Evil

POSTED BY: Geezer
UPDATED: Sunday, October 29, 2006 14:39
VIEWED: 8182
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RUE

Friday, October 27, 2006 12:03 AM

Naw, like reading an abstruse instrument manual.

RUE

Friday, October 27, 2006 2:52 AM

If I have the chance I'll get back to this later. It is possible to have societies - even large 'technological' ones - that don't have war.

Is it possible that the direction of societal development is dependent on accidents? Like the peaceable baboons? Or the baboon-like chimps?

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My neighbor gets literally hundreds of hummingbirds to her yard, including rare ones that are supposed to be transient but stick around. What she noticed is that with just one feeder, an aggressive male will dominate the territory and there will be few hummingbirds. With three well-filled feeders, there are too many visitors and too many locations for an individual to dominate, and so, many feast together.

The thing about the baboons was that the meat supply (at the dump) was in a small location and easily dominated by a few aggressive males. Once those males died (of TB they caught from the meat), the society became peaceable. And males that came in from other tribes came in small enough numbers to have to conform to those ways.

The fruit pile made male chimps act like - baboons. Once the fruit was distributed back out, peace was restored.

Maybe there is a particular combination of numbers that makes male dominance and aggressive societies more likely, and the other way around.

DREAMTROVE

Friday, October 27, 2006 1:44 PM

Quote:
human technology tends to create an excess and concentrate it.

I think it's important to remember that humans aren't just monkeys, they're rats. monkeys are rats/mice, and are decended from some monkey/mouse creature is my understanding.

Pack Rats store stuff as the result of a hoarding instinct. Winters, droughts, famines, all cause the 'random scarcity' problem. If you live like a cow, and then one day there's nothing, then you die like a cow.

We are natural pack rats. We hoarde. Just watch what happens when there's something like the beenie babies. Everyone is running around to catch 'em all because if they don't, they might not have them.

Think back to the animal days and what those items might have been, even for early humans. Food, is #1, and then medicines, clothing, building materials. Especially as human populations grew, scarcity was more and more of a problem. The materialistic society was born.

In order to shed the mental illness that results from allowing this instinct to take over completely, humans need to learn to control the monkey, and the rat.

CAVALIER

Friday, October 27, 2006 4:59 PM

I’d like to look at this from another angle: why do people care whether something is good or evil?

It occurs to me that people would generally like to be known for certain character traits e.g. hardworking, generous, honest, always repays a debt etc.

And they would generally like not to be known for certain different traits e.g. dishonest , treacherous etc.

Being thought to posses the first set of traits makes people more likely to be friendly, do you favours, trust you and so on. People are more likely to do things for you, perhaps because they think it is more likely that you will do something in return for them later.

The second set of traits tends to have the reverse effect.

So whatever kind of person you actually are, you should want the first reputation, as indeed everybody does.

How can you convince people that you deserve that reputation? Well, you can try acting in accordance with it, at least when other people are around. You can extol the first set of character traits, and damn the second set. You can call such things evil, and demand that people be punished if they act like that. You might even go so far as to risk punishing them yourself.

All this would be true if you were an utter sociopath, but if you can persuade yourself, it makes the act a lot easier.

So, evil is that behaviour which it is in your interests to loudly condemn e.g. treachery, murder, theft and, in some times and places, homophobia, racism, slavery, homosexuality, atheism, Catholicism, rescuing Jews, protecting kulaks, supporting George Bush, supporting Bill Clinton, Thatcher , Blair etc

This is a slightly cynical view, but it does explain a lot, especially the fact that no one ever considers an act evil when they decide to do it. At the most they call it a necessary evil ie less evil than the alternative.

RUE

Friday, October 27, 2006 5:38 PM

"No one considers it an act of evil ..."

I'm not sure I agree with that. There are people who don't seem to make the analysis at all (sociopaths), and people who say 'sure it's wrong, but what the heck !' ('sinners').

SIGNYM

Friday, October 27, 2006 7:25 PM

Interesting point about "hoarding". I don't think apes "hoard". Living in a tropical climate, where food is available most of the year and stored food would simply spoil easily, "hoarding" doesn't have any survival benefit.

OTOH, haording only really became possible (for humans( (1) when they moved out of tropical areas and (2) with the advent of agriculture, when it truly became possible to gather far more than you could eat. There would defnitely be a survival advanatge to the people who could hoard and protect more. But I'm not sure if "hoarding" has been around long enough to become some sort of ingrained response.

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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.

SIGNYM

Friday, October 27, 2006 7:59 PM

So... where are we? We've moved from a discussion of "good" and "evil" to "how to create a society that is 'good'", assuming that "good" means a society which promotes trust and fairness amongst it members. However, this is complicated by the fact that there are other reward neurotransmitters (dopamine) and other behavior drivers like testosterone and even (possibly) some inherent hoarding behavior.

Going back to the computer models that create different "life-forms" from the same basic code, I think the issue is that while humans ON THE AVERAGE behave certain ways, aberrant individuals can gain extraordinary power once society grows past a certain size. And the answer is perhaps not to control the AVERAGE behavior of humans but to set up costraints/ negative feeback loops that limit the cocentration of power.

If that is what we really want, then how to do?

In past societies, the paradigm was that sacrifice on the part of many was necessary but that reward is part of the deal. In the capitalist paradigm, NO behavioral constraints are necessary because the invisible hand, or Darwinian selection, will create a balance. "Greed is good". Both approaches ("Be good" versus "Be greedy") have failed to halt inevitable concentration of power leading to revolution.

Needs more thought....

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Reality sucks. Especially when it contradicts our cherished ideas.

CITIZEN

Friday, October 27, 2006 11:03 PM

Or maybe just limit the size of the powerbase.

More insane ramblings by the people who brought you beeeer milkshakes!
No one can see their reflection in running water. It is only in still water that we can see.

RUE

Saturday, October 28, 2006 1:31 AM

To get back to baboons for a bit -

I thought these were interesting -

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_16_165/ai_n6110153
"In 1982, the most aggressive Forest Troop males began foraging in a garbage pit at a tourist lodge in the reserve. The next year, infected meat in the dump killed all these dominant males, so only the troop's relatively easygoing males survived. By 1986, aggressive behavior in the troop had declined markedly.
The most interesting observations began in 1993. By that time, the troop contained high-ranking immigrant males. From 1993 to 1996, these males behaved as cooperatively as the original set of lower-ranking male survivors had ..."

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/13/science/13BABO.html?ex=1162094400&en
=a5b0df825390f6b7&ei=5070
"Dr. Sapolsky - said that the Forest Troop baboons probably felt as good as they acted. Hormone samples from the monkeys showed far less evidence of stress in even the lowest-ranking individuals, when contrasted with baboons living in more rancorous societies.
The new-fashioned Forest Troop is no United Nations, or even the average frat house. Its citizens remain highly aggressive and argumentative, and the males still obsess over hierarchy. "We're talking about baboons here," said Dr. Sapolsky.
What most distinguishes this congregation from others is that the males resist taking out their bad moods on females and underlings."
and
http://www.peacefulsocieties.org/NAR06/060216gen.html
"The culture of peacefulness in the troop remained intact—as it does to the present time. (2006)
The author suspects that this unique baboon culture is probably not actively passed on to successive generations, but that it emerges and continues from the ways the residents continue to act. He speculates that the females in the troop, with only the less aggressive males to deal with, became less wary and more relaxed, more willing to take chances with incoming juveniles from other troops. As a result, the immigrant juvenile males also relax the patterns they learned in their natal troops. Treated well by the resident females, they adopt the cultural patterns of their new group."

In other words, the fundamental culture of the troop permanently changed due to a fluke. It was all in the initial conditions.

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In the baboon and chimp societies, and with the hummingbirds, it seems to be about the relative aggression (kind of r x f) of males to everyone else.

The chimps and baboons put up with the males b/c the rest of the group has a permanent affiliation to each other and to their territory. So they don't just conclude - oh, they're being jerks, let's go somewhere else so they can be jerks on their own time.

So when the ratio is made right, the pacifists do determine the nature of the society.

But with people, money multiplies power, so a very small number can dominate the conditions everyone else lives under. Given the positive feedback on the cycle - power breeds control which breeds more power - the selection for sociopaths who prefer dopamine to oxytocin increases. ???

DREAMTROVE

Sunday, October 29, 2006 1:47 AM

Cavalier

Sure, this is pretty much how Lao Tse views it. Evil is usually created as a side effect of defining good. Anything outside of that becomes evil. But that's what I call "subjective evil"

There is also "objective evil" which is what Schweitzer is talking about.

The Earth is tugging on you. If you go into the forest, and sit real still for a long time, you can feel it. The Earth is pushing you to behave in a way which is to its benefit. Because, afterall, what is life? Life is the cooperation of its components, whether they be molecules, cells or whole life forms.

A cell would behave somewhat independently, it has its own capability for thought, action, etc. but in general, it feels the tug that it is part of something greater, ie. you, and tries to act in your benefit. If we behave in a way that is detrimental to the Earth, then we have become a cancer, and the Earth will try to stomp us out, and one or the other will perish if the relationship is not brought back into balance.

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