Man: Naturally Obedient or Naturally Free?

@no1marauder said
Actually, hunter gatherer bands are mostly made up of nonrelated individuals:

"First, bands are mainly composed of individuals either distantly related by kinship and/or marriage or unrelated altogether. In our sample of 32 societies, primary kin generally make up less than 10% of a residential band. "

http://johnhawks.net/weblog/topics/population_structure/kin-co-r ...[text shortened]... atic warfare on display at Nataruk, because they didn’t have land or stores of food to fight over. "

Sure, some amount of cooperation between related groups occurs.

Indeed, perhaps a lo tof the cooperation that we see in the 20th century from them was spawned partly by being driven into near extinction by the Bantu peoples that came through the area. I had heard that the Khoisan were nearly extinct even when the Europeans had met them, but it has been a long time since I have read about that.

@philokalia said
I think it appears to be an inclination toward cooperation as the natural state of man largely because we have grown up in such developed economies with high level of security.

If we had grown up in other circumstances, we might be more inclined to obedience, and even think of obedience as just another way to cooperate... as opposed to them being some sort of dichotomy.

Yes of course if your conditioned from birth to accept a strongly disciplined social environment you will be more accepting of it but that does not make it a natural condition, your in effect talking about brain washing or acting under duress.
If someone points a gun at your head your probably cooperate to an extreme level but it does not signify a natural or evolved tendency.

@moonbus said
This is not merely a semantic quibble. The point I'm trying to make is that the whole idea that there was once an idyllic state of nature in which men lived in peace and total freedom, a peaceful state which was shattered by the imposition of tyranny (i.e., government), is a fiction. A fiction shared by several authors, including Locke and Rousseau ("Man is born free but ever ...[text shortened]... mines-who-becomes-queen-bee/

Clearly, this would not suffice to make a human baby into a monarch.

Your argument is even more artificial though. The fantastical idea that a Strong individual can suppress the wishes of a group of weaker individuals in nature simply doesn’t exist.
Anyone whose studied our nearest relatives in the wild always comments on the political attributes of the Alpha male and female. They are constantly having to employ social and political skills to keep the group onside. The first thing any challenger does is to go on a charm offensive and recruit supporters from within the group. That’s not to say that the concept of a strong individual leading a group is alien to our biology but that they are and have always been susceptible to ousting by the group and therefor have always had to negotiate their position with the group. I would say this makes democracy a much more natural political condition then autocracy.

@philokalia said
You've chosen the example that best fits your desires and have ignored the other examples of primitive tribes.

That is why this is not very persuasive to me and others, I imagine.

Empty your cup, Philo.

Until people here accept the overwhelming consensus among anthropologists as to the social structure and lifestyles of hunter gatherer bands rather than relying on what they saw in 1930s Tarzan movies or re-runs of Gilligan's Island, their conclusions are going to continue to be at variance with the evidence.

@kevcvs57 said
Yes of course if your conditioned from birth to accept a strongly disciplined social environment you will be more accepting of it but that does not make it a natural condition, your in effect talking about brain washing or acting under duress.
If someone points a gun at your head your probably cooperate to an extreme level but it does not signify a natural or evolved tendency.

Maybe it is even just the case that people will accept a very wide range of environments based on their needs.

We are, by nature, adaptive.

Similarly, I think many other mammals are willing to adjust their behavior to their circumstances.

@no1marauder said
Empty your cup, Philo.

Until people here accept the overwhelming consensus among anthropologists as to the social structure and lifestyles of hunter gatherer bands rather than relying on what they saw in 1930s Tarzan movies or re-runs of Gilligan's Island, their conclusions are going to continue to be at variance with the evidence.

If man was so naturally inclined just to cooperation, why did he drift away from it so easily?

Why is war and violence so prevalent in all of these other tribal communities..?

I think it is the case that the environment would dictate to man what he needs to do to survive, and he follows it.

Moreover, the more successful models for social organization and survival tend to proliferate, while the least successful get left behind.

@no1marauder said
Of course, he has a natural state; that of being part of a egalitarian, emphatic group. And we evolved certain characteristics that enhanced survival inside of and (perhaps more important) of the group itself.

I heavily dispute the idea that small, hunter gathering bands had authoritarian structures with one "chief". I know of no research that supports such a thesis.

The evolution of the brain doesn't fit too well with the notion of small groups with authoritarian leadership either.

The frontal lobes are the most recently evolved areas of the brain (developing from the forebrain from the tip of the neural tube). The importance of our relatively giant frontal lobes is that every nerve fibre that goes from the frontal lobes to elsewhere in the brain is inhibitory. Amongst other things they are all about suppressing: aggressive urges; emotions; distracting tangential thoughts; not speaking out of turn etc. Everything that is required to take part in complex social behaviour. Stick a similar number of dogs and cats in a shopping mal on a Saturday and they just can't handle it, they don't have the off switches.

So these frontal lobes arrive fairly early in our evolution, hand in hand with complex social behaviours as observed in gorillas.

Where mammals could reach the age of reproduction early, humans have evolved a far longer childhood as the task of getting their frontal lobe function to mature levels has become harder. Whatever teachers believe the primary curriculum to be, they spend most of the time teaching appropriate social inhibition. Not your turn to answer, you have to wait for the toilet, sit quietly with your arms folded... Biology defines when we are ready to take over for ourselves. Some fronto-limbic fibres don't even myelinate until 15. There is more growth and development in the human brain between 15-19 than any other life stage apart from 0-4 with much neural pruning as we get ready for adult life.

So from a neuroanatomical perspective we are on the one hand built to be our own source of authority and conformity perhaps functioning as 'naturally free', but on the other hand we are built to be subservient to our frontal lobes with a 15-19 year period specifically designed for our family, community and society to shape the way in which our frontal lobes manage us, so obedient, but obedient to structures within the self. Think of the numbers of police we would actually need if most people weren't actually managed from within themselves.