The interesting quick read of the day: The Stone Age Trinity, which consists of guilt, envy and indignation. Max Border presents the idea that the human mind is hardwired by the evolutionary pressures of surviving as small groups of hunter-gatherers. These three emotions in reaction to perceived inequalities within the group reinforced a relatively egalitarian social structure.
The problem for Marx and all the collectivist derivatives of his thinking is that small group egalitarian systems break down fairly quickly and predictably once a group reaches about 150 individual members.
Now, folks who've encountered Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point may recall the "Magic Number 150." This number seems to be a kind of cut-off point for the simpler forms of human organization. Gladwell reminds us that communal societies -- like those our ancestors lived in, or in any human group for that matter -- tend to break down at about 150. Such is perhaps due to our limited brain capacity to know any more people that intimately, but it's also due to the breakdown of reciprocal relationships like those discussed above.So much of the political process these days relies on provoking the ancient trinity of emotions from our small group ancestry, regardless of whether or not such feelings offer any appropriate solutions to maintaining peace and prosperity in a population of billions.
