Key Ideas
3 Key Lessons:
- Humans are unequal by nature, fighting that would mean giving up freedom.
- Competition is something that’s hardwired into our genes. Humans tend to only cooperate because it gives them a competitive edge, whether that’s in units of families, communities, companies or nations.
- Based on genetics alone, we are all fundamentally different from the moment we’re born. No matter how much we train our bodies and brains, it does us no good to push equalities within societies to an extreme.
- The more complex communities get, the more specialization they require, so the only way to keep up equality is to restrict human freedom.
- That’s why socialist systems rarely work, because only when you allow power, wealth and influence to be distributed unequally do you create enough freedom for an economy or nation to flourish and progress.
- The evolution of humans was a social one, not a biological one.
- If you took someone out of Ancient Greece and placed them in 2016, they could still survive just fine. The huge difference in their behavior would only be a cultural one. The basic desires won't change.
- Cultural changes are a result of trial and error. Since the dawn of mankind, people have put forward ideas in various forms, some of which have sunk into the hearts of millions of people (like Christian religion or Facebook), while others have been discarded (like Nazism).
- War is a more natural state than peace.
- War is also a common state of mankind. This is something that’s not obvious, and you might not want to hear it, but it’s true. Throughout history, earth has been free of war of any kind less than 10% of the time.
- States are nothing but aggregates of individuals, which means they also behave like people. So when a state runs out of oil, land or food, it’s natural next move is to go to war with another state to battle for these resources.
- The only reason states unite is to fight off even bigger threats, which rarely happens. It’s not war that’s weird, peace is what’s unnatural and that’s why it’s so hard to keep.
https://twitter.com/BenMcC/status/969362332370354176