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Politics And Human Nature
Why our systems of government are so dysfunctional: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.
For a couple of decades after World War II it was transiently fashionable among the lefty-trendy set to pretend that there is no such thing as human nature and that all our behaviors are shaped purely by the social conventions we happen to grow up in. While this was an amusing conceit fabricated largely to support the flawed notions of Karl Marx, it was hopelessly incorrect.
We now have overwhelming evidence that a great deal of our behavior, perhaps the vast majority, is the result of hundreds of thousands of years of selection pressures that have shaped our brains just as they shaped the rest of our bodies. Indeed, it could hardly be otherwise. Given that for 99% of our evolutionary history we lived in precarious circumstances, if human infants were born as tabulae rasae very few would survive more than a few days at best. How could a child, lacking all hardwired instinct, learn to latch onto a nipple in order to feed? How could it learn quickly enough to cling to its parent? And later, how could it learn to walk and talk? The former especially is not achieved via observation, cogitation, and intentional action.
Moreover, once past infanthood, individual children continue to exhibit generic traits common to…
