Damien Walter comes across as a bit of an arsehole, to be fair.

I mean… Humans ARE assholes. Some are cute beyond imagination, while some are just… horrible.

It’s okay to say, “I wish the best for my friends and family over the entirety of humanity”. It’s the winning strategy of game theory plain and simple, isn’t?

“Start by being nice and cooperative. If faced by defection from the other side, do not cooperate until the other side cooperates again”.

The simplest example would be sharing a house as housemates. Some humans are assholes who you’d never want to share space with. Some, you’d desperately want as housemates.

It means I think everyone else is an asshole.

I might be too, but I don’t think I am.

In Intro to Political Science, I read King of the Mountain.

In it, the author explores the behavior of primates when they take over social groups. They secure access to food, mates, and social prestige. This happens in gorillas, chimpanzees, and in human beings, too. In humans, it tends to take the form of powerful leaders securing themselves wealth through corruption, having mistresses, and forming cults of personality, and that all of these behaviors are more pronounced under more authoritarian governments than under functional democracies.

I don’t think that humans are inherently bad, in fact I think that we achieved our level of success on the planet through our communal and altruistic tendencies. But I also think that there are human traits that we still have in common with our ape cousins, and that we’ve got to keep a close eye on them and think about what we can do to account for them and prevent them from overriding our healthier and more beneficial impulses.

ashole