"Teenagers with grandiose delusions are simply much more common than teenagers with superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy."
And yet Joan of Arc did exactly that - showed superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy. You said that it is more common to have teenagers with grandiose delusions, but no other teenager in France did what she did.
I don't really understand your logic. Something is unlikely and when it happens, and people call it a miracle, you say that it is not, just because it is unlikely, therefore it didn't happen?! If physics has been developed with such logic, we would have still believed in the 4 elements of the Universe.
Also, your definition of grandiose delusion (and job ad for shaman) fits absolutely perfectly to two other types: 1) the typical leftist, who believes in changing genders and 2) typical genius in physics/math, when observed by common crowd. Yet those two are totally opposed.
The problem with this is that you are using a VERY wrong criteria. You believe that because not everybody is smart, great, has ideas or simply put is a great person, then nobody could be. The difference between Trump and people which believe in transgenderism is that Trump actually accomplish what he has at his own goal (in whatever way), while the typical Leftist takes his own life (or others) after a few years, because - apparently - reality doesn't bend on your wishes, no matter how much you scream (or write over internet).
But you are on to something. Maybe those 4% are those that always poison the world with leftist ideas?
>>And yet Joan of Arc did exactly that - showed superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy.
Are you sure? It seems to me that she was most of all the right person at the right time. People waited for a savior virgin. At least the idea was far from unknown. So when a girl who believed herself to be the savior virgin turned up, she got a lot of help from people who liked the idea of a savior virgin. To me the story seems most of all like a series of unusual circumstances.
I don't say that people are never smart or unusually talented. I just say that in some situations, being delusional is actually more effective than being smart. Being both at the same time can achieve wonders.
Well, I cannot be sure, but what are the odds? Why was she the right person for the right time? According to you and Mark Twain she didn't know anything, could barely speak and so on. What makes HER the right person?
This is unfalsifiable argument. "It's not that she was extraordinary, but she is in the right place at the right time." It's not that the Blacks have much lower IQ than the Whites, it's that they were enslaved, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time." "It is not that the person is lazy and does not want to do anything with their life, but the system is against us", and so on and so forth
There were very many situations where "the right person" was needed and it never came. That is the big difference - do you believe in individual action/responsibility/value or you believe we are some sort of automata driven by foreign entity.
No reason, actually I believe in the same, too, but my understanding of your text was that it is purely situational and being delusional is some kind of random behavior which only due to circumstances occurring by chance is beneficial. Some kind of a brute-force of the nature, which is totally possible, I admit, but I would like to emphasize that there are natural geniuses which can change the world by themselves and their grandiose delusion is not a delusion at all.
Trump's appeal to many people was that his brand of crazy allowed him to fight against the delusions of the establishment. Sometimes it takes crazy to beat crazy.
If the socio-political situation in the US hadn't been so dire, there would have been no place for Trump.
I don't think confusing the opaque methods by which social learning proceeds in the world, with yet again another individual outlier, is good enough anymore.
A madness theory of religion and civilization was also provided by Julian Jaynes of bicameral mind who also started with an ape band. It is the question of communication in an ever-larger community that gave rise to "voices" of the absent leader being heard by an individual.
Followed by "voice" of the dead ruler, followed by "voice" of gods. And as voices withdraw as human mentality evolves, we have all the paraphernalia of religion--prayers, ritual etc etc ---all in hope of invoking the now-silent voices.
I is very interesting theory, well worth your comment,
I have read the first parts of Jayne's magnum opus. My biggest question mark was: Why didn't he test his hypothesis through interviewing some of the millions of people who lived their lives under primitive circumstances in the 20th century? Why didn't he go to the jungle and talked to people who underwent civilization processes, like Mark Ritchie did? Or at least talked to people who had done that. Or did he?
In general, shouldn't anthropology be the best way to find an answer to the question of how human cognition varies at different stages of civilization?
That primitives apparently have stronger connection with spirit world as a point in Jaynes' favor. Also, please check out his account of hyponsis (it is later in the book).
I am not saying that his theory has no problems. The transition from bicameral to present mentality is largely a mystery. But his account has the strangeness, the wildness that a true account of religion, language and civilization ought to have.
About 15 years ago, I read an interesting book whose name I have forgotten by, IIRC, an American ex-pat living in Russia. It was part a history of revolutions and part speculation on the rise of "mass shootings" in American schools and workplaces, with a communist ideological bent. The book's core thesis was that the first revolutionaries/people who went against established social norms (like early American abolitionists) were seen as crazy by their contemporaries because they actually *were* crazy. Any sane person would look at the odds of a revolution succeeding, decide it was zero, and stay home. Only a crazy person like John Brown would lead a raid on Harper's Ferry, and indeed he died, but without crazy people who can't work out their odds of death, normal people who are also anti-slavery have no idea that other anti-slavery people exist. If enough crazy people start revolting, normal people will see that they have the numbers and start joining; this creates a feedback loop where more people are willing to joing as the revolution becomes a surer thing.
Another example who's much more famous is Muhammad, who went from hearing angels to successful warlord. Men like Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun may have also operated under some level of grandiose delusions, except in their case they actually managed to conquer large parts of the world.
One quibble: there are accounts of clearly insane people from before the Enlightenment. For example, Mark 5: 1-13:
"They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. 2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones."
This is sad! This guy is crazy and his neighbors have definitely not made him a prophet or shaman; they've been chaining him up. And when that didn't work, he became a homeless guy living in the graveyard, yelling at people as they pass by.
Here's the end of the story:
"6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”
9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10 And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.
11 A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. 12 The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13 He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned."
Oops. I hit "enter" by accident. At least I didn't lose my comment. I was going to add that modern Judaism--as I understand it--basically rejects the idea of divinely inspired prophets. There have been exceptions, of course, but in general when you get a really successful prophet in the neighborhood, Judaism is what's left after people convert to the new thing. So Judaism may have evolved a kind of memetic resistance to prophesy over time.
I have read that part of Joan's success stemmed from flinging herself into the thick of battle. This was due to having no rational fear of death, since she believed God would protect her. Meanwhile it was actually the soldiers who followed and protected her; they didn't want her to die, and so also threw themselves into the thick of battle, thus solving the coordination problem whereby everyone rationally figures it's best to defect during battle and let someone else get stabbed on the front lines.
Of course, sometimes this strategy works out very poorly, like the case of that girl in South Africa who said the gods would drive the whites from their lands if her fellow tribesmen sacrificed all of their herd animals. No such thing happened and lots of people starved.
Elon musk also seems like a crazy person who has--so far--crazied his way into enormous success. He also seems to be teetering just on the edge of things going really, really wrong for him (maybe he has already passed over that edge). I find it very annoying when people say that Musk is autistic--autism is defined as involving significant impairments in multiple areas of life functioning. I don't see how the world's richest businessman who has wormed his way into being besties with the world's most powerful man and has at least 14 children by different women is facing "significant impairments" in his ability to get a job, socialize, etc. He might have some autistic traits, or have been diagnosed as a child, but that's not an accurate description of his current situation.
Well, that's about all of my thoughts for now... Take care :)
There is a fairly strong paleoanthropological explanation for the larger human group sizes (which were indeed a formidable super weapon relative to all other similar hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans and H Heidelbergensis) - it was self-domestication.
This is the hypothesis of Richard Wrangham's book *The Goodness Paradox.*
Broadly, sexual selection (from those same women you were modeling as mere property) where women prioritized narrative ability, leadership ability, cooperation, and altruistic tendencies over time, leading to more domesticated men. Those men then continued the process by ganging up and killing any men in their local groups who tried to dominate the tribe and / or monopolize women.
Essentially, as chimpanzees the only way to status was via domination. This sexual selection by women opened up another road to high status - popular affirmation and leadership. This was a very strong selection effect on both ends, from better leaders having more offspring and from overly dominating a*holes getting wiped out by the other men ganging up.
That self-domestication led to our group sizes getting MUCH larger than other hominin group sizes - it was literally a super-weapon, and is likely what led to us being able to wipe out every other extant hominin species in our last out-migration from Africa 50-60kya, because the greater density of people in group sizes led to more technological advance and refinement as well as larger amounts of warriors.
Then from there, I think your hypothesis comes in - we were already 2-10x more cooperative due to self-domestication. Now how do we aggregate in larger groups? How do we coordinate beyond Dunbar's number? At first this was a matter of shared languages and ethnicity, but eventually it becomes a matter of shared religions and cultures - and this is the part of the story you're focused on here.
The Goodness Paradox really is a great book. But do you really think that women deserve that much credit for selecting domesticated men? The endemic problem of female prison guards who have sexual relations with inmates suggests that sexual selection happened in the undomesticated direction too.
Why not blame group selection? Men who were better at cooperating with each other stole the Earth from men who were worse at cooperating with each other. For example, Homo Sapiens Sapiens stole Europe from the Neanderthals.
> But do you really think that women deserve that much credit for selecting domesticated men?
I do, it's kind of glossed over in Wrangam's book, but Geoffrey Miller's *The Mating Mind* makes the full case pretty persuasively.
Also, even today most hunter gatherer tribes are relatively egalitarian when it comes to mate selection, in the sense that it's basically never "the patriarchy / council of men allocates the wives however they deign." 3 out of 4 currently studied African hunter gatherer tribes practice "courtship marriages" and genetic studies indicate that true concurrent polygyny (as in multiple wives at the same time, versus wives in series) is relatively low incidence historically overall, going back 50k years.
Polygyny being relatively low incidence is a strong argument that women are influencing their male mate's choices and reproductive practices to be more in line with what they wish versus what their partner's wish, because there's a reliable split in most cultures down to the present day, where males desire and see nothing wrong with polygyny and females don't want it to happen. How powerless are they against their spear-wielding brutes of husbands, if most of those husbands didn't actually father children with other women?
Many HG cultures do have "bride price" or dowries and similar arrangements, but that doesn't mean that women have no choice, it means of the men they are choosing from, it's probably one factor among many that's considered by them and their families.
Australian Aborigines are the rare example of specifically terrible patriarchy-like dynamics, and represent the "high polygyny" exception in HG tribes studied genetically.
By selecting in our leaders the very things that the women in our evolutionary past were selecting for - good storytelling, good leadership, cooperation, altruism.
All of that is what makes a good leader even today - as opposed to "bad leaders," which are invariably trying to dominate / micromanage / impose their will.
This is too simplistic. People differ in their drive to power and there is nothing "bad" about it--esp in a evolutionary framework.
The question I asked was when men are supposed to self-domesticate by killing off those trying to dominate them, how does this lead to domination by kings? Storytelling ability doesn't cut it. The king has to be a warrior,
> The question I asked was when men are supposed to self-domesticate by killing off those trying to dominate them, how does this lead to domination by kings?
Oh yeah, sorry - misunderstood. This depends on the time period. I'm talking about the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), when we were all hunter gatherers for ~400k years.
They had chiefs and "big men" in these times, but there weren't kings, and hunter gatherer societies historically and today are extremely egalitarian, with dominating or arrogant behaviors routinely punished by expulsion or death.
Kings relies on agriculture, which is basically the last 6k years, and yes, agriculture profoundly changed society and how we organize and the behaviors that led to more descendants.
Indeed, the most successful men from a descendants standpoint that we know about, like Genghis Khan's line, and Ismail ibn Sharif, only occurred after agriculture made large empires possible, and they were indeed conquerors / overly dominating a*holes.
But all of our drives and intuitions around what's fair and what makes a good leader? Basically honed in that more egalitarian EEA.
I am actually reading Mark Twain's Joan of Arc right now!
Also I wrote possibly mad things about exactly that question of "did she know what she was doing" and "was it being crazy, or calculating, and how would we tell the difference in this, or other cases?"
1. "Before seeing it happen, Jungleman has no idea that people can live together in peace and forgiveness. But when he gets to know that there are people outside the jungle who have better technology and better social organization than his people, he is curious to learn. He strongly prefers the missionaries to the anthropologists, because since white people evidently know a better way to live, he wants them to share what they know. In other words: Although Jungleman couldn't tell what a better way to live would be like, he had no problem imagining that it existed once he saw a few signs that it did."
This is much like the domestication process in cats, far as I can tell, having no real experience with domesticity.
2. Concerning Trump, he sounds like a loudmouth of the sort found in any bar.
That said, the average frustrated deplorable can be said to have made an entirely rational decision in voting for weak, stupid, easily manipulated Trump. When the system is rigged, and not in your favor, when everyone outside the ruling class is being picked clean and left to rot, the choices on offer being corporate imperialist muppet Team R Tweedledee and imperialist corporate muppet Team D Tweedledum, one response is to choose the man who will Burn It All Down.
>>one response is to choose the man who will Burn It All Down
This argument makes me think of Peter Turchin's remarks that the people are almost always unable to do without elites. Revolts of peasants with hayforks almost always failed, because only elites can organize people successfully. The people can strike, sabotage or vote for a crazy person that tears things down. But it seems that they can't have their own agenda.
Most humans are herd animals to put any sheep or lemming to shame. At the same time, power comes from organization, and power attracts sociopaths, the way catnip attracts cats. Sociopaths are solely motivated by self-interest and power lets them maximize that self-interest.
At the same time, power is What Gets Stuff Done. Not only that, but if you don't use power, someone else will, and they may use that power in ways you don't like.
This is the paradox of humans. At least Tolkien's hobbits had the option of chucking The One Ring and being done with it. Humans don't have that.
"Teenagers with grandiose delusions are simply much more common than teenagers with superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy."
And yet Joan of Arc did exactly that - showed superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy. You said that it is more common to have teenagers with grandiose delusions, but no other teenager in France did what she did.
I don't really understand your logic. Something is unlikely and when it happens, and people call it a miracle, you say that it is not, just because it is unlikely, therefore it didn't happen?! If physics has been developed with such logic, we would have still believed in the 4 elements of the Universe.
Also, your definition of grandiose delusion (and job ad for shaman) fits absolutely perfectly to two other types: 1) the typical leftist, who believes in changing genders and 2) typical genius in physics/math, when observed by common crowd. Yet those two are totally opposed.
The problem with this is that you are using a VERY wrong criteria. You believe that because not everybody is smart, great, has ideas or simply put is a great person, then nobody could be. The difference between Trump and people which believe in transgenderism is that Trump actually accomplish what he has at his own goal (in whatever way), while the typical Leftist takes his own life (or others) after a few years, because - apparently - reality doesn't bend on your wishes, no matter how much you scream (or write over internet).
But you are on to something. Maybe those 4% are those that always poison the world with leftist ideas?
>>And yet Joan of Arc did exactly that - showed superhuman abilities in politics and diplomacy.
Are you sure? It seems to me that she was most of all the right person at the right time. People waited for a savior virgin. At least the idea was far from unknown. So when a girl who believed herself to be the savior virgin turned up, she got a lot of help from people who liked the idea of a savior virgin. To me the story seems most of all like a series of unusual circumstances.
I don't say that people are never smart or unusually talented. I just say that in some situations, being delusional is actually more effective than being smart. Being both at the same time can achieve wonders.
Well, I cannot be sure, but what are the odds? Why was she the right person for the right time? According to you and Mark Twain she didn't know anything, could barely speak and so on. What makes HER the right person?
This is unfalsifiable argument. "It's not that she was extraordinary, but she is in the right place at the right time." It's not that the Blacks have much lower IQ than the Whites, it's that they were enslaved, because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time." "It is not that the person is lazy and does not want to do anything with their life, but the system is against us", and so on and so forth
There were very many situations where "the right person" was needed and it never came. That is the big difference - do you believe in individual action/responsibility/value or you believe we are some sort of automata driven by foreign entity.
>>do you believe in individual action/responsibility/value or you believe we are some sort of automata driven by foreign entity.
Why not a little of both?
No reason, actually I believe in the same, too, but my understanding of your text was that it is purely situational and being delusional is some kind of random behavior which only due to circumstances occurring by chance is beneficial. Some kind of a brute-force of the nature, which is totally possible, I admit, but I would like to emphasize that there are natural geniuses which can change the world by themselves and their grandiose delusion is not a delusion at all.
Trump's appeal to many people was that his brand of crazy allowed him to fight against the delusions of the establishment. Sometimes it takes crazy to beat crazy.
If the socio-political situation in the US hadn't been so dire, there would have been no place for Trump.
Well there is a simpler explanation. There was a prehistoric period when 95 pct of all human males died..it was an age of brutal unrelenting warfare.
Eventually the winnered of this slaughter were those who could cooperate on a larger scale. Thatd it - cooperation was simply evolved in competition
>If Americans can't agree over anything real, they can agree over something unreal instead.
I guess many felt that it is a choice between a delusional ideology or a delusional person.
I don't think confusing the opaque methods by which social learning proceeds in the world, with yet again another individual outlier, is good enough anymore.
A madness theory of religion and civilization was also provided by Julian Jaynes of bicameral mind who also started with an ape band. It is the question of communication in an ever-larger community that gave rise to "voices" of the absent leader being heard by an individual.
Followed by "voice" of the dead ruler, followed by "voice" of gods. And as voices withdraw as human mentality evolves, we have all the paraphernalia of religion--prayers, ritual etc etc ---all in hope of invoking the now-silent voices.
I is very interesting theory, well worth your comment,
I have read the first parts of Jayne's magnum opus. My biggest question mark was: Why didn't he test his hypothesis through interviewing some of the millions of people who lived their lives under primitive circumstances in the 20th century? Why didn't he go to the jungle and talked to people who underwent civilization processes, like Mark Ritchie did? Or at least talked to people who had done that. Or did he?
In general, shouldn't anthropology be the best way to find an answer to the question of how human cognition varies at different stages of civilization?
That primitives apparently have stronger connection with spirit world as a point in Jaynes' favor. Also, please check out his account of hyponsis (it is later in the book).
I am not saying that his theory has no problems. The transition from bicameral to present mentality is largely a mystery. But his account has the strangeness, the wildness that a true account of religion, language and civilization ought to have.
About 15 years ago, I read an interesting book whose name I have forgotten by, IIRC, an American ex-pat living in Russia. It was part a history of revolutions and part speculation on the rise of "mass shootings" in American schools and workplaces, with a communist ideological bent. The book's core thesis was that the first revolutionaries/people who went against established social norms (like early American abolitionists) were seen as crazy by their contemporaries because they actually *were* crazy. Any sane person would look at the odds of a revolution succeeding, decide it was zero, and stay home. Only a crazy person like John Brown would lead a raid on Harper's Ferry, and indeed he died, but without crazy people who can't work out their odds of death, normal people who are also anti-slavery have no idea that other anti-slavery people exist. If enough crazy people start revolting, normal people will see that they have the numbers and start joining; this creates a feedback loop where more people are willing to joing as the revolution becomes a surer thing.
Another example who's much more famous is Muhammad, who went from hearing angels to successful warlord. Men like Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun may have also operated under some level of grandiose delusions, except in their case they actually managed to conquer large parts of the world.
One quibble: there are accounts of clearly insane people from before the Enlightenment. For example, Mark 5: 1-13:
"They went across the lake to the region of the Gerasenes. 2 When Jesus got out of the boat, a man with an impure spirit came from the tombs to meet him. 3 This man lived in the tombs, and no one could bind him anymore, not even with a chain. 4 For he had often been chained hand and foot, but he tore the chains apart and broke the irons on his feet. No one was strong enough to subdue him. 5 Night and day among the tombs and in the hills he would cry out and cut himself with stones."
This is sad! This guy is crazy and his neighbors have definitely not made him a prophet or shaman; they've been chaining him up. And when that didn't work, he became a homeless guy living in the graveyard, yelling at people as they pass by.
Here's the end of the story:
"6 When he saw Jesus from a distance, he ran and fell on his knees in front of him. 7 He shouted at the top of his voice, “What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? In God’s name don’t torture me!” 8 For Jesus had said to him, “Come out of this man, you impure spirit!”
9 Then Jesus asked him, “What is your name?”
“My name is Legion,” he replied, “for we are many.” 10 And he begged Jesus again and again not to send them out of the area.
11 A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. 12 The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” 13 He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned."
Oops. I hit "enter" by accident. At least I didn't lose my comment. I was going to add that modern Judaism--as I understand it--basically rejects the idea of divinely inspired prophets. There have been exceptions, of course, but in general when you get a really successful prophet in the neighborhood, Judaism is what's left after people convert to the new thing. So Judaism may have evolved a kind of memetic resistance to prophesy over time.
I have read that part of Joan's success stemmed from flinging herself into the thick of battle. This was due to having no rational fear of death, since she believed God would protect her. Meanwhile it was actually the soldiers who followed and protected her; they didn't want her to die, and so also threw themselves into the thick of battle, thus solving the coordination problem whereby everyone rationally figures it's best to defect during battle and let someone else get stabbed on the front lines.
Of course, sometimes this strategy works out very poorly, like the case of that girl in South Africa who said the gods would drive the whites from their lands if her fellow tribesmen sacrificed all of their herd animals. No such thing happened and lots of people starved.
Elon musk also seems like a crazy person who has--so far--crazied his way into enormous success. He also seems to be teetering just on the edge of things going really, really wrong for him (maybe he has already passed over that edge). I find it very annoying when people say that Musk is autistic--autism is defined as involving significant impairments in multiple areas of life functioning. I don't see how the world's richest businessman who has wormed his way into being besties with the world's most powerful man and has at least 14 children by different women is facing "significant impairments" in his ability to get a job, socialize, etc. He might have some autistic traits, or have been diagnosed as a child, but that's not an accurate description of his current situation.
Well, that's about all of my thoughts for now... Take care :)
Really interesting post and take.
There is a fairly strong paleoanthropological explanation for the larger human group sizes (which were indeed a formidable super weapon relative to all other similar hominins like Neanderthals and Denisovans and H Heidelbergensis) - it was self-domestication.
This is the hypothesis of Richard Wrangham's book *The Goodness Paradox.*
Broadly, sexual selection (from those same women you were modeling as mere property) where women prioritized narrative ability, leadership ability, cooperation, and altruistic tendencies over time, leading to more domesticated men. Those men then continued the process by ganging up and killing any men in their local groups who tried to dominate the tribe and / or monopolize women.
Essentially, as chimpanzees the only way to status was via domination. This sexual selection by women opened up another road to high status - popular affirmation and leadership. This was a very strong selection effect on both ends, from better leaders having more offspring and from overly dominating a*holes getting wiped out by the other men ganging up.
That self-domestication led to our group sizes getting MUCH larger than other hominin group sizes - it was literally a super-weapon, and is likely what led to us being able to wipe out every other extant hominin species in our last out-migration from Africa 50-60kya, because the greater density of people in group sizes led to more technological advance and refinement as well as larger amounts of warriors.
I wrote a post about this whole process here: https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/how-to-stop-bullies-and-inadvertently?r=17hw9h
Then from there, I think your hypothesis comes in - we were already 2-10x more cooperative due to self-domestication. Now how do we aggregate in larger groups? How do we coordinate beyond Dunbar's number? At first this was a matter of shared languages and ethnicity, but eventually it becomes a matter of shared religions and cultures - and this is the part of the story you're focused on here.
The Goodness Paradox really is a great book. But do you really think that women deserve that much credit for selecting domesticated men? The endemic problem of female prison guards who have sexual relations with inmates suggests that sexual selection happened in the undomesticated direction too.
Why not blame group selection? Men who were better at cooperating with each other stole the Earth from men who were worse at cooperating with each other. For example, Homo Sapiens Sapiens stole Europe from the Neanderthals.
> But do you really think that women deserve that much credit for selecting domesticated men?
I do, it's kind of glossed over in Wrangam's book, but Geoffrey Miller's *The Mating Mind* makes the full case pretty persuasively.
Also, even today most hunter gatherer tribes are relatively egalitarian when it comes to mate selection, in the sense that it's basically never "the patriarchy / council of men allocates the wives however they deign." 3 out of 4 currently studied African hunter gatherer tribes practice "courtship marriages" and genetic studies indicate that true concurrent polygyny (as in multiple wives at the same time, versus wives in series) is relatively low incidence historically overall, going back 50k years.
Polygyny being relatively low incidence is a strong argument that women are influencing their male mate's choices and reproductive practices to be more in line with what they wish versus what their partner's wish, because there's a reliable split in most cultures down to the present day, where males desire and see nothing wrong with polygyny and females don't want it to happen. How powerless are they against their spear-wielding brutes of husbands, if most of those husbands didn't actually father children with other women?
Many HG cultures do have "bride price" or dowries and similar arrangements, but that doesn't mean that women have no choice, it means of the men they are choosing from, it's probably one factor among many that's considered by them and their families.
Australian Aborigines are the rare example of specifically terrible patriarchy-like dynamics, and represent the "high polygyny" exception in HG tribes studied genetically.
That men ever ganged up to kill any man that tried to dominate the group--- I wonder if this idea has any support.
How did we ever get chiefs and kings?
> How did we ever get chiefs and kings?
By selecting in our leaders the very things that the women in our evolutionary past were selecting for - good storytelling, good leadership, cooperation, altruism.
All of that is what makes a good leader even today - as opposed to "bad leaders," which are invariably trying to dominate / micromanage / impose their will.
This is too simplistic. People differ in their drive to power and there is nothing "bad" about it--esp in a evolutionary framework.
The question I asked was when men are supposed to self-domesticate by killing off those trying to dominate them, how does this lead to domination by kings? Storytelling ability doesn't cut it. The king has to be a warrior,
> The question I asked was when men are supposed to self-domesticate by killing off those trying to dominate them, how does this lead to domination by kings?
Oh yeah, sorry - misunderstood. This depends on the time period. I'm talking about the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), when we were all hunter gatherers for ~400k years.
They had chiefs and "big men" in these times, but there weren't kings, and hunter gatherer societies historically and today are extremely egalitarian, with dominating or arrogant behaviors routinely punished by expulsion or death.
Kings relies on agriculture, which is basically the last 6k years, and yes, agriculture profoundly changed society and how we organize and the behaviors that led to more descendants.
Indeed, the most successful men from a descendants standpoint that we know about, like Genghis Khan's line, and Ismail ibn Sharif, only occurred after agriculture made large empires possible, and they were indeed conquerors / overly dominating a*holes.
But all of our drives and intuitions around what's fair and what makes a good leader? Basically honed in that more egalitarian EEA.
I am actually reading Mark Twain's Joan of Arc right now!
Also I wrote possibly mad things about exactly that question of "did she know what she was doing" and "was it being crazy, or calculating, and how would we tell the difference in this, or other cases?"
https://moore2024.substack.com/p/theophany
1. "Before seeing it happen, Jungleman has no idea that people can live together in peace and forgiveness. But when he gets to know that there are people outside the jungle who have better technology and better social organization than his people, he is curious to learn. He strongly prefers the missionaries to the anthropologists, because since white people evidently know a better way to live, he wants them to share what they know. In other words: Although Jungleman couldn't tell what a better way to live would be like, he had no problem imagining that it existed once he saw a few signs that it did."
This is much like the domestication process in cats, far as I can tell, having no real experience with domesticity.
2. Concerning Trump, he sounds like a loudmouth of the sort found in any bar.
That said, the average frustrated deplorable can be said to have made an entirely rational decision in voting for weak, stupid, easily manipulated Trump. When the system is rigged, and not in your favor, when everyone outside the ruling class is being picked clean and left to rot, the choices on offer being corporate imperialist muppet Team R Tweedledee and imperialist corporate muppet Team D Tweedledum, one response is to choose the man who will Burn It All Down.
>>one response is to choose the man who will Burn It All Down
This argument makes me think of Peter Turchin's remarks that the people are almost always unable to do without elites. Revolts of peasants with hayforks almost always failed, because only elites can organize people successfully. The people can strike, sabotage or vote for a crazy person that tears things down. But it seems that they can't have their own agenda.
Most humans are herd animals to put any sheep or lemming to shame. At the same time, power comes from organization, and power attracts sociopaths, the way catnip attracts cats. Sociopaths are solely motivated by self-interest and power lets them maximize that self-interest.
At the same time, power is What Gets Stuff Done. Not only that, but if you don't use power, someone else will, and they may use that power in ways you don't like.
This is the paradox of humans. At least Tolkien's hobbits had the option of chucking The One Ring and being done with it. Humans don't have that.