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Politics. The word comes from the greek "-polis", for city – akin to -puram, -pura (eg. Singapura). It makes me wonder about life before cities, and how we think and talk about how groups managed themselves then. There were coalitions and alliances, ofc https://t.co/Ng0QVOhpq9
!Kung, like our ancestors: - nomadic bands ~50 people - high levels of accidental injury&death - domineering senior males balanced by coalitions - v intolerant of hoarding & selfishness - occasional hunger, violence, hardship - extremely close&involved childcare - never alone
One of the strange, trippy things about modern life is that it's easy to forget how much we all depend on everybody else. (Wanna feel a glimpse of this? Get on a small-ish boat with a dozen people and go far out to sea, for eg go scuba-diving in Thailand. It's super intimate)
(Suddenly you realize how much we depend on others. You need the scuba equipment to work, or you're dead. You need to trust the boat crew to take care of you. This is true at home, too – the food, water, electricity, access to all the things you do – we depend on each other!)
Anyway. So fundamentally politics is abt how we conduct ourselves collectively. It’s a collaborative conversation about values, about priorities, about how to allocate our resources. It’s a group text, at scale. Seen through this lens, everything is “political” to varying degrees
But then... why do some things seem more or less political than others? It seems (to me) to have something to do with political office. Most of us don’t want to spend too much time working on our collective union(s), so we appoint some people to do it for a living on our behalf
This segmentation is what allows us to lead “non-political” lives. But that’s kind of an illusion. We just get to avoid seeing how the sausage is made. But every decision politicians make is in our name. Related-ish: our individual, “private” acts of consumption affect the world
(Observing, not preaching) This is where things get messy & confusing, particularly if you’re very used to the illusion that we lead private, compartmentalized lives. If you peek behind the curtain, you’ll find that the compartments are typically built with violence and blood.
Violence?? What does some cheerful soccer mum in a suburb have anything to do with violence?? This is the great comforting illusion of the factory-farm-zoo-circus-prison of civilisation. Violence, and the threat of it (incarceration, etc) is how we enforce rules and boundaries
This isn’t modern. The God of the Old Testament was vengeful and prone to wrath, demanding sacrifices and punishing his errant children with floods&plagues. Before that, nomadic tribes would beat or ostracize transgressors. Violence is a tool used by many living beings
What IS modern is the bureaucracy of it. Violence used to be simpler. A public stoning, everybody grab a rock. Very participatory. Today we have invented extremely complex, elaborate instruments of violence that are sometimes hidden from our own eyes
Which I guess brings us to the present - a very complex, complicated, fragmented reality, where people have staggeringly different concepts and ideas about what’s going on, what matters, what should be done, or how to even talk about any of this!
What do you do when everything is so chaotic, convoluted and incomprehensible? For many people, the obvious choice is to pick a team and stick with it. It’s how our ancestors survived, so the impulse is strong. But honestly... it seems to me that all the teams are contaminated
Knowing that doesn’t protect you, though. It allows you to be more wary, but if a group of people decide you’re not quite human, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Best you can do, IMO, is to build good relationships with people as best as you can https://t.co/Z97B6I7Jca
So it all boils down to, again, building networks and coalitions of people to try and bargain for your humanity, and for the humanity of others. And the perennial problem with groups is that manipulative, self-centered assholes tend to seize control (and nobody knows how to deal)
No bystanders https://t.co/JqQPunEUGv
Reduced role of community seems related to increased role of authority Ancestral-type societies punished "failure to share", "freeloading" and "bullying", starting with ridicule and shunning, all the way up to "assassination of the culprit by the entire group" No bystanders