Rather than Nietzsche's master and slave morality, the true categories are hunter and prey morality.
Let's first talk about plants. Why doesn't every plant have huge thorns? Why isn't every plant a cactus? Don't they need to worry about being eaten?
Well, no. No they don't. You see the one plant being eaten. Probably because that's where the motion is - it attracts your attention. You don't see the hundreds or thousands of plants silently not being eaten.
Plants are a bit poisonous, to avoid being actively inviting, but beyond that plants do not die of predation often enough for it to be an issue. Half the time being eaten doesn't even kill the plant. (Plants mainly worry about other plants - the sun affords germination to too many plants.)
This means herbivores see abundant food. There's (almost) never too many herbivores for the available herbs. Basically, food is free. At worst, food is never the bottleneck.
A brief diversion to hunters. For a hunter pack, each new member is a new mouth to feed. It's a guaranteed cost, and only a dubious benefit.
To a prey herd, each new member is someone the wolves and crocodiles can eat instead of you. They only slightly compete for your food. They mainly compete for disasters. Herds form because the other prey sees the same tradeoff and agrees to make it.
The Democrat is a kind of prey. They yearn to be part of the largest herd, and the only contribution they offer is their mere presence. They offer to take the chance of being eaten to lessen their co-Democrats chance of being eaten. All life is sacred. A sacred thing to put between me and the predator.
(Or so they believe. Fixed action patterns. It doesn't actually work like that, but they can't see the Real world, they can only think using blood memories.)
Unlike plants, meaty prey can flee. It can kick or has horns.
(Dinosaurs were superior. Ankylosaurus and triceratops. Rhinos, do better.)
Most hunts fail. Only unlucky prey fall to natural hunters, and even human hunters regularly fail to find anything to kill.
Because predators are so good at fighting, they can fight one another, they can defend territories. Strategic paradox: because they can defend land, they have to make do with whatever prey is found within.
Predators do not see abundant food. Prey does have to worry about the chance they'll be eaten.** You worry about the plant being eaten because you can't have blood memory of being a plant, and it instead reminds you of your blood memory of being mammal prey.*
*(Occasionally lizard prey - those blood memories are faint, but they do exist.)
**(One does wonder if this means herbivores are inefficient and carnivores are efficient.)
Prey is not free. Predators have to work and strive.
Most predators hunt alone, because maintaining a pack simply isn't worth the hassle. If someone is a better hunter than you, why would they carry you? If you're a better hunter than them, won't you get more meat on average if you only have to share it with yourself? In exchange for these dubious offers, there's social overhead and the risk of betrayal. Consequently pack hunters are rare.
Humans are pack hunters.
Even once the benefits of the pack exceed the costs, pack members must pull their weight. More importantly, the pack has a maximum size. The prey can only breed so fast, and consequently the territory can only support so many.
Rather than the herd, trying to maximize size, the pack tries to minimize size. Get away with as few members as possible, so that each can eat as abundantly as possible. This is done via elitism. Excellence. Gatekeeping and exclusion. Not only is life not sacred, life is actively a vice. Quality quality quality => gotta pay for your original sin: being born.
The above are are the defining features of herd and pack.
To a herd, bad things just happen; there's nothing they can do about it. You could make the herd even bigger so it's less likely to happen to you, but you already tried that.
To a pack, the bad things are things the pack itself does. If it's you doing them, you can stop doing them. If it's not you, you can expel the problem from the pack. Humans can not accept the problem in the first place.
There's no point to being friends with prey. You don't need their help. They broadly don't compete for food but they can still eat the choice stuff before you do - physically putting their mouth on the stuff you want to eat.. Explicitly the point of a herd is to betray your fellows - when push comes to shove, you shove your [[friend]] into the crocodile's mouth before your [[friend]] can shove you in there. A [dog eat dog] world is in fact a ram push sheep world.
Pack hunters not only can be friends, but must be. The more friendly and bound together, the better. It's good to have buy-in, to remind the pack members not to abandon the pack during moments of disruption. Humans don't need buy-in anymore - not the non-herd types, anyway - because they can cognitively grasp the fact that short-term isn't long-term.
Friendship is magic? Friendship is literally for killing. The purpose of friendship is to win wars. (No wonder women and gays can't be friends.)
More babies more better is unquestionably herd ideology. The r-strategy.
Carefully nurturing the best and killing the runts is predator ideology. The K-strategy.
Lol @ everyone who worries about birth rates. Declining rates are good. Lol @ nationalism or any race-based thinking. A [race] isn't a pack, junior. I mean, if you want to be prey...well, no son of mine is going to grow up to be prey. Trust me on this.
Though the pack is hardly going to object to the herd expanding itself. If the herd contracts, well, it means I need to take the territory of the next pack over.
Herd thought: even if there are runts, the predators will take care of it. Dysgenics is impossible. We can [[support]] them as much as they want. Genetic quality is automatic and free, like manna from heaven.
Prey, by focusing on getting the largest herd, lowers the incentive to, you know, resist predation. It's about getting the problem down to tolerable so it can be perpetuated. Although individual prey avoid getting eating, as a species prey actively cooperates with predators, attempting to ensure there's always enough prey to eat.
Herbivory and foraging are extensive. Predation and hunting are intensive. Farming is intensive.
The mass market is the herd market. Appeals to prey.
The most ironic part of all: neither adult predators nor adult prey die except to obscene bad luck. Healthy specimens neither get caught nor fail to catch. It's the juveniles who get caught or can't conquer a territory. Basically at all times all the kids are dying. The adults hang around tho, creating more kids, until an adult gets old or has an accident, opening a space for a former kid.
Security is affordable even for (adult) animals.
What you absolutely can't do is carefully nurture and cultivate individual children while banning infanticide for mutants. Preypack. Predatorherd. Just don't.
I shouldn't say humans are pack hunters. It's clear there's two major classes of human - the predator human, and the prey human.
My issue with Caino masochiens can be boiled down to way it seems that predator humans (Sith?) are always pretending to be prey humans (Jedi?) The wolf, tiger, and lion don't pretend to be the gazelle. The predator human is always a wolf in sheep's clothing. It is dishonourable, pathetic, ugly, and it is to the eternal shame of the prey human that this predation scheme even vaguely works. A black government is a parasite, not a predator, and it makes the host sick and weak, ultimately replacing a slavering reaction with a [kill it with fire] reaction.
Nietzsche's master morality is in fact a kind of prey morality, whoops. Yes it's a highly deviant, adulterated version, but those adulterations will get gradually filtered out were you to intentionally attempt it.
6 comments:
first reaction: wtf i was just thinking on this topic, get out of my head
second reaction: ok i was never going to notice this, now i am learning / it's comfortably not in my head
"For a hunter pack, each new member is a new mouth to feed. It's a guaranteed cost, and only a dubious benefit. To a prey herd, each new member is someone the wolves and crocodiles can eat instead of you."
this was amazing
im not sure if this is true, but [predators are good at fighting] + [women and gays can't be friends] implied to me prey are bad at fighting. i forgot where i was going. bad at killing, so fight more, because impossible to escalate (and thus end), also bad because beneficial to have them both from individual and herd perspective, also not my fault cause see i only pushed you, i didn't kill you. i wanted something else. i forgot.
i don't agree with hunter life is vice. it is certainly conditional though.
i think it'd be interesting if you wrote more on plant thinking (if there is any more plant thinking) and parasite thinking (because there's so many of them). i've been here before with the lion vs cow eating thing; it seems thinking like a plant is a good equilibrium too. actually now that i've written it out it's (naturally) a proto version of both predator and prey. getting eaten? don't worry about it. cloudy day? don't worry about it. everything will be ok. though i was only thinking from the gain perspective, and now that i look at it again the distinction between plant gain and predator gain is rather important.
it's good to think there's more that can be had.
it's better to specifically think there's more that can be had *if i look for it.
which lines up with plants not being able to move while animals can.
...i don't actually know if i will want to have read how a parasite thinks. maybe it's not a good idea. probably only good if it also comes with antiparasitics.
What would you say of a man who feels he is both the hunter and the prey?
> Nietzsche's master morality is in fact a kind of prey morality, whoops.
Bronze Age Mindset summarizes "Nietzschean"* morality in exactly the same predator-prey terms, because its an obvious extension.
*In quotes for a very good reason.
Prey are good at running away.
Prey are sometimes good at defecting on each other - the biggest ram can push all the other sheep away from the tasty lush grass, toward the dry short grass. The loser sheep still gets to eat, so in humans, who can change strategies, the bully and victim can change places. Repeatedly, even. Because grass is basically infinite, I understand prey don't feel that getting deviated upon is a big deal. They complain but it's mostly playing up in an attempt to manipulate the bully. They get very strident precisely because the bully cares so very little.
E.g. promiscuous women aren't bothered by murder - if one of their sons dies, she'll just have another. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Skip the infanticide this turn of the cycle. She wasn't much attached to her son in the first place - he kept eating her grass.
The only thing the plant needs is the soil they're already in and the sun. Hence, many plants can self-pollinate. They can afford pure solipsism. Every other plant is a cost...but they don't care about plants their own roots can't reach. Functionally they never meet mammals and only rarely meet insects. "Grow as much as you want as long as it's not where I can see it." They only care about not being an actively inviting meal, then they care about other plants.
For plants that do reproduce sexually, most are hermaphrodites. The few non-hermaphrodites have no need, nor ability, to be loyal to their husband/wife.
Root systems don't look especially impressive to aboveground mammals, but they're in a constant state of vicious internecine chemical warfare. For a plant, it's fine to declare war on your wife. Assuming you can even reach her. There's plenty of fish in the sea...and there's orders of magnitude more fronds of seaweed. Even if your plant-wife could or would withhold her flowers or whatever, who cares? A ridiculous level of promiscuity.
Some plants are so solipsistic they learn to cooperate, since they self-pollinated and all the nearby plants are clones.
Parasites are twisted pack/herd hybrids.
Proper predators cull the weak, strengthening everyone. Parasites target the strong, making them weak.
Parasites are inherently cowardly. If you think to attack them, they lose. They always use stealth and poison.
Parasites target the strong, because they have all the blood. Then they make the weak, so they can't fight back, to the detriment of both parasite and prey. Then they try to finesse the host so it doesn't become so weak it dies, prolonging the suffering.
Humans like to adulterate herd behaviours with atavistic pack stuff.
Farming, for example. It has pack-like traits. They have to work and strive, especially at the harvest. They have to strategize, especially during sowing. They are aware of scarcity. Each farmer has to pull his own weight. Have to be territorial.
Mainly it's herd behaviour, though. The field doesn't run away. Most plantings succeed. The farmer always plans for success, never for failure. Highly individualist. Due to conformity, the next farmer over probably plants the same thing you do, meaning if there's a failure, you all fail at the same time. Can't rely on each other. The weather just happens. Generally, the soil just happens. Nothing you can do about it.
Consequently the farmer has a prey relationship to the rancher. The purpose of agriculturalists is to get raided.
Democracy seems to be the idea that you want a predator "representing" a herd. The idea is the herd tramples the "wrong" predators and leaves the "right" one standing.
Herds are dumb. They don't appreciate the long-term effects of their choices. There's always more grass...why bother thinking about a time of no grass?
"What you absolutely can't do is carefully nurture and cultivate individual children while banning infanticide for mutants."
it just occurred to me this is what is currently done.
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