Well duh! Of course it is. You honestly don't think a magnificent blend of personal autonomy combined with interconnectedness to the group in such a way that does not force dependencies or control of others isn't patently obviously better than a dominance based social stratification based on the maintenance of "traditional" power which was achieved through Might Makes Right do you?
There are two fundamental types of social organizations - partnership oriented ones and dominance oriented ones. No current society is entirely at either end of the spectrum, but it's not exactly a question of whether or not it's nicer to live in Sweden than it is to live in Iran.
You have some weird "my team" attachment to patriarchy that so many men have and it's just confounding, because it's so idiotic. It’s not “your team” — not unless you are the king, or the mayor, or the CEO, or the feudal lord.
The gender aspect is only one aspect (an important aspect to be sure) of dominance based hierarchies which are essentially feudal systems and yes, they are terrible. They are the source of all societal ills that come out of artificial rankings and hierarchy that is not merit based. It's the root of everything from slavery to garden variety bullying. What about that exactly is good? "Well, we built a lot of shit, mostly on the backs of poorly paid and otherwise oppressed underlings, but we got rich and even more powerful doing it, so it must be good...." 🙄. Puhleez...
This is a whole other topic that deserves it's own story, but it does illustrate my point beautifully. In case after case of white children (and even adults) being abducted by Indians, they almost never wanted to be "rescued" and many who were ended up returning to their tribes. Because egalitarianism is ALWAYS better than artificial hierarchy.
“Missionaries had a difficult time translating words such as lord, obedience, or commandment into local languages because there was no concept of such things amongst the tribes they hoped to convert to Christianity. This “wicked liberty of the savages” was considered one of the primary impediments to getting them “submitting to the yoke of the law of God.” If local political leaders had no real way to compel anyone to do anything that they did not wish to, how was an unseen deity going to inspire that sort of subservience?
In this sense, equality was all about freedom — something that seems to have been viewed as an inalienable right. European-style equality at this time meant equality before the law, which essentially meant equality before the monarch — equality in the ability to be subjugated. Individual freedom for Europeans was mostly a concept drawn from property ownership, which rose out of Roman law, wherein a male head of household has complete control over all of his possessions, including his children and slaves.
By this way of thinking, freedom was posited as something you had the right to do at the expense of others — completely opposite from native concepts of freedom. It indicated not being reliant on others, once again the complete antithesis of many indigenous cultures that balance personal autonomy with a dedication to the well-being of the community. As Dr. Peter Gray points out about contemporary hunter-gatherer bands, their concepts of self-determination are very much in contrast with how we tend to think of it from a “civilized” perspective.
Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself. It does, however, allow people to make their own day-to-day and moment-to-moment decisions about their own activities, as long as they do not violate the band’s implicit and explicit rules. For example, individual hunter-gatherers are free, on any day, to join a hunting or gathering party or to stay at camp and rest, depending on their own preference. (source)”
And I apologize for the fact that I'm not able to fit 15+ years of study of sociology, anthropology, archeology, primatology, etc., into just one or two short articles. Perhaps instead of making inferences about what you assume I think or mean, you might want to make a stab at reading some of the 50+ stories that I've written on these topics and actually learn what I think, believe, mean, and know.
When you mischaracterize what I say, when you attribute false facts to me - that is debating in bad faith. If you don't know something, don't make an assumption. Either use your Google machine and look it up, or ask me a question about it. I have no interest in debating you about British theater because I am more than happy to acknowledge that I know next to nothing about it - just one of the many things that keeps me from writing opinion pieces about it that disseminate false information and that takes pot shots at people who do have expertise.
As for the perverse kind of affection, it's there, but in the past few months my tolerance for bullshit has gone down significantly, so if you want to stay frenemies, don't push your luck.
Egalitarianism has nothing to do with a complete and total absence of violence. What is has to do with is whether that is a core value of the group, and not just a sporadic eruption of human heat of the moment stuff. The Kurgan invasion very literally shifted the core religious beliefs from the lauding of beauty and the life-giving goddess to the deification of death and the people and instruments that brought it. Again, that probably needs it's own story, but I can only work so fast on so many topics that require research and citations to at least ward off some of the trolls. I could write something in an hour from what I know out of 15+ years of study, but then I'd have to deal with the trolls, so you can either trust at least in some measure that I do know what I'm talking about, or you can wait for when I get around to the story.
