Society is not the government, or the nation
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, July 14, 2026 15:10
VIEWED: 8615
PAGE 4 of 6
Quote:Well, G, you might want to get out with some competent people older than 60 once in a while. Yanno, moderate your condescension a bit. And, yes, I would LOVE to discuss with you, but you simply don't know how. Here's a couple of hints:
FWIW I have spent countless hours with "old people" - most of them with dementia - in the last 12 years so that last f*cking lie of hers hit a little too close to home.
When you make a statement, be prepared to support your statement with something OTHER THAN emotion and CONSTANTLY repeated assumptions. Define your terms. Explain what you mean. Bring evidence (not allegations) to the table. Show how it has some sort of internal logic.
LISTEN to what the other person has to say. If you can't reach agreement, at least try to understand exactly what you disagree on. Sometimes it turns on a single word. It's a slow and tedious process, kind of like international negotiations. Step by step.
Stop the name-calling and insults (ad hominems), straw-manning, non-sequitors etc. I've been on this board long enough to recognize pretty much every rhetorical trick, and they reek of a weak argument.
Stick with the topic. You often (well, always, so far) bail before we even get to the point where we can at least agree on what we disagree on. Instead, you let your emotions get the better of you.
Stop dragging insults into every random thread on the board. For a few days, all you did was pop into any thread that I posted, and call me a "liar", even tho I wasn't posting about you at all. How old are you, anyway? Twelve? That kind of behavior doesn't do you any good, and hardly sets the stage for productive discussion. If anything, it just makes you look like a jerk, and maybe even a stupid, drunk, and angry jerk at that. You're not a jerk, are you? Then don't behave like one. If you won't, I won't.
And what is this "lying" shit? I'm not "lying", I have no idea what you're talking about. I AM making negative statements about your character, which- as far as I can tell from your behavior here- are all entirely true. For example, your snottiness about "knowing about computers" (As if! All you seem to know about is your smart phone and Twitter!) You may be a saint IRL, but here, you're just another dick, along with your dick friends.
Stop being a jerk, and I'll stop condescending.
IN FACT, I'LL GO FIRST. NO MORE NEGATIVE SHOTS AT YOUR CHARACTER FOR A WEEK. IF I FIND THAT YOUR ARGUMENT IS FLAWED, I WILL FOCUS ON THE POINT, NOT ON YOU. LET'S SEE IF WE CAN BOTH BEHAVE LIKE COMPETENT ADULTS FOR A WHILE.
How's that?
Oh BTW, I don't think my PM is working, so don't bother. And if you've tried and gotten nowhere, I'm not ignoring you, so don't feel insulted.
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Back to topic.
The problem with human society and human economies isn't "human nature", it's almost a problem of energy transfer. It's like biophysics ... some of the same patterns turn up over and over - like the 3:1 ratio of branches to main stems, whether leaf veins or human ones - due to the minimization of turbulence at that ratio.
NOT ALL HUMANS ARE THE SAME. Some are productive, some (like children) are at least temporarily parasitical. Some are very sociable and have well-developed empathy and a sense of fairness. Others... not so much.
Criminals generally don't do well because they have some sort of defect - poor impulse control, low tolerance for frustration etc. Even in primitive societies, some people are recognized as troublemakers, angry people. But with ENOUGH human beings, some will develop that are both sociopaths AND smart. These kinds of people can do rather well, and they hide their behavior by molding society to fit themselves. So the inveterate liar becomes a story-teller priest, and the knifesman becomes a warlord, and the thief becomes a capitalist.
For whatever reason, most humans simply don't seem to clue into the fact that there are human-looking predators among them.
And, yanno, there are no lessons that seem to last more than a couple of generations. Even the most ardent revolutions cool. Simply telling people about it, and trying to institute some sort of ethical awareness is doomed to fail, partly because generations will forget and partly because the problem isn't obvious at the personal level.
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I was told that the first studies of chimps were terribly flawed because the researchers would lure chimps out into the open with big piles of fruit, which precipitated all kinds of aggressive behavior. Maybe we need to outlaw concentrated flows of wealth and power, or at least allow distributed flows of wealth.
There are a few ways to maybe get around this problem. The first is perhaps to make sure that the means of control are too widely distributed to be useful to large-scale predation.
The means of control have to do with the media (in the past, that would be the god-kings and churches) and weaponry. Today, instead of FORCING people with whips and spears to do their work, we reward them with tokens (called money) ... which, amazingly, only the banks have the authority to make out of thin air ... which are only as meaningful as whatever importance we choose to give them. It's a beautiful system - for those who can churn out these tokens ad infinitum. Instead of having a WORLD currency, or even a NATIONAL currency, perhaps a multiplicity of currencies would prevent the kind of one-ring control that is so tempting for the sociopath.
The problem and the solution may be in the mechanics of our organizations ... simply keep them local. It would be too much work for the dedicated sociopath to have to take over every currency, every radio station, etc. Instead of tending towards a larger and larger organism, perhaps we simply need a varied ecology of production and distributions. (oh, and BTW- the difference between an organism and an ecology is transportation of resources. An organism has the same resource flowing throughout. An ecology has different organisms which convert and transfer resources between each other.) So the biggest problem might even be TRANSPORTATION - of goods, of money, or people. Keep it local and the problem may be solved. Very DUNE-ish.
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Or, just to be a whole lot simpler, maybe the trick is to reduce the male population to about 10% of what it currently is. That's a good genetic sampling, isn't it? Most sociopaths and aggressors are male. That might be simpler than fighting physics.
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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So, speaking of ONE-RING control ...
Norway's Biggest Bank Demands Cash Ban
Quote:
The war on cash is escalating faster than many had imagined. Having documented the growing calls from the elites and propagandist explanations of the "benefits" to their serfs over the last few years, with China, and The IMF entering the "cashless society" call most recently, International Business Times reports that Norway - suffering from its own economic collapse as oil revenues crash - has joined its Scandi peers Denmark and Sweden in a call to "ban cash."
Cash ... it's so ... uncontrollable! Untrackable! Why, anybody can do ANYthing with it .. buy used goods, or pay a baby-sitter, or buy drugs.
Digital currency, that can be tracked, taxed, halted, or withdrawn by TPTB... what a tool for total control!
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-23/norways-biggest-bank-demands-
cash-ban
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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
"I believe that nearly all humanity has a surplus of primitive urges and a shortage of self-control. The shortages tend to defeat all rational or intelligent designs for societies and we are left with the mess all around us."
That's pretty much the 'human nature' argument. We're all too full of chaotic primitive urges. No way could we form societies where millions of people live in a single city without mayhem and murder every day on every corner!
Human nature is far more tractable than you give it credit for. Especially when people have a reason to buy in to the system.
How could I possibly argue with that? Except I will.
Nearly everybody drives on the right side of the road in Texas. They don't do it because they have self-control. Certainly not because driving on the right is intelligent -- elsewhere the arbitrary rule is drive on the left. I picked left/right because it is one of those societal rules that has to be binary when dealing with humans. Making it more complicated (drive on all sides or drive left only on weekends, other times right) would definitely be beyond human traffic engineers or human nature (there's that concept, again, but one of the things I mean is head-to-head fatal collisions when the rules are too complicated for humans).
Texas drivers stay on the right, except when drunk or fleeing from a robbery, because it's a habit or other people are also on the right at this very moment. There is no conscious thinking going on in drivers' heads, except for student drivers' heads. Everybody driving is on automatic pilot. A traffic engineer or a google driverless car engineer might be mentally engaged, but nobody else.
I'm about to be really rude and completely unscientific about how I see people function: society rules (like driving on the right) are enforced by the part of the brain that is also found in birds. To wit, bird brains! See footnote 1.
For a more complex example than left/right, if you want a comically awful example of bird brains enforcing society's arbitary rules, see the movie The Big Short (2015). The comedy comes from following four peculiar people who are weirdly conscious of what hundreds of thousands of calm and normal bird brains in finance are unconsciously but profitably doing to society. The audience laughs because the movie artistically explains underlying financial ideas that the bird brains have no need to understand. Not understanding leads to the comical collapse of companies and an economic depression.
www.metacritic.com/movie/the-big-short
Footnote 1: Comparing humans to birds would insult birds if birds had the brains to know they have been insulted. I know birds do some mental calculations: Some birds talk! Some birds sing! Birds migrate across oceans!
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"They don't do it because they have self-control."
They do it because they've been taught that that's where cars get driven, even before they learn to drive, even before they learn to talk, even before they learn to walk. It's what they see from their carseats. It's what they see in cartoons and on TV shows. It's what they're told when they're being taught how to cross the street. It's where the school buses drive. It's the side of the road where they get on any bus or other roadside transportation. It's a lifetime of experience before they even take the wheel of a car, or if they never take the wheel of a car.
By way of illustration, there was a book about a female British spy in wartime France who got caught because - by habit - she looked in the wrong direction first when crossing a street. The title was 'I Looked Right'.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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Quote:Charles Darwin on a bird's rules of sexual selection and a society's rules:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
They do it because they've been taught that that's where cars get driven, even before they learn to drive, even before they learn to talk, even before they learn to walk.
“No certain answer can be given to these questions; but we ought to be cautious in assuming that knobs and various fleshy appendages cannot be attractive to the female, when we remember that with savage races of man various hideous deformities – deep scars on the face with the flesh raised into protuberances, the septum of the nose pierced by sticks and bones, holes in the ears and lips stretched widely open – are all admired as ornamental.”
Who designed these supremely elegant feathers? Certainly not a human. If Darwin is right, the artists here seem to have been the birds themselves, which means (since the males usually have the best feathers), primarily their wives. So is there not something oddly condescending about scientists presuming to doubt whether these original designers are themselves capable of the “almost human degree of taste” which would be needed to appreciate their work?
Darwin was suggesting that the wishes of hen-pheasants – their inner thoughts and feelings as they watched their various suitors – had affected, and had finally determined, the design of later generations. This thought is frightening, not only when it concerns animals but even more when it concerns people.
www.philosophersmag.com/index.php/tpm-mag-articles/11-essays/101-the-m
ythology-of-selfishness
Humans are no more conscious when making the rules of society than birds are conscious of where their standards in male plumage originated. Or maybe birds are just as conscious as humans? Depends on how humans feel about being called “bird brained”.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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"Humans are no more conscious when making the rules of society than birds are conscious of where their standards in male plumage originated."
Our 'rules of society' aren't in our genes. Why do I say that? Because the entire human race isn't attracted to highly raised keloid scars. Or red hair. Or irezumi. Or bound lotus-feet. Or anything really.
(An interesting case can be made that whatever is indicative of higher status is attractive. Hence, Polynesian women who ate pork as a privilege of their status, who were tall and hefty, were deemed far more attractive than lower status women who stayed slim on a diet of taro and fish. Feudal and Victorian women who never worked a day in the fields, who had 'alabaster' skin and 'buxom' figures and 'delicate' hands were deemed far more attractive than their tanned, fit, muscled, calloused counterparts who worked every day in the fields. But now that people work indoors - in their necessary servitude as lower-class wage slaves - being chubby and pale is no longer attractive. And so on.)
The entire human race isn't monogamous. Or polygynous. Or polyandrous.
The entire human race doesn't live in nuclear families. Or extended families. Or even families at all.
And you seem to think that OUR particular form of society just comes to us through genetics. When in fact it's taught to us - we're even propagandized to it. We're taught that a white man with a beard lives up in the sky, judging us (and occasionally looking after us). We're taught what (and who) is 'good' and 'bad'. We're brought up being taught IN SCHOOL the agenda that our country is free, and great, and capitalistic - by definition. We're taught to be consumers by commercials. We're taught we should strive for a young, hip way of life with our i-phones and latest trendy fashions.
We're taught this. It isn't in our genes.
Find me an example that you think is genetic - and I'll find you exceptions. I can find exceptions scattered through humankind, or whole societies that are exceptions. That indicates to me there's a LOT of 'human nature' that isn't genetic.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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signy
Well, G, you might want to get out with some competent people older than 60 once in a while.
'g'
Also - sorry to see but not too surprised that you would be so dismissive of people suffering from dementia.
As the ONLY comment signy made about people older than 60, I fail to see what was so dismissive about people with dementia.
you people need to try and think like I do...
strawman
signy
And, yes, I would LOVE to discuss with you, but you simply don't know how.
When you make a statement, be prepared to support your statement with something OTHER THAN emotion and CONSTANTLY repeated assumptions. Define your terms. Explain what you mean. Bring evidence (not allegations) to the table. Show how it has some sort of internal logic.
'g'
Straight up Siggy condescension (note 'g''s use of a demeaning nickname while he complains about being condescend to, apparently he can't keep himself from being a hypocrite!) - totally worthless except as an obvious irritant. "But I want to discuss!" Fake whine.
Well, apparently 'g' really DOESN'T know what a discussion consists of!
signy
Stop the name-calling and insults ( ad hominems ), straw-manning, non-sequitors etc. I've been on this board long enough to recognize pretty much every rhetorical trick, and they reek of a weak argument.
'g'
Yep, you've used them all.
And right on cue, 'g' responds with ad hominem.
'g'
Funny - you're lying about lying.
And another.
'g'
something you both have little if any firsthand knowledge of
And another.
'g'
you have no idea so you are super defensive
And another.
'g'
why else do you think people respond to you that way?
Actually, it's just you and THGR. kpo can actually discuss things in between insults. But you and THGR are completely vapid.
SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.
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I'm going to pound the point about energy transfer some more, because so far nobody seems to have gotten my point.
Human society (and human evolution, and human societal evolution) isn't about our specific social constructs at all.
But just because there isn't a biological basis for the features of "human nature" that have been pointed out, doesn't mean that there aren't real physical drivers compelling society in one direction or another.
As an example of non-human, physical drivers, I look at reproductive strategies of all sorts of animals. Some animals are harem species. Some are seasonally monogamous. Some are polyandrous. Some just breed indiscriminately. Some species are fecund, some have only a few young. There are many ways of continuing each species, but they all have to be survivable if the species is going to continue! It's all about transferring food (energy) from one generation to the next. http://www.earthlife.net/birds/mating.html
Now, all of these species face constraints. I read a very interesting article about red deer in Scotland (Clutton-Brock), a harem species in which the largest, fastest-growing males get to breed. This sets up an internally-driven evolution logic in which males continue to get larger and larger ... and larger and larger ... which each passing generation. On average, males are about twice as large as females.
Why don't they get larger still? Well, large males are energetically costly. They require a LOT of food, both in the womb and afterwards. Females which have had male calves the previous year tend not to breed successfully the year afterwards for example. But event which capped this evolutionary trend during this particular study was a killing blizzard, in which food was very scarce. ALL of the males died, except the very smallest one, because his muscle mass didn't require so much food. The females did much better, nearly all of THEM survived, except some that had been stressed by having had very large male calves the summer before.
That kind of hit the "reset" button on that evolutionary trend, at least for that moment.
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But this whole "harem species" thing ... I know, one male, many females. It's a kind of wet-dream for some human males, because they imagine THEMSELVES as the dominant male, but the reality is that for harem species, life sucks for most males.
It seems such an odd system: breeding so many males, only to dispatch them later in life. Hardly functional!
But then when you compare what happens with birds, it makes sense: Many birds are at least seasonally monogamous. That because the chicks are SO demanding ... they have to grow so fast, they eat so much food! ... that BOTH parents are required to keep the next generation going. Males, in that strategy, are a necessary component of species survival. In harem species, where males don't contribute at all to the survival of the young (and in fact compete for resources) the point is to GET RID OF EXCESS MALES.
Harem species aren't an indication that males are important. What they are is an indication that males are disposable.
If you take that logic- that it's all about successfully gathering and preserving energy for the next generation without too much waste - you'll see most strategies make sense. They have to, otherwise the species wouldn't survive. Predators which require a lot of concentrated energy tend to have small numbers of young. Over millenia, their over-survival would have decimated their own prey (food source) and so for them small litters are tolerable for survival, even perhaps preferable. Top predators have the smallest of all litters, and their survival isn't a top priority. Male bears, for example, will eat cubs, and male lions will kill the cubs bred from the previous male.
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So, what does this have to do with humans?
Human organizations are also dominated by energy transfer. Those organizations which harvest and direc
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Quote:Homo sapiens are one of 16 species in the family Homo. There is an extinct subspecies called Homo sapiens idaltu. "Idaltu" is from the Saho-Afar word meaning "elder" or "first born". That makes modern humans second born. I don't know what the scientific name for third born is, but there is reason to believe it is out in our world and playing havoc with second born because sapiens are so easily deceived.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
So, what does this have to do with humans?
Human organizations are also dominated by energy transfer. Those organizations which harvest and direct energy the fastest and most efficiently will tend to survive. Assuming that there are human parasites or predators among us, since they have a tendency to acquire the most energy with the least effort, they have a tendency to reproduce their own strategy the fastest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens_idaltu
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly
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