it creates a background violence that takes form in the many invisible hands of structural power asymmetry.
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So the natural state of humanity seems like groups fighting against other groups, but even within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females’ children, and so on. A fractal of competition...
The argument is that this social contract violence abstraction is the attempt at meeting our fundamentally collaborative evolutionary niche in the context of large societies. The fractal power structure you describe is the full and complex solution that Hobbes’ simplifies.
We as a social species have evolved to this point because it is the most amount of collaboration our social technologies have gotten to.
Within each group the alpha male is oppressing the rest of the group, the alpha female is helping her children oppress other females’ children, and so on.
Alphas in human society is a Randian myth. Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained “reverse dominance hierarchies” (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an “alpha”).
Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained “reverse dominance hierarchies” (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an “alpha”).
I agree that a human alpha cannot rule alone, he is typically a leader of a clique. But if egalitarianism is our nature, why is there so much bullying at schools, reinvented independently?
I am not just making a claim, this egalitarianism you refer to is the conclusion of modern anthropology. You’re right that the inference from ‘people suppress bragging’ to ‘egalitarian society’ deserves scrutiny in isolation. The logical point is sound, but you’re applying it to a straw version of the claim. The anthropological case isn’t built on the thin inference ‘people suppress bragging, therefore egalitarianism’.
You are doing a few things here; one is conflating egalitarianism with lack of violence, drama or conflict, another is a misunderstanding of what our social skills actually evolved to do and in what context.
Our social skills evolved for groups of at most Dunbar’s number (~150 people). When hunter-gatherers exist in such small groups, there is no need to specialize. Classes (such as a warrior class in your post) don’t exist yet, as specialization only occurs after farming was invented. With a good balance of information (skill) symmetry between peoples, power mostly concentrates along social lines (who has respect) and not violent ones. This is because most people know how to fight and are themselves strong, making it difficult to truly physically resist the group.
Hunter-gatherer reverse dominance hierarchies work because the group is small, everyone knows everyone, and there are constant interactions. Schools are large, semi-anonymous institutions where those accountability mechanisms are weak or absent. The persistence and reinvention of bullying cliques in schools is precisely what you’d predict if the egalitarian mechanisms of small-band lifedon’t transfer to large modern institutions. Robin Hanson’s own framework predicts that in small bands where dominance is hard to achieve physically, prestige-based status dominates.
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The argument is that this social contract violence abstraction is the attempt at meeting our fundamentally collaborative evolutionary niche in the context of large societies. The fractal power structure you describe is the full and complex solution that Hobbes’ simplifies.
We as a social species have evolved to this point because it is the most amount of collaboration our social technologies have gotten to.
Alphas in human society is a Randian myth. Early hunter-gatherers were notoriously fiercely egalitarian and maintained “reverse dominance hierarchies” (where the tribe teams up to bully, exile, or kill anyone who tries to act like an “alpha”).
I agree that a human alpha cannot rule alone, he is typically a leader of a clique. But if egalitarianism is our nature, why is there so much bullying at schools, reinvented independently?
My alternative explanation is that it is simply the dominant clique maintaining order.
I am not just making a claim, this egalitarianism you refer to is the conclusion of modern anthropology. You’re right that the inference from ‘people suppress bragging’ to ‘egalitarian society’ deserves scrutiny in isolation. The logical point is sound, but you’re applying it to a straw version of the claim. The anthropological case isn’t built on the thin inference ‘people suppress bragging, therefore egalitarianism’.
You are doing a few things here; one is conflating egalitarianism with lack of violence, drama or conflict, another is a misunderstanding of what our social skills actually evolved to do and in what context.
Our social skills evolved for groups of at most Dunbar’s number (~150 people). When hunter-gatherers exist in such small groups, there is no need to specialize. Classes (such as a warrior class in your post) don’t exist yet, as specialization only occurs after farming was invented. With a good balance of information (skill) symmetry between peoples, power mostly concentrates along social lines (who has respect) and not violent ones. This is because most people know how to fight and are themselves strong, making it difficult to truly physically resist the group.
Hunter-gatherer reverse dominance hierarchies work because the group is small, everyone knows everyone, and there are constant interactions. Schools are large, semi-anonymous institutions where those accountability mechanisms are weak or absent. The persistence and reinvention of bullying cliques in schools is precisely what you’d predict if the egalitarian mechanisms of small-band life don’t transfer to large modern institutions. Robin Hanson’s own framework predicts that in small bands where dominance is hard to achieve physically, prestige-based status dominates.