This article explores the differences and similarities between three seemingly unrelated things: the behavior of social insects; families among the species Homo Sapiens; and socialism / communism.
Robustness:
One estimate is that social insects (think ants and bees, wasps, and termites) have been around for perhaps 160 million years or so. There’s maybe 30,000 species, in damn near every habitat. Just counting ants alone, it has been estimated that there are 20 quadrillion ants in the world, or over a million per human being. Point is – this is an incredibly robust way of life. Social insects will, essentially, be around forever, in massive numbers. This organizational structure WORKS.
Families in homo sapiens have existed in every known tribe for the entirety of known human history. Not nearly as robust as social insects, but again, this way of organizing life works pretty damn well.
Socialism / Communism:
The Communist Manifesto was published in the mid-1800s, and the first government organized using this set of ideas occurred around 1900. The more hardcore of these two ideologies, communism, has uniparty states in China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. The big dog is China, with 1.4 billion people. Roughly 20% of the world’s 8 billion or so people live in communist countries. Throw in the longer list of countries currently run by socialist governments, and the people in non-socialist countries personally identifying as socialist or worse, and you get perhaps half of all humanity living under, or believing in, this ideology. Bottom line: not nearly as robust an organizational structure as the other two things. It could vanish entirely in a geological eyeblink of time. We hope.
How do these three ways of life work?
Social insects have a single queen per nest, who produces a large number of literal sisters who are chemically neutered and mind-controlled zombie slaves serving her. Seriously. Look it up. This wildly dystopian thing exists, everywhere.
Human families, while they have a lot of variation in structure (gay families, single parent families, infertile older couples, etc.), are in their most robust evolutionary form a delivery device to produce children. This Rube Goldberg contraption consists of a man and a woman who are chemically bonded to be a mild form of slaves to each other, thus inducing them to reproduce and take care of the resulting children. The formula for these chemical cocktails changes over the course of relationships: an initial potent mix that causes infatuation, the fun mix you get during sex, a medium-term mix that causes you to want to keep staying together once that initial heady mix wears off, a long-term mix that causes couples to enjoy each other long after the mid-term mix goes away, the chemicals formed during birth and nursing that causes a mother to love her offspring. And so on. Bottom line – we WANT this form of mild slavery. It feels GREAT. And every society has these chemically induced behaviors, because otherwise we’d wanna kill those crying little helpless bastards known as babies when they keep us up all night, leaving us sleep-deprived and staggering around like zombies.
Socialism is a bastard mix of the above two. It strips out the (oftentimes perverse) incentives to preserve lives because you’re closely genetically related, aka the thing that makes social insects and human couples so evolutionarily stable. It tries to create the hive mind of social insects using ideology instead of chemical bondage. It tries to create a family type of relationship – the brotherhood of man, socialist worker solidarity, protecting the motherland (international socialism, such as Soviet Russia), protecting the fatherland (national socialism, such as the Nazi party, which voicing that inconvenient fact to “real” socialists will get them reeeeally mad at you, because that’s not the “real socialism” that is fuzzy bunnies and rainbows and all that is good and nothing that is bad – aka what they * think * socialism is.)
So, socialism in uniparty countries ruled by that ideology, usually consists of a ruler controlling minions under them using indoctrination (carrot), and a terrifying propensity to murder anyone perceived as not being ‘all in’ to being thusly ruled (stick). The minions apply the same tactics to the rest of the populace.
In non-socialist countries, the carrot approach alone is used. At first. Until the CB (commie bastards) seize control of the government.
Socialism is, biologically speaking, a “ecological sink” — that is, it kills vast numbers of people living under it, or inhibits them from reproducing, and thus periodically needs to attract or conquer new victims from the “ecological sources” around it that produce the fodder for that ideological machine. Think famines in North Korea, China’s One Child Policy, Stalin starving the wreckers and kulaks and traitorous Ukrainians, Pol Pot purging about a quarter of all Cambodians, the Nazi concentration camps, Soviet Russians choosing not to reproduce because life there was so shitty. And so on.
The thing causing socialism to be a sink rather than a source is that the one ruler, essentially owning all the slaves under them, isn’t biologically related to the masses of proles and serfs, and thus carelessly tosses their lives away for ideological reasons, or to hang onto power via violence. Or just for fun, because such immense power attracts psychopaths.
So, that fatal flaw – rulers not being close kin to the ruled – makes socialism really really unrobust over the long haul.
Hopefully.
About the Author:
“Some words, on the other hand, displayed a frank and contemptuous understanding of the real nature of Oceanic society. An example was prolefeed, meaning the rubbishy entertainment and spurious news which the Party handed out to the masses.” –George Orwell, 1984
Prolefeed is, in the parlance of Newspeak, a doubleplusungood crimethinker. He’s happily married to a black-ish woman with a sexy big booty who is a self-described bleeding heart liberal. This is his first article for Glibertarians.com
Nicely done.
Nice first article.
How can it be a first article without mentioning our resident firster?
Don’t encourage him.
Thank you for writing
This was an interesting read – thanks prole!
Robustness comes to socialism through the constant production of those that believe real socialism hasn’t been tried.
Also known as “education”.
I once saw a guy on a beekeeping YouTube channel and he, being young and stupid and commie, said we could learn a lot about how to live from bees. And he wasn’t talking about what not to do.
Like, proscribed slavery from birth to death? One ruler that gets to reproduce? Everyone’s lives devoted to the care and feeding of that one ruler?
Yeah, great. Let’s all be bees.
The working bees are all sisters, the very few boys in the hive rarely leave and are fed by the girls The lady bees literally work themselves to death.
In Europe after WW2 there was a shortage of men, caused by the disasters of the war. Women necessarily had to pick up the load previously provided by men.
Keep up the good work, prole
I have considerable skepticism about socio-biology even though the founder E.O. Wilson quipped about communism – right theory, wrong species. He was an entomologist, primarily focused on ants. The problem is that human socio-biology might bear some relationship to other primates, less so to other mammals and not at all to colony species (ants, bees).
It tries to create a family type of relationship…
The ‘Us vs. Them’ mentality isn’t limited to socialists. I’m no evolutionary biologist but I’d wager it’s part of the human condition. Socialism is a horrible ideology but that particular characteristic isn’t what sets it apart form other ideologies.
Indeed. If an outside isn’t already there, then one will be created.
Look, Jews!
Always projection, all of the time. Notice the wokesters complain about being ‘othered’. They complain that they are being made the ‘other” when in fact creating others to drive away is one of the foundation stones of their ideological edifice.
Us v Them, “Our Team v The Other,” is inherent beyond humans. We have it in more arenas, but bees, to fish and lions all operate on the same principle. Just colony, school and pride instead of family, clan, tribe and nation+. Though orangutans are odd non-social primates, two’ll still get together to procreate. The competition for territory (generally with resources+ females), is fierce and understood. Humans have hardwiring to understand when other animals are pissed off for our own safety. That is inter-special communication. Like it or not, all organisms here share a global dot floatin’ ’round the sun. We all fight for our own little space in it. As much boning (for pair-bonding as well) to get dat offspring out.
Nature don’t give no shits about ‘How we’re doin’.’ Eat or be eaten. Adapt or die.
2 clips from sci fi to illustrate this point:
https://youtu.be/ynSTKlhlRAE?si=7VLEnPuyn9XCX96V&t=200
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIyTZF6xTh4
Well done sir! Glad to see you writing!
Interesting take. Socialism is like a beehive, but with a lower survival rate. I will also note that neither bees nor ants need to put up walls to keep their workers from escaping.
Please rise for the unofficial socialist anthem:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JAucbMXqNTA
Not as funny as that 2019 socialist convention, but still good.
Ok now I want to become a communist after listening to that.
Well, if you can’t beat them…
This will change your mind:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moWe3rk7LzQ
Stuck in my basement listening to the storm and the tornado sirens. Hope the power stays on.
Fingers crossed for you Illinoisians
Oh dear. Hoping for the best. It does seem like it will be a busy season.
O’Hare is obviously a hot mess
👍
Supposed to have some severe here too…at 3am…should just be thunderstorms
Wow this is your first? Nice job. i promise it will not be your last. I do like this type of article that gets a person thinking, thank you.
Very good article. Would read again.
I’m searching for a good way to phrase the left’s love of lawlessness. They excuse actual deviancy to breed undermine the fabric of society while criminalizing shit that is normal and traditional. I settled on they excuse actual deviancy to create an environment of fear and dependency while criminalizing normalcy or harmless bullshit. They love the ability to arbitrarily enforce the laws.
It’s like the story posted on the weekend about South Africa throwing the book at a women who had been mugged for using racial slurs while not doing a damn thing to catch the violent criminal.
Not prosecuting “Asian” migrants in the UK who were grooming and raping little girls, but violently apprehending an autistic teenager who said a cop looks like a lesbian.
Letting violent criminals with guns off with slaps on the wrist, but throwing the book on a driver who had a legally owned firearm in their trunk and was just driving through a gun free zone.
Letting Antifa walk, but ruining every conservative life they can after January 6tth.
And on and on. Yet there are still conservatives out there who would give the government more power in the name of fighting crime. Like these laws will be applied justly .
The left loves itself some arbitrary use of power. To politicize the laws in both their enforcement and effect.
Many leftists are stupid and immoral rather than being evil. On the other hand, stupidity often has then same or worse consequences than being evil.
The Gods of the Copybooks Headings said it best. Here is the relevant stanza:
***
In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”
***
Kipling was often on point.
Despite the obvious evidence, some people never will learn:
As the Dog returns to its Vomit
And the Sow returns to the Mire,
And the Burnt Fool’s bandaged Finger
Comes wabbling back to the Fire…
It all makes sense when you feed their ridiculous shit through the “oppressed/oppressor” translator routine. All the rest is just a happy coincidence.
I don’t know what Biden did to piss off the Italians, but they’ve been coming at him hard lately:
‘My name is Joe Kennedy’: Italian TV savagely mocks Joe Biden in yet another comedy skit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApTyNOXUhSk
For years, corporate shills in the access media and among “fans” defended the woke shit being pumped out by Hollywood. Not because of any belief that it was actually good, but because it was politically correct to do so. Corporations used the media to draw a line in the sand with their critics on one side being labeled as racist, sexist bigots and the enlightened true fans on the other.
As these projects have gone from middling failures to outright flops, it’s become undeniable that the product is bad. And with it, a new tack has been taken up by a shrill minority. You can’t criticize movies because, you see, making movies is hard. It’s like really, really hard guys and no one sets out to make a bad movie! It started with some access media shill and then spread to Youtube critics and now throughout the Twattersphere.
It’s kind of sad what happens to the human mind when their identity becomes wrapped up a product. Corporations succeeded in taking a group of people, albeit a small minority, and convincing them that not liking the crap they produce makes them a bad person somehow.
Of course, by not reviewing something or not criticizing a movie….you are basically telling people what you actually think of it. But it allows them to continue the delusion that they don’t agree with those icky people.
Those assholes that excuse failure by saying that it’s hard to make a movie are admitting, whether they know it or not, that talent and ability matter. Their faith won’t permit them to say it outright.
They have earned all the derision they get.
But they thought they could replace seasoned white male writers who have been working in the industry longer than they’ve been alive with a 23 year old BIPOC and get something even better!
“If it’s male and pale, it’s stale.”
They’re Wile E Coyote-type sooper geniuses.
Lose all the munny, geniuses
*Vice Media waves hi*
Socialist Realism 2, Propaganda Boogaloo
Milan Kundera said the reason Soviet films were so bad was that the greatest conflict was often just a misunderstanding. He thought she no longer loved him; she thought he no longer loved her.
A Soviet anti-jazz cartoon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzScYtmg0yY
Stalin: ha ha much funny. You go to gulag.
Do you talk to your wife with that mouth?
When he got to the part about social insects, I thought he was talking about Paris Hilton, or the Kardashians.
I suspect he does
*appreciative finger snaps*
I say all kinds of saucy stuff to her without much uproar. I went to some lengths to find someone who likes me being unapologetic about my worldview.
Excellent first outing! Good cricket, they say.
That article really is the bees knees.
“…otherwise we’d wanna kill those crying little helpless bastards known as babies when they keep us up all night, leaving us sleep-deprived and staggering around like zombies.”
…Or play glorified babysitter for ’em. *Spit* (In the past I used to *teach* cute li’l bastards.) There’s a reason I don’t have any. (Bro has thee boys. Youngest, 3, has inherited all the Ev genes. Everyone in the family recognizes it. I was known to run myself into walls as a youngster. Damn helicopter parents! Taking all the life out of childhood LIFE. I shall hone Ez’ skills.)
*SPIT*
Most humans never grow up thinking for themselves. We are all blinded in some ways, love a chief one. People are happy as long as things are ‘Good Enough.’ Life ain’t easy. Anything, anyONE, who can (at least) PROMISE to make it better… and sort of make it ish-OK… is far better, easier than Troubleshooting that shit yourself. People are busy. Staying alive is fucking hard. (Ask an ant.) We ain’t no different.
People constantly forget we are just mammals. Social primates. Despite every attempt to convince ourselves otherwise, we’ve never “Evolved” to change this. Eat or be eaten. And FUCK. ASAP. Time be fleeting. *Those with Money & Power don’t voluntarily cede it.* People will spout all sorts of bullshit, pre-Written Record on, to sway the masses. Always root for your own family, team, group, nation, etc. We be social creatures, like it or not. We’d all be dead (right after birth) if we weren’t. This neuro- pathway is especially useful (good and bad) when hating the fuck out of ANOTHER Group. (“KILL ‘EM! THEY’RE…. DIFFERENT!$@! LANGUAGE! CULTURE! *RELIGION!!!* EVEN THEIR *SKIN!* SO ICKY!… especially here. *I* get to rape that corpse’s bride! ME!)
Most people are, throughout our history, far too ‘busy’ to fucking care about anything not IMMEDIATE. Anything semi-abstract goes bye-bye. Life is hard and it will always be. Anyone saying otherwise is selling something. And life is hard. People have always been, and will always, eager to buy that shit. No matter. Even with their lives. Especially if the risk of dying gets them some kinky lays w dem other gals… damn kinky… Happy to be alive so they’ll fuck anything, regardless of pulse. Humans being human… tend to like their own children. Tend to. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Excellent article. Moar!
Questions for your pinko friends. Are you permitted to be a communist in a capitalist society? Are you permitted to be a capitalist in a communist society? Which society is more likely to have prison camps for those who wrong-think?
“Shut up”, they explained.
Lol. Right on the money.
the prog version, “Your questions are making me uncomfortable.”
The prison camps are a plus when they help control the beliefs of the ordinary people that they dislike so much.
“Capitalist society is a prison camp!”
Nice article, prole! Keep them coming.
tonight’s random fact about Japan
***
During the political ferment which produced and followed the revolution of 1867, Kyōsai attained a reputation as a caricaturist. His very long painting on makimono (a horizontal type of Japanese handscroll/scroll) “The battle of the farts” may be seen as a caricature of this ferment. He was arrested three times and imprisoned by the authorities of the shogunate.
***
Some of his other works include: The Fart of the Terrible Farter and The Farting Contest
Fart Battles were a popular genre of paintings in 19th century Japan, as may be seen in the gallery linked below:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/he-gassen#19
I may be semi-alone in this: I routinely have fun practicing funny belches when they come.
I may be alone (here) in this: I enjoy being a flatteur… performance art farting. I like making them go up-down in pitch and changes in sustain. We all do both. Why not have FUN w ’em? (I don’t do it in public. I don’t think I’ve even practiced around humans.) Farts are fun and funny. (Getting Korean students to get the difference was harder than you’d imagine. I used roller coasters as a distinction.) See the smiley faces in headlights! Ya got dat gas! Might as well explore it!
(…I also used to have fun running into walls as a boy. It was also fun, dammit!)
I turned on ST:TNG just before opening this article. Coincidence?
P.S. The first season was terrible.
It’s amazing the thing got renewed for S02.
So true. If I remember correctly, it had decent ratings but they were shaky. I know I was ready to bail out if the second season stunk. I guess Riker growing a beard helped them turn the corner.
Riker’s beard barely made up for somehow letting Beverly go. S03 was another lucky happenstance, but they were righting the ship by then.
Yup, Seasons 3-6 were excellent. The outer ones significantly less so.
Mahalo for the article Prole. A fine first effort.
“This is his first article for Glibertarians.com” and a very good one it is. Now I will nag for more.
Happy hump day peeps.
☕👀
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4lScbCIgLxw
🎶🎶
Morning, Sean.
🙂
Good morning, Sean, U, Suthen, and rhy, and good afternoon, Pie!
I really need to remember to take my cell phone off “vibrate” when there’s the threat of severe weather, especially overnight. All’s well, but I woke to find a notice on my phone that there’d been a tornado warning that expired at 5:00 a.m. 😳🌪
*waves*
☹☹☹☹
The nail on my injured toe decided to detatch 90% of the way from the toe. I had to finish the job, since there was no way to coax it back with which 90% had come away. Honestly, it’s probably for the best, given how much trouble it had been giving me. Not sure if anything will grow back or if I’ll be without a nail there going forward. I’ve lost that same nail twice before. (dropped plates and granite steps seem to hate that toe)
At least there was no blood.
In my experience they do grow back. Good luck 👍
I assume it will grow back. Probably taking it off is for the best.
Yikes! I’m sorry you couldn’t save it despite your best efforts. If you’ve lost it before and had it grow back, that’s somewhat encouraging.
Have you considered steel-toed shoes?
Or a carbon-fiber toe, lighter for everyday use.
🤔
But I’ve still got the fleshy bits of the toe.
Yeah, but a Borg implant toe would be so cool! 😃
Here’s the thing – the injury happened when I wasn’t wearing shoes. I was walking around my house in socks. The only time I injured that toe when wearing shoes was the time I fell down a flight of granite steps at the office. (Yes, I filed worker’s comp paperwork over that icy stair). I don’t recall if I was wearing my steel toed sneakers at that time or if it was a pair of soft-toed sneakers.
Also, the timeline of when it decided to disconnect matches up with the “approximately a week later” timeline from the last time this happened.
Since what’s left is smoother and cleaner than what was there the previous time, if it does come back, I might end up with a more properly formed nail than the janky mess several previous injuries to that toe had given me.
Well, whether the nail grows back or not, the most important thing is whether the toe is in pain, so I hope it’s not.
It was only hurting during the walk from the parking lot to my cube. To get to that point I’d A: Driven to the store, B: shopped for breakfast, C: driven to the office, and D: walked part of the way to my cube. Since I’ve sat down, it’s calmed down, especially since I took the shoe off to reduce the pressure.
Soak with Epson Salts twice daily..
/Not a podiatrist but lots of personal experience
“Janky Toes” is the name for my new rock’n’roll band.
Looking for a bassist.
If someone thinks ants are a good form of organization for people I hope that person goes away. We are not eusocial.
Socialism … the Nazi … – spicy
rulers not being close kin to the ruled – but they are Morally Superior so that’s okay
See-Through Try On Haul | Transparent Lingerie and Clothes | Try-On Haul At The Mall
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGQUPObLXiU
NSFW probably
Cute girl but why even bother wearing a shirt?
I assume YouTube requires it.
suh’ fam
whats goody
TALL FLORIDA CANS!
(after work of course)
Good morning, homey!
One thing socialism gets “right” is the offloading of personal responsibility from the individual to society at large and, as such, will never go away. The displacement of responsibility is an incredibly powerful motivator, I’d argue the primary motivator beyond basic needs, for many (most?) people.
Well of course the reason I’m dirt poor is not because I took on six figures of debt to ‘find myself’ in college and got a degree that isn’t in high demand in the marketplace, nor that I need to have the newest hot gadgets every six months and don’t know how to manage a personal budget. It’s because burger-flippers and Doordash drivers aren’t paid a living wage, and greedy landlords gouge people with unreasonable rents. And it’s not that I wasn’t smart enough to get scholarships to college and avoid most or all of that student debt, it’s that schools don’t teach the right subject matter like knowing all the genders and sexualities out there. Plus systemic racism and stuff.
sin,
Leftist dolt
I will give the generations behind me a bit of slack on this – they were relentlessly preached at about going to college. It will set you up for your future, they were told. And in general, we’ve ended up in this society treating a college education as we used to treat a HS diploma. You can’t entirely fault the dumb kids for that.
Ahem.
Not sure of your disagreement. To go back to the article – ants don’t need to be raised to function in the colony. Human offspring must be, and they don’t raise themselves (generally speaking). It is also the prerogative of old farts like me to complain about kids these days – which is also a manner of shedding some responsibility from the comment starting this thread, just as much as Grumbletarian’s take.
Not disagreeing; on the contrary.
Now I iz confused.
Oh, I thought the “ahem” was to register dissent. My bad.
It takes a village, it’s right there in the book
We had to destroy that village in order to save it.
Change the author to Thomas Sowell, and perhaps without much modification (I can’t say for sure having never read the book), you might be nodding in agreement.
You know what just struck me.
In both north and south america, we have archeological evidence that diseases dramatically reduced the native population shortly after the first Europeans arrived, even well before they reached the areas hardest hit. But we don’t have any dint of this apocalyptic plague in the oral histories of the people left behind. How do you have a society-collapsing event like the kind of die-offs that happened and not have it even garner a mention in the tales of the apocalypse survivors? I know that the wars that followed were more recent and dramatic, but it doesn’t strike me as the kind of event that gets forgotten.
Or had enough generations passed that continuity of civilization with those who came before was disrupted by the die-off and the new cultures living in the quickly reforesting ruins did forget what came before?
You know what just struck me. – something in your toe obviously 🙂
Maybe many oral histories were not compiled before the colonials came in the area
😆
Brand new day, the best, the classiest. Just in time for breakfast. Works out perfectly.
Morning to all, now let’s get out there and kick some butt, figuratively, speaking, of course.
Figuratively, I might be able to.
Physically, I think it’d be ill-advised at the moment.
We got rain here, I think you got the bitter cold. Stay warm (and dry) out there.
No it’s not. It is the same day as 27th may 2016. Not brand new.