Robert Sapolsky found the the most obvious predictor of stress in primate societies (measured via cortisol levels) was inequality. Speaking as a member of a highly inequal primate society, it makes sense to me.
I think evolution hardwired our primate brains against inequality. We go out of our way to punish those who don't play nice and share with the broader group. Otherwise complex societies would have never emerged, because assholes exploiting and taking advantage of peers would ruin and doom any group larger than a few individuals.
> But we also seem hardwired to want to feel superior and special.
Both can be true simultaneously!
[1] https://wir2022.wid.world/chapter-2/#:~:text=In%20effect%2C%....
I've always found this to be a massive flaw in analyzing policy from a Pareto criterion. Economists love to show the very simple arithmetic that a Pareto improvement is strictly better but my intuition was always that the theoretical increase in total surplus didn't actually lead to a better real outcome.
One flaw in your comment seems to be the assumption that "superiority" is a one-axis quality. You could have a group where everyone is superior, just at different things.
I am concerned that your (good) point assumes that we can reasonable assume that there’s enough opportunities for individuals to provide value to others to match the number of people looking to do so. What if there’s an imbalance? Which seems inevitable.
I.e. What if it turns out there’s not ways for all the people on earth to distinguish themselves in the way that you describe?
The work to improve the bottom of society is about 7 billion times more work than to punish the top, just by numbers. And that is ignoring that shooting someone is a lot easier than the years of mental health help followed by years of training the bottom requires to improve.
To say nothing of the fact that, obviously, a separate class in society needs to be empowered to hammer down those pesky nails ("the KGB"). Which is another way of saying that socialism needs gunpoint-enforced inequality to keep existing. So does capitalism, of course, but since they accept inequality it seems less of a problem. And (mostly democratic/social-) capitalism needs a LOT less violence in practice. I get it, it needs more than zero violence and that sucks. However ...
I would also like to point out that both indigenous primate societies are EXTREMELY hierarchical, frankly nightmarishly hierarchical. Everyone has someone directly in charge of them, and there is someone at the top. There may be groups. There usually are male vs female groups, and a dynamic between them with clear hierarchies in both groups, but not so clear a hierarchy between a given man and a given woman.
Oh and, btw, sex in indigenous human societies is somewhere between prostitution and rape. Meaning sex is either directly transactional (a good meal, as opposed to scraps, for sex), or there is direct use of force. In the most comfortable locations to live women may gather food, in trade for a measure of sexual independence/choice, but that seems to be limited even in the best situations. Furthermore, neighboring human tribes are always at war, and both tribes are growing fast in a limited resource environment: it is a matter of time before they massacre each other (because: preferable to starving to death). Humans may kidnap and rape women from neighboring tribes, or they may massacre them. And yes, when times are really good (halfway between "wars"), they will feed them and return them.
Occasionally a "romeo and juliet" from the same tribe or neighboring tribes may fall in love and run away. If they die, nothing happens, and if they survive, of course, this only results in the creation of a new tribe.
There is NOTHING any human can do in such a primitive human societies that comes anywhere close to delivering the "status and love" that massacring the neighboring tribe during war delivers in terms of status.
Meaning the "love and admiration" essentially translates to violence to get drugs (an orgasm is effectively drugs, after all) for men and prostitution (if they're lucky) for women.
Oh and kids have only one option: scraps, they're abandoned by mothers to mothers can go back to prostitution, as soon as possible. Slightly bigger kids take care of the smaller ones (meaning 6 year olds care for 4 year olds, 4 year olds care for 2 year olds, ...). Occasionally, during very good times, women join the hunt and gain a measure of independence. On the other hand, during bad times everything sucks, there's less sex, and rape is the norm, as are abandoned babies starving to death (they even have "tricks", such as putting a baby, floating, in a river. Probably slowly sinking in the river will cause the kid to lose body heat far faster than it will become hungry, and it will peacefully sleep in and die, before being eaten, and won't cry)
Is this what you mean by "hardwired for equality"? Men are hardwired to fight, using physical violence, for better social position and "love". Women are hardwired to do the same, using less direct means. Also, humans are social animals, and this is nothing special. All social animals have a "total hierarchy", enforced by a form of violence for men, and by accepting transactional and/or forced sex for women. Wolves, gnus, orcas, dolphins ... it doesn't matter. All are variations on this theme.
I'll give an example. In the 90s and 00s, there was a wave of Marxist attempts to cancel anthropologists who had reported on the competition for dominance, competition for status, physical and sexual violence, and overall strife present in primitive societies that were studied. The whole affair about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_in_El_Dorado is the most famous example of this. The accusations were largely discredited, but the damage was done. One consequence is that unsympathetic anthropologists were banned from Venezuela, where there is now nobody allowed to report on the slow, systematic extermination of the country's indigenous peoples.
The reduction of certain evils to economic essentialism is frequently itself a tool to assert ideological superiority--itself an 'antisocial behavior', one done not for money or profit but for the simple desire to feel superior to another, and excuse the evils of their in-group. In an ironic way, the above post is its own counterexample.
My first reaction was to think "it's not just perceived"... but after a little introspecting, I couldn't help but notice how grim that statement actually is. It means that any mistreatment is fine - as long as the person can be distracted from it.
And thinking about that reminded me how every new tech since the internet/90th has been increasingly distracting. There is a reason we've started calling it the attention economy after all...
One can certainly have stress or frustration based on truly perceived unfairness.
Take the case of someone who gets more test time because of a disability and the ADA.
Those who don't know the why, may find it unfair. And there may be people that perceive it as unfair despite it being overall accepted as such.
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That said your observation is also entirely true in it's own right. You can even distract from the real problem by focusing one's attention on a different unfairness, even if that unfairness impacts them less in the short and/or long term.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/h...
and it really should be a fundamental aspect of how companies are viewed.
The way many people use the Internet now reminds me of an episode of Star Trek TNG ¹ where everyone is hooked on a game.
¹ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(Star_Trek:_The_Nex...
My problem is that when a corporation does something super shitty to me, I have zero ability to punish them for it.
Give people the ability to punish corporate bad actors, and they would get a lot happier.
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/trust/archive/fall-2022/how-the....
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
If I convinced the bank to loan me 1 million dollars for a 1 million dollar house, my net worth would remain unchanged.
Watching your epi-pens go from $35 to $700 is a stark & present reminder that the very wealthy corporations are predatory as fuck, and that you are prey. And that nothing will save you. (Short of Linda Khan & the FTC starting actual anti-trust activities again.)
However I’m not totally convinced this is the main factor.
- Broader awareness, as you suggest. Police violence didn't necessarily increase, but the number of videos documenting it did, as did the distribution.
- Highlight-reel effect on social media, so it feels like your peers are richer and happier than you. With previous generations' mass media, it felt like there was a separate "rich and famous" class, but the perception of the average person was a lot like yourself.
- Tribalism from market segmentation and the echo effect. So we learn less tolerance and our convictions get stronger without reasonable, respected counter-arguments.
- Actual increase in inequality through automation and globalization, without sufficient mechanisms (e.g., higher taxes, UBI, etc) to re-distribute the gains.
The world has never been more full of choices and opportunities (as in "things that one might do" - as opposed to a more limited but fashionable "next job one step up"). And extremes in the world are still just as irrelevant to our own lives as they have ever been - whether you envy Jacques Cousteau or Jeff Bezos. In that what they have is not added or removed from your life (although what they achieved added to our lives - if you see the distinction), but you are still free to use them as models and steer your life by them.
What has changed:
- the harping
- the spectrum of actual possibilities in what we can be
- our self-awareness that we fall short of what we might have been
If someone was doing much better than you it would be hard to know or it was more formalized within the social hierarchy itself: nobles, kings, etc.
Now all you have to do is open social media and see dozens of people doing things you could never even dream of doing.
[1] https://wid.world/document/inequality-trends-in-europe-world...
Everything else about society is conservative political ideology
Just angling for vanity rewards based upon peddling the best story, the best trauma, or best political network connections given contemporary zeitgeist; no Im the best aligned with set of virtues!. Whose family sold the most cars during the auto boom, and why we should still care…
It’s hilariously bad
We need to keep stuff on shelves or people will riot. But we also need to validate the past rulers for some reason by enabling them to monopolize capital. As we cling to Anglo-babble story about risk taking. When tree trimmer was number one most dangerous job in 2023, and the rest are blue collar jobs… police not on the list, fwiw… the rich investor is using story they won for some reason to avoid real risk of trimming a tree.
But Protestant work ethic and so a generational Ponzi scheme to funnel dads post world war welfare job money and hand it to juniors startups and hedge funds is ongoing.
Same as back in the day when landed gentry paid the church to let their kids avoid work by studying theology
What’s great is since these are social hallucinations and they aren’t real it’s belief in social hallucinations not real stuff; it’s effectively nihilism given it ignores externalities of its resource use, but dressed up in ties, animated pitches that titillate and manipulate oxytocin and dopamine