re: #512 Fat Bastard Vegetarian

Heh. As an example, this is something I’ve been thinking about.

The researcher Sapolsky is one of my favorite scientists and writers. He does research into the effect of stress on the immune system, and behavior on stress, etc. etc.

He followed a troop of baboons to do this research. The baboons were assholes. The baboons that were the most successful were the most abusive, and abuse traveled down the chain; a baboon would whack another baboon, that baboon would hit a smaller one, the smaller one would hit a female, the female would hit another female, etc.

And the ones at the shit end of the scale got sick more often, since they were constantly stressed out. Meanwhile, the assholes had much less stress. There were some of the male baboons who used teamwork and ‘friendship’— mutual grooming— to help lower their stress and to gain some advantage in mating, but they were not as successful as the abusive males.

Then the alpha males discovered a new food source— a garbage dump. They wouldn’t let anyone else eat there, would savagely attack them if they tried. And eventually, they ate tuberculosis-tainted meat. And died. All of them.

Every asshole abusive male died. The only ones who survived were the consensus-builders, the friendly guys, the mutual groomers. And something amazing happened; those guys stayed that way. They didn’t become abusive themselves. And when male baboons joined the troop, they adapted to its culture, they didn’t dominate through abuse. If they tried, the team would resist them and often eject them. Abuse virtually disappeared from the tribe.

And all that had to happen was for all the assholes who thought that life is better if you pass along your pain, if you take out your frustration on other people, all that had to happen was for all of them to die.