Friday, October 21, 2011
Occupy Wall Street and Reality
I was listening to Dead Prez, song "Police State" in the introduction of the song Omali Yeshitela states
"You have the emergence in human society of
this thing called the State.
What is the State?
The State is organized bureaucracy.
It is the police department…the Army, the Navy
It is the prison system, the courts.
The State is a repressive organization.
The reality is
the State becomes necessary
only at that juncture in human society
where it is split between those who have and those who ain't got!"
He seems to be summarizing what we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Several Months ago I blogged about Socialism vs. Capitalism, I asked are we as a species more inclined with socialism or capitalism? In other words, which system is more our true nature as a species, socialism or capitalism? Socialism is any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of means of production and distribution of goods. In other words, it's a system where everyone collectively gets a share of the pie, because the collective owns the pie. Capitalism is an economic system characterized by private or corporate ownership of capital goods, by investments that are determined by private decision, and by prices, production, and distribution of goods that are determined mainly by competition in a free market. In other words, it is a system where only a few own a piece of the pie and sell the crumbs to the rest, it automatically creates a class based system. I think we lived in social groups because the need to bond and band together to survive and pass on our genes (DNA) , and this bonding and banding occurred for millions of years and evolution selected groups who bonded and banded together that out competed groups that didn't. Why did humans move toward egalitarianism? On a website Anthropology.net an article entitled Modeling The Egalitarian Revolution states:
"The observation that Gavrilets et al. make is that while our closest living evolutionary cousins form alliances and cooperate in groups, their social systems are extremely hierarchical. The most glaring example can be seen in a gorilla troop where a dominant silverback presides over a few adolescent males and a harem of females. The group dynamic is fluid throughout life history, but each member of the system ultimately plays a role in the dominance hierarchy.
But early human societies, such as the quintessential hunter-gatherer society, is generalized as being egalitarian. Prior to the agricultural revolution, hunting and gathering is thought to have been the only subsistence strategy deployed by early human cultures. Studying modern day hunter gatherers, ethnographers have noted that such societies distribute dominance much more equally and thus tend to be non hierarchical. Leaders are comparatively weaker than their subordinates which reverses the pyramid of power."
"So why was there such a big behavioral shift during our evolutionary history? We may never know for sure. There are ideas floating around that all seem to suggest the lack of food and realization that cooperation, rather than competition, was more beneficial for overall survival. When food sources became more dependable, as seen after the Neolithic and the dawn of agriculture and pastoralism, is when we've seen a return to a traditional hierarchy." (http://anthropology.net/2008/10/09/modeling-the-egalitarian-revolution/)
In other words, all one needs to do is observe the remaining hunter-gatherers to see how we lived for the most part from 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. However, with the rise of agriculture and the new abundance of food, the focus changed and class or hierarchical social order emerged or perhaps reemerged, and with surplus food, trading developed and this lessen the need for cooperation our (primitive) default natural state reestablished itself. As stated above if all our primate cousins (Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Gorillas, Monkeys, etc.) are hierarchical then this must have been our way of living for millions of years until we broke away evolutionarily from them to a Socialist/Egalitarian system as hunter-gatherers. Therefore, I think our default position is hierarchical for it is the older and primitive state, and our primate cousins are hierarchical and what make us think we are the exception? As a result, egalitarianism is a late player on the evolutionary time scale. However, Egalitarianism is close to Socialist idea of a classless society where everyone has an equal chance and has the opportunity to optimize their talents without regard to the class you happen to be born. As I watch the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations and the little national coverage it is getting and it seems to be a reaction to the 2009 petty bourgeoisie revolt of the Tea Party. Which side will win, will we evolve or default to our primitive hierarchical or class system? I think it depends on which system gives our DNA the best chance to survive and continue the game, for nature does not care which system exist, its only function is to keep the gene (DNA) successfully replicating itself and how it is done Nature does not give a damn, it does it by any means necessary! Think about it.
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