Evolution is slow, we’re still wired to kill anything that doesn’t look exactly like who we grew up around.
Everytime a society starts taking society for granted, like it’s some inalienable right that will always be there no matter what, we stop socializing our kids and stop enforcing social norms.
Then everybody acts shocked that humans are really just animals.
Being against fascism is 100% opt in, and even with socialization some people are gonna want it because it involves almost zero thinking
Like, if you wanted to design a system for producing people who hate thinking and just want ordered around…
It would be hard to do better than No Child Left Behind.
But for lol ke 30 years now no one has wanted to fix it. This is the natural result
Evolution is slow, we’re still wired to kill anything that doesn’t look exactly like who we grew up around.
Explaining socio-historical phenomena by appeal to evolution is a pretty dodgy move, and a defeatist one. People can do better, and in many places and times they have done and still do. Fascists are responsible for their fascism. We’re not evolved to be fascist; we have slipped into it due to very particular circumstances.
People can do better, and in many places and times they have done and still do.
Because they were socialized…
I had a buddy back in the day with a very well trained dog, the guy used bird calls instead of spoken commands, and the dog understood perfectly.
But go out and start whistling at some wolves and see what happens.
We’re not evolved to be fascist
Oh yeah?
Why does humanity have less genetic diversity than any other mammal that’s not critically endangered?
Why are we one of the few species that “coincidentally” had all our relatives close enough to resemble us on the family tree all just happen to die out?
Modern humans have been unchanged for 300k years, we’ve lived thru multiple ice ages and societal collapses without any change.
We evolved for chaos and rebuilding. The whole time narrowing down our genetic tree to the point it’s basically a telephone pole.
Why does humanity have less genetic diversity than any other mammal that’s not critically endangered?
Probably because of some event in the past that few individuals survived, so that all humans since have been descended from them. Homo Sapiens is a relatively recent species and genetic diversification takes time, so the genetic narrowing effects of such population reduction would still be felt today.
But it has nothing to do with character or temperament, and as far as I know there’s no evidence Homo Sapiens actively killed off its close relatives. For whatever reason they died off, while at some point we almost did too, but we just scraped through with less diverse genes as a result. That’s how it goes in evolution: tiny differences can sometimes be amplified due to environment and chance. It’s absurd to draw political conclusions, and to do so shows a misunderstanding of evolutionary processes and history.
The system responsible for “love” and in group bonding also causes out group bias.
And in/out group is just based on who you’re socialized around as a very young child.
Overall, our findings suggest a pivotal role of the oxytocinergic system in the RIBE-modulated neural activities and revenge intention in human interactions with the modulatory effect of interpersonal trust
Oxytocin, he wrote, “motivates in-group favoritism” and “derogation” of outsiders. According to the study, oxytocin had “a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence.”
According to a Vice report published this week, the study’s participants — all Dutch males — were told that they had to choose five persons out of six that would gain access to a life-saving lifeboat.
The men on oxytocin were more likely to deny men with Muslim or German-sounding names access and save the men with Dutch names, while the men who were given a placebo didn’t pay attention to the origin of the names.
Oxytocin is incredibly important. It’s why we stick around with mates and raise children, it’s why we live in groups instead of solitary. And it is directly tied (especially to men) to bias and aggression to outgroup individuals (especially other men).
Which is literally what fascism is. It’s an institutionalized bias against “them” which uses fear and violence to control everyone.
Just because you can’t immediately see the connection doesn’t mean it’s not there.
But out group bias, whether by chance or because it’s beneficial, has always existed in modern humans. It’s tied to such a fundamental neurotransmitter that it couldn’t have made a sudden change, and again, humans are essentially unchanged for 300k years.
The problem like I said in the beginning, is that after a couple centuries of civilization socializing humans, humans start thinking that socialization isn’t important and any random human can just magically grow up into a well adjusted person.
this ignores how many precolonial societies were wholly nonviolent. there are three kinds of culture: pure cultures, remix cultures, and domination cultures. pure cultures resist outside influence on their culture. remix cultures integrate ideas and concepts into their culture very fluidly. domination cultures attempt to eliminate other cultures they encounter. the only reason you perceive it as a biological imperative this way is that domination cultures seek to acquire and justify the power to eliminate pure and remix cultures, and then they do, and the evidence that the pure or remix culture they eliminated is gone, no longer able to speak on how they see the world and the other cultures. give this process 20k years and eventually you have an extremely small number of domination cultures subjugating the remnants of the other cultures.
this is the situation we find ourselves in today. there is nothing saying it must be this way, except for the domination cultures themselves. we can work to stop the domination cultures, but as we do this we must learn to listen to the pure and remix cultures. part of why we must do this is that the domination cultures if treated as pure cultures will continue on their course. they must be converted to remix cultures, integrating into themselves the idea of remix and pure cultures that they don’t have to be so fucking violent all the time
Evolution is slow, we’re still wired to kill anything that doesn’t look exactly like who we grew up around.
Everytime a society starts taking society for granted, like it’s some inalienable right that will always be there no matter what, we stop socializing our kids and stop enforcing social norms.
Then everybody acts shocked that humans are really just animals.
Being against fascism is 100% opt in, and even with socialization some people are gonna want it because it involves almost zero thinking
Like, if you wanted to design a system for producing people who hate thinking and just want ordered around…
It would be hard to do better than No Child Left Behind.
But for lol ke 30 years now no one has wanted to fix it. This is the natural result
Explaining socio-historical phenomena by appeal to evolution is a pretty dodgy move, and a defeatist one. People can do better, and in many places and times they have done and still do. Fascists are responsible for their fascism. We’re not evolved to be fascist; we have slipped into it due to very particular circumstances.
Because they were socialized…
I had a buddy back in the day with a very well trained dog, the guy used bird calls instead of spoken commands, and the dog understood perfectly.
But go out and start whistling at some wolves and see what happens.
Oh yeah?
Why does humanity have less genetic diversity than any other mammal that’s not critically endangered?
Why are we one of the few species that “coincidentally” had all our relatives close enough to resemble us on the family tree all just happen to die out?
Modern humans have been unchanged for 300k years, we’ve lived thru multiple ice ages and societal collapses without any change.
We evolved for chaos and rebuilding. The whole time narrowing down our genetic tree to the point it’s basically a telephone pole.
Probably because of some event in the past that few individuals survived, so that all humans since have been descended from them. Homo Sapiens is a relatively recent species and genetic diversification takes time, so the genetic narrowing effects of such population reduction would still be felt today.
But it has nothing to do with character or temperament, and as far as I know there’s no evidence Homo Sapiens actively killed off its close relatives. For whatever reason they died off, while at some point we almost did too, but we just scraped through with less diverse genes as a result. That’s how it goes in evolution: tiny differences can sometimes be amplified due to environment and chance. It’s absurd to draw political conclusions, and to do so shows a misunderstanding of evolutionary processes and history.
An article about this:
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-we-lost-our-diversity
And a fun (but long!) video about the misuse of evolutionary theory to support psychological, political and social conclusions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31e0RcImReY
The system responsible for “love” and in group bonding also causes out group bias.
And in/out group is just based on who you’re socialized around as a very young child.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39244015/
https://time.com/49399/oxytocin-racism-study/
Oxytocin is incredibly important. It’s why we stick around with mates and raise children, it’s why we live in groups instead of solitary. And it is directly tied (especially to men) to bias and aggression to outgroup individuals (especially other men).
Which is literally what fascism is. It’s an institutionalized bias against “them” which uses fear and violence to control everyone.
Just because you can’t immediately see the connection doesn’t mean it’s not there.
But out group bias, whether by chance or because it’s beneficial, has always existed in modern humans. It’s tied to such a fundamental neurotransmitter that it couldn’t have made a sudden change, and again, humans are essentially unchanged for 300k years.
The problem like I said in the beginning, is that after a couple centuries of civilization socializing humans, humans start thinking that socialization isn’t important and any random human can just magically grow up into a well adjusted person.
It takes fucking work
this ignores how many precolonial societies were wholly nonviolent. there are three kinds of culture: pure cultures, remix cultures, and domination cultures. pure cultures resist outside influence on their culture. remix cultures integrate ideas and concepts into their culture very fluidly. domination cultures attempt to eliminate other cultures they encounter. the only reason you perceive it as a biological imperative this way is that domination cultures seek to acquire and justify the power to eliminate pure and remix cultures, and then they do, and the evidence that the pure or remix culture they eliminated is gone, no longer able to speak on how they see the world and the other cultures. give this process 20k years and eventually you have an extremely small number of domination cultures subjugating the remnants of the other cultures.
this is the situation we find ourselves in today. there is nothing saying it must be this way, except for the domination cultures themselves. we can work to stop the domination cultures, but as we do this we must learn to listen to the pure and remix cultures. part of why we must do this is that the domination cultures if treated as pure cultures will continue on their course. they must be converted to remix cultures, integrating into themselves the idea of remix and pure cultures that they don’t have to be so fucking violent all the time