The wonderful world of pyramids: social innovation began and ended with the Pharaohs. Human predators rise to the top and abuse their human prey. In the United States the arrangement is furthered by law: lawmakers legalize their own predatory behavior, and that of their social class, by passing special laws that exempt corporations and uber-rich individuals from consequences for criminal, immoral and unethical behavior.
Modern social behavior did not exist before humans began living in densely populated environments.
Modern Social Humans have existed for a very brief time. The hypersocial behavior that we observe in humans today developed due to dependence on agriculture, which initiated urbanization and a bureaucratic system of production and distribution. Labor was the key to successful agriculture; a percentage of individuals were willing to trade away a free and self-determined life in exchange for bondage to a dependable food supply. These new urban societies were divided into levels of social importance and power, with predators (sociopaths) at the top (called Pharaoh, Great King or CEO) served by a class of Priests, who functioned as marketing and propaganda ministers and who controlled the presentation of beliefs and communications, followed by production managers who were to oversee and implement massive building and weapons projects. Skilled artisans ranked above labor in some societies, but everyone else, free or slave, lived, worked and remained at the bottom, with “disposable” soldiers receiving hollow praise. Sound familiar? This pyramid of human worth is so fundamental to social organizations that it persists and flourishes today, even in supposedly democratic societies.
Evidence and common sense show that modern social humans are a recent variation in the history of hominid / human development; if one were to look at the history of human behavior, a new human type ‘appeared’ circa 10-15,000 years ago during the Agricultural Revolution, and another type developed over the very recent period of the Industrial Revolution. Physical and psychological changes have resulted from adapting to manmade changes in our environments, especially in how the brain perceives and processes the environment. Modern social behavior simply would not have been necessary BEFORE humans began living in densely populated settlements and urban concentrations. Urban environments require “getting along with” strangers, a behavior that modern humans find exceedingly difficult despite their self-proclaimed social mastery, and the myriad rules, laws, social and legal contracts and military force which have yet to produce love and harmony between husband and wife or nation and nation.
Mass consumption of Coca-Cola and other profit-making products have penetrated the remotest human settlements, but the enjoyment of these “gifts of democracy and civilization” is moot when the inhabitants are overrun and slaughtered by AK 47-toting boys and men who commit murder on command in obedience to male predators. Surging population growth and globalization have resulted in war and economic conflict as status quo. Indeed, the two efforts are indivisible. Modern social behavior is insufficient to meet the challenge of an overcrowded and resource-depleted planet, a disaster that modern humans have created. Domestication has led to physical and psychological neoteny in modern humans, a reduction that may be beyond repair; domestication is a one-way process.
Domesticated animals can become feral, but they will never again be wild. Wild is healthy.
During the 5,000 years of the development civilization that is familiar to us through writing, we know that a slave class was created to supply labor: women were corralled like domestic sheep and goats to be baby-making machines. Children were exploited as a labor force and inheritors of class and caste, which guaranteed an indefinite supply of docile workers. People who resisted socialization were driven off or exterminated. (Asperger types) The rapid increase in urbanization brought chronic disease, plagues, chronic malnutrition and death from starvation. The steep incline of social domination by a few, and the demotion to inferior status of the many, was made possible by a two-pronged strategy on the part of predators at the top, both of which are actively pursued today: Physical brutality, which everyone understands and fears, and magic words, which in the beginning came from God, but in our modern sphere have been taken over by the media, advertising and marketing.
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