Society is not the government, or the nation

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Tuesday, July 14, 2026 15:10
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THGRRI

Wednesday, January 27, 2016 6:55 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
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. Tho

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1KIKI

Wednesday, January 27, 2016 9:35 AM

I wasn't ignoring anyone, I was thinking.

I can see that there could be an interesting split between the tendency for most people to be more docile - self-domesticated as I've heard it described - and the few human predators to become increasingly dominant.

FWIW, among the many blurbs I've read there was an interesting experiment done with bacteria, by embedding a mix of different energy sources (citrate, acetate, sugars and sugar-alcohols) in the agar of petri dishes. Some bacterial colonies rapidly selected for mutations that allowed the fastest use of one energy source. They multiplied rapidly, spread quickly, used up their preferred energy source, and then died because they didn't have enough genetic variation to ultimately succeed. Other colonies, for unknown reasons, developed a variety of mutations allowing different energy sources to be used. Their numbers didn't grow nearly as quickly, and their distribution tended to be spotty, but the cultures lasted a long time as they were actually successions of population mixes over time.

Anyway, I haven't concluded anything, but I think UK Le Guin had an answer for the predators - and that's to have a society without 'power structures'.

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.

SECOND

Wednesday, January 27, 2016 8:18 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

Anyway, I haven't concluded anything, but I think UK Le Guin had an answer for the predators - and that's to have a society without 'power structures'.

I strongly believe humans will not cooperate with Ursula K. Le Guin, except for humans she creates in a story.

Hoping for better society rules is probably more practical than hoping for an end to all power structures. But that puts us back where we started. What are the rules of society? And you can't have a rule: "No Power Structures". For humans that is an impossible to obey rule.

New power structures are being erected everywhere and all the time. It might be a human genetic trait that has widely spread for thousands of years. We have always had executives of various types who lay down society's poorly thought out rules and have squadrons of willing & violent enforcers of those arbitrary rules:
www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ex%2032:15-35&version=KJ21

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

SIGNYM

Thursday, January 28, 2016 10:59 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
I wasn't ignoring anyone, I was thinking.

I can see that there could be an interesting split between the tendency for most people to be more docile - self-domesticated as I've heard it described - and the few human predators to become increasingly dominant.

FWIW, among the many blurbs I've read there was an interesting experiment done with bacteria, by embedding a mix of different energy sources (citrate, acetate, sugars and sugar-alcohols) in the agar of petri dishes. Some bacterial colonies rapidly selected for mutations that allowed the fastest use of one energy source. They multiplied rapidly, spread quickly, used up their preferred energy source, and then died because they didn't have enough genetic variation to ultimately succeed. Other colonies, for unknown reasons, developed a variety of mutations allowing different energy sources to be used. Their numbers didn't grow nearly as quickly, and their distribution tended to be spotty, but the cultures lasted a long time as they were actually successions of population mixes over time.

Anyway, I haven't concluded anything, but I think UK Le Guin had an answer for the predators - and that's to have a society without 'power structures'.

This reminds me of a post that RUE had a long time ago. RUE kind of pounded the point home several times ... and it took me several reads before I understood the importance of what was posted.

RUE posted about the stages of energy (more or less): how successive generations of humans learned to utilize more and more sources of energy- literally.

First, it was human energy. Using muscle-power and rocks to bash seashells or bones (for marrow), using hands to chip flints, walking, digging, stripping bark or cutting strips of hide to plait bindings, using teeth and stomaches to digest food.

Then finding fire to help pre-digest food, to stay warm. Literally, energy- BTUs.

Then advancing agriculture beyond the adventitious scattering of favored seeds or casual use of digging sticks to the widespread and intentional, with the use of animal power for plowing, harvesting, trashing, grinding, drawing water, transportation. Again - literally - energy. Muscle-power beyond what humans could bring to the equation.

Wind power. Water power. Power-spinning and power-looms that took the hand-work out of carding, spinning, and weaving cloth. Drawing water and powering water-pumps; draining land for farming. Sail-power.

Then, the steam engine. Wood, and coal. Large-scale industrial factories. More energy at-hand.

The internal combustion engine - petroleum-power. Electricity.

In each step, the amount of energy available for each person's survival is greater. The system is awash with more and more energy which is used to process more and more materiel.

But like the computer-simulated evolutionary systems, the more "energy" (in that case, bits) available for consumption, the more parasites and predators evolved.

My observation is that at each technological advance, the greater the amount of energy and resources available, the larger the systems are integrated, the greater the discrepancy between the top predators and the primary producers. In the simulated systems, it eventually reaches equilibrium through successive collapse. But human systems don't seem to be evolving towards equilibrium. The technology driver always points in one direction: more energy, more materiel. It only seems to be limited by external circumstances, the resources available. For example, if energy were to suddenly be a constraining factor, wide-scale transportation might become impractical, leading to the re-localization of worldwide systems, which would not be able to support such a tall hierarchy.
The social systems also seem to point in one direction, which is towards greater and greater integration = the better to concentrate wealth for more efficient parasitism/predation, leading to collapse.

I wish it was as simple

SIGNYM

Thursday, January 28, 2016 6:59 PM

Okay, so I guess my first question is: what is a "power structure"?

KIKI, help me out. I've rolled that idea around, and I don't know what you mean, but you must mean something.

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If you mean the imposition of a hierarchy thru the use of force, then any time weapons exist and are used for anything other than self-defense, I suppose a power structure exists.

But one of the points I came to earlier showed (to me) how a centralized parasitical system could be developed perhaps without the use of force at all - at least, not a first. That is the introduction of MONEY. If MONEY becomes the medium through which all labor is exchanged, and the only way to avail oneself of the resources washing around "out there" is through the use of money, then instead of standing over the serfs with a whip, everyone might be induced to participate through reward. Being excluded from the system through lack of money would be punishment enough. Banishment is a pretty effective punishment,

I suppose the imposition of that money through force only comes in later, when the parasitism/ predation via the commandeering of money becomes too severe. (Which is here we are now, I think.)

Anyway, back to my question: What is a "power structure"? I feel there is something there that I'm not getting.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

SIGNYM

Friday, January 29, 2016 12:25 PM

Bump, for KIKI.

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

1KIKI

Sunday, January 31, 2016 2:54 AM

"Hoping for better society rules is probably more practical than hoping for an end to all power structures. But that puts us back where we started. What are the rules of society? And you can't have a rule: "No Power Structures". For humans that is an impossible to obey rule."

As I understand it, not all societies had 'a' 'ruler', so I don't think it's in-built into human nature. THIS type of society probably has power structures built in to it. So the question is, do we want to do what we've been doing and get what we've been getting? Or do we want something we can survive?

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.

SIGNYM

Sunday, January 31, 2016 6:30 AM

But what was it about the former societies with no ruler? The biggest ones, possibly, were the Indus River civilizations typified by Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa. According to National Geographic

Quote:
A well-planned street grid and an elaborate drainage system hint that the occupants of the ancient Indus civilization city of Mohenjo Daro were skilled urban planners with a reverence for the control of water. But just who occupied the ancient city in modern-day Pakistan during the third millennium B.C. remains a puzzle...

The city lacks ostentatious palaces, temples, or monuments. There's no obvious central seat of government or evidence of a king or queen. Modesty, order, and cleanliness were apparently preferred. Pottery and tools of copper and stone were standardized. Seals and weights suggest a system of tightly controlled trade.

The city's wealth and stature is evident in artifacts such as ivory, lapis, carnelian, and gold beads, as well as the baked-brick city structures themselves.

A watertight pool called the Great Bath, perched on top of a mound of dirt and held in place with walls of baked brick, is the closest structure Mohenjo Daro has to a temple. Possehl, a National Geographic grantee, says it suggests an ideology based on cleanliness

Also, no statues of gods, no temples, no armories, no jails, no checkpoints.

Harappa, at the time, was estimated to be about 25,000 people and Mohenjo-Daro around 40,000. The civilization did not fall to invasion, since there do not appear to be indications of widespread fires or mass graves.

But

Quote:
What is clear is that Harappan society was not entirely peaceful, with the human skeletal remains demonstrating some of the highest rates of injury (15.5%) found in South Asian prehistory. Paleopathological analysis demonstrated that leprosy and tuberculosis were present at Harappa, with the highest prevalence of both disease and trauma present in the skeletons from Area G (a pit of skulls located south-east of the city walls). Furthermore, rates of cranio-facial trauma and infection increased through time, demonstrating that the civilization collapsed amid illness and injury. The bioarchaeologists who examined the remains have suggested that the combined evidence for differences in mortuary treatment and epidemiology indicate that some individuals and communities at Harappa were excluded from access to basic resources like health and safety, a basic feature of hierarchical societies world-wide

The original paper that I read indicated that people who suffered from disfiguring diseases were marginalized and victimized.

The fact that such large, highly-developed (for the time) and wealthy society existed without the trappings of gods, kings and soldiers indicates a different social organization.

Perhaps they had a "society" but no government?

What can we make of that?

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You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

1KIKI

Sunday, January 31, 2016 7:00 AM

I was thinking of N American Indians, who didn't seem to have ruling structures. 'Rule' was decided by expertise, argument, consensus, contest or other means, but as I understand it, it was provisional (depending on the needs of the moment) and temporary.

There's a theory I heard, that indicates people can get together in groups larger than families because they can accept 'stories' that give them commonality. Stories that explain god made them from mud, or that they're favored by the gods, or follow rules from the incorporeal world that make them better than others. The archaeological evidence is that large-scale populations (for the day - 10,000 to 30,000) show up at the same time as statuary showing human-animal figures - men with a lion's head for example.

So fabrications (mythology, with gods and subjects) may be *A* way people gather in groups. It may even be the dominant way people gather in groups.

But if they're exceptions, then it's not the only way.

BTW, I'm not ignoring your posts, I'm just too short on time to reply at length.

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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