Theme: Cooperation

Well you know, I tend to stay away from silly terminology and instead make operationally testable statements. men evolved to work in groups of brothers to herd women, hold territory, and kill competitors and take their stuff. this requires both cooperation: shared risk, and loyalty: elimination of defectors and parasites, and a division of spoils preserving both cooperation, loyalty, and the punishment of defectors and cheats. civilization is the result of teh accumulated knowledge and institutions that allow us to scale this system to ever larger and ever more competitive circumstances. in this sense, yes, the bond between men that we traditionally call the ‘intitiatic brotherhood of soldiers’ is in fact, the source of what we call ‘civilization’: cooperation at very large scales. But we could just as likely say that it’s the need for men to bind to herd women and hold territory and develop institutions that is the source of civilization. or we could say that it is man’s reaction to the untrustworthiness of women that is the origin of civilization since all we do is invent better farms in which to herd our women at lower cost to us. Or we could say that women are untrustworthy in order to force us to build good farms (nests) for them in which they can nest. And that it is women’s untrustworthiness that forces us to cooperate and create nesting areas for them. Roll that little model around in your head for a while? 😉 Curt Doolittle The Propertarian Institute Kiev, Ukraine