Kropotkin -vs- Darwin. Humanity, Cooperation and Mutual Aid -vs- Egoism and Pitiless Struggle; Socialism/Communism -vs- Competitive Capitalism/Darwinism. (Russia -vs- West)

[Steve Kinney]

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On 06/17/2016 05:09 AM, Александр wrote:
> This work is such a tremendous FRESH AIR for us... after
> reading-seeing & being zombified by the "social Darwinists" with
> their endless examples of pitiless and brutal struggle in the
> Nature (-> thus it "must be" between us too!).
> 
> Rereading this wonderful work (now on English)...i meet again 
> Kropotkin's (and other researchers) great examples of mutual aid in
> the animal kingdom.
> 
> One of these examples is truly amazing:

Here's mine:

Over the years three people have told me the same curious story about
how their dog died:  Old and sick, about ready to go, the dog went out
and disappeared:  To be found later, having dug a fairly deep hole in
the ground some distance away from the house, backed into it, and died
there.  None of these animals was "in the habit" of digging holes and
camping there.

An animal that is about to die will not reproduce.  That beast has
already been dealt out of the game.  Yet somehow, the domesticated
canine has acquired a genetic program for a solitary funeral rite:  A
practical one, that inhibits the spread of disease and minimizes
attraction of scavengers etc. to the site.  How is that possible?

The all-conquering Dominant Individual may or may not contribute to
the survival of a community that includes his or her own offspring.
But the individual whose behavior actually does contribute to the
survival of that community increases the odds of his or her
descendants out-competing those of other local communities.  Add
massively iterated trial and error and viola:  Whatever neurophysical
mechanism inspires a dying dog to do that unlikely ritual became a
factory stock feature in the canine world.

The recently popular book Sex At Dawn includes a fatal critique of
"what we think we know" about those horrible killer apes whose example
supposedly explains and excuses human ultra-violence.  Among other
examples, it turns out that foraging apes, when presented with a
single super high value food source daily by anthropologists who want
to study them, do begin to fight over control of that pile of fruit.
The most dominant individuals "would rather let it rot" than allow
others to share it:  A massively iterated genetic trial and error
process prepared them to defend high value food items "as if" there
was only enough for one or two individuals - because that is usually
true of "rare goodies" found while foraging.  But meanwhile, when
observed foraging in the wild, members of the same species tend to
announce their finds to attract others to areas where more goodies are
likely to be found, by bragging on the way cool find /they/ own.

Among Homo Saps, the massive advantages of language and technology
have given a free ride to individuals who get top marks in
intelligence, strength and psychopathy.  They organize for mutual
advantage and spread their contra-survival social traits through the
population like a wildfire.  Thanks to abstract language, the capacity
to lie gives them a powerful arsenal of behavioral manipulation
techniques and they will seize on any opportunity to rationalize and
glorify their violent behavior.  Their cult of the "rugged individual"
and deification of those who accumulate the most wealth and power at
the expense of the community has yet to be bred out of the human
species by massively iterated trial and error.

One of these days I'm gonna create a propaganda poster modeled on the
heroic art of the NSDAP, featuring our favorite Objectivist, with the
inspirational slogan:  "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ayn Rand."

:o)





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