Nope. We’re all dumb the world around. We can individually be taught, but to make that work we generally need to get more people than not front loaded with what we’re trying to do (in the modern world, make societies of tens of millions, even hundreds of millions, not fall apart, say from corruption at the top).
A recent Kurzgesagt video Is Our World Broken stated the problem in very hagiographic terms. It comes down to this: Evolution takes a long time, and we’ve gone from small migratory bands to stationary agrarian clans to nuclear families in industrial societies very fast, and our brains still think feudal loyalty hierarchies are a better idea than the fixed principals applied equally as a social contract. We still think society should be small, that we should know everyone personally, and that being odd (wrong skin color, worshiping the wrong god, talking with a dialect, etc.) are signs of infectious disease which will potentially kill off the entire clan, and we should throw rocks at them and burn the bodies.
The White Christian Nationalist movement isn’t unique to us and Germany, but is a purification movement that is behind every witch-burning epidemic, and is visible in the fall of the Mayan and Roman empires; the despair of kings and high lords as they cling to power slipping away.
The interesting thing this time is we commoners are talking about it on the internet. We get to hear academics who have studied this stuff not only tell us the bad that can happen, but how other instances have been able to prevent that bad. So we might be able to slow it down, prevent it altogether, or find a less tumultuous path through it… so we can deal with the great filters, like the climate crisis and plastic crisis that might kill us all.
My piece of the elephant is this: All of our billionaires and 100 millionaires seem to be possessed with making more, even though their hoard is well beyond enough to take care of their family, and is only being used to gain more wealth, lather, rinse, repeat. Not a one of them is considering giant humanitarian projects that would assure a bronze statue of them was erected in every state park. And that shows us our stupidity of who we are in the dark.
Honestly, evolution is not our friend here. A lot of problems we see in humanity parallels other mechanisms that have similar incentives for success. Social Darwinists were correct about capitalism mirroring evolution, but wrong about that being a good thing. Evolution will maximize suffering if it helps the species. It will not make them live better or be safer. If anything, encouraging that system is against the interests of all who favor personal safety. You’ll almost always get eaten by other dogs eventually.
It depends on where evolution takes us, but yes, the mechanisms of evolution are too slow for us to count on them helping us adapt to the new paradigm.
When we went agrarian enough to stop migrating, it came with the responsibility of being able to defy our instincts for small, clean societies. Stationary agrarian societies need large numbers to operate, and this is susceptible to parasitism, e.g. corruption and demagoguery.
Then we moved on from agrarian to industrial and from that to digital. The thing is, the corruption has been there since the dark ages. But with the internet and the free-flow of information that it offers, we can detect the corruption more easily. However we’re used to socio-political systems to solve these problems without resorting to violence, and those are either ineffective or corrupt themselves.
The horror of it is that we are individuals in giant social movements, and so participate by adding our tiny amount to mechanations far bigger than ourselves. And many of us are going to get harmed or killed in the stampedes.
We might evolve to where we are able to better make rational choices rather than do what we feel is right, but more likely we’ll have to invent psychological tools to make sociological changes. We see this with Charles Schultz adding Franklin to the Peanuts gang, or Mr. Rogers soaking his feet with Officer Clemmons. SMBC has approached the idea more than once, but we haven’t yet found a breakthrough to solve critical recurring problems like over-prioritizing boys sports in education, sexual harassment and exploitation in the workplace or police brutality, all which seem to be informed by dominance hierarchy.
Still, some warblers learn to identify and group-attack cuckoos to chase them away from nesting areas. Birds in Australia teach each other to flip cane toads over to avoid their poisonous back glands. We may yet get lucky.
That’s not exactly what I mean. I’m talking about evolution making things worse for us, regardless of how quickly it moves. If the survival pressure is high enough, it can drastically change a species as long lived as elephants within a few decades. Most of them in certain areas now lack large tusks, as the lethality rate of getting poached was extreme thanks to the funding of war efforts.
If 99% of people with the ability to hear died from an uncontrollable disease while those without hearing rarely died, people would literally evolve to barely have hearing in a similar time frame. The weaker selection pressures on traits that are harder to evolve take a long time, but strong pressures on traits than more easily change happen far quicker than you’d expect. They also don’t give a fuck about making our lives better, only helping our biological machines continue replicating and existing.
In this sense, peace and working together will only be favorable when the costs of being awful are far higher than the benefits. A better life is not always the most efficient for continued existence. Mutually assured destruction and no benefits from violence are what’s necessary for evolution to favor peace. Even then, there will always be those who start shit, as evolution also favors some level of diversity and deviation.
When parasitic hierarchies dominate over long periods in society, it’s because they successfully perpetuate themselves. This doesn’t even mean they serve anybody or anything but their own continued existence. Thinking of them as emergent organisms from smaller entities, the answer to how they shape evolution becomes more apparent.
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In a monarchy, one may ask who the beneficiary of the system is. Is it the king and royalty, funneling the resources from peasants with their soldiers? One might assume so, but the king and royalty often have limitations that can make their life unpleasant. Every decision they make is constrained by them maintaining their position. They could get forced into relationships they don’t want, get murdered by their family or outside rivals, or have kids they don’t want to continue their “bloodline.”
So then is it their genes in a gross eugenics sense? Not necessarily. An entire family can get wiped out or slowly replaced by interkingdom marriages without fundamentally changing the governmental entity. The bloodline is a bit more favored than individual family members, but they can all get purged while the system persists. The empire remains while the royal family is wiped from the genepool.
The beneficiary is the crown itself. It’s a social construction made of independent parts working together out of common interests by serving the meta entity.
This idea might sound crazy, but when you look at biology, you see parallels all the way down.
A single cell is made of proteins and molecules, producing more of each other and themselves to maintain the larger entity they are a part of. They can undermine each other, with genes moving around in the code to avoid deletion by the error correcting mechanisms, code from unrelated cells occasionally getting absorbed and sometimes resulting in the cell’s death on the off chance that the code is useful, or proteins themselves unraveling the proteins of other cells via prion diseases.
At the multicellular level, differentiated cells, bacteria, viruses, and rare multicellular microbes work together and against each other in a vast ecosystem that sometimes moves around and gets labeled as a single entity. To deal with predation and violent competition, more complex nervous and immune systems drive increasingly larger units. At the same time, all the smaller levels of replicating entities continue to exist alongside when they can find a niche. Small gametes cease existing, but sperm and ovum become the backbone of multicellular gene exchange, resulting in all sexual mechanisms from all multicellular life.
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The reason oppressive states, companies, and social systems exist and propagate is because they protect their own interests, not the interests of the humans they comprise.
If a company decides to work against the system of capitalism, they usually lose their place via human mechanisms of social rejection, in addition to losing the extra efficiency immoral practices can provide. Businesses don’t just compete within an industry, but against the cold investors looking for which ventures are most profitable. Companies must be the most efficient users of finite capital, with their speculative economic profit being pitted against the speculated economic profit of every unethical company on earth.
If a country decides to enact regulations, the neoliberal system of global capitalism allows the rich to move their wealth away, forcing most places to race each other to the bottom. If a group doesn’t use fossil fuels, they won’t have access to the same energy as their competitors. If a nation doesn’t have enough weapons or doesn’t form alliances with an empire like the US, those that do can ruin them.
Organisms from the genus of state in the family of government in the order of organization in the class of explicit construct in phylum of human idea in the kingdom of communication in the domain of meta organism are what prevents a renewable climate future. Organisms from the same class make up global capitalism, while ideas in the phylum are restricted for every human hierarchy we see.
These organisms reproduce every time we think about them, mutating and changing as if they were a bacteria or virus carried by every thinking person on earth. Society is an ecosystem of these organisms that exist within us, but they don’t exist for our benefit, they exist for their own. They sometimes serve us, but only the ideas worth remembering persist. If no one thinks an idea again, it is gone unless it convergently evolves.
No individual iteration of an idea exists in quite the same way across our minds, but they often relate in similar ways. They aren’t sentient, but they are alive and evolving in a very important sense.
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That’s the level at which our problems lie. Human nature goes beyond humans and what we typically think of as nature.
It’s all fun and games until you find out the rest of the world isn’t any smarter, we’re just monoglots who can’t parse foreign news sources.
All the world is just playing it by ear and hoping for the best.
I love the implication that only Americans speak English.
More that the only news we can read is from the Anglosphere, and the Anglosphere is dominated by American news, because we are very loud.
When I learnt how to read English I started to get access to new currents of thought that are not common on Spanish (is that a latinsphere or Spanishsphere I wonder), at the same time I learnt how loud are US people on internet really.
Tbf, there is like 350 million of you lot, that’s like 75% of the Anglosphere, so it makes sense you’d have the most news.
This angry “female news reporting voice” is what makes me not wanna watch it. They sound like they want to make you angry (which they probably do, they wanna keep you on the channel after all, like Twitter).
No they aren’t. There are just more idiots in the us because it has a larger population. Here in germany there are a ton of idots too (AFD voters (extreme right))
how dare you insult the wikipedians who vote on articles for deletion!!!
the americans are generally less literate though. germany’s self-reported 99% literacy rate is quite a bit higher than the us’s self-reported 92% literacy
(the AFD is of course awful)
I suspect there may be a discrepancy in what is defined as illiterate. You’ll find plenty in America who may struggle to read quickly, but I only know one person who is fully illiterate in all languages (she can spell her name and can read numbers though) but she’s more than 90 years old and I’m from a low literacy area.
A literate person has better opportunity to learn ethics and good thinking habits, but they also have better opportunity to confirm their own biases and be manipulated by grifters. It is kind of a wash when it comes to being a good person or not if the rest of the education system doesn’t actually educate.
or to reject them altogether
ok fair… way to bring in politics on a 196 post…
also guten tag
It’s a political post and was popular enough to get shown outside of the community. What did you expect?
That’s “I Love Amy”, isn’t it?
Yup! 😁
My current workting theory is that societies reliant on collectively ignoring/justifying the atrocities thet are built on cannot thrive.
I don’t think America’s people are specially worse than other countries.
There are everything like every other place. Here in europe we have our share of stupid people. Have you ever seen people breaking each other heads every week because they have different football (I mean soccer) teams?
We have still Kings and Queens. They may not have political power (though they actually do have it) but still live like… Well… like kings on public money just for being born with royal blood. And most people support the monarchy.
We’ve always been dummies, and mostly in ways that have nothing to do with IQ.
I’m European, and my relatives often buy into and bring up the US crackhead conspiracy theories they saw on Facebook and from coworkers.
I was having an argument the other day concerning things like the weather machine conspiracy theory, chemtrails, and a bunch of shit about how the war in Ukraine is made up to steal money and how Zelenskiy was trying to abandon his country and flee because he’s a coward or whatever. A lot of US and Russian brainrot makes its way here I suppose.
Where do I sign up for my “doesn’t believe Kamala Harris can control the path of hurricanes with a weather machine” award?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that fewer people than you have been led to believe actually believe that. You don’t get an award for being smarter than a strawman.
I feel like an average person or group of people are of average intelligence.
But huge masses of people? They begin to adopt emergent traits that cancel out individual intelligence. It’s why foot traffic can be modelled as a liquid. Or why the entire field of economics can exist.
This makes large public masses have predictable behavior that’s exploitable by grifters, demagogues, and propaganda.
I’ve come to realize that the upper limit of human intelligence is both surprisingly smart, and depressingly stupid. I’m lucky enough to be smarter, but also smart enough to know I’m an absolute idiot. I’m not even that smart in an IQ sense, just lucky in my experience, education, and focus. I’m smart in a particular way, but I’m not quick or even capable of many basic tasks.
I don’t enjoy people seeing me as smart, because they then expect things I don’t feel capable of. I don’t want that pressure! I’m not that much smarter than you 😫
