Friday, July 19, 2019

The cline of fearlessness

There are many class-gradients across capitalist society: income, wealth, power, intelligence, health, genetic load.

Let me add another one.

Life within contemporary bourgeois elites is perhaps the safest it has ever been anywhere. Disputes are not normatively settled by inter-personal violence. Coordination is via transactions not threats. There is a premium to being generally affable rather than intimidating.

(These are rules - there are individual exceptions which are normally deprecated).

This suggests that capitalism as a complex self-reproducing system selects - in a biological sense - for smart, high-trust, non-violent individuals in its elites. People who are the opposite of the suspicious, family-and-clan-oriented, rough types who were the success stories of pre-capitalist elites.

In a word: capitalism selects for liberals. Who have smaller amygdalas.

Surely this explains a lot?

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