Not content to battle it out in the boardroom, crypto bros, tech executives and start-up founders have embraced an old-fashioned version of masculinity.
I wonder how many of them didn’t finish or didn’t understand Fight Club. Tyler kills you clowns at the end.
These are the laws of the jungle. If we allow the “Rationalist” plague from Silicon Valley to spread we will all be in more peril than anyone could have imagined. This is what their ideals.lead to, might makes right.
These are not the laws of the jungle, these are the laws of the most “civilized” cities in Western European culture.
The law of the jungle is not a law, it is a spontaneous cooperation of organisms that coordinate in extremely complex flexible ways to produce an incredible efficiency and stability. The laws of the jungle do not always advantage the strongest, most traditionally powerful creatures capable of dispensing the most violence, and in one sense jungles can be thought of as environments that tend to select against that in favor of more specific adaptation strategies.
The jungle as a metaphor for brutality, chaos or regression of humanity to authoritarianism is steeped in racism and honestly it is a metaphor that holds little utility for us these days given how vitally important it is to learn from the jungle… the ACTUAL fucking jungle.
In a related note, monkeys are NOT LESS EVOLVED than humans are, when we say “monkey brain” we are just insulting ourselves by choosing to believe a little bit more in the lie that evolution is a simple continuum of intelligence that humans beat all the other animals at by getting to the top.
I know this isn’t the point, but people use these metaphors a lot and it is problematic in that it obscures the truth and people’s intuition for it.
Except thats not what Law of the Jungle means: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_the_jungle
It means anything goes, and when anything goes, might makes right.
It means anything goes, and when anything goes, might makes right.
I know you are referencing that concept, but it is a shitty concept, if this were true jungles wouldn’t exist, they would be woods with one or two types of beefy animals living in them that would murder anything else weaker than them.
Stop equating the jungle with chaos, jungles are extremely efficient, balanced, diverse systems capable of handling major shocks and structural changes to nutrient inputs, STOP lazily saying “Law Of The Jungle” like it means anything, the metaphor is at best problematically broken and at worst designed to create the kind of conceptual confusion that can be used to justify awful HUMAN choices and systems.
The Wilderness is the embodiment of might makes right. In the wilds, if my force overpowers your’s I’m taking your food and your baby as a snack for later. Thats it. I get there are complex systems. This is not a phrase about nuance or even environments. Its a phrase about the macro of our origins, the overarching theme in human antiquity that granted some privilege and others oppression. In the Jungle, might makes right. Feel free to submit that to the complaints box (my mouth, you are being eaten). Now we can talk all day about the yin and the yang, but I’m a hungry snake and your eggs are unprotected.
The Wilderness is the embodiment of might makes right. In the wilds, if my force overpowers your’s I’m taking your food and your baby as a snack for later
You don’t seem to grasping the difference between the inherently anarchistic nature of ecosystems where each agent is usually acting completely according to their own devices, and the macro scale stability, diversity and efficiency that arises out of the many complex ways individuals don’t have as their first instinct the desire to kill or destroy those weaker than them.
Fungi and trees communicate in large nutrient sharing networks, there are all kinds of cooperation that involve many sophisticated forms of mutual aid including extending help sometimes as a bold gesture to create the foundation for further collaboration. Wolves change the shape of rivers from preying on herbivores that feed along the banks, vampire bats have complex dynamics to the way they choose to share meals with other bats that couldn’t find a meal that night (which includes extending help as a bold gesture sometimes) your world view can’t account for that kind of subtletly and nuance to natural systems and it leaves you hopelessly ill-equipped to use metaphors of nature to try to examine or explain humanity.
edit ok the syncronicity between this metaphor and the truth here was too amusing not to add this context
The Wilderness is the embodiment of might makes right. In the wilds, if my force overpowers your’s I’m taking your food and your baby as a snack for later. Thats it. I get there are complex systems… In the Jungle, might makes right. Feel free to submit that to the complaints box (my mouth, you are being eaten). Now we can talk all day about the yin and the yang, but I’m a hungry snake and your eggs are unprotected.
Hilariously, probably one of the most common relationships between organisms on the planet is prey producing enough offspring that the predators in their environment are fed adequately and there are still offspring left even after all the predators are full. Turtles, corals, geese, and countless organisms are very successful in the situation you seem to delineate as powerless.
If we do not dismantle this rhetorical construction of a brutally simplified dichotomy between “nature’s brutal chaos” and “civilized organized humanity” we will be doomed to repeate the mistakes of the past and continously rebuild the conditions for fascism to take off like a wildfire.
Capitalism is a project in rationalizing brutalizing the poor by drawing shitty conclusions from shallow observations about how nature structures things, and it is only one example of how these brainworms destroy our ability to think critically about the choices we have made to structure our society vs. the inveitabilities…
You dont seem to grasp that this is not about plants, or fungi, or ecosystems. Its about people and how we were then.
