As an anthropologist, I'd like to compliment you on your descriptions of hunter-gatherer society; you get it quite right and that's unusual. Most people go for Social Darwinism--a much discredited 19th century misinterpretation. Some feminists like to pretend that h/g society was matriarchal or that everything was a paradise of equality prior to agriculture, but you got it right. A pleasure to read.
Thank you. That means a lot. I go into a lot more detail in the book. I spent a lot of time reading books recommended by anthropologists and archeologists to prepare to write this one.
Mr. Fell, you're right in most if what you said, and if you read my reply to Imposter Bezmenov you'll see what I mean. BTW, the real Bezmenov has been dead many years. This guy is just a MAGA booster using the name of someone who was much better than he is. There's value in stealing the identity of a good person.
To quote a famous person, we change the world by changing ourselves. Systemically, the world has always been full of injustice and all the things you describe. But on the ground, the world is full of loving, just, giving people if you look for them. As I noted in my most recent blog, we have to stop waiting for someone else to save us...a president, a congressman, a media representative. You are the answer to your problems.
I just switched from Twitter to BlueSky. Will you add an account there? I want to share your posts more easily. I am Sandy Roggero: @sandync28704.bsky.social.
So stunning and brave to use the word 'fuck' 11 times and he/him pronouns. Have you tried not smearing 76 million Americans as fascists, racists, etc and try to understand why every demographic shifted towards Trump over the past decade? Of course not, self awareness is not a strong suit of the righteous who believe they are on the "right side of history".
It would appear as though I struck a nerve. Admit that you support a rapist and a convicted felon who was only elected because of his ability to sell division and hate. You will reap what you have sown, and I expect you won't be pleased.
Weird that the guy selling division won the popular vote.
Weird that the liberals you claim don't fall for propaganda believed the media's narrative that Kamala would win ... along with everything else the media tells them. Which definitely isn't propaganda.
Have you considered that two decades of the left relentlessly bashing white people, men, Christianity, America, heterosexuality, Western civilization, merit, and borders might qualify as divisive? No wait sorry the media said that's "Inclusion". Which definitely isn't propaganda, which you definitely didn't fall for, and the people who like those things (which it turns out are most people) are the ones who fell for propaganda.
Obviously, no-one is immune to propaganda and there is a hint of holier than thou in the piece, but what you call bashing of white people etc. can equally be viewed as attempts to redress historic imbalances and injustices. Some people believe that increasing that sort of empathetic thinking is a good thing for the world. Seeing it as an attack on groups and ideology is, to my mind, looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
And yet these “historic imbalances” only ever seem to be condemned in one direction. No one ever says a word about the Arab slave trade, for example.
As for “injustices”, well there you go moralizing again. Justice according to which standard? By what definition? Like empathy, these are just words leftists throw around in an attempt to emotionally manipulate their targets.
If I understand your point, you're saying that the west was only doing what other cultures were doing, which of course is true, but that's no reason not to examine and question our own history. Doing whatever everyone else is doing when behaving badly has never been a defensible moral or legal position. We can argue about what is meant by 'badly' I guess, but there surely has to be some recognition that sometimes damage is done by some to others, and I don't think that realising that there have been times in history where one section of society has unfairly dominated / exploited another section, and maybe trying to do something about it, is a bad thing. And, if we must resort to lazy generalisations, it's not just leftists who throw words around to emotionally manipulate their targets, the GOP election campaign being a prime example. Personally, I think quite a lot of the developments in what is considered politically correct are absurdly extreme, but see this as part of the cultural negotiation: reach for the stars and you may get the moon.
It doesn't sound like you're too aware either Imposter Bezmenov. You're claiming to not be aware of the power of propaganda, greed, sexism, bigotry, and narrow reactionism? Is that it? He's not smearing 76 million people... he's accurately portraying them. And you're undercounting them. There are actually 300+ million bigots at the least. Including myself. Because everyone's a bigot against someone somewhere. I've never met anyone who wasn't. What changes from person to person is whom they're bigoted against and whether they wear their bigotry on their sleeves or not. Trump and MAGA wear their bigotry on their sleeves. You sound like you do too. Especially against liberals. Even though most of the positive reforms in this country were generated by liberals. Something you won't ever admit to. Well, without those liberal reforms we'd all still be working six 10 hour days per week. The workplace would have a lot of children doing dangerous work, and we'd still be living in an apartheid society. Which I'm guessing might be just fine by you. The apartheid part is mighty popular among a lot of people I know, friends and family both. I expect your apologia to be coming up shortly. Just for the record, a free and open society, democratic in nature, is a fragile thing that calls us to be better than our base instincts. To rise above our petty selfishness and try and do something positive for everyone, even though they are different from us, and we disagree with them. Your style is to repudiate all of that stuff and to prettify the results. I'm sure you'll be paid well for your services. And pandering to people's baser instincts is easy. Try doing something difficult and good for once.
Except that the Psychotic Oompah Loompah is unapologetically plagiarizing Hitlers playbook from the 1930’s, so those who voted for him ARE fascist and racist at the end of the day as the consequences of Project 2025 are ultimately way worse (including economically) than whatever perceived economic benefit might be gained from having voted Republican.
You kinda glossed over some stuff in the hunter-gatherer part. First, patriarchy isn’t the same as patrilineal. Many modern cultures that were hunter-gatherers or small-scale agriculturists before European contact are matrilineal. The example that comes to mind are the Diné (Navajo). They are exogamous (even today, largely so), and neither men nor women are traditionally allowed to marry within their own matrilineal clan.
There are also endogamous cultures. I don’t know any details off the top of my head (I’m an evolutionary biologist, not an anthropologist), other than that they exist. Our own homegrown “cousin fuckers” in Appalachia and other isolated regions were constrained by small population sizes, isolation, and inability to fit into the race-constrained culture of the surrounding regions. Check out Terra Vance - Marked Melungeon and Before We Were White for a well-researched and documented take on this. Also, iirc state laws banning first-cousin marriages came out of the eugenics movement, for good or for ill.
Your take on bigotry is spot on, and there is some thought that the presence of other species of Homo during all but the last ~30,000 years of our evolution reinforced this (and maybe gave us the legends of giants, fairies, and trolls). The idea that children are taught prejudice is kinda backwards, since when they’re infants, anyone but mom or occasionally dad will send them screaming, and their socialization is part of their upbringing. What people get wrong is that skin color isn’t always a factor in determining “us” vs. “them”.
But a natural result of that is a high cohesion within groups. There has always been debate over whether altruism is just sloppy kin selection, but in exogamous cultures not everyone in your group is kin. Within-group cohesion (one might say “collectivism” in political terms) may be one of the factors accounting for our initial success as a species. Or not; there’s evidence of the same in Neanderthals.
It’s not always the young women that were sold off; in other exogamous cultures, young men were expected to move on (and the group would accept young men from other groups). The traditional dowry is actually the inverse of bride price, and there are other ways for wealth redistribution as well.
You correctly pointed out that hunting is not necessarily a strictly “manly” activity, and this seems to hold for division of labor in general: a lot of it is cultural rather than ecological, and as stored food became more common, strict division of labor based on sex became possible.
In the study of the behavior of non-human animals, there has been the realization recently that a lot of our conclusions were based on a human-centric view of sociality in other species. Wolves turn out to be extended families rather than packs. Horses don’t have alpha mares, and other horses often don’t look to dominant mares as leaders. The pecking order of chickens (the source of the term) is fluid over seasonal timeframes and reproductive cycles.
Likewise a lot of our conclusions about human cultures are based on a Eurocentric view of sociality in other cultures. This doesn’t negate the greedy or religious, it casts a different light (or actually many lights) on sexist, and considering a common dictionary definition of bastard, the varying customs of who is eligible for inheritance make that one complicated as well.
I’m not trying to pick a fight. I support what you’re doing, I think it will be an important book. I’d prefer that you not make any unforced errors. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has a lot of important observations, but it has been savaged by people across the social spectrum, in many cases from simple “did you actually read what he wrote?”, but there were unforced errors as well.
I’ve been thinking about human culture in a biological context for many decades, and it never gets old, in large part because people keep coming up with new evidence. If you consider what I’ve written, and decide based on your readings that none of it is valid, you will still have considered the alternatives, and I will have succeeded.
The propensity is encoded. It's a fact. And if you read the entire piece, you'll note that I said right wing media took advantage of that propensity, and taught a lot of people today to embrace it.
Well, you believe anarchism is a viable societal construct, so I'm afraid I can't take your understanding of human history all that seriously, especially when you are so terrible at reading comprehension.
It absolutely is🤣 And anarchy is the ABSENCE OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS. All governments are HIERARCHIES. All HIERARCHIES are AUTHORITARIAN. Social constructs are tools used by the ruling class to keep us fighting amongst ourselves instead of fighting them. Divide and conquer works. No one is born HATING ANYONE. It has to be taught.
You are both right though. No on is born hating anyone in particular, that has to be taught (as you say), but we are all born with the capacity to hate (that's what James is saying).
The Age of Dumbfuckery is indeed upon us and we may as well learn to cope with it and adapt as quickly as possible or succumb. Adapting to the new context is imperative, which in no way means acquiescing or surrendering. We draw strength from like minds and hearts and soldier on till the next cycle.
If there is a moral arc to the universe (does the vast vacuum care?) it requires human intervention to bend it. MLK was a preacher with a gift for rhetoric and musing about dreams.
To be honest, there's a lot of male-centric and Euro-centric and Christian-centric bias in this. Much of what you described as human nature is not actually human nature at all, but is rather a direct result of colonial mentalities and cultural developments that are pretty specific to Western and European origins.
The problem is that the disease of dominance has wiped out a lot of the cultures that existed previously, and rewritten history to center itself, but that's not actually human nature at play. What is human nature is the qualities that make it so hard to eliminate those artificially constructed colonial/patriarchal systems - e.g. that arguments that trigger the limbic system are more persuasive than reason or thoughtfulness.
Please research indigenous civilizations and matriarchal communities. Anthropology as a discipline has had a lot of upheaval as many long held racist and sexist assumptions have been proven false - (like the notion that women were gatherers and men hunters).
Don't perpetuate false assumptions about inevitability of sexism/racism, there really are circumstantial reasons for the emergence of those concepts, both tied to the same source. The elements of human nature that contribute are not the ones you mentioned. We need the true picture if we're ever to construct a better reality.
As an anthropologist, I'd like to compliment you on your descriptions of hunter-gatherer society; you get it quite right and that's unusual. Most people go for Social Darwinism--a much discredited 19th century misinterpretation. Some feminists like to pretend that h/g society was matriarchal or that everything was a paradise of equality prior to agriculture, but you got it right. A pleasure to read.
Thank you. That means a lot. I go into a lot more detail in the book. I spent a lot of time reading books recommended by anthropologists and archeologists to prepare to write this one.
I could tell you did your homework--I'll get the book!
Permission to share this?
Please do. All of my public posts you are welcome to share.
Thank you. I will make sure to include links for Sweary History!
Mr. Fell, you're right in most if what you said, and if you read my reply to Imposter Bezmenov you'll see what I mean. BTW, the real Bezmenov has been dead many years. This guy is just a MAGA booster using the name of someone who was much better than he is. There's value in stealing the identity of a good person.
Oh, I know. Although I'm not sure I'd call the real Bezmenov a good person. He became a darling of the far right while he was still alive.
True. Testosterone doesn't age well. Better to go with when they were younger, rather than when they got old and crotchety. That last part was ugly.
To quote a famous person, we change the world by changing ourselves. Systemically, the world has always been full of injustice and all the things you describe. But on the ground, the world is full of loving, just, giving people if you look for them. As I noted in my most recent blog, we have to stop waiting for someone else to save us...a president, a congressman, a media representative. You are the answer to your problems.
You’ve given this woman a few great laughs !! Thank you!!!!
Too true… so true…. Incredibly true…..all that you point out is exactly correct. Very interesting.
Let’s pull the plug on Fux no-news!!!!
Faux Noise?
I just switched from Twitter to BlueSky. Will you add an account there? I want to share your posts more easily. I am Sandy Roggero: @sandync28704.bsky.social.
I’m on threads. Is bluesky a better platform?
An interesting commentary, James. Thank you for taking the time to keep us informed.
So stunning and brave to use the word 'fuck' 11 times and he/him pronouns. Have you tried not smearing 76 million Americans as fascists, racists, etc and try to understand why every demographic shifted towards Trump over the past decade? Of course not, self awareness is not a strong suit of the righteous who believe they are on the "right side of history".
It would appear as though I struck a nerve. Admit that you support a rapist and a convicted felon who was only elected because of his ability to sell division and hate. You will reap what you have sown, and I expect you won't be pleased.
Weird that the guy selling division won the popular vote.
Weird that the liberals you claim don't fall for propaganda believed the media's narrative that Kamala would win ... along with everything else the media tells them. Which definitely isn't propaganda.
Have you considered that two decades of the left relentlessly bashing white people, men, Christianity, America, heterosexuality, Western civilization, merit, and borders might qualify as divisive? No wait sorry the media said that's "Inclusion". Which definitely isn't propaganda, which you definitely didn't fall for, and the people who like those things (which it turns out are most people) are the ones who fell for propaganda.
Obviously, no-one is immune to propaganda and there is a hint of holier than thou in the piece, but what you call bashing of white people etc. can equally be viewed as attempts to redress historic imbalances and injustices. Some people believe that increasing that sort of empathetic thinking is a good thing for the world. Seeing it as an attack on groups and ideology is, to my mind, looking through the wrong end of the telescope.
And yet these “historic imbalances” only ever seem to be condemned in one direction. No one ever says a word about the Arab slave trade, for example.
As for “injustices”, well there you go moralizing again. Justice according to which standard? By what definition? Like empathy, these are just words leftists throw around in an attempt to emotionally manipulate their targets.
If I understand your point, you're saying that the west was only doing what other cultures were doing, which of course is true, but that's no reason not to examine and question our own history. Doing whatever everyone else is doing when behaving badly has never been a defensible moral or legal position. We can argue about what is meant by 'badly' I guess, but there surely has to be some recognition that sometimes damage is done by some to others, and I don't think that realising that there have been times in history where one section of society has unfairly dominated / exploited another section, and maybe trying to do something about it, is a bad thing. And, if we must resort to lazy generalisations, it's not just leftists who throw words around to emotionally manipulate their targets, the GOP election campaign being a prime example. Personally, I think quite a lot of the developments in what is considered politically correct are absurdly extreme, but see this as part of the cultural negotiation: reach for the stars and you may get the moon.
💯
It doesn't sound like you're too aware either Imposter Bezmenov. You're claiming to not be aware of the power of propaganda, greed, sexism, bigotry, and narrow reactionism? Is that it? He's not smearing 76 million people... he's accurately portraying them. And you're undercounting them. There are actually 300+ million bigots at the least. Including myself. Because everyone's a bigot against someone somewhere. I've never met anyone who wasn't. What changes from person to person is whom they're bigoted against and whether they wear their bigotry on their sleeves or not. Trump and MAGA wear their bigotry on their sleeves. You sound like you do too. Especially against liberals. Even though most of the positive reforms in this country were generated by liberals. Something you won't ever admit to. Well, without those liberal reforms we'd all still be working six 10 hour days per week. The workplace would have a lot of children doing dangerous work, and we'd still be living in an apartheid society. Which I'm guessing might be just fine by you. The apartheid part is mighty popular among a lot of people I know, friends and family both. I expect your apologia to be coming up shortly. Just for the record, a free and open society, democratic in nature, is a fragile thing that calls us to be better than our base instincts. To rise above our petty selfishness and try and do something positive for everyone, even though they are different from us, and we disagree with them. Your style is to repudiate all of that stuff and to prettify the results. I'm sure you'll be paid well for your services. And pandering to people's baser instincts is easy. Try doing something difficult and good for once.
Except that the Psychotic Oompah Loompah is unapologetically plagiarizing Hitlers playbook from the 1930’s, so those who voted for him ARE fascist and racist at the end of the day as the consequences of Project 2025 are ultimately way worse (including economically) than whatever perceived economic benefit might be gained from having voted Republican.
Why demographics shifted is clearly spelled out in the essay--for those who have reading comprehension that is.
Good to see your words. Push on with your book, I’m waiting….;)
In the eighth paragraph, did you mean "hoard" instead of "horde"?
Indeed I did.
You kinda glossed over some stuff in the hunter-gatherer part. First, patriarchy isn’t the same as patrilineal. Many modern cultures that were hunter-gatherers or small-scale agriculturists before European contact are matrilineal. The example that comes to mind are the Diné (Navajo). They are exogamous (even today, largely so), and neither men nor women are traditionally allowed to marry within their own matrilineal clan.
There are also endogamous cultures. I don’t know any details off the top of my head (I’m an evolutionary biologist, not an anthropologist), other than that they exist. Our own homegrown “cousin fuckers” in Appalachia and other isolated regions were constrained by small population sizes, isolation, and inability to fit into the race-constrained culture of the surrounding regions. Check out Terra Vance - Marked Melungeon and Before We Were White for a well-researched and documented take on this. Also, iirc state laws banning first-cousin marriages came out of the eugenics movement, for good or for ill.
Your take on bigotry is spot on, and there is some thought that the presence of other species of Homo during all but the last ~30,000 years of our evolution reinforced this (and maybe gave us the legends of giants, fairies, and trolls). The idea that children are taught prejudice is kinda backwards, since when they’re infants, anyone but mom or occasionally dad will send them screaming, and their socialization is part of their upbringing. What people get wrong is that skin color isn’t always a factor in determining “us” vs. “them”.
But a natural result of that is a high cohesion within groups. There has always been debate over whether altruism is just sloppy kin selection, but in exogamous cultures not everyone in your group is kin. Within-group cohesion (one might say “collectivism” in political terms) may be one of the factors accounting for our initial success as a species. Or not; there’s evidence of the same in Neanderthals.
It’s not always the young women that were sold off; in other exogamous cultures, young men were expected to move on (and the group would accept young men from other groups). The traditional dowry is actually the inverse of bride price, and there are other ways for wealth redistribution as well.
You correctly pointed out that hunting is not necessarily a strictly “manly” activity, and this seems to hold for division of labor in general: a lot of it is cultural rather than ecological, and as stored food became more common, strict division of labor based on sex became possible.
In the study of the behavior of non-human animals, there has been the realization recently that a lot of our conclusions were based on a human-centric view of sociality in other species. Wolves turn out to be extended families rather than packs. Horses don’t have alpha mares, and other horses often don’t look to dominant mares as leaders. The pecking order of chickens (the source of the term) is fluid over seasonal timeframes and reproductive cycles.
Likewise a lot of our conclusions about human cultures are based on a Eurocentric view of sociality in other cultures. This doesn’t negate the greedy or religious, it casts a different light (or actually many lights) on sexist, and considering a common dictionary definition of bastard, the varying customs of who is eligible for inheritance make that one complicated as well.
I’m not trying to pick a fight. I support what you’re doing, I think it will be an important book. I’d prefer that you not make any unforced errors. Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel has a lot of important observations, but it has been savaged by people across the social spectrum, in many cases from simple “did you actually read what he wrote?”, but there were unforced errors as well.
I’ve been thinking about human culture in a biological context for many decades, and it never gets old, in large part because people keep coming up with new evidence. If you consider what I’ve written, and decide based on your readings that none of it is valid, you will still have considered the alternatives, and I will have succeeded.
Great writing and disturbing at same time but true . Thank you for a great post . peace
No, none of that is encoded into our species. HATE IS TAUGHT.
The propensity is encoded. It's a fact. And if you read the entire piece, you'll note that I said right wing media took advantage of that propensity, and taught a lot of people today to embrace it.
No it isn't. Psychopathy is caused by a malformed brain. No one is born hating. HATE IS TAUGHT.
Well, you believe anarchism is a viable societal construct, so I'm afraid I can't take your understanding of human history all that seriously, especially when you are so terrible at reading comprehension.
It absolutely is🤣 And anarchy is the ABSENCE OF SOCIAL CONSTRUCTS. All governments are HIERARCHIES. All HIERARCHIES are AUTHORITARIAN. Social constructs are tools used by the ruling class to keep us fighting amongst ourselves instead of fighting them. Divide and conquer works. No one is born HATING ANYONE. It has to be taught.
You are both right though. No on is born hating anyone in particular, that has to be taught (as you say), but we are all born with the capacity to hate (that's what James is saying).
The Age of Dumbfuckery is indeed upon us and we may as well learn to cope with it and adapt as quickly as possible or succumb. Adapting to the new context is imperative, which in no way means acquiescing or surrendering. We draw strength from like minds and hearts and soldier on till the next cycle.
If there is a moral arc to the universe (does the vast vacuum care?) it requires human intervention to bend it. MLK was a preacher with a gift for rhetoric and musing about dreams.
To be honest, there's a lot of male-centric and Euro-centric and Christian-centric bias in this. Much of what you described as human nature is not actually human nature at all, but is rather a direct result of colonial mentalities and cultural developments that are pretty specific to Western and European origins.
The problem is that the disease of dominance has wiped out a lot of the cultures that existed previously, and rewritten history to center itself, but that's not actually human nature at play. What is human nature is the qualities that make it so hard to eliminate those artificially constructed colonial/patriarchal systems - e.g. that arguments that trigger the limbic system are more persuasive than reason or thoughtfulness.
Please research indigenous civilizations and matriarchal communities. Anthropology as a discipline has had a lot of upheaval as many long held racist and sexist assumptions have been proven false - (like the notion that women were gatherers and men hunters).
Don't perpetuate false assumptions about inevitability of sexism/racism, there really are circumstantial reasons for the emergence of those concepts, both tied to the same source. The elements of human nature that contribute are not the ones you mentioned. We need the true picture if we're ever to construct a better reality.