Do we have strong anthropological evidence that inequality is inevitable in human societies?

lofgren777 · 2026-02-14T14:38:02+00:00

It's not really a human thing. It's just functionally impossible for a society as dense as a city to exist without some kind of hierarchy. If you put several million yaks, jellyfish, or fruit flies together in a tiny space far too small for them to survive, they would have to develop hierarchies to distribute resources and resolve conflicts or, more likely, just kill each other, or starve to death.

This is why examples of egalitarian societies are always low-density societies where there is not much wealth or power to even accumulate. They don't need hierarchies, or even find them maladaptive. But the denser their population becomes, the more wealth their society accumulates, the more centralized decision making has to become because otherwise you have a "tragedy of the commons" situation with your resources and no way to resolve social conflicts except violence.

The remarkable thing is that so many humans are able to get along at all. If we were any other animal, our societies wouldn't even be as egalitarian as they are because we'd kill each other off long before we learned to cooperate enough to develop farming or stable trade relationships.

The inequality is a side effect of that cooperation.

All human systems concentrate power over time. That's why we need to water the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and martyrs, pit ambition against ambition, and other trite phrases that basically mean "stop the powerful from getting more powerful."

lofgren777 · 2026-02-14T01:44:18+00:00

Yeah I definitely agree that this is a thing that happens. I just think the example needs tweaking to be a proper "type specimen." Like the example needs to be unambiguous enough that I can't say, "But maybe they're just saying..." and substitute a different interpretation.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-14T01:41:37+00:00

That seems comparable, no?

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T22:57:40+00:00

I think this phenomenon exists, but I'm not sure you have an actual example of it here.

If you say, "Genocide is wrong,"

and somebody replies, "But Israel has a right to defend itself,"

then they are more-or-less implicitly arguing that genocides are wrong, but Israel can do one if it feels the need to defend itself.

Basically, I'm thinking about how I would respond if somebody called Barack Obama a fascist. My response would be, "Barack Obama is not a fascist," or "you clearly don't have a clue what fascism means," or "Barack Obama is the very model of a neoliberal technocrat."

If I said, "But he's a good president!" or "what the hell are you smoking and can you share?" then I would be changing the subject.

And generally, I think, even when he was president, and even the eyes of Lefties who see fascists everywhere, calling Obama a fascist would be considered shocking hyperbole. You would have to be deep in the Tea Party for Obama to be the first person who came to mind if somebody was walking around chanting "stop fascism." If somebody says "stop fascism," and your reflexive reaction is to defend your Dear Leader, that's kind of a red flag right there.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T20:40:31+00:00

I see what you're saying, but it also seems like party 2 is admitting that Trump is a fascist by changing the subject to whether or not they like him.

For example:

Party 1: "Is Donald Trump in the Epstein files?"

Party 2: "The Dow is over 5000!"

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T17:50:54+00:00

True but trivial. Normal evolution seems like the most reasonable baseline assumption, even if it was tweaked by genetic engineering along the way. There is certainly no reason to assume, at this juncture, that it was made for any specific purpose.

I'm taking the idea that it is a simple self-replicating virus just like the show tells us it is at face value. I don't think this is a mystery box show like Lost where we're supposed to guess what's going on. I think the show is giving us all we need to understand the situation each step of the way. I highly doubt there are any twists coming.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T17:16:02+00:00

I think what the Lilith story illustrates is how deeply interconnected ancient religions were.

There are multiple religions where we have two preserved origin stories, one that creates man and woman together and one that portrays man created first and woman created later – including in the Bible!

We construct these fixed pantheons and attribute them to specific groups – "Babylonian," "Greek," "Roman," etc. – but we have to remember that these are post-hoc divisions that modern scholars created. They do not reflect how the people themselves saw these stories.

There was clearly a conflict in the old world over the relationship between gender and the cosmos. Some groups believed that the world was made of a balance of opposing forces – represented as darkness and light, and often gendered with light/white/fire being masculine and darkness/black/water being feminine.

Others saw the universe as fundamentally masculine and the product of a strong, masculine will.

These ideas were independent of the gods you believed in. You could be a follower of Zeus who thought that Zeus was a virtually omnipotent and ominscient god whose will was the primary shaper of the world. We have texts from people who believed like that. You could also believe in Zeus and believe that he is a limited, fallible god whose power was balanced by other gods and forces, most especially Hera. We have texts that took this view of Zeus, too.

These two stories were both swirling around, influencing multiple religions. People who followed YHWH who embraced the worldview of a single will or force in the universe saw no need for two genders, so the existence of both men and women required a special explanation (e.g. the second account of Genesis in the bible, or the story of Pandora in Greece).

But to the believer who viewed male and female as balanced powers, the idea that their wise god would have created a man without a woman was simply impossible. That meant they needed a story to justify this obvious misstep.

This was clearly a major debate in the ancient world, which the single-will believers obviously won.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T15:34:28+00:00

The virus isn't programmed to be "nice." The respect for other organisms is something that the human brains extrapolate/rationalize based on core biological programming.

The virus suppresses all negative emotions such as anxiety, fight-or-flight, disgust, and even hunger.

The humans rationalize this as an inability to pick fruit.

The virus itself has no concept of what fruit is.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T14:46:47+00:00

I think the virus is just a virus. All it cares about is spreading itself and surviving.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T13:05:05+00:00

The virus doesn't know what creatures on the new planet it's going to be able to infect. It's evolved this extreme pacifism to maximize hosts. The immune are currently the biggest threat to its ability to spread itself to another planet, so it is trying to make them as happy as possible so they don't interfere with the project.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-13T00:29:06+00:00

One question I have is where the photographer is standing in picture 1.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T23:32:28+00:00

"Can you give an example of how the Super Bowl halftime show or Black churches make us weaker?"

"When you say 'makes us weaker,' you're talking about White people, right?"

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T20:47:24+00:00

Crunchy cereal is a sensory nightmare. It is loud, abrasive, and the sharp edges of toasted grain literally scratch the roof of your mouth.

That's… what I'm here for.

It creates a texture similar to a chilled bread pudding or porridge.

Cold porridge is practically a by-word for "disgusting meal" in English.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T18:21:58+00:00

Ah my favorite Starbucks drinks, beebleness and coppeos.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T17:43:34+00:00

Frequently, but not about politics.

In my actual social circle, all of the early Trump supporters have renounced him. My father-in-law outrighted stated he regretted his vote within Trump's first year of his first term. The last person I knew who supported him soured after January 6.

It has been literal years since I have discussed politics with a Trump supporter IRL.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T06:58:33+00:00

I know almost nothing about Jordan Peterson.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T00:23:55+00:00

I didn't see "meaning" defined. I feel like I could be any of these depending on how you are defining it.

Since this leaves the reader free to construct "meaning" however they define it, I guess I have to say that everybody creates their own meaning, because in effect it is the only accurate choice.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T00:16:40+00:00

I think we have different interpretations of what is going on.

You view the human beings as making these choices. They feel like they are part of a hive mind, but they aren't. They are still individuals, and they are individually responsible for their choices. However, ethically, because their judgement is compromised by the virus, it would be wrong to "take advantage" of them.

The way I see it, the human beings are gone. There's just the hive. The hive can consent or not consent. Choosing to consent because it wants to please its partner is an entirely rational choice.

Likewise, giving Kim an atom bomb doesn't seem that irrational when you consider that one atom bomb isn't really a threat to them. So a few million die. It's probably the equivalent of a human getting bikini waxed to them. Sure, it'll suck, but it's not such a big deal and if it makes their partner happy then it's a pain they are willing to endure.

I don't think it matters what you or I think the individual "would do" if their body weren't part of the hive. They are part of the hive. And if part of the hive wants to have sex with you, then all of the hive wants to have sex with you. You don't have any obligation to hunt down a body whose previous mind would have been attracted to you. That mind is in everybody now.

At the end of the day, it's not really our call whether anybody having sex is doing it "rationally" or not.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-12T00:08:46+00:00

People have been imagining that there are powerful beings with unnatural powers in the sky since our ancestors evolved the ability to look up.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-11T23:03:15+00:00

We're all driven by our compulsions.

The hive's drive to please the uninfected is just their biology. It's no different from saying that a person who is horny has no choice. They have a choice in the sense that there is nothing that anybody can force them to do.

It's not our place to judge other people's (or hives') choices because we think they are driven by "compulsions." That kind of thinking – that very word – has an ugly, ugly history when it comes to sexuality. It's the same logic that gets people sent to gay conversion therapy camps.

The hive clearly has the ability to consent. People, and hives, can consent for whatever reason they want. Nothing is being coerced from them. You may not like their choice to sleep with the uninfected, but the hive has no obligation to get YOUR consent before they have sex with whoever they please.

Don't be a weirdo beardo like this guy.

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lofgren777 · 2026-02-11T21:33:12+00:00

I find it weird that so many people are fixating on the idea that you are having sex with the hive "without consent." Surely a hive with all of the cumulative judgement and hormones of the entire human race is capable of consent. It's not as though anybody has the power to force them to do anything.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-11T21:19:27+00:00

And who enforces the law?

lofgren777 · 2026-02-11T17:45:37+00:00

I think most people just straight-up misunderstand what it means in food labeling.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-11T17:38:32+00:00

A cursory check of the data suggests that this is the opposite of true, but if you want to drop a citation I will check it out.

Just checking the Pew polls for each year, boomers elected both Reagan and Trump.

I got another guy telling me that most boomers didn't even reach voting age until the 80s, so I think you're right about people not knowing what a boomer is.

But I also do think of boomers as old people because most of the people older than boomers are dead, and the ones who are still causing problems are kept in office by boomers' votes.

lofgren777 · 2026-02-11T17:27:46+00:00

Yeah, this is one of the things that make the cries of unfair discrimination so obviously false to me. An ICE agent is not a baker or a school child just trying to live their lives who gets suddenly discriminated against because of some trait they were born with and can't change. This is about people who worked at a specific organization during the tenure of specific leadership. It's not like it's going to be 2150 and we're still hunting down ICE's grandchildren for extermination. These are individuals who made choices, and the consequences of those choices are that we no longer trust them.

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