@Rah1woot
But there is no theoretical reason why this [familial hierarchy] will "always" be so. Cockshott gives a good description in his book "How the World Works" of how societies changed from matriarchies (the "longhouse" that the internet right wing often complains about) to patriarchies partially as a result of the agricultural revolution…
I believe the longhouse example should be a simple picture for explanation purposes (HR creates a helicopter parent culture where direct competition is replaced with adhering to a counter-business value – looks like a place run by a matriarch – ergo longhouse image as Lomez breaks down). But it doesn’t mean an inverse hierarchical role in ancient societies. Anyone who lives in a homestead environment or conventional conservative nuclear families today believes in “complementarianism of the sexes,” which practices something like the longhouse. Men and women playing into their strengths and weaknesses create the first division of labor. Every boy strong enough to carry tools behind his dad all day is no longer in the longhouse during daylight hours, and is inducted into a coming of age mindset – masculinity. In a patriarchy, high cooperation with the maternal instincts of the mother figure is an intrinsic value that every anti-feminist strong father figure I’ve met believes in.
I have read of how other pre-agrarian societies developed social order, and find the conventional chieftain patriarch very common. I don’t believe Cockshott’s theories regarding a whole humanity-wide development from matriarchy to patriarchy; I believe he saw thru a very limited, small window, into the human experience so far back that we rely on the trash they left on the ground, and correlates that with a few modern examples of what I’m sure are real matriarchies in primitive societies.
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I’ll try to condense the following. I don’t believe I’m using a naturalist argument (I agree that that’s a fallacy).
…IVF and egg freezing… cloning and artificial wombs… birth control, the medicalized abortion, "One Child Policies", most recently primitive forms of embryo selection… So I don't see why sexual reproduction relations would necessarily have to remain fixed…
I believe there is a dichotomy of mentalities we are in – I guess a “culture war”... sheesh lol
In the absence of darwinian pressures, communal cohesion takes a backseat to increased indulgences of individualism. Communal cohesion prioritizes long time strategy, and enforces beliefs in God, strong father figures, subservience to parental figures, etc, but most importantly, they survive due to medical innovation where they once perished. In the premodern era, infant mortality rates reached 50% in some cases even in advanced nations like England – this is the purest data on the health of nations, but technological advancements are able to hide that. Technology that overcomes these constraints and indulges individual weakness, desire, or vice, simply promotes the selfish individual. So, now these people exist in a duality with the God fearing peasants who, supporting the principles of sacrificial living, sanctify and preserve them via tradition and culture. We see now that this environment promotes the lower IQ demographics reproducing at higher rates than the higher IQ demographics (this includes conservative demographics with their reproducing purposes).
You’re basically saying that the technologically protected atypical person is a step in our evolutionary development as a species. I’m saying this is a mutated person with less testosterone and progesterone than a healthy person following conventional boundaries. Data seems to support this; statistically, non conservative people are uglier, shorter, have increased chance of autoimmune conditions often affecting the brain, and are more sexually deviant. People who did and do promote a deconstruction of human sexuality have uncoped mental trauma or a disorder.
Progesterone, testosterone, estrogen, cortisol, or serotonin, won’t ever start doing something different in the human brain. Making babies will still give girls “mommy-brain,” and a man guarding his wife by peering thru a window with a baseball bat or yelling at a big dog while walking down the sidewalk will still provide a surge in testosterone that a woman can never produce in a similar scenario. You can switch these roles around and try to make them do both, and it will only result in their gonads producing less of their optimized hormonal production, and this often increasing stress, producing more mutation. To change the sexual chemistry and voluntary role assumptions of the average heterosexuals engaging in sex, is to claim these hormones, or their function in the brain, will begin changing.
The families with the strongest cohesion become communal pillars of stability.
Sure. But it would be wrong to extend this relationship wholesale to the present day, in which the size of communities… is dramatically expanded…
their system was completely different from ours today, just as theirs was different from the prior one.
Just more complicated.
I Believe that monarchy is the governing expansion of the family unit. I even believe that, following traditional tribal developments, a monarch can be “voted” into power. Monarchists can select loyal czars to master the masters of every industry. Traditionally, these would be next of kin – that doesn’t have to be so, the principle of monarchy is familial levels of loyalty. This manages increasingly complicated economies.
It doesn’t need to literally be family, it needs to be literally modeled after family.
I don't think spending many hours a day acquiring food (as a male) and collecting water (as a female) is the ultimate calling of man.
Agreed. I believe an esoteric sacrificial lamb who fights or feeds his demons, will do more to practically lead people into a better or worse scenario than the broader populace ever will. This will be true in a communist utopia, monarchy, hunter-gatherer society, etc. This is the way the dial moves for most people. Is this necessarily related, almost dependent, on environmental factors? Of course, but it’s always a “fall guy” who chooses to be un-apathetic enough to change something. These people may be more like the god-kings you shared… maybe Nietzsche saw a piece of this puzzle with his superman.
I think your characterization of the rational "social contract", in which the peasant "rationally understands" how hierarchy is good, is not correct.
I base this off of the accounts of how chieftains are picked, then followed, in history, and how the stereotypical men cooperate on the construction site or in a farming community like the Amish (and how they handle men who rule-break).
Just ask women, there is an innate desire by men to have a strong man, aka father figure, to lead them into glory, or become one for their fellow men – both seeking affirmation of their peers. This is actually as cooperative as it is competitive, and doesn’t automatically lead to conflict. Basically every society that reached philosopher producing levels, observed that men embody discipline, and women the sensuous. I can’t find the study, but a study found that males who have higher testosterone, are stereotypically jocks in their competitive nature, but are more sacrificial team players, while lower testosterone males are more inter-team competitors, while less competitive against the outside team.
But then you have something like a society which uses these methods to create "cheap" soldiers, for example, capable of conquering others that stayed with the "old way"
Ultimately, a lot of this argument, Marxism, is speculation, and I believe that where Marx is most right, is that there will be more no-holds-barred existential wars between these opposing dichotomies, that ends with the deconstructionist winning (entropy) – until the bigger God-King returns 😉
