this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I'd say exploitative (and dominant) behavior can be either biologically based instinct or learned trait.
Learned behavior could potentially become a trait if it spreads, is beneficial to the species reproductive success, and genetic mutations occur.
A nice person can learn that to survive requires them to act in an exploitative manner, I'd not call this an instinct, this is a animal of an adaptable species adapting to a cruel environment.
A person that is not nice because they are less adaptable and see exploitation as the default way of operating in life and would act this way even in a nice environment could be called an instinct. This could be the biological start of what could evolve into a stable instinct in a species should this person's genes become dominant in the population (I believe this is happening now).
The reason I talk the way I do on this topic, is my belief that early humans did not have a desire to dominate others on a large scale, we were more like other animals. Not that everything was peaceful or tribes didn't have leaders and inter-tribal battles, just that any individuals with a tendency to dominate and hoard were mostly taken care of by cultural mechanisms and didn't get very far, i.e. they got their ass beat when then screwed over their brother and the community said "good, they deserved it". Or a tribal leader that was dominant and coercive rather than a respected leader could get killed and there's no state to stop this or punish those who did it. The tribe decided their leader was bad for them and took care of the issue.
But at some point, these cultural mechanisms were not enough to contain these individuals with a dominant instinct and they took over and colluded, and this eventually evolved into the concept of the state.
The thing that might've tipped the scales is money. Money provides a means to hoard wealth, something that is difficult without money as things rot or or too large, etc. By hoarding money that represents resources, they are simultaneously creating artificial scarcity and those willing to violently back up the dominant hoarder can have more than others setting up a class structure. This is a bit different than for example how Marx says classes came about.
tl;dr I think our society was stable for 200K years until a dominator instinct took over that was previously kept in check culturally, facilitated by the invention of money. This situation exploded when we found our fossil energy inheritance that we're currently wasting on the equivalent on hookers and blow. And now society is built around the dominators, designed for easy exploitation and prevention of self-defense, it's called "statehood".
Isn't "the state" just cultural mechanisms extended beyond familial or interpersonal ties? There's a threshold where the group becomes too numerous for a member to form social ties with all other members. At that stage, culture becomes a force unto itself, propagating further than the members that comprise it. That point, more than money, seems to be where exploitative behavior becomes more likely to take hold.
Like, feudal aristocracies were plenty exploitative, plenty domineering. But they didn't necessarily need money for it; a lot of them operated on barter economies. They just needed a knife-point and a cultural belief to justify the domination. Money is just an innovation on a much older process.
This is "community"
"State" refers to a group of people that feel entitled to rule over others and use violence to do so. To help ensure their power they create laws that make their violence legal and give it names like "law enforcement" and make your violence, particularly violence to protect yourself against them, illegal. This typically goes along with enclosure leaving people nowhere to escape the state.
This is true but does not on it's own lead to the formation of state. Without dominator types successfully taking advantage of the situation, it could just as well lead to loosely connected communities. Also, the size of early non-state communities was limited to ecosystem provided resources (i.e. they were inherently sustainable), our populations are not because we found fossil energy.
Domination and "the state" are not equivalent, but it takes the former for the latter to come about. Domination without the state has always existed on some level, I think that pre-state societies had cultural mechanisms to prevent dominators from taking over.