DOMINANCE HIERARCHIES AND SEEMING INSANITY

Joe, please note several of my previous posts in reference to your position on these matter. In the deepest sense, I agree with you, yet in another I notice your own moral, that is, emotional biases edging into the discussion.

Instead of valuing "inequality" in either a positive or a negative light, we must accept that "inequality is." I agree and I believe that's what you're saying, plus you are objecting to those cultural forces which are trying to eradicate inequality by redistributing wealth? And that's where your own emotional valences come in. It pisses you off! Your sense of entitlement is deeply a part of your own sense of place in the human dominance hierarchy. It's part of your genetic makeup and much of what causes you to value and accept the rewards that you feel ought to accrue to those who win their way up the dominance hierarchy. Your emotions (your value system and behavior triggers) all work together to make up who you are.

I also suggest that those human animals around you who are trying to moderate the situation of unequal wealth distribution on the globe are also demonstrating the sort of stuff you see in monkey tribes where middle-ground individuals seem to wish to moderate extremes and bring a harmony between conflicting individuals.

Me... I seem to be stuck in a place where I'm trying to find emotional contentment (by various rationalizations) in what very little I've achieved, being as how I gave the others of my generation a 23 year head start while I drank and played the artistic type.

There could not be more evidence of the dominance hierarchy at work than in all the ways all the parties in these conversations rationalize and justify their own positions and sense of status in the current cultural hierarchy.

What is interesting to me, the one playing (rationalizing) the outsider role, is that the middle ground of the whole debate is the realization that no one can take any credit about who they are and what they've achieved or for their current status in the global dominance hierarchy. In my deterministic view, everyone is acting according to their inherited genetic makeup and the influences of their nurture upon the chemical switches that activate their every behavior in the current moment. Again, what's confounding about this, is that each of us must continue to rationalize our behaviors in order not to feel out of control. If we didn't imagine that we were responsible for who we are and what we've become, we'd feel out of control and insane which, by the way, is what it felt like to me from about 1966 through 1976 when my psychological makeup was undergoing a hell of a realignment of the synaptic switches of my traditional upbringing and the switches that the culture of the 1960s were activating. I often thought that the world or I or both were crazy. In short, I suppose I'd say that the rationalizations which create in individuals their necessary sense of control are the very rationalizations that lead human beings into disagreement and conflict or...

What makes most of us feel sane inside our individual skulls is what makes the behavior beyond our control sometimes seem insane.

Whataparadox!

Of course my view allows me to imagine that the only reason that things have ever seemed insane is that I didn't have sufficient intellectual tools to comprehend the situation within me and/or my culture. It bears repeating... evolutionary psychology has been the lens though which the world culture, from top to bottom, makes sense.