I'd heard quite a bit of that before, but you also added stuff I was unaware of, and you wrote it up very entertainingly.
The thing about large colonies - I see that as both borne out by my experiences in a truly vast school, and as indicating that it would be far better if we made sure that despite the economic imperative to all cluster round the worst possible place to be (where everyone else is and where no one cares about anyone else) we should instead learn from the monkeys, since we behave exactly the same way, and make living at low densities economically viable by comparison with living at high densities.
Basically societal collapse is in very many ways a result of the growth of cities in the form that we know them in; thus we can infer that many of the things we either excuse or condemn in others are actually not 'them' at all, but a product of the insane conditions we require our race to live in.
I don't know whether the monkeys realise that a nice little place in the country would be friendlier, but we do (or at least those who researched the monkeys do), and we are doing nothing about it. I don't think that anything can be done to change us or the macaques; instead, we must change our environment for our own good; humans are far more capable of changing their environment than they are of changing their internal condition. That's why we've stopped evolving.
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Date: 2008-03-29 01:12 am (UTC)The thing about large colonies - I see that as both borne out by my experiences in a truly vast school, and as indicating that it would be far better if we made sure that despite the economic imperative to all cluster round the worst possible place to be (where everyone else is and where no one cares about anyone else) we should instead learn from the monkeys, since we behave exactly the same way, and make living at low densities economically viable by comparison with living at high densities.
Basically societal collapse is in very many ways a result of the growth of cities in the form that we know them in; thus we can infer that many of the things we either excuse or condemn in others are actually not 'them' at all, but a product of the insane conditions we require our race to live in.
I don't know whether the monkeys realise that a nice little place in the country would be friendlier, but we do (or at least those who researched the monkeys do), and we are doing nothing about it. I don't think that anything can be done to change us or the macaques; instead, we must change our environment for our own good; humans are far more capable of changing their environment than they are of changing their internal condition. That's why we've stopped evolving.