With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the necessity of peaceful interactions with strangers as society evolved.
This quote by Jared Diamond reflects on a significant change in human history when chiefdoms emerged. It underscores the importance of social cooperation and the ability to navigate relationships with unfamiliar individuals, marking a pivotal shift from instinctual violence to more complex social structures where coexistence became essential for survival and progress.
In practice
In a presentation about social evolution, this quote can illustrate the need for cooperation in diverse societies.
For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.
The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island isolated in the Pacific Ocean β once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There was no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world], we won't be able to get help.
But this was the only way of life that humans knew for their first 6m years on the planet. In giving it up over the past few thousand years, we have lost our vulnerability to disease and cold and wild animals, but we have also lost good ways to bring up children, look after old people, stave off diabetes and heart disease and understand the real dangers of everyday life.
We scientists have fantasies of being uniquely qualified to make great discoveries. Alas, reality is cruel: most of us are replaceable. For the vast majority of scientific contributions, if scientist X hadn't achieved it that year, scientist Y would have achieved the same result or something very similar soon thereafter.
All human societies go through fads in which they temporarily either adopt practices of little use or else abandon practices of considerable use.
AIDS and malaria and TB are national security issues. A worldwide program to get a start on dealing with these issues would cost about $25 billion... It's, what, a few months in Iraq.
You married me...but you didn't marry what you could make out of me.
I got a few marriage proposals in my 20s. I just wasn't ready. I just knew if I committed, I would've wound up doing something wrong, messing it up. I still felt like I had some living to do.
We don't do enough to help older people recognize how much they matter.
When I got my first TV set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships with other people.
I like to see people reunited, I like to see people run to each other, I like the kissing and the crying, I like the impatience, the stories that the mouth can't tell fast enough, the ears that aren't big enough, the eyes that can't take in all of the change, I like the hugging, the bringing together, the end of missing someone.
Asking women to respect themselves in order to βearnβ the right to be treated like a human being is total horseshit. But suggesting that you have the right to treat her exactly as you please because she didnβt adhere to your archaic views of feminine propriety is misogyny, plain and simple.
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