neighbors. It's why the hunting-gathering cultures that survived long enough to be studied all lived on rather poor pieces of real estate that no one else fancied.

Even that being the case, those same studies showed that hunter-gatherers "worked" only a fraction of what even Westerners work, let alone Third-World sweatshop workers: about 15-20 hours a week doing "work" and about an equivalent additional time doing "chores". They are the kings of leisure time. In fact, it's something of a mystery what drove people to start agriculture and animal husbandry in the first place; hunter-gatherers aren't stupid, they know damn well that if you plant seeds in the ground plants will sprout. "But why should we?" they would respond to questions about farming. "Isn't that a lot of hard work?"

Perhaps they would have benefited from having more “crazy people”, after all.

First of all: most hunter-gatherer groups that lasted long enough to be studied did practice some sort of intergroup conflict or “war”. Now, some caveats need to to be said right away: their “wars” are low-intensity conflicts , sometimes even just single homicides, and sometimes more symbolic than bloody. (One described instance from Australian aborigines: both sides met on a prearranged field, with men shouting insults at each other and detailing their grievances, while old men threw spears at each other at very long range, during which old women ran amongst their own men screaming at them to behave. When someone was finally hit by the rather inaccurate spear throwing, everything ceased, as if a reaction of “OMG someone actually got hurt!”). Moreover, such a “war” might not involve all the members of either group; one could sit out the “war” and still be friendly with people on the other side; indeed, you might have family on the other side. While the percentages of adult male combat deaths due to “war” could be rather high (c. 25 %) the low population densities meant that this would translate to be on the order of about one death every 10 years per band from “war”.

However, most groups studied did fight “wars” and there were casualties and deaths. That needs to be said. So despite not having Hitlers and Stalins and Pol Pots, they know how to fight and to defend themselves if the need arose.

I could add more, but I got burned on a long comment before so I’ll stop.

-StewartM

Ian Welsh

But once they have a way of doing things, they hate to change it. Usually a once very succesful culture won’t change until forced to, either by full on collapse or by a barbarian invasion, or both.

Interestingly enough, said resistance to change seems to correlate with social stratification and hierarchy. Hunter-gatherers and other band-and-village people are open to change when they control it and see it improving their lives. They will adopt using modern tools instead of handmade ones, or sport baseball caps and T-shirts. (Although the sad story of the obliteration of cultures on my continent and elsewhere often starts with such ‘gifts’, even those well-meant, that result in the peoples forgetting how to make the tools their ancestors did, and becoming dependent on the outsiders).

Hierarchical societies, controlled by those on top, fear change, because any change will likely decrease their wealth and power and comfort. In previous blogs you’ve nailed it spot-on: our elites are stuck on the oil economy, it’s just been too damn good to them, and all its associated aspects such as climate change. The only change they would allow is a change towards another energy source they can likewise control, top-down, to continue to be able to charge the serfs a monthly fee.

Plus many of them are aging. I had a Rush Limbaugh fan who complained about the guv’mint taking his “hard earned money” (actually, he walked down a church aisle to obtain that) admit to me in a moment of honesty that all he cared for was to keep taxes on himself as low as possible until he died. After that, he didn’t care.

(And conservatives maintain that homosexuality is “dangerous” because gays don’t have children and therefore don’t have any posterity to worry about?)

-StewartM

Stewart, your theory, or the theory to which you adhere, is extremely plausible, but that does not make it fact. We cannot extrapolate from now back to the entirety of human history based off of what we only see and know now. Or, more specifically, we could certainly attempt to do so, and that is what you are doing, but with what degree of accuracy? Granted, your theory is very well reasoned, but well reasoned doesn’t make it right.

It’s precisely why I said let me see the links to the interviews with some of the 100,000 year old humans so we can see just what type of social arrangement they were exercising. Absent that, much of this is well reasoned conjecture, and what irks me about well reasoned conjectured is the air of authority it carries when it has no basis to wield such authority and more than the Pope has any business wielding Authority about the question of God and Divinity.

A thing worth contemplating is that the wider one’s eyes are open, the less differences are seen between us. It is the half-lidded, mean-of-heart that would identify “better” human beings. Of course, those same would be inclined to declare, then, that the compassionate are de facto “better” human beings, but the objects of such a judgment would unfailingly demur.

Orange,

Beauty is a very subjective thing. From one generation to the next, if not to a finer degree, the definition changes.

And strength, intelligence? How about sociability? Which qualities would show you the alpha? People are very flexible, and oftentimes fit roles for the betterment of a group, not take a role because of whatever talent. It can go either way. I have seen too smart or strong or beautiful be shunned from a group, and ostrasization occur based on these very traits claimed to show the alpha.

To be sure, I am not a “everything is relative” kind of person, but this alpha thing spoken of seems to fit a relative, or subjective definition, and not an objective one at all. No, this alpha notion is a cultural construct.

I think there are too many Alphas commenting to this thread.

Beauty is not subjective
Beauty is not subjective
Beauty is not subjective
Beauty is not subjective
Beauty is not subjective
Beauty is not subjective

Studies have shown this repeatedly (as if it wasn’t so strikingly obvious anyway)

This is why the Left is not taken seriously

Beauty is not subjective

Exactly……it’s learned.

My credentials? “Well-read” on many topics, including this one, though I can’t claim professional status. (Not that it matters, what matters is the argument, not who speaks it).

Stewart, don’t you know? FTB has declared that you are WRONG, that you have no thoughts worth sharing that can touch his beautiful mind. You should have avoided “removing all doubt.” How DARE you presume to take up a moment of his precious, unique life.

anon2525 PERMALINK
July 6, 2011

Here’s some good news from Iceland:
=============================
Now that is heart-warming; damn, I want to move to Iceland.
It would be nice to live in a free country for a change; at least one with its priorities set correctly @ its citizens.

Alpha smalfa; humans have finally gotten enough technology combined with a huge dose of psychosis/psychotic behavior to follow through with their death wish…

anon2525 PERMALINK
July 6, 2011
Can Air Conditioning Save You?
=====================
Sure, if you want to be a prisoner of your home and vehicle.
I live in the tropics (13 deg. N.Lat) and we do not have air conditioning. We live in a 2 bdrm home which I’ve surrounded with trees. We’re also rural/urban and not surrounded by cement/black-top, so we get the “real” temperature. My wife grew up without aircon here; and I grew up without it in the states and I’m very content to not have the expense every month.
But, most importantly, I decided to forgo aircon so I was free to visit, explore, shop fresh markets, and basically not become a prisoner of the temperature. My first year here my job was in an aircon office and an aircon hotel room I lived in for a year.
I was never comfortable without aircon; it’s a curse, IMO. And let’s be clear; I’m 66, not some youngster, so age has nothing to do with it.
Now after 8 years without it, I’m a free man, so-to-speak.
Oh, just as an example; last year we had 90 days of 38 – 42c everyday (February,March & April).
My Habaneros suffered greatly… 😉

And even if the 700 million tons of emissions were reduced, it’s a small percentage of the total savings needed. Here is an (25-minute) audio program in which one of the speakers makes the claim that we need to reduce total emissions by twelve gigatons (the total amount of emissions by the world economy each year): Climate Change Gridlock, part 1

Obama’s Nixon goes to China moment has arrived. Can we please have Nixon back?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-debt-talks-obama-offers-social-security-cuts/2011/07/06/gIQA2sFO1H_story.html

Thank you to David Swanson for telling Mr. Hopey Change to go fuck himself (pretty much the only appropriate response):

http://warisacrime.org/content/killing-old-people-fiscally-responsible

Thanks for the link anon2525. Let’s hope whatever the Icelanders have going for them is contagious.

^ Fireland! Welcome to Paradise…

A sample of 1 is not enough. Higher death rates do ensue from heat stroke in un-ACed contexts in tropical countries, as well as other non-fatal diseases such as kidney stones, etc. Whether that is justification for AC is another matter. I had a temperature-kept-low-in-winter/bundle-up sort of upbringing in Canada, so I’ve always found it extremely difficult to function in heat—trips to see the relatives in South Asia are usually miserable for me—and will move to eventually-habitable Antarctica if necessary to avoid it 🙂

I question the terms “intolerably hot” and “in need of A/C”; maybe by spoiled western standards, but certainly not by “human” standards.

It’s true that “intolerably hot” is used too quickly by most people with A/C, but then there are the tens of thousands who died in Europe (France, particularly) during their heat wave in 2003 (?) and the tens of thousands who died in Russia’s heat wave last summer. That is undeniably intolerably hot. Expect more of this in the future.

A new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research warns that based on current projections of global-warming pollution, vast swaths of the world’s most populated areas could begin suffering from extreme drought within decades. The increasingly dry soil would threaten water and food for hundreds of millions.
…
Using 22 computer models of the climate, the study indicates that the extent and severity of droughts could soon be unprecedented.

“Shooting the messenger” has never been shown to be an effective ploy with natural phenomena.

First gambit: shoot the messenger (“the messenger is a hypocrite”)
Second gambit: change the subject (“the messenger’s prescription is wrong”)

And yet still the elephant remains in the room, despite all of the “shiny” distractions:

A new study by the National Center for Atmospheric Research warns that based on current projections of global-warming pollution, vast swaths of the world’s most populated areas could begin suffering from extreme drought within decades. The increasingly dry soil would threaten water and food for hundreds of millions.
…
Using 22 computer models of the climate, the study indicates that the extent and severity of droughts could soon be unprecedented.

And yet still the elephant remains in the room, despite all of the “shiny” distractions:

What’s the Elephant? Seriously, I’m curious. What is the Elephant?

Third gambit: “talk about other elephants that aren’t in the room”

The other problems need to be solved, too. The point was to provide for everyone information about this problem, and not to deny it or change the subject or shoot the messenger, or provide some other distraction. This problem–by itself–is enough to end human civilization. Piling on really doesn’t change anything, unless we want to say, “Not only will civilization end in 100 years, but it will really, really end. Not only will the horse be dead, but we’ll be beating it with a stick for a week after.”

Repeating myself:

Speaking of climate change, drought, and famine, there is this item that summarizes the end of human civilization in two illustrations of present and future rainfall, 2000-2009 and 2090-2099: The Scorched Earth

Not enough people realize how close to the end we are, and many (most?) do not even think that we are in any danger of approaching the end.

If someone has an argument, it is with the illustrations of the data at the link provided. Not with me, not with Gore. Either the illustrations are wrong in what they predict (based on our current course of action), or they are not. And if they are not wrong, why aren’t they wrong?

You are not curious, Anon, and you do not want to learn. I have a way of knowing whether the link I have provided has been followed, and it has not, meaning you didn’t even click on it. I believe that shows your true character. You are either a stubborn ideologue who has made up their mind and refuses to consider information from uncredentialed, unvetted sources, or you are a propagandist who’s mission it is to subtly, or not so subtly, steer and direct on informed blogs such as this. Maybe a combination of both.

Does most everyone ‘deserve’ to suffer for the wrongs they’ve collectively committed?

Of course.

Should they?

Of course not.

I have not lived your life, and I am not you, so I cannot fully grasp the roots of your worldview. I have lived my life, and I am me, so my worldview is my own.

That said: I take it as a basic truth that suffering should be prevented as far as that is possible. Suffering and pain, while perhaps satisfying to see inflicted on the deserving, in the end profit no one. Whatever I may think in my outrage and contempt, however much I may sometimes fantasize about evil men being punished, I realize that to inflict pain willingly, and to condemn others to pain, is a barbaric and animal act.

The human thing to do is to work against suffering, even the suffering of those who might deserve it. The Christian might say especially to work against the suffering of those who might deserve it. Mercy is what makes us human, makes us higher, better creatures.