Social Nature

The citizens of each nation, having been thoroughly inculcated with their nation’s systems of belief, are typically unable to consider any notion of governance save their own as proper or appropriate.  Furthermore, man has yet to demonstrate the capacity to consider the governance of its peoples from the viewpoint of human nature, from the natural inclinations of man.  Democracies are thought to naturally have the divine right to choose their leaders by plebiscite.  Monarchies feel it natural for the king’s descendants to be the successor.  Communists, maybe they feel that the person best suited to lead them is the one most familiar with Marxism and Leninism.  But what would the evolutionary psychologists say in regards to a nation’s governance?  If they are smart, they will probably say little.

We here at Bad Natured are not so smart.  Ignoring common sense, this little essay will begin with a look at group formation in men.  Specifically, we will consider group size in relation to familiarity.  Studies have shown that the average number of people that a person may recognize in a permanent setting is around 150 faces.  Tradition villages and clans, etcetera, peacefully exist when their populations were less than 300 people.   As the clan swells above 300 members they would typically fracture into two competing clans.  The obvious correlation here is that men are best suited to exist in populations where they can recognize the faces of their members, with the unpopular notion that men are naturally uncooperative to aggressive towards men that they do not recognize.  Yep, the implications are that humans are xenophobic by nature.  Not very PC, but there you have it.

Now let’s take a look at another aspect of humans, our hierarchical nature.  Far from being egalitarian, man is geared up to exist in a hierarchy, with some men enjoyinga higher social position than other men.  These men, we’ll call them leaders, will typically have three or four similar traits.  They will be more dominant, more intelligent, more capable, and may enjoy a curious dearth of empathy.  In other words, these are the men that will be successful as leaders simply because they have the capacity and drive to earn it.  In other words, by declaiming that man is hierarchical by his very nature, his lot is best governed by an authoritarian system.  Alarming but true, man is best suited to be governed by a dictatorship. 

The factor that should not be forgotten here is that man is also best suited to exist amongst people that he recognizes, The Rule of 150 again states that men can recognize around 150 faces.  Whereas dictators today rule over millions of people, the original dictators ruled over much smaller populations. When clans were some 150 people strong, then the dictators, we’ll call them chiefs, could literally recognize everyone under their rule and would hence govern with every one’s best interests in mind.  They will likely enjoy more of life’s fruits, but they would be much less inclined to do so at the expense of a familiar face.  

Of course, the democratic champions of Western Civilization would like to shatter this notion with the laurels of the plebiscite, but what they fail to mention, probably because they have been inculcated to believe otherwise, is that man is not democratic by nature and never will be.  Believing something to be true is not enough to make it so.  Just because universal suffrage sounds just, sublime even, does not mean that its employ will make for a divine system of government.  Instead, the gears of the democracy use man’s natural inclinations to fear the stranger, to be aggressive and uncooperative towards the stranger, and uses this xenophobia to glean votes.  Politicians denounce the ominous ”them” in their campaigns, building up a notion of an extended family to be fairly governed.  Asking man to vote for strangers only sets the voter up to look for notions of familiarity when at the polls, and this notion does not go unnoticed by campaign managers.

Of course, national dictatorships are no better.  Being a dominant, aggressive, intelligent man sans a normal level of empathy, one can hardly expect a dictator to govern numerous people fairly if they are only a mass of strangers to him.  Given unlimited power, the dictator cannot but fall back on his exploitative nature, amassing as much gold as possible, unconsciously creating a surplus that his primal mind sees as the best course in his charge to spread his seed.  Men in positions of power, no matter their ideology, will succumb to their drive to secure resources in order to secure mates.

What’s the point of this rather rancid account of man?  Firstly, it to stop deceiving ourselves as to what men truly are, animals with certain behavioral drives that cannot be successfully repressed through sheer will.  That accomplished, a cyclopean feat in and of itself, we can finally advance toward a goal that might lead to a world filled with less discontent, with less suffering of the masses at the hands of the elite, and with a lessened chance of social implosion followed by possible extinction.  In other words, we can get exchange the foundations of civilization which are presently built upon specious and convenient notions of human nature and begin the work to build a social matrix that is constructed with the actualities of human nature in mind.  That is the point.

Genru’