Animal versus human societies

This is a comparison between animals and humans on their political and organisational ability. It's an opinion, an idea.

Animals

• Many animals are biologically DNA-programmed to act in a certain way in their society (instinctual behaviour).
• Ants, bees, birds, fishes, et cetera, can organise in groups/nests by themselves, without oppressing each other.
• Animals organised in societies to become stronger than non-social animals and ensure their survival in the nature.
• Animals lived for millions of years and evolutionary process made them not to need social processes and leaders.
• The ants have a society that has no leaders, but with social classes. The ant society is DNA-programmed. No ant will ever think about getting more food than the other ants and in fact all ants share their food happily with ants from the same nest without competing, but they do enslave and make war with other nests. Some ant species avoid to compete or make war with any other ants, and some of them build huge networks of friendly nests that span many kilometers. Ants cultivate plants and other animals (insects).
• Some social insects, like the wasps, become mad in winter and kill each other inside their nest. It may be a kind of social suicide before the cold comes.
• The ant has not been changed in 150 million years.

Humans

• Humans are not biologically or DNA-programmed to act in the society, they need education and social programming.
• Humans build huge cities, big states, structured communities and complex organisations with rules and policies.
• The human society is so complex that a legal system was developed. The legal system needs specially-educated humans in order to run, that is, solicitors, police officers, et cetera.
• Humans, because they are not biologically programmed, cannot peacefully accept the social class paradigm that many social insects live with. Poor humans want to become rich and rich humans want to become even more rich by oppressing the poor.
• Humans organised in societies to become stronger than non-social animals and ensure their survival in the nature.
• Modern humans have existed only for a few hundred thousand years. Humans in any form have lived for about 2.4 million years.
• When science developed in Ancient Greece, the fall of the Roman Empire and the oppression of the Christian Church caused the human society to experience an awful dark age full of superstition, ignorance, oppression, poverty, stupidity. When the Church fell out of power, scientific and technological development improved. Science advances only in a free society. Oppression leads to a loss of technological advantage.
• A society without leaders is at least as good as its individuals.
• Humans without education, when left living without leaders, tend not to know how to function in society and disregard the value of their freedom. This leads to the formation of states and/or warlordism.
• Humans with good education when living without leaders can create a much better and advanced society.
• Anarchic human societies need good education to function. Without extensive education an anarchic community will fail. Good education means that every individual must be a philosopher, a scientist and a statesman. When no leaders exist, every individual must know how to be a leader and how a community needs to be organised.
• The terms democracy and democratic were derogatory in the Dark Ages because of the propaganda of kings and churches.
• Today the terms anarchy and anarchist are often regarded as derogatory, usually by people who never seriously explored anarchist thought.

Conclusions

• Animals do it better because they had hundeds of millions of years to achieve their advanced DNA-based social organisation.
• Humans can't do it unless they develop an advanced educational system. Human DNA does not contain instructions for dealing with complex social organisational issues.

A Transhumanist Future?

• Humans can import DNA instructions for dealing with complex organisational and social issues using genetic engineering. Socialist anarchic communities with genetic programming devices could insert special DNA instructions to make newborns be social-friendly, not to claim ownership, not to make war, be cooperative with others, etc! However, enforcement of these traits is not feasible, since that would lead to the negation of a basic aspect that makes humans persons: free will.

Anarchopedia as a model

• As was exposed in this article, culture is the most critical aspect in leader-less human societies (even more so in socialist and anarchic ones). A community devoted to the collection, organization and pubblication of information such as Anarchopedia could therefore be an ideal testing ground for anarchism.

Notice

No copyright is claimed for this work. It's public domain. No need to give attribution, just spread the idea and modify it as you like.

Links

• - similar article in Italian