Are libertarians evolutionary survivors - living dinosaurs in a sense? (EDITED!)

Last edited Sun Aug 31, 2014, 10:46 AM - Edit history (1)

Lately, I'm been in close contact with a Libertarian friend. I've been an active commentator on his blog.
So, I've been learning a lot about their views about the world (hint - A lot of them are based on fantasy)

I've also been reading and watching documentaries about our closest relatives - the great apes and how close they are and how they have much of our cultural and technological grasp and they have the potential to make great leaps soon in the future. They are already hunting with spears of their own construction and cooperate and have cultural events just for pleasure - social pool parties..

Anyway, what keeps them from joining us is a very few differences, or we would be living and working with them before long.

1 = most important = NO IMPULSE CONTROL!
2 Lack of impulse control make it difficult to cooperate on a project
3 A high priority to teach and learn is no where near the level it is in humans, or dogs for that matter.

One researcher pointed out that we've bred out the chimpy-types in our species and kept the docile cooperative ones. This has historically been done either through natural selection (violent people tend to die violently) and through capital punishment.

Same as we did with dogs. Only sweet, eager to teach pups were allowed to breed. Mean dogs get neutered or worse.

If you fill a 747 with chimps instead of humans and fly it from London to New York, only a handful of chimpanzees would survive the journey. We do this all day every day and are mostly successful.

We've been conditioned to tolerate strangers we don't know sitting nearby, possibly engaging in annoying behavior.
Our inner chimp might be screeching but we smile and grind our teeth and try to ignore it.

So anyway. Are Libertarians chimpy? They don't like to cooperate. They fetishize instruments of death and fantasize about using them.

Libertarians are anti cooperation. Doing anything as a community makes their skin itch.

But what I really wonder is how they feel about the death penalty.

Historically, the DP was used to weed the "chimp" out of our gene pool.

Now we "enlightened ones" want to end the death penalty. For good reasons - I will always be anti the DP for a variety of reasons.

But I am curious about the Libertarian stance of the DP: It is the ultimate expression of State Power over the individual, so on that level, I would think that they would be anti-DP.
Also, as a tool to bring a new norm of behavior that is different from the norm of the Libertarian ideal, I would think they would be against it as well.
On the other hand, I think it appeals to their impulse for revenge, bloody revenge, for behavior that angers them.

Can they move beyond the chimp impulse to see the long-term advantage?
This is something animal behaviorists say that actual chimps cannot do without outside help.

For example: candy has to be represented symbolically before a chimp can resist reaching for an immediate short term reward for a larger, long-term reward.

This ends my first experiment in waiting for ambien to kick in. Not too long as it turns out!
Hope I made some bit of sense. My feeling is that society continues to find ways to be ever further connected that the Libertarian types are going to get more and more "chimpy" Fortunately and animal behaviorists will say that their long-term goal setting is weak, and they trust no on but very close family relationships

There was lots more brilliant commentary to come, but the pill kicked in too soon. MAYBE NEXT TIME

On edit: corrected the Ambien induced poor typing and clarified some of my ideas.

fALLING ACCTUALLY ASLEEP NOW, WILL ASSES IN MORNING....