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Since this is a vanity site, you could call everything "opinions". I guess I wanted to give people some indication that this section has more controversial stuff: the sort of thing one is encouraged not to discuss at a dinner party because the guests will come to blows.

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2006 Feb 18 [ Sat ]

More about the meaning of games, the sequel (my theory of history)

I recently posted about the human weakness for games representing a dangerous vulnerability in the human mind which may already be being abused in unexamined ways: www.panix.com [http://www.panix.com/~dannyw/weblog/Opinions/Society/games02.html]

At the time I had no idea *why* humans have this weak point. Since then however I remembered something else I've posted about: if predators always try to breed and consume at the maximum rate, they are vulnerable to catastrophic crashes in population when they eliminate their prey species. And one can say games=play.

So it is very striking that every predator animal spends a great deal of its time in play, dominance rituals and just lying around sleeping, while prey animals all eat and breed as fast as they can. I think it would be a reasonable guess that humans, as a predator species (although my own sabre-tooth-tiger-trapping skills happen to be rather limited) are hard-wired to limit their normal "cruising" efficiency in various ways just like lions, wolves and otters do.

On the other hand bird and insect predators do *not* have any form of play that I ever heard of. Perhaps the triggers which induce the "limiter" to cut in are rather subtle and difficult for an insect/bird brain to discriminate.

However, I would have thought that the triggers would *not* have to be very subtle. It could be just something like "am I well fed? Are there a lot of people around me?" (I'm guessing that the people would also need to be close to one's own genotype, too.) That kind of thing could work off nothing more high-level than pheromones.

So when people started to gather in cities, they presumably started to have fewer children and sit around drinking all day. That probably isn't what ruthless leader types wanted, so they had to invent crap like religion to make the workers keep working.

I've always thought that the world had all the technology at the *beginning* of the twentieth century to make the world a paradise. Sure, most of us would probably not say no to penicillin among other things, but basically we could have been a lot happier by 1930 than we are now. Looking at it from this predator-game loop aspect, our ruthless leaders seem to have decided that unless *all* human societies had balanced levels of lotus-eaters, the cruellest and most "efficient" would eventually eliminate *them*. So they invented the conflict between capitalism, socialism and fascism to entertain us and make it look like we all had to work extra hard, when in fact it was only necessary if you think maintaining the ruthless leader class is necessary. Bread and circuses.

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