Benjamin Cain
1 min readApr 15, 2023

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I agree that egalitarianism was closer to the norm in the long, prehistoric period, when people lived as hunter-gatherers. Egalitarianism was necessary then because everyone had to pull their weight in the small tribes. However, there was likely still a role for psychopathy in the Stone Age, namely in the hunter's relation to prey. A psychopathic lack of empathy would have been instrumental in overcoming the human social instinct to feel sorry for killing anything, including wild animals. So psychopathy could indeed have a biological basis.

I've read The Dawn of Everything, and written about it elsewhere. The authors do well to emphasize that not everything is baked into biology, that we're a flexible species. But we shouldn't ignore the sociobiological norms that are evidently very hard to change.

This hypothesis about white male privilege is consistent with your claim that there are many ways to live. I'm just trying to explain the familiar double standard in developed, secular humanistic societies. Antisocial tendencies are playing a role in maintaining our dominance hierarchies, despite the fact that we're supposed to be rationally "enlightened" (after the European Enlightenment).

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Benjamin Cain
Benjamin Cain

Written by Benjamin Cain

Ph.D. in philosophy / Knowledge condemns. Art redeems. / https://benjamincain.substack.com / https://ko-fi.com/benjamincain / benjamincain8@gmailDOTcom

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