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February 24 - March 20, 2018
The inter-subjective is something that exists within the communication network linking the subjective consciousness of many individuals. If
These imagined orders are inter-subjective, so in order to change them we must simultaneously
To get into a game with the strangers we find in the schoolyard on any given afternoon, we not only have to work in concert with four teammates we may never have met before—we
large systems of cooperation that involve not ten but thousands or even millions of humans require the handling and storage of huge amounts of information, much more than any single human brain can contain and process. The large societies found in some other species, such as ants and bees, are stable and resilient because most of the information needed to sustain them is encoded in the genome. A female honeybee larva can, for example, grow up to be either a queen or a worker, depending on what food it is fed. Its DNA programmes the necessary behaviours
brain is not a good storage device for empire-sized databases, for three main reasons. First, its capacity is limited.
This mental limitation severely constrained the size and complexity of human collectives.
after the Agricultural Revolution, human social networks remained relatively small and simple.
Between the years 3500 BC and 3000 BC, some unknown Sumerian geniuses invented a system for storing and processing information outside their brains, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of mathematical data.
bestowed
Alas,
humdrum
Partial script, on the other hand, is a system of material signs that can represent only particular types of information,
Inca Empire, which ruled 10–12 million people and covered today’s Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia, as well as chunks of Chile, Argentina and Colombia.
full script that we today call cuneiform. By 2500 BC, kings were using cuneiform to issue decrees, priests were using it to record oracles, and less exalted citizens were using it to write personal letters. At roughly the same time, Egyptians developed another full script known as hieroglyphics. Other full scripts were developed in China around 1200 BC and in Central America around 1000–500 BC.
quarrelling
internalised techniques of cataloguing, retrieving and processing information very different from those used by the brain. In the brain, all data is freely associated.
how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts.
scoff
pawn
hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it.
roots in biological survival mechanisms that make humans feel an instinctive revulsion towards potential disease carriers, such as sick persons and dead bodies.
laws and norms that were meant to safeguard the racial order in the South.
By the mid-twentieth century, segregation in the former Confederate states was probably worse than in the late nineteenth century.
Most sociopolitical hierarchies lack a logical or biological basis – they are nothing but the perpetuation of chance events supported by myths.
One hierarchy, however, has been of supreme importance in all known human societies: the hierarchy of gender.
In many societies women were simply the property of men, most often their fathers, husbands or brothers. Rape, in many legal systems, falls under property violation – in other words, the victim is not the woman who was raped but the male who owns her. This being the case, the legal remedy was the transfer of ownership
Modern Athenians disagree. In present-day Athens, women vote, are elected to public office, make speeches, design
They don’t see this as a cultural bias, but rather as a biological reality – relations between two people of the opposite sex are natural, and between two people of the same sex unnatural.
A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others.
our concepts ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ are taken not from biology, but from Christian theology. The theological meaning of ‘natural’ is ‘in accordance with the intentions of the God who created nature’. Christian theologians argued that God created the human body, intending each limb and organ to serve a particular purpose. If we use our limbs and organs for the purpose envisioned by God, then it is a natural activity. To use them differently than God intends is unnatural. But evolution has no purpose. Organs have not evolved with a purpose, and the way they are used is in constant flux. There
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Dominant men have never looked so dull and dreary as they do today. During most of history, dominant men have been colourful and flamboyant, such as American Indian chiefs with their feathered headdresses and Hindu maharajas decked out in silks and diamonds. Throughout the animal kingdom males tend to be more colourful and accessorised than females – think of peacocks’ tails and lions’ manes.
least since the Agricultural Revolution, most human societies have been patriarchal societies that valued men more highly than women.
there is some universal biological reason why almost all cultures valued manhood over womanhood. We do not know what this reason is.
In fact, human history shows that there is often an inverse relation between physical prowess and social power. In most societies, it’s the lower classes who do the manual labour.
Another theory explains that masculine dominance results not from strength but from aggression.
If there’s any truth in these stereotypes, then women should have made excellent politicians and empire-builders, leaving the dirty work on the battlefields to testosterone-charged but simple-minded machos.
suggests that through millions of years of evolution, men and women evolved different survival and reproduction strategies.
Particularly problematic is the assumption that women’s dependence on external help made them dependent on men, rather than on other women, and that male competitiveness made men socially dominant.
Myths and fictions accustomed people,
Every culture has its typical beliefs, norms and values, but these are in constant flux.
since the French Revolution, people throughout the world have gradually come to see both equality and individual freedom as fundamental values. Yet the two values contradict each other. Equality can be ensured only by curtailing the freedoms of those who are better off. Guaranteeing that every individual will be free to do as he wishes inevitably short-changes equality. The
riven
A real ‘clash of civilisations’ is like the proverbial dialogue of the deaf. Nobody can grasp what the other is saying. Today when Iran and the United States rattle swords at one another, they both speak the language of nation states, capitalist economies, international rights and nuclear physics.
hone
barter.
Some societies tried to solve the problem by establishing a central barter system that collected products from specialist growers and manufacturers and distributed them to those who needed them.
most societies found a more easy way to connect large numbers of experts – they developed money.
Money is thus a universal medium of exchange that enables people to convert almost everything into almost anything else.
People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination.
What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations.
