Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-waysQ&A: “CURT WOULD YOU PLEASE COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLE?”

(more hunter gatherer pseudoscience) (a sustain attack on the peaceful savage)

h/t: Nicholas Arthur Catton ( In response to https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201105/how-hunter-gatherers-maintained-their-egalitarian-ways )

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FOUR INVERSIONS

All,

Thanks to whomever asked me to visit and comment.

INVERSION 1: REACTION NOT VOLITION

Norms and practices reflect environmental demand not desire.

We justify our norms and practices as good.

We do not intentionally create good norms and practices.

Good norms and practices survive, and bad fail.

Many bad norms and practices survive because the cost of upgrading is too high (truth telling is my favorite example.) or because rents will expand (corruption) rather than produce returns. Or, the dirty secret of contemporary social science: the lower your group’s median intelligence and the higher its impulsivity, the higher the barrier to high trust formation, and the more difficult the formation of low-rent (lower corruption) institutions.

A study of any group’s organization of production will tell you everything you need to know about its likely organization of reproduction. Reproduction (society, norms, childbearing, beliefs) changes to reflect its method of production. It must. Group survival depends upon it. And civilizations fail when there is either a failure of the means of information coordination and the scale of the population, or when shocks (disease, climate, war) cause change and the informational institutions by which we coordinate our production fail.

Hence all cultures with similar methods of production have similar beliefs because such beliefs are a technology appropriate for maintaining the relationship between the organization of production and the organization of reproduction.

INVERSION 2: DEMANDS ON THE HUNTER GATHERER

Egalitarian Hunter Gatherers live in a world of personal reputation with limited asymmetry of power. In other words, everyone knows what you’re doing, knows how you operate and how you think, and has since you were young. Three men with spears can almost always overcome a troublemaking alpha, and being outcast from such a group is a death sentence. The spear was probably the origin of our egalitarianism even if the selfish alpa instinct still exists as a tool if we need it.

Yet as populations increase so does both anonymity and asymmetry of information. And with asymmetry of information and anonymity opportunities for free riding – whether aggress predation of free riding parasitism – increase precisely because people know longer possess the knowledge to predict your behavior and control your behavior. So the larger the organization the more parasitism and the more necessary are institutions that prevent aggressive predation and passive parasitism. Property, the family, and hierarchy arise, and from there all institutions arise to incrementally suppress increases in aggressive predation and passive parasitism.

The pseudoscientific record rife with projection and wishful thinking does not see the record of exposure, of outcasting, of sacrifice and voluntary euthanasia, of the ‘costly’ nor the punishment, ostracization and death of those who do not carry an adequate share of the work. Nor the murder of those who lie cheat and steal.

The archaeological record is not favorable to the peaceful hunter gatherer hypothesis. Just the opposite. While in-group violence may have been limited, out-group violence was a profitable way of life. And an uncomfortable commonality of the discovered dead is the record of their wounds.

That I know, of all bands that remained by the 19th century were competitive failures or outcasts from more successful cultures and civilizations. They live in remote areas and maintain their methods because they are evolutionary laggards. The useful statistic is the number of these people who commit suicide upon biting the apple of knowledge, whereby they become aware of their poverty. It’s the most common cause of death that I’m aware of. So these particular hunter gatherers could not compete with – in any dimension – paternal, hierarchical, sun worshipping, expansionary, property-owning, warriors . (I’m trying to put this in a less subjective light – they are failed peoples and they act as failed peoples.)

INVERSION 3: DIRECTION OF FORMATION OF INSTITUTIONS

The idea of ‘we’ that’s used in this article, evolved under the institutions of religion and state. An organization of families, bands, and tribes evolved in the ‘age of transformation’. First with cults, then with organized religion, then with organized states. They were able to evolve because of the division of labor.

So while today – after indoctrination into the cults of individualism, monotheism, statism, socialism, and social democracy(dependencies) – we tend to think of the generative organization as the polity, that thought is an enlightenment era invention developed in the age of firearms moving at human scale to seize power from the landed nobility that evolved an age of pointed objects moving at human scale. In other words, the power of arms shifted and with it the power over government. Prior to that we were familial, village, tribal, and regional peoples with the only membership being ‘Christendom’. In other words, these higher orders are the result of families and tribes cooperating in the production of commons with sufficiently homogenous rules that the division of knowledge and labor can expand – creating reproductive parity with competitors. Families are not the result of higher orders.( Origins )

INVERSION 4: PSEUDOSCIENCE VS SCIENCE

There is a reason that the field of Freudian psychology and Boazian anthropology originated as pseudosciences and still retain much of their pseudoscientific origins. It was to provide a counter to Darwin, Nietzsche and the Economists (culminating in Spencer).

There is a reason for the perpetuation of questionable research in both pseudosciences of psychology and sociology outside where experimental psychology that seeks to observe and measure our cognitive biases, and political economy, that seeks to observe and measure the consequences of those cognitive biases in the face of informational asymmetry. That is to perpetuate the mythos of the wishful thinkers.

There is also reason that my generation – and very likely those that follow – will use economics of production and reproduction, information, decidability, and incentives to perform analysis of human behavior. Because our emotions reflect changes in state of anticipated and existing inventories of various assets necessary for our survival and reproduction. And otherwise our emotions, beliefs, and prejudices are after the fact justifications not causally descriptive truths.

Humans are expensive creatures, and the brain is a disproportionately expensive organ. We must act to acquire resources to sustain ourselves. We do act to acquire the resources (health, goods, relations, status, experiences, offspring) to survive and reproduce in the greatest comfort possible. All emotional reactions are responses to changes in state of resource inventory.

And all human societies organize accordingly.

The equilibrium we humans evolve against is between the genetic distribution of our talents, and the physical resources at our disposal, and the knowledge embedded in our myths, traditions, habits, norms, laws, institutions, and records. We either improve all or we are out-bred, out-produced (economics), out-gunned, out-germed, out- steeled, or out-organized (religion and government), by those who do.

INVERSION 5: THE TWO GREAT LIES: SCRIPTURAL MONOTHEISM AND PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC HUMANISM

It was Boaz(sociology), Freud(psychology), and Marx(political economy) that performed the same function in the 19th century as Jesus, Peter, and Paul did in the first “Great Lie”: scriptural monotheism that we call Christianity. The second great lie was Pseudoscience, and it evolved from the first by the same technique of deceptive verbalism: half truth, loading, framing, suggestion, and overloading.

The criteria for testimony – meaning scientific theory – is If you cannot explain the i) organization of reproduction, ii) organization of production, and iii) organization of commons, as an evolutionary strategy in response to local conditions, then you do not understand it and are engaging in pseudoscience.

THE CONDITIONS:

Any statement of social science requires the warranty of due diligence of all of these criteria:

– Categorically Consistent (non-conflationary)

– Internally consistent (logical)

– Externally Correspondent (empirical)

– Existentially Possible (operationally constructed)

– Parsimony (think of occam’s razor)

– Full Accounting (personal, ingroup, outgroup, territorial, and environmental)

We slowly overthrow the century of pseudoscience. And unfortunately bad theories die only with the generation that invested their careers in them.

Curt Doolittle

The Philosophy of Aristocracy

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukraine