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Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

I think it's simpler than that. Humans desire political power because there's an evolutionary advantage to being in charge of your tribe. Primates care about the politics of their tribes, so do we. No need to delve into secondary, non-specific human needs. It's a direct, intrinsic motivation.

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No, people desire power (political or not) for more than one singular reason.

Outside the realms of true global (or even country, or state level...) power, I've been driven to "power" before because I felt that my part of the community was being wronged and I had the attributes to fix it. When I fixed that wrong, I relinquished that power and went back to my place of relative obscurity (the way I like it).

Was I motivated by some basic thirst towards being the leader of my community? Nope. I was driven by anger and injustice for my community.

Are there are basic instincts at play? Probably, maybe, I don't know, but the simple point I'm making here is that you can't reduce it to evolutionary advantage of being in charge, otherwise people would never relinquish the power.

Humans are social creatures, and wildly vary in what they offer the group, and when they feel the need to.

> I relinquished that power and went back to my place

Sulla resigned the dictatorship -- as he said he would -- and that was a surprise to many.

We are survival machines for genes and are biologically programmed to move in the world in a fashion that our genes survive. Females desire to mate with the highest status males and males are compelled to fight each other for status in order to win the females with the best genes. It's horrible but its true.

It's only generally true, and I would say people vary too much for it to be basically true even when just talking about biological imperatives (e.g. The fact that homosexuals exist in the gene pool confound the basic biological imperative you're arguing for).

But lets take what you said as fact - the conflicting factor even here is that humans have a layer over the top of our biological programming, which results in people going against their "basic" interests quite often.

Not everyone does, but many do, and we are talking about humans on that layer - whether that goes against our instincts or not.

I would not say it confounds the issue. Just because someone is homosexual it doesn't mean they don't look for similar attributes in their parters. Would it be surprising if women that dates other women generally look for high status, while men that dates other men look for genetics (ie appearance)? There is also a few but correlating findings where if one sibling is homosexual then the others siblings have more children compared to the national average, but researchers don't really know why except that it is statistically significant.

You are right the human factor is relevant and people can go against their "basic" interests, but statistics from census data and dating sites shows quite grim numbers. Wealth (as a proxy for social status and power) is the single biggest dominating factor for men with a very sharp drop at the bottom, and appearance (as a proxy for genetics) is the single biggest dominating factor for women. It also correlated to the size of peoples social support network, stress levels, overall health, and life expectancy.

Just looking at life expectancy, wealth for men has a correlation of about 10-15 years difference. Exercise in comparison seems to only have a correlation of around 7 years difference.

>Would it be surprising if women that dates other women generally look for high status, while men that dates other men look for genetics (ie appearance)?

Absolutely fascinating question, I would not be surprised by this possibility at all. It seems quite probable.

Who would be an example of someone who you think is in charge of their tribe?

The President of the United States, the minister of your local church, the quarterback of the football team, the CEO of your company.

You sound like N, stop. You basically described the will to power

Who or what is N?

Nietzsche, I'm guessing.

Apparently Nietzsche, given the mention of "will to power". But yeah, that's a confusing one.

I think they actually mean the extremist-right German "socialist" party.

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