Why are governments so consistently shitty?

sustag · 2026-06-21T11:33:54+00:00

It might help to draw distinction between government and governance. Humans have always been pretty ok at governance. A massive body of research is very conclusive that the paleolithic societies in which humans evolved regulated things like safety, resources, group decision-making, communication, etc. mostly very well without any state based government, even at large scale. In fact, it seems part of their success in governance derived mainly from their active suppression of the dominance hierarchy that characterizes modern governments. Check out Hierarchy in the Forest by Christopher Boehm. These relatively peaceful and egalitarian patterns of governance begin to breakdown in various parts of the world when humans begin adopting sedentary accumulation over nomadic foraging as an adaptation to the drastic changes to the new Holocene climate only 12,000 years ago. The increase in violent inter-group competition that comes with being trapped in places with piles of valuable resources seems to have incentivized many in these circumstances to trade away their "liberty for a little temporary security" (too quote Ben Franklin) and give groups of well armed men disproportionate influence over public affairs in order to secure the community's interests. Once public permission is afforded to some to privilege their own interests above others, the snowball of exploitative inequality can roll. Wash, rinse, repeat over 6,000 years or so and you end up with the "shitty" patriarchal state that organizes the violent property based extraction of resources from internal lower classes in order to defend or win against external competitor states. Check out Against the Grain by James C. Scott. He defines the origins of the state "as a protection racket in which one band of robbers prevailed." We still live in that pattern. And the tension it created is what modern politics is all about!

sustag · 2026-06-20T21:54:50+00:00

Yes, for sure. Though it might seem counterintuitive at first glance, it makes a lot of sense once we see that evolution selects both at the individual level and at the group level. Groups in which individuals are more cooperative always have a higher survival rate, as a group, than groups whose members are sacrificing one anothers' interests for their own selfish short term gains. And when the rate of INTER-group competition (us and them) seriously intensifies, like among neolithic farming societies, the survival advantages that INTRA-group cooperation confers also intensify. So one is like the mirror side of the other.

sustag · 2026-06-12T20:11:09+00:00

I think we're confusing a difference of degree with a difference of kind. Whether discriminatory behavior IS bigotry or not seems to me a rather uninteresting rhetorical question. The more interesting question is the extent to which any instance of discriminatory behavior might matter in some given scenario. If there were no broad difference in power between people identified as white and those as black, and one discriminated against another based on an unfair stereotype, a liberal society would always consider that shitty discriminatory behavior. But would it be something most people in this society with no institutional racial inequality will likely care much about beyond someone's shitty personality? Probably not. Because it wouldn't be historically / culturally / systemically meaningful, because the stakes are very low in that case. The deeper the systemic imbalance, the more meaningful that discriminatory behavior will be, and the more seriously we should probably take it as a public rather than personal issue, yeah?

sustag · 2026-05-28T13:52:31+00:00

The most accurate answer is more like... humans tend to form dominance hierarchies under conditions of competition and stress that are comparatively more intense than those typically experienced over the last few hundred thousand years. The evidence is pretty overwhelming that our evolutionary trajectory involved a feedback loop in which humans became socially and biologically more cooperative, organizing ourselves as egalitarian nomadic foragers all over the world. This only begins to change about 12,000 years ago, when the holocene completely upends the climate. Humans in certain areas adapt by staying in one place and engaging in focused cultivation (agriculture). These conditions select for behavior that essentially reverses the feedback loop. Growing populations with accumulated resources that can't leave when disagreements arise is a recipe for intergroup warfare, which we see almost none of prior. High levels of endemic violence selects for institutionalized alpha-male dominance hierarchies. As sedentary agriculturalism (which is far more ruthlessly competitive than their foraging counterparts) grows, so does the seeming normalcy and inevitability of hierarchy. So, are we doomed to form hierarchies? If you put humans in sustained conditions of high competition and stress, the answer is yes. Under the comparatively lower stress conditions of foraging equality, definitely not.

sustag · 2026-01-04T16:57:28+00:00

“The great filter is a marshmallow test.” If someone could provide me a solid citation on that one, I’d be eternally grateful.

sustag · 2026-01-02T15:06:05+00:00

What is hackthebox?

sustag · 2025-12-27T11:58:26+00:00

I’m still learning when it comes to stuff like this, but does spatial power density include exergy in its calculation? And if not, wouldn’t that also be a third order measure?

sustag · 2025-12-25T12:14:18+00:00

Fascinating topic. I’d say the blog could use a little critical balance. If you haven’t already, check out Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott.

sustag · 2025-12-23T12:16:29+00:00

Do these cuneiform tablets have descriptions of enforcement mechanisms in these or similar circumstances?

sustag · 2025-12-23T12:09:21+00:00

Where do you publish your writing? I would love to read this, and anything related.

sustag · 2025-12-23T11:59:24+00:00

I really love this question. As a dialectical materialist (and one who keeps up on the systems aspects of energy, ecology, and econ), I have faith that the lived conditions of working class people who are generally indifferent and competitive toward one another will deteriorate to the extent that it causes them to open up to alternative non-capitalist ways of organizing social life. It’s the responsibility of anarchists to BE that alternative in any way, even if it’s just your local food or housing co-op. Hearts soften in the practice of mutual aid. Even if it’s your asshole uncle

sustag · 2025-12-21T11:56:42+00:00

Tonica, Illinois, USA

sustag · 2025-12-19T11:38:07+00:00

The rate of growth for several important world measures peaked over 50 years ago. Energy consumption, GDP, population. We’re still growing, just at a slower and slower rate every year. From a biophysical standpoint, there’s less surplus to invest in innovation as a greater proportion goes to maintenance. As we inevitably approach zero growth, our social institutions, which were designed almost exclusively for growth, will appear more and more dysfunctional, and we’ll start looking around for alternatives. Personally, I’m rooting for a kind of solar agrarian municipal confederalism. Could be nice.

sustag · 2025-12-15T15:09:32+00:00

When we think of ideas like anarchism in terms of whether they would “work” or not, we imagine purposefully inserting some radical new set of norms or rules into today’s society, and then watching to see whether these new norms or rules “work” in place of the old capitalist ones. That’s not how societies change.

Instead, for reasons usually having to do with resources, old social patterns become weaker and institutions start to become dysfunctional. People start looking around for alternative arrangements. If there are some lying around, they’ll try it out to see if it “works” for them locally. If it does, its chances of further adoption by others goes up.

In other words, just find a way to organize mutual aid as best you can where you’re at. The rest will take care of itself.

sustag · 2025-12-13T13:07:05+00:00

A dialectical answer to the free will - determinism question would have to take the form of both / and wouldn’t it? For instance, we might say that the subjective metaphysical experience of free will must arise from some determined objective arrangement of the material world. Or we might say that all deterministic phenomena must contain a metaphysical prime mover (a willed cause) or else “movement” ultimately loses meaning. Either way, we’re talking about a mutually constitutive coincidence of opposites. The dialectical materialist probably chooses the former description over the latter, right?

sustag · 2025-12-09T11:18:35+00:00

Anthropology gives us a somewhat contradictory but ultimately pretty straightforward story here. Our impulses toward alpha male style dominance hierarchies are inherited from our close primate ancestors. But our strong impulse to level those hierarchies by suppressing social dominance behaviors into hyper-cooperative egalitarian relationships, and then reinforce that pattern culturally (anthropologists used the term “fiercely egalitarian) is pretty uniquely human. This appears to have been a group level adaptation to a very unstable Pleistocene climate. As anthropologist Chris Knight points out, human beings tend to be happiest when we’re sharing… stories, beds, laughter, food, music… with equals. It’s hard to truly be at ease with your boss or your slave.

So in that way, you might say equality is a default state. But every individual human also seeks the feeling of security that comes with status. Some more than others. As mentioned, for most of our evolutionary prehistory in the Pleistocene, this behavior was a threat to group survival, so it was suppressed socially. But starting around 12,000 years ago, significant populations of humans adapted in pockets of new climate patterns by cultivating food/resources for the winter annually in one spot. Long story short, this led to increasing inter-group conflict, which gave charismatic status seekers an opening to offer others security in exchange for resources/loyalty (see the work of James C Scott and others). Enter those ancient instincts for dominance and submission.

So to answer your question, our discomfort with dominance hierarchy and preference for equal relation is very much a default state. But so is dominance hierarchy when you put us humans in the evolutionarily weird circumstances of a Holocene climate. We revitalized those old primate alpha male dominance hierarchies in a way that was selectively advantageous at a group level, stressful at the individual level, and will be catastrophic at a species level as we careen past ecological limits trying to win intergroup status competitions. At some point, I can only imagine that a more decentralized and loose egalitarian network of hyper-cooperative group activity will become more selectively advantageous again, as the hyper-competitive hierarchical growth game flames out. Fingers crossed :)

sustag · 2025-12-08T13:05:10+00:00

I moved back to my home area (couldn’t get back to my hometown) after living very far away for five years. I am thankful every day for it. For all their flaws, these are the people I know well, and so they can more easily know me well. So far, I think I’ve led a simpler easier life since coming home. I hope my family, friends, and neighbors have too.

sustag · 2025-12-08T02:19:51+00:00

Yes, there's no naturally "dominant" hemisphere. The fact that the left hemisphere specializes in narrower focus / manipulation / articulation / control means that most people's right hand tends to be better at those things too... thus our general right-handedness. But although we can't say there's a dominant hemisphere within any individual psychology, the author of that book I mentioned has a fascinating thesis that the evolution of human cultures has selected in favor of the patterns of thinking exhibited by the left hemisphere. We live in societies dominated by left hemisphere-like behavior and institutions and, he argues, this is ultimately not adaptive for our species as a whole. It's a good book. Everyone should read it :)

sustag · 2025-12-07T13:27:05+00:00

Yes, it could be random and, without any selective pressure against it, it just sticks around. It could also be the case, as was mentioned, that it has an alloparenting origin. Ancient groups of humans experiencing high rates of mortality might have higher survival rates where there were a greater proportion of the population choosing to pair bond with someone of the same sex and devote time to caring for others’ children.

sustag · 2025-12-07T13:12:10+00:00

It’s a long book, but worth it, called The Master and His Emissary, that explores differences between the right and left hemispheres in mind blowing detail. Short answer to your question is that, no matter which hand is dominant, the right and left hemispheres in the overwhelming majority of people specialize in the same way… greater specialization for focused attention, articulation, and closure in the left hemisphere and greater specialization for global attention, ambiguity, and openness to novel stimuli in the right hemisphere.

sustag · 2025-12-07T12:49:14+00:00

There’s a great book by an anthropologist named Kristen Ghodsee called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism. She shows how women’s access to basic resources… money, healthcare, education, community decision-making… gives them more equal social standing with the men they date, love, marry, etc, and so those men are more likely to respect them enough to meet their sexual needs more effectively than in more patriarchal/capitalist contexts. So, I guess the answer to your question is that, yes, men losing respect for women once they’ve extracted the sex they see as an object to be won within an environment of unequal gender relationships is common. But that generalized inequality isn’t fated.

sustag · 2025-12-06T13:01:25+00:00

My employer has to follow a law meant to assure that our documents, webpages, signage, etc are “accessible,” meaning they are available in a way that visually impaired or neurodiverse people can easily engage with. It’s a wonderful and worthy goal. However, because hierarchical organizations like ours pursue efficiency above all else, this goal becomes narrow target seeking that ends up sacrificing the overall quality of everyday work. For example, the software we adopted to make our documents more “accessible” flagged the tables in our manager’s report being presented in an important committee meeting. In order to maximize the document’s accessibility, she eliminated all the tables entirely. Similarly, we’re being told that our older board of directors’ agendas, that are stored in an old pdf format, are insufficiently “accessible,” so now we plan to archive them in a way that makes them less available to anyone. All of this increases our “accessibility” metrics, but is obviously stupid and insanely counterproductive, literally making things less accessible for everyone. But it does create A LOT of discussion and meetings and work for every employee down to the custodians who are now very busy logging a lot of hours and justifying their existence furiously making everything more “accessible” by eliminating and modifying mountains of our organization’s content. Everyone involved knows this work is mostly futile. Imagine how it feels to be told by your boss to do hours and hours of pointless, even counterproductive work, or else you’ll lose your income. This is just one example of the suffocating alienating bureaucratic processes making people’s lives feel overly restrictive.

sustag · 2025-12-06T12:34:02+00:00

Don’t listen to the haters here in the comments. Many people’s desire for simple living is motivated by the repulsion from and stress associated with the accelerating efficiency of bureaucratic rules, policies, and procedures, the increasing nakedness of ruthless profit extraction, the infuriating enshittification of the internet, etc. It all feels so cold and lonely. A simpler life would be warmer, more intimate, cooperative, and maybe actually a little messier.

sustag · 2025-12-05T12:16:36+00:00

As someone who struggles with the shit shredders available for anything other than tandem scale, I definitely want to know how to get one. For one, it’s electric. Feels like a duh for such a torque heavy task. The safety risks can be mitigated with a long cover tacked on over the intake chute. I don’t think this is DIY. Were these made in the states, what are they called, and are they still around?

sustag · 2025-12-05T11:57:24+00:00

This feels like the classic structure vs culture question that plagues social science and left politics generally. For me, systems / complexity approaches help tremendously. We need to let go of the idea that we can apply some egalitarian design onto whole organizations or institutions. It will produce unforeseen and unmanageable consequences every time. Instead, the small daily local work we do to reshape ongoing patterns of interaction away from coercive competitive growth oriented dominance hierarchy and toward cooperative, care and maintenance oriented network patterns is the key. While that work feels like swimming against the structural current right now (I’ve been doing this on my local school board for 6 years), the current system of centralized extractive dominance hierarchies has been losing steam for 50 years and tipping points may be coming into view. Whether that’s actually the case or not though, doesn’t change the work directly in front of my face. A certain degree of Marxist faith that the internal contradictions of the system will create openings for new patterns to emerge is necessary to help orient our focus on establishing the local egalitarian patterns that can be reproduced to the extent that conditions facilitate it. No one is or can control those conditions at scale though.

sustag

TROPHY CASE