>>36125>Our "higher" qualities are just human instincts No they are not. Humanity was not born with that capability. While our instincts allow us vague concepts of competition and cooperation, the ability to be reasonable and logical and ignore emotion is much harder
>Aristotle is as smart as any thinker today. Aristotle
A) Would be an outlier, he is not representative of the entire human population of his time
B) Is an individual, the general levels of intelligence has grown over human history because WE have grown and improved and become more or less more civilized, even if it isn't unitary.
>This only occurs after slavery is introduced Absolute fucking ahistorical burger revisionism. Human social dynamics, including male dominance arose from natural material realities - hominid males are sexually dimorphic, being stronger, more aggressive, larger etc. Which meant that they took charge of their groups and over females, thus in early hunter-gatherer societies women were almost exclusively gatherers and homemakers, while the males were the ones hunting and killing, because that was the more physically taxing work. This sort of dynamic can be seen in Native American societies prior to Western Colonization diluting their culture. American Indians did not have slavery, or most of them did not, but they still had this male dominated society and while women could hunt or otherwise act in roles traditionally held by male Braves and chieftains - the exceptions to the rule. Native American societies were male dominated as were almost all human societies until the past few centuries, because human rights can only exist in a society developed enough to actually care to enforce entirely metaphysical rules on the treatment of others. Callousness and rudeness only have meaning, because society as an existance gives them meaning for example, just as any other forms of manners, it is an unspoken rule we created to keep a civil tongue in our heads.
Similar to Native American Indians, numerous African tribes remained tribalistic hunter-gatherers for a long time, and most of them still had male dominated societies. In some rare cases things were more equal, more out of the lack of resources and very small size of their communities than anything else. There is a wild-tribe on a remote Indo-Pacific Island that hasn't had contact with the outside world for centuries. Their warriors are all male, females all live in small, barely existant villages they live in.
>following from primitive communism Right… primitive communism, with hierarchies! The most basic ape groups have hierarchies with a dominant male and several other top-males under him who dominate other males and females and adolescents. There is anthropological evidence to suggest early hominids were also like this and so were the first Homo Sapiens. A trait that further went on to continue into the first societies and civilizations that arose.
>events are ways to point to things which appear to be "outside" the system though, when they are just eruptions from within.A Nuclear bomb is not an eruption from within a system unless you want to play at some pseudo-philosophical waxing about mankind destroying itself. A human society falling into chaos is a sort of apocalypse, but humanity while on a decline hasn't fallen yet.
>A view that we live violent lives is a more proper critique In what sense? This liberal expansion of the term violence has made violence itself lose meaning, like many other words reinterpreted by various liberal ideologues and demagogues.
>"We live in an apocalypse", hence the semantics.We'll be living in an apocalypse when the government begins to fall apart. "We live in a dystopia" is the correct term.