Well that and sometimes watching each other starve to death. But the main topic of this thread is the alleged psychology not lifestyle
Nature is what, if it goes away, so do you.
I like, “The purpose of life is to make a purpose.” That’s after we reproduce. Without progeny, we leave only memories. But I digress. We need training to become decent people. Of COURSE we’re born broken, rotten, imperfect. The only perfection is in death. Till then, we fuck up. It’s called learning. Live and learn, or don’t. The older I get, the more perfect I become, soon to be intolerable. Still broken, but what the fuck, that’s life.
If we weren’t born broken we’d have nowhere to go but down.
I guess that’s one way to look at all of it. I just don’t like thinking that wanting a romantic relationship makes me broken to trying to mend some tear with the primal unity or whatever
…may be different from each other, depending on circumstance.
True. The other part in the link is arguing how spirituality changed also with this “verticality”. Humans had creation myths and created gods and spirits that ruled over things. ONe could argue much of our society today is a result of that with games where there are winners and losers and rankings.
Their children also die at a rate probably around 20-30% before the age of 5.
But, if you measured their stress levels, you’d probably find that they’re more carefree and happy than your average modern day person.
Modern life and morality force us to live in a way that goes against evolution. Evolution is a psychopath and, naturally, humans are relatively psychopathic on that basis. Pushing them to be moral, organized, timely, to share, to be peaceful, etc. causes them stress since it’s a difficult thing to manage and live up to. It requires mass social pressure and economic incentives to accomplish - and even that fails some percentage of the time.
The price of the freedom to be a raging a-hole day in and day out, through your whole life, without having someone bash a club through your skull is that you will be more stressed out and less happy in your life than you would be for the much shorter life you would have lead as a hunter gatherer (and where you would have ended up getting pushed over a cliff one day, while no one was looking). You do not have to watch 30% of your children die, but you will be less happy on a daily basis in return for that.
It’s the price we pay.
It’s not. You wanting a romantic relationship makes you a normal, healthy human being.
Well apparently not.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0791444422/ref=cm_cr_arp_mb_bdcrb_top?ie=UTF8
Moderator Note - excessive quote removed
Um… no. This is a misunderstanding of what evolution is. Evolution is a neutral process, which OFTEN (perhaps usually) favors social cooperation over selfish individual short-term benefit. Human beings are the most notable example of how successful the evolution of cooperative behavior can be.
Wiki:
Co-operation (evolution)
Cooperation, Conflict, and the Evolution of Complex Animal Societies
Organisms as diverse as amoebas and elephants frequently live in groups. Why do these and many other animals form complex societies?
The Evolution of Cooperation
When and why individual organisms work together at the game of life, and what keeps cheaters in check
Cooperation, not struggle for survival, drives evolution, say researchers
Empirical experiment confirms new hypothesis on evolution of life
Darwin and Malthus Were Wrong: Cooperation Is Key to Evolution
The statements in a new conceptual model of evolution undermine the whole rationale for Social Darwinism.
I don’t disagree. But one notes that the cooperative model that works best, tit for tat, has a punitive side. And one also notes that cooperation among humans pertains to relatively small groups who, a large percentage of the time, are hostile to one another, raiding the other group for fun, to kill a few, rape a few, and steal a few as slaves to take back.
Particularly when it comes to the family unit, we are not psychopaths in the majority case. When it comes to, say, the fate of the people of Syria, many modern people will say that they all need to be saved and given refuge, etc. But if that does not happen, your average person will simply move on, unaffected. Some will be hurt, angry, and sad - it is a bell curve - but that’s not the middle of the bell.
If you read historical literature, it is not uncommon to see statements that so-and-so beat his servant, child, or charge and it goes by completely unremarked upon as a unremarkable and often expected thing. It’s just as common sense that you would challenge a person to a duel for insulting you as you would beat a servant for mouthing off.
In the 19th century, slaves were whipped, soldiers were flogged, sailors were flogged and keelhauled, factory workers were beaten, and children were universally switched. It is fairly likely that it’s not until the 20th century that we began to enter a phase of human history where your average person might never have been beaten, at least once, by a person who commanded them.
But, quite possibly, people used to be happier on average. Some percentage of us prefer the modern world and understand why we wanted to get here and why we should stay here. Most people are just going along, living life in accordance with the rules of society as imposed upon them by the majority - same as at all times through history. But, through history, those rules were closer to human nature - a mix of cooperative, punitive, and occasional genocidal wrath - and as best we can tell, is quite possible that the majority would be happier if they had been born in a place that still lived according to an older set of rules.
Or, our ability to measure stress and happiness is completely borked. That’s not impossible.
+1
Well I was trying to get at the psychology of people back then as my block states, not about evolution or whether or not cooperation is a good thing or anything else like that.
I accept evolution but that does not mean I approve of it.
Horseshit. The urge to mate is as old as life on Earth, and as universal. The urge to pair-bond, whether permanently or for a time, is universal to all human cultures in all times. If anything about humans can be called “natural”, it’s the need to bond with another human.
I skimmed that wall o’ text you quoted, and as far as I could see, Berman merely claimed that an excessive (“all-consuming”) drive for sex or love was a symptom of our “unbalanced” quest for “verticality”. And our so-called “unbalanced” modern Western society agrees: we call that a personality disorder.
Can’t speak to Berman’s thesis, since what you’ve posted is someone else’s review of it, but sounds like the reviewer has some fantastic romantic idea of hunter-gatherers’ superiority to us corrupt, broken moderns. Which is an idea as old as Rousseau’s Noble Savage.
Humans are humans; I don’t accept that hunter-gatherers are any more or less fucked-up, or any more or less happy, than modern humans, just because a modern Western reviewer thinks they are.
Moderator Warning
You posted the exact same quote that you were told was beyond fair use. That gets you an official warning for failure to follow moderator instructions.
Do not post entire reviews. Post snippets and discuss, as is typical for fair use.
This is your third warning for failure to follow moderator instructions. If you continue to choose to intentionally disregard instructions from the moderation staff, you will find your posting privileges here under review. Do not do this again.