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and their spirits continue to inhabit that place.
A mining or palm oil company seeking a concession has to negotiate with hundreds or sometimes thousands of landowners, and there is no statute of limitations on land claims under traditional rules.6
From the standpoint of many foreigners, the behavior of Melanesian politicians looks like political corruption. But from the standpoint of the islands’ traditional tribal social system, the Big Men are simply doing what Big Men have always done, which is to redistribute resources to their kinsmen.
they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value.
Ideas are extremely important to political order; it is the perceived legitimacy of the government that binds populations together and makes them willing to accept its authority.
Real-world Communist regimes of course did exactly the opposite of what Marx predicted, building large and tyrannical state structures to force people to act collectively when they failed to do so spontaneously.
no one (apart from a few specialists in public administration) ever stops to think about the complex, invisible social system that makes this possible, or why it takes longer to fill potholes in the neighboring District of Columbia, or why potholes never get filled in many developing countries.
Any causal factors one adduces for a given development are themselves caused by prior conditions that extend backward in time in an endless regression.
Putting the theory after the history constitutes what I regard as the correct approach to analysis: theories ought to be inferred from facts, and not the other way around.
Most purportedly general theories of development fail because they don’t take into account the multiple independent dimensions of development. They are, rather, reductionist in seeking to abstract a single causal factor out of a much more complex historical reality.
And they fail to push the story back far enough historically to the conditions that explain their own starting points and premises.
human beings are by nature both social and competitive animals.
“Warre … of every man against every man.”
Thomas Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence traces its ancestry directly back to Hobbes’s right of nature, via Locke’s amendment concerning the danger of tyranny.
He talks about man’s perfectibility,
nepotism is not only a socially but a biologically grounded reality.
The human and chimp genomes overlap by some 99 percent, matching
the combatants always turn to her—even the adult males. Many a time I have seen a major conflict between two males end up in her arms. Instead of resorting to physical violence at the climax of the confrontation, the rivals run to Mama, screaming loudly.”
Male reproductive strategy maximizes success by seeking out as many sexual partners as possible, while the female reproductive strategy involves harboring the resources of the fittest male for her offspring.
attribute causality to invisible abstractions is in turn the basis for the emergence of religion.
These emotional responses make human beings conformist, norm-following animals.
“moralistic aggression” when proper metanorms are not carried out.
Georg W. F. Hegel called the “struggle for recognition.”
status can only be relative. In contests over status, there are no win-win situations as in trade.
Status-seeking behavior has become genetically coded for a wide variety of animals, including humans,
great deal of contemporary politics revolves around demands for recognition, particularly on the part of groups that have historical reasons for believing their worth has not been adequately acknowledged:
economic resources are often seen more as markers of dignity rather than ends in themselves.
Coerced recognition isn’t meaningful;
they cannot be changed due to people’s heavy emotional investments in them.
your social world was limited to the circles of relatives surrounding you, who determined what you did, whom you married, how you worshipped, and just about everything else in life.
there does not seem to be any evidence that a true matriarchal society has ever existed.
their roles are defined for them by the surrounding society before they are even born.
By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity.
unwilling to sell title to their land under any conditions, since the spirits of their ancestors dwell there.
the Europeans deliberately empowered a class of rapacious African Big Men, who could tyrannize their fellow tribesmen in a totally nontraditional way as a consequence of the Europeans’ desire to create a system of modern property rights. They thus contributed to the growth of neopatrimonial government after independence.
violence is a social activity engaged in by groups of males and sometimes females.
those who were able to work with their fellows to defend themselves
The idea that violence is rooted in human nature is difficult for many people to accept.
a continuous use of violence by prehistoric human societies.
a leader and his band of armed retainers.
they began to wield the power to coerce that did not exist
It was only with the rise of a bourgeois class in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe that the warrior ethic was replaced by an ethic that placed gain and economic calculation above honor as the mark of a virtuous individual.
Militias, moreover, are typically made up of young men without families, land, or assets, but with raging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure.
In India, kinship interacted with religion and mutated into the caste system, which up to the present day has proved much stronger than any state in defining the nature of Indian society.
The fact that these regions had no long history of statehood very much affected their development prospects after they achieved independence in the second half of the twentieth century, especially when compared to colonized parts of East Asia where state traditions were deeply embedded.
Tribal societies are egalitarian and, within the context of close-knit kinship groups, very free. States, by contrast, are coercive, domineering, and hierarchical, which is why Friedrich Nietzsche called the state the “coldest of all cold monsters.”
Inhabitants of agricultural societies may be richer on average, but they also have to work much harder, and the trade-off may not seem appealing.
the social expectations for sharing surpluses quickly quash private incentives to move to higher levels of productivity.
The Greek word charisma means “touched by God”; a charismatic leader asserts authority not because he is elected by his fellow tribesmen for leadership ability but because he is believed to be a designee of God.
Muhammad’s
