10,000 year explosion by Gregory Cochran

Miscellaneous History
21

Well I think that biologists hold that even in animal species evolution is never constant. Instead it is for the majority of the time very slow, but can greatly speed up when evolutionary pressures change and intensify, that is when you have a crisis for the species of some sort.

I don’t go for much of what the book has much to say about the state either. The author believes the rise of the state decreased the levels of violence, which doesn’t sound terribly likely to me. Also I don’t see why the existence of state should foremost select for docile character. You can easily make up reasons why it was likely to select for any number of character traits. In any case the book doesn’t dwell on this, it is far from being central to the text.

22

I think it is related but it’s a mistake to see agriculture qua agriculture as the culprit. The State rose alongside the rise of capital stocks. Prior to the rise of capital stocks, the only way to plunder someone was to literally eat them. Hans Hoppe in a lecture on YT discusses how cannibalism is the original principle of parasitism within humans and that this was gradually eradicated as we moved out of primitive conditions.

But as the capacity to produce capital stocks (wealth) has increased, so has the capacity and drive to plunder those stocks (State). The agricultural revolution is connected to this because it resulted in a sudden, dramatic increase in the capacity of humans to build capital stocks. Semi-perishable grains could be stored for several seasons with the right storage technology, enabling the accumulation of massive grain stockpiles. In addition to feeding humans, these stockpiles could feed domesticated livestock, giving rise to what I think of as “primitive capitalists”: farmers who could continue to feed themselves and their cattle even through droughts and famines.

It may have decreased violence but what it has increased is terror. The State is founded squarely on terror, the terror of being publicly hung or beheaded … or being imprisoned for a few decades with “Bubba”. The idea that violence is the “ultimate evil” is part and parcel of the Statist “meme” (since someone mentioned memes). Human beings are capable of handling violent situations, just like we are capable of handling fire. Your brain has all the necessary circuitry to handle violence.

Violence is not the ultimate evil. The ultimate evil is to live in subjugation, terror and fear, to have one’s productive energies ripped away and diverted from one’s own genetic offspring and put to use supporting the genetic offspring of another. This is the State. It is a highly organized system of indirect cuckoldry.

How do you think successful genes can spread through the population so rapidly? Do the math. The successful gene must be propagated from a single source and from the offspring of that source. Those possessing it must literally father more children than their competitors. So, yes, the State has played a role in “accelerating” human evolution but only in the same way that alpha male primates have their evolution accelerated by male-to-male competition.

As an aside (yes, I’m getting down a rabbit-trail), this goes to show the absurdity of women in politics. I don’t have a moral problem with it… if a woman wants to be in politics, by all means, she should do what she likes. But the idea that it’s ordinary or natural for women to be a 50/50 composition of the political class with men is just downright silly. Politics - from Nature’s point-of-view - is about one thing and one thing only: offspring.

The sexual privileges that come with high political status are the vehicle by which the politically powerful have genetically out-competed their subjugated rivals. The advantages of plunder are of reproductive benefit to the female only through proxy of her male children (their ability to use that wealth to magnify their reproductive capacity). Additional wealth beyond what is needed to be well-nourished is of only marginal reproductive advantage to the female (she might be able to attract a genetically better male but that’s it). Politics - like labor and production - is primarily a male activity. I’ll qualify this statement once again for the hyper-sensitive that this is a descriptive statement not a prescriptive one. I have no problem with women in politics or the workplace but the fact remains that it’s not “normal” or “natural” for them to be there… our biology is not structured in that way.

Because if you fight the King, you will die and you will not pass on your rambunctious genes.

Clayton -

23

One scary chapter, but a relevant one, is how agriculture came with the rise of statism.

Yes. That’s why I say the only anarcho-capitalist societies have been H/Gs.

24

I thought about something similar a few years ago. Think about all the physically superior and intellectually superior men that were killed in World War II. They might have been able to produce offspring before they were sent off, but even those children grew up without dads. This is definately to the advantage of the elite class; that women had to raise their children without their husbands/boyfriends certainly pivoted how “society” evolved after the war.

Also, think of the men who survived. They went through militaristic indoctrination and it certainly affected how they would raise their children and how they conducted business at work. (I have a theory that much of the corporate bureaucracy today is a result of the militarization of the minds of the men who went back to work after the war.)

25

That’s a description not proof. I could just as easily claim that if you do what the king tells you to you will half starve and, weakened, perish in an epidemic or just die fighting his wars, thus killing off your docile genes and leaving room for more sneaky genes that, in the interest of self-preservation, do not balk from desertion or hidding produce from tax collectors.

26

But you’ve missed the point - rambunctiousness is the opposite of sneakiness. Watch any old Western movie and its depiction of the brawler. There are brawlers today just as there were then (though I doubt they looked anything like Hollywood depicted them) but they are more marginalized and less economically successful today.

As for sneakiness, you’re absolutely right. That is exactly what we are breeding for (though I don’t think the Elites intend this) and it will continue to increase. The average Joe will get better and better at maintaining ‘the Facade’ of white-picket suburbanite mediocrity while becoming secretly focused on deception, concealment of economic activity, tax-evasion, and so on. The Establishment is fighting gravity.

Clayton -

27

Interesting idea. I can attest to the fact that the corporate world is made in the image and likeness of the Pentagon. The military culture permeates the corporate culture. I work for one of the world’s largest corporations (around 95K employees) and it is sometimes jaw-dropping the level of militarism.

When I first started, I was stunned by the interior decor of the buildings. The cubicles are available in three shades of gray: slate-gray, beige-gray and gray-gray. The walls are undecorated. There is no common-area seating, no lounges of any kind (no breakroom/employee lounge). The interior environment is pseudo-Spartan.

Then there’s the lingo. 90% of everything spoken in a meeting is jargon: acronyms or codenames. We have a “classification” system that is modeled on the military’s: Confidential, Secret, Top Secret, etc. We “execute to plan” in order to “deliver on schedule” and when problems arise there are “crack teams” that are assembled by the “war room” to “mitigate”… I could go on and on. Sometimes I have to stop myself from just bursting out in laughter at the absurdity of it all… a social faux pas that would be a bit like bursting out in laughter at a funeral, given the gravity etched into the long, dread faces around the table.

Or take the “charity” runs that happen a few times a year. Now, when you think of running for charity, you ordinarily think of a bunch of friendly people half-running half-walking… maybe a few dedicated runners sprinting out ahead of everyone because racing is just what they do and they love it. At the end, maybe the winner or top 3 get published and the rest are ignored. Not here. Everyone is ranked. And because the campus is large, there are a lot of runners, so even ranking in the top 100 is actually quite an achievement. A particularly ambitious manager in my group made sure to “let it be known” that he had ranked 80th in the race. There is a direct correlation between his career ambition and the competitiveness in the race. Ranking high in PT in the military is taken as a sign of dedication, diligence, etc. I believe the same principle is in operation with these corporate “charity” races.

Clayton -

28

Given the high degree of rigidity in the big tech companies, I think that the major reason for their survival is IP and government contracts.

How many business do you think would be using MS Office if Microsoft did not have IP protection. Or, given that college is the precursor to the corporate world, what if universities didn’t require business majors to take a class in which half the course was learning how to use Excel, Access and Project? What if universities instead taught OpenOffice/LibreOffice? And how many millions of licenses do they sell every year to governments?