this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Ultimately it comes down to might makes right. That’s the final argument of kings (the barrel of a gun). For all the progress we’ve made we still can’t escape the account of Thrasymachus.
So by definition, since no human is more powerful than 3 or more (average) humans combined, might makes right should translate to majority rule.
Now if we had a superman flying around that could honestly take on millions of people at a time, then yeah might makes right makes him king. Besides that, it always comes down to fooling the majority.
The argument doesn’t specify how one achieves might. That’s an exercise for the reader. One guy sitting in a bunker with his finger over the red button of a doomsday weapon is rather mighty. A million people all working together in a coordinated hive mind would also be mighty.
The main issue for a group of humans is coordination. In general, smaller groups are easier to coordinate than larger groups. I think this is one of the biggest reasons elites can form and take control over larger groups in society. Wealth has a big effect too but this coordination problem has always existed and so have elites, at least since the dawn of agriculture.
One guy sitting in a bunker with a red button is only possible because of society and our cumulative technology.
I think you missed my point, what I meant is that some having more power than others is a product of modern society, not an inherent value one is born with. So big power imbalances only exist because we let it be possible. We only let it be possible by convincing enough people that’s the only way we can have a functioning society.
I actually think that used to be true until the last few decades.
That’s simply not true. Read about the Egyptian pharaohs or ancient kings like Sargon of Akkad. Huge power imbalances have been with us for thousands of years. They don’t depend on modern technology, just agriculture and organization.
Yes, we invented power imbalances when we got domesticated by wheat. We haven’t solved that yet.
That’s the last 10,000 years, for a good 70,000 years before that we lived without civilization, so civilization is still far more brief in terms of evolutionary timescale.
Yes, I just wouldn’t characterize ancient Sumeria as “modern society.” Modern society, to me, began with the Industrial Revolution.
Your right, should have used the word civilization and pointed out how the Industrial Revolution super charged it.
But my point still stands, big power imbalances within a species is not natural and 100% a human invention.
I don’t find appeals to nature persuasive. Nature is full of terrifying, disgusting, and deadly things. Most of what people associate with nature (lush forests, beautiful meadows, butterflies, birds, gently flowing clean rivers, gorgeous mountains) is biased to our needs.
Nature also includes foul-smelling swamps teaming with disease-carrying insects, unclean water full of deadly pathogens, harsh deserts with no shade, no water, but plenty of deadly scorpions and snakes, hot savannahs full of powerful lions, leopards, cheetahs, and hyenas, coral reefs full of jagged rocks, deadly stonefish and box jellyfish….
You get the point. Moral judgement of humanity as a whole is silly. Your energies are much better spent trying to make things better in a smaller area around you. Oh, and a lot of human power is illusory: people refusing to act because they don’t think anything will change.
Not sure what you mean by that.
By definition, a living thing is meant to live in a certain environment. Evolution is all about adapting to your environment. So imo the best way to judge a living thing is to take its natural habitat into account to figure out what it is designed to do.
So the issue with humans and all our modern problems is that we are not used to this environment, we have been evolved for more hunter gatherer lifestyles. Even if we got used to the Industrial Revolution, the computer age changed all that.
Imo that’s one of the basis of socialism, it’s the recognition that capitalism makes a terrible environment. And that we must ask, how do we design our economic system to provide a better environment for humans (one that works better with what the body and mind expect).
So this is why I brought up my original point. Humans are not designed for huge power imbalances, it’s why the extremely powerful lack empathy. It’s our invention that is doing more harm than good.
There’s a few things here:
Nature is cruel. Living things aren’t “meant” to do anything, they just exist and try to survive. Humans aren’t the only living things on the planet that change their environments. Microorganisms, plants, social insects, and beavers are other examples.
Try creating a new sourdough starter from flour and water to see what happens. It goes through a really cool progression of different stages which are each dominated by different species of bacteria, before settling on a mixture of wild yeasts and lactobacillus bacteria that are adapted to the acidic environment (which the micros themselves created)!
Similar things happen with the progression of forest ecosystems from early lichens and pioneer grasses to conifers and finally deciduous trees in a mature forest. It all seems beautiful and pleasant but there is much life and death going on all the time. Oh, and if you spend enough time living near forest with your window open then you’ll definitely hear the screaming of small animals being killed by predators.
None of that has anything to do with my point. I never brought up happiness or morality, simply that:
I honestly don’t know how you went from that to nature is cruel.
My point is more like: humans are not designed to take a lot of radiation so it’s not a mystery that there are problems when they are in a high radiation environment.
Gonna stop responding here unless you have a direct rebuttal to the point above and not about morality or nature being cruel.
My second point above contains the seeds of what you’re looking for: humans evolved culture which enables us to function in a wide variety of organizational styles across a large range of population sizes. Huge power imbalances, the most extreme being dictatorships, are not a barrier to human survival.
The fact that humans evolved in an environment without huge power imbalances is no more relevant than the fact that humans also evolved in an environment without huge temperature variations and yet are thriving on every continent save Antarctica (we could thrive even there but we have no reason to try). We are extremely good at surviving, even if we’re not always happy about it.
We did though, losing our fur gave us that ability and then we went all around the globe around 50,000 years ago.
Okay yeah this is a direct response. Your claiming huge power imbalances help us survive. It’s not true though, as authoritarian states are far less stable.
Also, lots of inequality leads to fertility rates plummeting, now I’m not saying that’s morally good or not, but it’s direct evidence that huge power imbalance does affect survival negatively.
IMO the best example is climate change. With huge power imbalances, we are literally killing our own future.
Some power imbalance can work, the extreme just makes sure there is less resources for the majority to actually thrive, pure and simple.
No, we needed culture and the technology to make warm clothing, fire, and insulated structures to be able to survive. Losing fur did not help us survive cold climates at all.
Where’s the evidence that authoritarian states have been less stable over the last 5000 years? There have been plenty of authoritarian empires which lasted for thousands of years, far longer than western democracies have even existed. We are currently in a period of increasing popularity of authoritarianism. Liberal democracy may turn out to be a blip in an otherwise authoritarian-dominated history (over the next ten thousand years).
And I wouldn’t say liberal democracies have thrived at all, evolutionarily speaking. We’ve essentially destroyed our own desire to reproduce. That’s the opposite of thriving.
I’m talking about extreme power imbalances, and there have been multiple instances of extreme power imbalances throughout history. 5000 years ago wasn’t as extreme.
I’ve already given you an example, here is another one: conditions leading to the French Revolution.
Even though monarchies existed for a while, and also napoleon was a dictator, it was extreme poverty while the elites had extreme prosperity that lead to the fall.
Similar to Russian the revolution. There is also the huge power imbalance and wealth inequality that lead to two world wars.
My favourite is feudalism, basically all of Europe was stagnated until peasants had the leverage to ask for more.
Also, ever since the Great Recession (which made inequality more extreme), most countries in the world have become less stable.
You should study more history then because conditions leading to the French Revolution were nothing compared to the brutality of Bronze Age God-Kings. Large scale slavery, horrific forms of capital punishment even for petty crimes, high taxes, practically zero public works. As a citizen all you really got out of the government was protection from invaders who were going to steal all your food and carry off the women and children.
Or how about the Aztec Empire where the elite (Aztec citizens) would capture and ritually murder anyone they could get their hands on? The wealthy feasted and got high on drugs every night, reaching physical and spiritual ecstasy as they sacrificed one captive after another, piling their skulls on huge racks for all to see.
Feudal Peasants in Europe didn’t have the leverage to ask for more, they seized it for themselves in the wake of the Black Death. Vast swathes of countryside opened up after the depopulation caused by the plague and so the survivors claimed whatever they could get their hands on.
It’s still too early to say what will happen right now but many signs to me point to countries like the US abandoning democracy and slipping into dictatorship.
I’m going to stop responding because you don’t really talk against my point about power imbalances. You asked for examples, I gave you some, and then you responded by giving examples of horrible times in human history (you didn’t mention inequality and how it could relate to stability or why the examples relate to my point).
Also, my original comment was about supreme power being something that the majority can get back if they truly wanted to, hence why we have revolutions. That’s still true without extreme power imbalances being problematic.
You never explained how power imbalances affect human survival as a species, which is key to your original evolution argument. Revolutions and instability represent periods of unhappiness, just as brutal authoritarian systems do, but neither is much of a threat to survival of the species or evolutionary fitness in general.
Nuclear weapons do represent a real threat to species survival but still the only country to have used nuclear weapons in war is a democracy, so the jury’s still out on that.
In the same token, this is how revolutions are successful. The "might" of power in number. The escape from tyranny is realizing that the bottom of the pyramid is a lot heavier than the top.
Yeah thats why this requires revolution to accomplish
As a first step. Really, it’s the easiest step along that path.
The hard part is building the new order among the ashes of the revolution. The leaders of the revolution will in all likelihood want to claim the spoils of victory for themselves. Who could blame them? It’s human nature.
Selfishness is not "human nature". Is it in the coal miners nature to have black lung? Humans are a product of their environment and our current environment rewards the most selfish behavior it can so you are gonna have a highly selfish population. Capitalism has made us sick but there are those of us who can do better. The selfish human nature you have been taught is a lie meant to justify current systems and dismiss any alternative. Something incredibly important I have learned as a history student is that humans have a great capacity to come together under adversity. It is our greatest strength. Civilizations do not form under abundant conditions, they form when we are forced to work together for a collective good. We can cooperate, we can work together on massive scales for the benefit of all.
Are there any evidence that human selfishness is not innate? I think almost all organisms are selfish, except in the case of parent-child relations sometimes and collective animals, like ants.
Let me put it another way. Selfishness is no more human nature than cooperation is. If we can build a civilization based on rewarding selfishness we can build one off rewarding cooperation.
Yes, both selfishness and cooperation are traits of human behavior but it seems natural that humans only cooperative if it benefits them i.e. Bob helps his village now because Bob is fairly confident the village will help him in the future if he needs help. In situations where there are not enough resources for all, don't people usually fall back to every-person-for-themselves?
I've been watching past seasons of the US reality show "Survivor" and it's a common strategy to stay in alliances throughout the competition but it's not uncommon for these alliances to breakdown towards the end in the form of backstabbing, because there can only be a single winner. I've only seen a handful of seasons so far and it seems split at best that the winner of a season won with little/or no use of deceit and backstabbing.
My point is, when there's lots to go around, sure, people will help each other. But when resources are scarce, it's every person for themselves. And scarcity is a feature of life itself, therefore, human selfishness is natural and I'd guess is prioritized over cooperation when things get really tough.
Thats not selfishness though. It isn't selfish to contribute to a group that benefits you. Its selfish if you contribute to a system that harms others because it benefits you. These are very different things.
In the various crucibles of civilization people came together precisely because resources were scarce. Yes they would eventually collapse when resources became too scarce to sustain whatever system they had built and infighting wasn't uncommon but resources are not scarce now. We produce enough food, we have enough homes, we have enough water (for humans not for our current technological setup). The issue we are currently struggling with is not scarcity its distribution. The technology produced by the capitalist era is more that sufficient to provide for us all.
Don't disagree with this. From what I understand, from a tech point of view and ignoring existing systems we use to distribute resources, we can technically provide a decent life for everyone on Earth but resources aren't distributed in a such a way, for various reasons.
Even collective animals have to fight against selfishness. Worker bees detect and kill upstart queens. Human cells are being destroyed all the time (apoptosis). Cancer is the result when that mechanism fails.
Not sure what this has to do with selfishness. Is the worker bee killing an upstart-queen from its own hive? If so, what's its motivation to kill the upstart-queen? How does this benefit the worker bee, causing the behavior to be selfish?
In the case of body cells and apoptosis, I'd view the actual human being as equivalent to the entirety of the hive/the queen bee, in which case, the process of apoptosis is selfless from the point of view of the cells killing themselves or other cells - in theory it's for the good of the human being as a whole.
Yes, the upstart-queen is from within the bee’s own hive. The hive permits only 1 queen and others are destroyed. The selfishness is not on the part of the worker who kills it, it’s on the upstart-queen who is trying to replace the main queen.
Yes, apoptosis is selfless. Cancer is the selfishness it fights against: a group of cells in selfish rebellion against the body.
Ah, OK. I'm assuming at some point the upstart-queen does take over the existing hive, maybe once the existing queen dies from sickness or age or the upstart-queen escapes or moves somewhere else to start its own hive?
I agree with this. Though, it's a bit odd talking about 'selfishness' in the context of body cells, which I think most people don't think are sentient. But I think we both understand the gist of what we're talking about.
The upstart queen can replace the main queen if she dies, yeah. Queens produce a pheromone that triggers the killing of upstart queens. In the absence of a queen, an upstart queen can survive and take over.
The idea with cancer being selfish comes from an idea of organisms functioning at different levels of organization. Single-celled organisms, colonial microorganisms, multicellular life, social animals, larger societies, civilizations, ecosystems, the whole planet.
Perhaps one day we may colonize other planets and form yet another, higher level of organization. How it will function is still to be discovered but I think selfishness of individual units is always a potential.
This makes sense. From the hive's point of view, there are at least two ways to ensure there is always a queen:
Since the latter is more risky e.g. active queen might die before birthing a new queen, the hive goes with the former strategy.
I've had similar thoughts regarding the "scope" of an organism. How human individuals think of themselves as separate from other humans but the earth might think of humanity as a single organism.