Yeah, seems to be variations on the call of various Utopias; if only people saw how I/we saw things, or followed this methodology I/we follow, then the world would be transformed from the awful place it obviously is into something more deserved.
Something like that
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Well, it’s almost hard not to. Otherwise one can end up simply repeating tautologies, various of “it is what it is”. “Humans do what humans do”. or “Humans are animals and do animal things which is natural and normal”. Going ’round and round.
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Anthropology is often full of “just-so stories” of origins, my ongoing critique of evopsych fits well into this hard research you have here.
One of my favorite things that gets my eyes rolling was an old sci-fi trope, “If women were in charge, we would be at peace”. Thing is, people generally are as tough as they need to be to survive. Stable societies big and small form divisions of labor, etc.
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oh of course. The whole “humans are rational / animals are emotional” is 400 year old science best left in the past, but has made it indelible mark in its role in the development of English common law, etc, systems we’re not quite ready to dismantle but are slowly learning (I think) to work around some of its fundamental flaws.. Starting anyway.
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But nevertheless, the ‘gist’ of the call is sound:
We are capable of better things than animals and it is worthy to make the effort to improve any aspects of community we may wish to try to improve.
We don’t have to of course. But we can work on it.
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Like
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lots.
You can compare wolf pack territories to Indian tribal territories, pre Colonial America.
But making a direct comparison between wolf pack territories to modern property lines and all that goes with that seems a bit of a stretch.
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But you do go through the effort to chip away at various other people’s utopias, which seems to indicate a preference for status quo, rather than a laissez faire, the statement about modern property lines is particularly telling.
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Arguably, a fuller civilization level laissez faire attitude would include acceptance of such things as people’s development of religions and utopians and fantasy futures and pasts, as that’s well within perfectly normal human behaviors.
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I’m 50. I have a “birth year”, I’m in the “-” part, then I’ll have a “death year”.
I might as well be a cell in a 4 billion year old organism surrounding Earth like a slime mold.
Not sure what “talent squandering” would be. What’s the accounting system in place to measure squandered talent versus talents properly utilized?
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As a teenager, I drew up an elaborate “skills inventory” system:
I had this idea that, if only we could figure out people’s interests and skills and “what drives them”, we could put them in the optimum position to be able to choose a course in life that would be of greatest benefit to themselves and foster whatever future choices they might make in the best way possible.
I still believe it’s possible but damn, systems are all cracked everywhere I look for that to even start to be possible. It’s not that we have lack of knowledge; it’s just other older things get in the way of this kind of thing happening.
So, each generation is responsible for their own self-actualization process, fumbling about, getting pushback instead of assistance most of the time.
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