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in my opinion. he did more than that.
Like what? I’m not doubting you. Maybe I’m conveniently forgetting the hate-filled pejoratives he used to describe her as a human being.
i’m not talking about trashing hillary.
i’m talking about the manipulation of people’s fears.
it’s been hashed over again and again. so i don’t want to go over it another time.
i think hillary did similar things. i don’t like how her campaign seemed to center around don’t vote for trump or you’re a racist homophobic ass hole. i think it turned a lot of people off.
i wonder how bernie would have handled it. i don’t think he would have handled it the same way. i hope not.
my guess is as the population increases the need for hierarchy increases.
That would assume that human beings are wired to have a need for hierarchy.
If you look at history and anthropology combined, human beings are not wired either for or against social hierarchy. That is you can find examples of everything. If you measure human beings by looking at examples of the kinds of social systems they construct, then, we have done absolutely everything.
In fact what you find about human social hard wiring by looking at examples across space and throughout time is that other than being social animals, we are actually not hard-wired for any one particular way of doing things. We contain endless possibilities that way.
Given that, there’s no reason to assume that population increases lead to a need for hierarchy.
As a rule, though, people tend to desire hiearchy the more they base ideas about social order on fear.
Real or imagined fears.
…
I agree with most of that.
More and more recent studies are actually showing humans are hard-wired for cooperation and empathy, and desire equality. Several recent studies deal with very young kids, most of whom actually get upset when food and toys are not distributed equally. It actually ticks them off, and the studies show they’d rather get rid of extra food and toys than have one kid receive more than the others. There appears to be a bias in favor of equality.
And those kids are saying this about their peers. It’s not just them demanding they receive as much as the other kids. It’s them saying it’s wrong that the other kids receive less, etc.
To me, the evidence points to this: Cooperation, empathy and the desire for equality are beaten out of us over time. These things are replaced by artificial calls to competition, aggression, inequality, indifference, etc. etc.
Yes, there has always been a small percentage that comes into the game already with close to sociopathic ways. But the vast majority of humans are taught to be selfish shits. Most humans aren’t born that way.
how do we not know those kids are sharing because of learned behavior though? i’m always suspicious of those kinds of studies. too much bias inherent in those studies. humans will always see what they want to see.
of course i could just be seeing what i want to see, so i concede i could be dead wrong about this.
humans love to teach their own to be sharing and to be compassionate with each other. but when it comes to others we are taught to be fearful and guarded.
But are hierarchical structures really proof that we can’t have truly egalitarian ones instead? We used to. As far as we know, our first 200,000 years on this planet were very close to non-hierarchical and egalitarian, structurally. By no means perfectly so. But the norm in “traditional societies” was for pretty flat pyramids, with maybe one or two steps.
We now have hierarchies with thousands of them.
Given the fact that the vast majority of our time on this planet was spent within those virtually non-hierarchical societies — which in some parts of the world, lasted into the 20th century, btw — is it really accurate to say “human nature” prevents this?
i don’t know. haha.
my guess is as the population increases the need for hierarchy increases.
i could be wrong.
sometimes i imagine there’s a planet out there somewhere with an advanced society with the egalitarian values you talk about. the vulcan?
or maybe humans will become that eventually.
or maybe it’ll be a war of the worlds.
