@vivify saidNot really interested in petty insults from someone who has had the premise of his OP so easily refuted by actual scientific evidence.
Nice strawman
You just quoted me referencing America overthrowing rule by a monarchy. Then you attack me for not acknowledging overthrow of such systems.
Not sure how you old you are but get checked for dementia.
You keep saying humanity is older than written history; of course it is. I only bring up written history because we have incomparably more data of what pe ...[text shortened]... c ones. Based on that evidence, right-wing mentally was the most prevalent one throughout humanity.
Claiming that history (and a particularly simplistic reading of history) is "incomparably more data" than all the other fields of study of human behavior combined is just out and out ignorance. I'm comfortable citing anthropology, biology, psychology etc. etc. etc. none of which support your argument.
You should just accept that and move on.
Aboriginal tribes displayed some traits of a classless society:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Leadership-and-social-control
There were some gender roles but overall Aboriginals did display a type of egalitarian society. The same goes for Native Americans pre-Columbus:
https://historyfacts.org/unraveling-native-american-societies-before-1492/
So there is evidence supporting No1's point.
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@vivify saidThis seems the exception not the rule.
Aboriginal tribes displayed some traits of a classless society:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Australian-Aboriginal/Leadership-and-social-control
There were some gender roles but overall Aboriginals did display a type of egalitarian society. The same goes for Native Americans pre-Columbus:
https://historyfacts.org/unraveling-native-american-societies-before-1492/
So there is evidence supporting No1's point.
I think the balance of opinions and neural circuitry in society is what's been selected for. You can see this in the hunger we have for debates like this in general. A spectrum of political ideas, a space for arguments, formation of consensus.
@vivify saidHave you looked into spiral dynamics yet?
Okay. Egalitarian societies may exist in small bands that rarely exceed 100 members.
But as societies become larger there is a shift toward right-wing traits, like rigid hierarchies, nationalism, etc.
If small bands are egalitarian, that may simply be because there's no practical way to implement hierarchies in numbers that small.
History is written by members of ...[text shortened]... fact, there's never been a truly communist nation to this day.
That should tell you something.
That expains the evolutionary steps of humans and culture (including incentives towards behaviour).
It also indicates what led to the following step in the progression. And it predicts what the next step will be.
Interestingly, it also shows how to communicate with people who haven’t advanced as much as the rest of humanity (say in an organisation).
What you see is that a current situation can have people behaving in an earlier stage of evolution. A safety net, sort of a thing.
Take polarisation. That leads to fear. And fear throws people back to protecting what they already have, instead of looking towards common futures. So, the behaviour becomes more conservative and combative.
This is depicted as tribal red. The next step in the evolution is traditional blue (conservative, belief in God, rules and discipline).
If someone is stuck in red, you can’t communicate on communal green. You first have to communicate on red, then blue, then orange (which is in a sense capitalism and individualism and wanting to be succesful, etc. ) before you can get to communal green or thereafter integral yellow or even holistic coral.
Many of the debaters here use orange or blue language, but the underlying message is very red. Which means that fear is blocking them from any form of progression at the moment.
More importantly to your OP, is that humans aren’t inherently right or left wing, they progress in an evolutionary manner, reacting to previous steps and real life situations.
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@no1marauder saidYou missed my post just before yours by 24 seconds.
Not really interested in petty insults from someone who has had the premise of his OP so easily refuted by actual scientific evidence.
Claiming that history (and a particularly simplistic reading of history) is "incomparably more data" than all the other fields of study of human behavior combined is just out and out ignorance. I'm comfortable citing anthropology, biolo ...[text shortened]... logy etc. etc. etc. none of which support your argument.
You should just accept that and move on.
You're the one who threw out words like "yapping" and "stubborn", right? You have a funny habit of always being the first to insult people and then getting indignant when they're thrown back at you.
Your reading comprehension is slipping again. My point is that there's more data about written history than prehistoric times. That is self-evident.
Regardless, this was meant to be a discussion, not an argument. You're the type of person to offended when discussing whether Superman could outrun The Flash.
Next time just engage in a conversation like a normal person instead of your typical douchy behavior.
@vivify saidThis article is a refutation of the BBC's article fantasy of a 100,000 year war between humans and Neanderthals that led to the latter's extinction: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/techandscience/did-ancient-humans-ever-go-to-war-with-neanderthals/ar-AA1lRcKc
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201102-did-neanderthals-go-to-war-with-our-ancestorsterritoriality has deep roots in humans. Territorial conflicts are also intense in our closest relatives, chimpanzees. Male chimps routinely gang up to attack and kill males from rival bands, a behaviour strikingly like human warfare.
I would love to believe humans are naturally egalitarian but most evidence suggests otherwise.
"John Shea, a paleoanthropologist at Stony Brook University, says the case for consistent hostility between Neanderthals and humans is tough to make. Fossil evidence for face-to-face contact between them is slim, so whether they liked or despised each other probably varied, Shea says.
Reacting with violence, while not an impossible outcome, would have likely been too costly for either group. A smarter idea would have been to simply ignore each other.
"It's a big, empty world back then. There's not much to fight over," Shea says. "Rather than, ‘Okay, let's continue to murder those guys', a wiser head might prevail and say ‘Hey, if we try and murder them and fail, they're gonna murder us back. So why don't we just move?'""
"The assumption that these groups regularly massacred each other has fallen out of favor, however. Decades ago, researchers theorized that humans played a direct role in the extinction of Neanderthals approximately 40,000 years ago, killing them as they moved into Europe and Asia.
No concrete fossil evidence of this supposed "conquest" has ever appeared, and so researchers have instead turned to other explanations like climate change or population dynamics."
"Miraculously, connections likely did spark between humans and their newfound relatives. Potential overlaps of the two groups in Europe suggest that they would intermingle and share cultural knowledge, mostly becoming friends, not foes.
Some Neanderthals were likely assimilated into human groups; interbreeding also followed, which is why the average human outside of Africa currently carries about 2 percent of Neanderthal DNA. In that case, ancient humans sped up the extinction of Neanderthals not by annihilating them, but by reproducing with them."
@vivify saidBoo Hoo.
You missed my post just before yours by 24 seconds.
You're the one who threw out words like "yapping" and "stubborn", right? You have a funny habit of always being the first to insult people and then getting indignant when they're thrown back at you.
Your reading comprehension is slipping again. My point is that there's more data about written history than prehistoric ...[text shortened]... xt time just engage in a conversation like a normal person instead of your typical douchy behavior.
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@shavixmir saidThis was a fascinating post. It will be at the top of my list to look into spiral dynamics this weekend.
Have you looked into spiral dynamics yet?
That expains the evolutionary steps of humans and culture (including incentives towards behaviour).
It also indicates what led to the following step in the progression. And it predicts what the next step will be.
Interestingly, it also shows how to communicate with people who haven’t advanced as much as the rest of humanity ...[text shortened]... wing, they progress in an evolutionary manner, reacting to previous steps and real life situations.
If I understand correctly: humans have steps in the evolutionary process that we may tap into at certain times. What I perceive as "right-wing" behavior is actually this.
You mentioned that someone on red can't communicate on a later stage like green; that you have to first help them through the earlier stages. But can someone really be helped through those stages? If we use the posters here as an example, there those who seem stuck on the same talking points for years, no matter what rationale, evidence, etc., is provided.
Simply put, how does one walk another person through those stages?
I promise, I'll read into spiral dynamics this weekend instead of having you spoon-feed me these concepts.
@sonhouse saidThank you. I'll start with this.
@vivify
Here is a bit about 'spiral dynamics' something I never heard of before Shav brought it up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_Dynamics
Not sure of what the critics say about SD, and if there have been societies or business wins built on this theory.
@vivify saidIf someone is operating on the blue level, which is conservative, believing in Gods, knowing one’s place in society, etc. Then to communicate with them, you have to go to that level. The next level is individualism, capitalism, self-empowerment… that is the level you have to coach them into… before you can get them onto the level of community, that we’re all into it together.
This was a fascinating post. It will be at the top of my list to look into spiral dynamics this weekend.
If I understand correctly: humans have steps in the evolutionary process that we may tap into at certain times. What I perceive as "right-wing" behavior is actually this.
You mentioned that you someone on read can't communicate on a later stage like green; that yo ...[text shortened]... ise, I'll read into spiral dynamics this weekend instead of having you spoon-feed me these concepts.
Basically, most humans have evolved enough to participate in all tier 1 levels, but circumstance throws them back to more basic levels.
@vivify saidMaybe this thread is played out but I found this article an interesting counterpoint to such claims: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/ancient-settlements-show-that-commoning-is-natural-for-humans-not-selfishness-and-competition/ar-AA1qIPoD?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=93ce7d187537489c9150a3f44e944fa7&ei=19
Okay. Egalitarian societies may exist in small bands that rarely exceed 100 members.
But as societies become larger there is a shift toward right-wing traits, like rigid hierarchies, nationalism, etc.
If small bands are egalitarian, that may simply be because there's no practical way to implement hierarchies in numbers that small.
History is written by members of ...[text shortened]... fact, there's never been a truly communist nation to this day.
That should tell you something.
"In The Dawn of Everything (2021), Davids Graeber and Wengrow explain (among many other things) how after the Agricultural Revolution, at least 4000 years passed before the first hierarchical urban developments. During this period, early farming communities developed technologically (e.g. metallurgy, leavened bread, basic mathematics, sailing, the potter’s wheel), but without kings, centralised control, hierarchy or bureaucracy. Archaeological evidence from what is now Kurdistan and central Turkey shows large settlements with no centre, and in which all houses were more-or-less the same size (and of high-quality), and no special burial sites containing lots of treasure.
This pattern was repeated in places as far apart as China and Peru. There were, for example, large, non-hierarchical settlements of people in Peru, 4000 years before the Incas; and in the Indus Valley and Ukraine, the very first cities show no evidence of monarchs or rulers.
The BBC repeated this message in its Ascent of Woman series. The first episode looked at Çatalhöyük, in what is now central Turkey. Inhabited by 5-8,000 people from around nine-and-a-half thousand years ago, excavations have revealed a society without gender inequality, but also without much inequality of any kind. ‘Aggressive egalitarianism’ they called it – no-one was allowed to lord it over anyone else, and all houses were of a similar size. They buried their dead underneath their houses, and incredibly, DNA testing found that bodies in ‘family’ graves were often not blood relatives. It seems that they shared their children around! Mum and dad weren’t necessarily biological parents. The ‘family’ was the entire community.
Maybe this 4000-year period isn’t significant – it could just have been lag time before hierarchy inevitably kicked in. But maybe it wasn’t inevitable, and human history could have taken a very different trajectory if we’d managed to prevent concentration of wealth and power. But even if it were inevitable that some of the first attempts to seize power would be successful, and would only lead to more wealth and power making it to the centre – even if that were true, it still shows that humans can live together in large settlements without hierarchy, and therefore that selfishness, greed and competitiveness are no more inherent than empathy, sufficiency and collaboration.
This has huge implications for attempts to build a commons world, including economy, governance and society. Those non-hierarchical societies must have had ways to make decisions, to produce what they needed, and to distribute it reasonably fairly – otherwise there would have been chaos. We don’t know exactly what those processes were, but today, we have plenty of ideas, plus the technology to make it happen."
"The main takeaway for me from all of this is that when we’re presented with arguments that humans are inherently selfish and competitive, which means that any attempt to build a commons / co-operative / mutualist society is doomed to failure, we can respond that without a shadow of doubt, that isn’t true, and selfishness and competitiveness are only dominant today because we live in a system that rewards those attributes."