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.
It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they're physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.
I work for him despite his faults and he lets me work for him despite my deficiencies.
With all my fans I got a family again.
We love those who know the worst of us and don't turn their faces away.
So the opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.
My yardstick is how somebody treats me.
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