Quotes About Societies

In fact, all known societies above the very primitive level have been slave societies—even many of the Northwest American Indian tribes had slaves long before Columbus's voyage.46 Amid this universal slavery, only one civilization ever rejected human bondage: Christendom. And it did it twice!

The world's societies suffer from the current cult of victimization because its subtle dogma holds that circumstances and other people prevent you from achieving your goals.

If we don't harness their potential for good, their societies will continue to reap their capacity for evil.

Political ideologies focusing in particular on what they call 'cultural nationalism'—and this is common to many societies apart from the Indian—blatantly exploit history.

Adivasi societies are not fossilized societies. The historical legitimacy of groups such as forest tribes lies in recognizing their way of life and in analysing the signifi-cance of their contribution to the creation of Indian culture since early times. Given that the precise meaning of the term 'tribe' remains controversial and is not uniformly defined, it becomes even more difficult to deduce an authentic history.

some American anthropologists, who were already warning before the end of the 1960s that the term 'witchcraft' was being used as a label for phenomena that differed radically between societies.

imposition of European terms and concepts on studies of other societies and the offering of comparisons between those societies which the imposition of the terms concerned made easier.

Western historians now needed to back off from comparisons with extra-European cultures and concentrate on their own societies, for which their terminology was native and so well suited.

We prefer to imagine brutal wars and atrocities as events that "just happen" every now and then, much like tornadoes or lightning strikes; this metaphor suggests that we can't generalize from them, since they are radically discontinuous with ordinary life. But wars and atrocities do not "just happen": societies and individuals slide into them, little by little, one tiny decision or omission at a time. (p214)

In so-called primitive societies there are two words for power, mana and taboo: the power which creates and the power which destroys; the power which is benign and the power which is malign. Odd that we have retained in our vocabulary the word for dangerous power, taboo, and have lost mana.

If whole societies and polities are to adapt then the necessary decisions will need to be made collectively, within political institutions, as happens in wartime or national emergencies. After all, isn't that what politics, in its most fundamental form, is about? Collective survival and the preservation of the body politic?

Societies in decline have no use for visionaries.

What is not generally remembered is that Prohibition was an explicitly religious exercise, being the joint product of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the pious lobbying of certain Protestant missionary societies.

Ethics are important because they give direction to people and societies who have some sense that they cannot flourish without being moral.

The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.

Societies are composed of individuals and are good only insofar as they help individuals to realize their potentialities and to lead a happy and creative life.

Nevertheless, an iron rule exists in genetic social evolution. It is that selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, while groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals. The victory can never be complete; the balance of selection pressures cannot move to either extreme. If individual selection were to dominate, societies would dissolve. If group selection were to dominate, human groups would come to resemble ant colonies.

It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species' maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.

S]elfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members. (63)

Within groups selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals, but groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals.

selfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members.

Even in the most low-tech societies, however, humans are completely helpless without tools and the creative insights that generate them. We need creativity simply to function.

Human rights activists often talk about equality in whatever sense; however, equality neither existed, nor it exists and never be since it contradicts the nature and trend of societies.

Dado que el mundo es de una complejidad pavorosa, una buena historia de ficción lo simplifica y lo hace inteligible. La ficción ayuda a largo plazo a poner las cosas en su sitio. Al final, lo que sabemos de las sociedades lo sabemos a través de ella a lo largo del tiempo.