There's also "Lord of the Flies", which came out in 1954, and cemented the idea that young boys -- when removed from the moral guardrails of proper British society -- would become absolute terrors to one another
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There's also "Lord of the Flies", which came out in 1954, and cemented the idea that young boys -- when removed from the moral guardrails of proper British society -- would become absolute terrors to one another
But when this happened in reality -- when six boys were marooned on a remote island for 15 months -- they all cheerfully banded together and co-operated, including carefully tending for one boy who broke his leg, while it healed: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/09/the-real-lord-of-the-flies-what-happened-when-six-boys-were-shipwrecked-for-15-months
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Clive Thompsonreplied to Clive Thompson last edited by
And I'm thinking also of game theory -- which, when it emerged in the early-to-mid 20th century, predicted that people would behave as selfish maximizers
But when they started testing the theory with real people, it didn't work that way
real people were as liable to cooperate and give a fair shake to their supposed competitors
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Clive Thompsonreplied to Clive Thompson last edited by
It's interesting to think about what was going on, culturally, in this period of the mid-to-middle 20th century, that all these theories of "the horrible, selfish, violent people that lurk within us" gained such currency
WWI and WWII, certainly, but there's got to be a lot of factors at play in why these theories grew so big and loomed so high
5/5
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Michael Downey 🚩replied to Clive Thompson last edited by
@clive cf. The collectivistic reaction to COVID before the power grabs and misinformation campaigns began.
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Clive Thompsonreplied to Clive Thompson last edited by
I mean it's not like the overall point -- that moral behavior is heavily influenced by our environment, and so environments/rules/jobs that encourage and endorse horrid behavior and power-wielding will *produce* horrid behavior -- is wrong
But the balance of understanding got decisively tipped away from probing and investigating the role and lure and satisfaction of cooperation in human affairs
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@clive I love The Dawn of Everything for exactly this reason - it eviscerates the whole idea that outside of a controlling state people are horrible to each other, with example after example of people building large, complex societies where they cooperate and help each other without being forced to.
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Thank you -- I've been meaning to read that for ages, this is tipping me over to doing it
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Stefan Bohacekreplied to Clive Thompson last edited by
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@clive Thank you for this thread, I am going to follow all the links and buy the related books pre-load them for Double Anxiety Week next week.
