SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the I'm-handing-out-infinite-punishment-for-finite-crime,-spread-the-word-and-take-donations dept.
Complex societies gave birth to big gods, not the other way around: study
"It has been a debate for centuries why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in large groups of genetically unrelated individuals," says Seshat director and co-author Peter Turchin from the University of Connecticut and the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. Factors such as agriculture, warfare, or religion have been proposed as main driving forces.
One prominent theory, the big or moralizing gods hypothesis, assumes that religious beliefs were key. According to this theory, people are more likely to cooperate fairly if they believe in gods who will punish them if they don't. "To our surprise, our data strongly contradict this hypothesis," says lead author Harvey Whitehouse. "In almost every world region for which we have data, moralizing gods tended to follow, not precede, increases in social complexity." Even more so, standardized rituals tended on average to appear hundreds of years before gods who cared about human morality.
When ancient societies hit a million people, vengeful gods appeared
The God depicted in the Old Testament may sometimes seem wrathful. And in that, he's not alone; supernatural forces that punish evil play a central role in many modern religions.
[...] But which came first: complex societies or the belief in a punishing god?
The researchers found that belief in moralizing gods usually followed increases in social complexity, generally appearing after the emergence of civilizations with populations of more than about 1 million people.
"It was particularly striking how consistent it was [that] this phenomenon emerged at the million-person level," Savage said. "First, you get big societies, and these beliefs then come."
All in all, "our research suggests that religion is playing a functional role throughout world history, helping stabilize societies and people cooperate overall," Savage said. "In really small societies, like very small groups of hunter-gatherers, everyone knows everyone else, and everyone's keeping an eye on everyone else to make sure they're behaving well. Bigger societies are more anonymous, so you might not know who to trust."
(Score: 4, Informative) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 25 2019, @09:37PM (14 children)
The problem with your "Communism murdered millions of people, therefore it's bad" trope is that it's not really true.
What is true is that in both the Soviet Union and China millions died during periods of political upheaval, but when you assert "Communism killed them" you're over simplifying it.
You should also ask yourself why, if communism is such a bad idea, do we in the west invade countries that decide to try it? Why wouldn't we just leave them alone to figure out how bad it is by themselves?
If you were a young man growing up in 1950's Nicaragua, you would be a communist, because the alternative would be living as a slave of the United Fruit Company. Brutal, corrupt dictatorships propped up by the West is one of the reasons communism is tried repeatedly. See also Cuba
There is a comment on this thread:
which completely ignores the fact that in both Russia and China the communists won because they were not replacing people with a proven track record of success, they were replacing brutal, corrupt warlords or dictators.
You should read some history books, the 20th century was much more nuanced than you seem to think.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:15AM (4 children)
And they proceeded to kill or imprison the people with the proven track record of success.
This policy, in fact, was the direct cause of the starvation that caused so many deaths and sufferings in both countries. With the successful farmers taken out and the farms distributed to the collective, production on the farms collapsed. The central authority swept through the farms confiscating every scrap of grain for the loyalists in the central government, not even leaving enough for the peasants to survive the harsh Russian winters.
Your attitude is "oh, well, it didn't work because they didn't do it right, but I know how to make it work!" The height of hubris.
It's not the implementation, nor outside forces that caused all those deaths, it was the ideology itself. I suggest you educate yourself with some history, before you convince others that somehow this deadly idea should be tried again, only with a bigger hammer.
This year is the 50th anniversary of the first publication of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, it's a really good place to start.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @12:52AM (1 child)
None of that is true, I'm sorry to tell you.
No, they didn't. They killed and imprisoned the people who had enslaved them for generations. In the case of Russia, serfs had only been freed from bondage a generation before and plenty of serfs starved under the old order.
China had been ruled by warlords for nearly a hundred years, and plenty of people were starved or worked to death under those regimes as well.
That's just bullshit. I have not advocated for communism. What I have done is attempted to understand why people all over the world have attempted to set up communist governments regularly during the 20th century and why the West has repeatedly used violence to stop them.
No body pretends the The Gulag Archipilago is history, in fact this is from the Wikipedia article about it:
Oh, and I have read it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:44PM
Bullshit. Kulaks were a common target, for example in Russia (frequently to the point of false accusations in order to make quota [wikipedia.org]), but those guys couldn't have enslaved anyone.
Second, "enslaved them for generations" indicates that one is blaming people for the sins of their ancestors - which isn't a premise of any sane legal system. And there are ways to fix such inequalities fairly without becoming genocidal maniacs in the process.
It's funny how many apologists there are for the worst governments of the world.
(Score: 2, Troll) by dry on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:29AM (1 child)
The problem with communism is that it was usually used or taken over by, totalitarians. For a country full of serfs or the equivalent, communism sounds great, get rid of the government, share everything and have a pure democracy, but it seems every communist revolution saw totalitarians take charge and do what totalitarians do.
The real problem is simply that ruthless totalitarians usually win and take over when the revolution involves really poor people with no experience with self government.
OTOH, you have revolutions like America's where the people revolted due to their rights as Englishmen being abused and had rallying cries like "no taxation without representation" because they were used to self government, at least to some degree and went on to create a system of government similar to what they were already used to.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Friday April 05 2019, @09:46PM
Actually, the problem is it doesn't work at all in a society with more than 50-100 people, because then the population starts competing to be the most needy or the least able.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @02:22AM (7 children)
They wouldn't have starved under a capitalist system.
Because communists routinely steal the assets of the capitalists. Which works for the communists when they can executive said capitalsts, and doesn't work so well, when the capitalists were from a country with a powerful military.
Presumably the subsequent grab-assing of the past few decades has cured Nicaragua of that false dilemma.
Who often happened to be more competent than the communists who replaced them. I don't buy, for example, that the Holodomor [wikipedia.org] would have happened under the Czarists.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @07:02AM (4 children)
Why not? This one killed a third of the population. [wikipedia.org]
This one contributed to the Czarist government's overthrow. [wikipedia.org]
Let's not pretend the Czarist regime was anything but brutal and incompetent. They couldn't beat the Bolsheviks even with France, Britain and the US sending troops to help.
No-one seems keen to explain why, if Communism is so bad that we have to kill people when they want to give it a try.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday March 26 2019, @01:52PM
Brutal and incompetent is relative.
Which is irrelevant for two reasons. The Czars were already dead and gone by the second year of the civil war. The Czarist advocates were only a part of a greater opposition, including a democratic component. Second, not winning a war doesn't indicate incompetence in agricultural policy.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:03PM (2 children)
> if Communism is so bad that we have to kill people when they want to give it a try
Wait. AFAIK it's communists that have to kill people when they want to give it a try. Class struggle, remember? They only are half of the game? it's likely.
Of course, the fact that some of them actively deny being involved in any killing for 40 years, when they are safely abroad, only to confess when caught, so that they get only 12 years for 4 homicides might have thrown you off.
Happened yesterday BTW and one guy was killed in my town. Such a little world.
https://uk.news.yahoo.com/italian-ex-militant-battisti-confesses-144316367.html [yahoo.com]
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:19PM (1 child)
I was thinking about places like Chile, who elected a President who ran as a Communist, began to implement the campaign promises he made, then was shot during a CIA coup.
Nicaragua is a particularly interesting one, as the people there also elected a communist government, perfectly legally, but the president of the US illegally sold guns to Iran to help fund actual death squads in an effort to overthrow them.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday March 27 2019, @06:15PM
Stopping two neighbours to be satellites of an URSS you are fighting against is fair game. They forgot to fix Venezuela, guess how it turned out.
JK, the USA is a rogue state. Just not because of some illegal ops they got exposed doing. But I said half of the game.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday March 26 2019, @03:05PM (1 child)
I question your certainty. It's fair to say that we've not seen mass starvation under capitalism - I'll support you that far. But, I'm not willing to claim that it can't, or won't, happen.
It is also fair to say that mass starvation wouldn't have happened under capitalism, in Russia. China is another story - and - I wonder. It's probably safe to say that if China had experienced all of the same catastrophes and disasters, including the invasion by Japan, capitalism would have served them better after the dust settles, and fewer people would have starved. Far fewer, actually.
But, let us remember, the capitalist west had their own crisis during the 1930's. It was pretty touch and go for most of that decade.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday March 26 2019, @10:24PM
Thanks for that balanced comment.
I am trying not to defend communism, because I agree it is a much worse system of government, particularly the way the Soviets did it, but I am trying to make the point that when we in the West bomb people back to the stone age just because they choose a different system to us, maybe we ought to ask some questions?
In my view maybe Vietnam was handled poorly in the 1940's and 1950's.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 26 2019, @04:17AM
whoa dude! the fact that every AC before you is a complete moron who's never read anything buy official history don't give you the right of spew all these unconfortable truths! also it's a complete waste like you know throwing pearls to pigs