Post #1847251

This is an excellent question IMO, and I'm sure you'll receive plenty of excellent (and energetic) responses, but I do want to point out something which chronically gets overlooked, as part of these discussions. Ready? *Homo sapiens* is traditionally a tribal, social, and clan-based animal, not unlike our cousin chimpanzees, and others such as wolf & dog packs, elephant herds, parrot flocks, and a couple other examples. Our organisation upon such likely goes back at least 2.4Myrs, when biologists and those in related fields first classified "Homo" as a distinct genus. But arguably, such goes back perhaps as long as our common ancestor of chimps, maybe 7Myrs ago or so. Or earlier! My point is-- modern humans' natural state is to exist in smallish, commune-like situations, and that is a fact. That's literally in our DNA upon a multitude of levels, and literally spans the entire length of *H. sapiens* ~300Kyr history. Meaning? That we're *naturally* communists of a kind, and my take on "socialism" is that it's roughly an attempt to make our traditional style work, when organised upon regional and national levels. **THAT SAID**: I think it's good to also observe how things happen in the wild. For example, my mentors Robert Sapolski and Jane Goodall famously observed our fellow apes & monkeys being total assholes towards each other, amidst hierarchy-type situations. It's a complicated discussion, anyway, and maybe not hard to imagine why so many of our fellow rich, needy, powerful human monkeys are such total, narcissistic assholes towards everyone else.