I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.
I don't know about that. Some people absolutely, but most people just want to belong to something and be a valued contributor. Like I really don't care about having the biggest house on the block, but some people having huge places and others stuck in tiny studios rankles me quite a bit.
>> I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group.
> But we also seem hardwired to want to feel superior and special.
Nonsense. A healthy person in a healthy society desires to be valued by their peers above everything else. Only in the absence of this belonging does one pursue the antisocial behaviors you describe. Capitalism is barbarism.
Most people in every society want to increase their social status. The metrics vary by society — could be dollars or touchdowns or wooly mammoth meat quantity — but this is nearly universal. And in a closed society this is essentially a zero sum game: in order for someone to rise in status someone else must fall. Whether this competition is "healthy" for people or society is irrelevant since it's not going to change.
But there aren't 100 people, there are 8.1 billion of us. If your relationships are such that the only way for me to be a winner is for you to be a loser, when we can both be winners, it's sad.
If it's a closed system, like a race, then that makes sense. Only one person can finish first. But life's not a closed system like that, so I can win at the races and you can win at the slots, and we can go for a nice dinner together. Maybe a bit pollyanna, but not everything has to be a competition. My happiness doesn't come from the expense of someone else's.
You really missed the point of my comment. I am blessed with an abundance of healthy relationships. But for society as a whole, status only exists on a relative scale. The slope of the curve may differ but most people are striving to move up that curve.
Global income inequality has slightly decreased since 2000 [1] due to globalization. For the same reason, quality of life has greatly equalized across the world. The utility gained from switching between flying coach and flying a private jet is less than the utility gained getting access to electricity or antibiotics. If you want equality, you should want capitalism.
I see this argument trotted out and it's a huge dodge that implicitly acknowledges the zero-sum nature of capitalism as practiced by modern societies. It's true that global quality of life has increased and the examples you gave are true. But it's critically important to note that in many developed countries quality of life within that country has stagnated or regressed on many key metrics. If the only we way we can make the world richer is by making the rich countries poorer, I don't think it's a shining endorsement of that social system. We already have many other social systems that can do about the same thing.
I've always found this to be a massive flaw in analyzing policy from a Pareto criterion. Economists love to show the very simple arithmetic that a Pareto improvement is strictly better but my intuition was always that the theoretical increase in total surplus didn't actually lead to a better real outcome.
> It's much simpler to be valued by your peers if it is perceived that you're value has surpassed theirs instead of perfectly balanced.
One flaw in your comment seems to be the assumption that "superiority" is a one-axis quality. You could have a group where everyone is superior, just at different things.
That’s a great point, so I appreciate that first of all. How would you prevent extraordinary or lucky people from encroaching on the “market share” (hate using this metaphor honestly) of their peers?
I am concerned that your (good) point assumes that we can reasonable assume that there’s enough opportunities for individuals to provide value to others to match the number of people looking to do so. What if there’s an imbalance? Which seems inevitable.
I.e. What if it turns out there’s not ways for all the people on earth to distinguish themselves in the way that you describe?
I feel like his point is not homogeneity, but that humans have an inherent need of status through love and admiration. Healthy people will prefer their close circle to satisfy it, less healty people will settle with strangers (fame), and even less healthy people will resort mainly to material wealth.
What is equality other than homogeneity? And how is enforcing equality "from above" (or whatever you want to call it) ever going to work other than "cutting the tall grass" or "hammering down the nail that sticks out"?
The work to improve the bottom of society is about 7 billion times more work than to punish the top, just by numbers. And that is ignoring that shooting someone is a lot easier than the years of mental health help followed by years of training the bottom requires to improve.
To say nothing of the fact that, obviously, a separate class in society needs to be empowered to hammer down those pesky nails ("the KGB"). Which is another way of saying that socialism needs gunpoint-enforced inequality to keep existing. So does capitalism, of course, but since they accept inequality it seems less of a problem. And (mostly democratic/social-) capitalism needs a LOT less violence in practice. I get it, it needs more than zero violence and that sucks. However ...
I would also like to point out that both indigenous primate societies are EXTREMELY hierarchical, frankly nightmarishly hierarchical. Everyone has someone directly in charge of them, and there is someone at the top. There may be groups. There usually are male vs female groups, and a dynamic between them with clear hierarchies in both groups, but not so clear a hierarchy between a given man and a given woman.
Oh and, btw, sex in indigenous human societies is somewhere between prostitution and rape. Meaning sex is either directly transactional (a good meal, as opposed to scraps, for sex), or there is direct use of force. In the most comfortable locations to live women may gather food, in trade for a measure of sexual independence/choice, but that seems to be limited even in the best situations. Furthermore, neighboring human tribes are always at war, and both tribes are growing fast in a limited resource environment: it is a matter of time before they massacre each other (because: preferable to starving to death). Humans may kidnap and rape women from neighboring tribes, or they may massacre them. And yes, when times are really good (halfway between "wars"), they will feed them and return them.
Occasionally a "romeo and juliet" from the same tribe or neighboring tribes may fall in love and run away. If they die, nothing happens, and if they survive, of course, this only results in the creation of a new tribe.
There is NOTHING any human can do in such a primitive human societies that comes anywhere close to delivering the "status and love" that massacring the neighboring tribe during war delivers in terms of status.
Meaning the "love and admiration" essentially translates to violence to get drugs (an orgasm is effectively drugs, after all) for men and prostitution (if they're lucky) for women.
Oh and kids have only one option: scraps, they're abandoned by mothers to mothers can go back to prostitution, as soon as possible. Slightly bigger kids take care of the smaller ones (meaning 6 year olds care for 4 year olds, 4 year olds care for 2 year olds, ...). Occasionally, during very good times, women join the hunt and gain a measure of independence. On the other hand, during bad times everything sucks, there's less sex, and rape is the norm, as are abandoned babies starving to death (they even have "tricks", such as putting a baby, floating, in a river. Probably slowly sinking in the river will cause the kid to lose body heat far faster than it will become hungry, and it will peacefully sleep in and die, before being eaten, and won't cry)
Is this what you mean by "hardwired for equality"? Men are hardwired to fight, using physical violence, for better social position and "love". Women are hardwired to do the same, using less direct means. Also, humans are social animals, and this is nothing special. All social animals have a "total hierarchy", enforced by a form of violence for men, and by accepting transactional and/or forced sex for women. Wolves, gnus, orcas, dolphins ... it doesn't matter. All are variations on this theme.
This point of view is not supported by anthropological evidence.
I'll give an example. In the 90s and 00s, there was a wave of Marxist attempts to cancel anthropologists who had reported on the competition for dominance, competition for status, physical and sexual violence, and overall strife present in primitive societies that were studied. The whole affair about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_in_El_Dorado is the most famous example of this. The accusations were largely discredited, but the damage was done. One consequence is that unsympathetic anthropologists were banned from Venezuela, where there is now nobody allowed to report on the slow, systematic extermination of the country's indigenous peoples.
The reduction of certain evils to economic essentialism is frequently itself a tool to assert ideological superiority--itself an 'antisocial behavior', one done not for money or profit but for the simple desire to feel superior to another, and excuse the evils of their in-group. In an ironic way, the above post is its own counterexample.
I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.