Reputation is a Matter of Life and Death Among Hunter Gatherers

Yeah, the incremental progress that we achieve as a civilization is, it's amazing but also so frustratingly slow that no one, I mean no one I've ever talked to thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime where there's no war. No one. No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime when there's no murder. No one thinks there's going to be a moment in our lifetime when there's no rape. Where we just figure it out. Like I'm pretty confident if it was just the three of us forever, no one would rape anybody, no one would murder anybody. Just the three of us? Just the three of us. I sure hope not. But you know what I'm saying? Because I'm probably the victim here. Like you know what I'm saying? What number of people, how many people do they have to be before one of those things becomes a possibility? If you have a group of close friends, a group of close friends who are good communicators and good, honest, healthy, friendly people can live together. And you know whatever issues you might have with someone not doing the dishes or someone forgetting to put back your lawnmower or whatever the fucking is, you could work that out. It's no big deal. Like what is the number of people? 150. Okay. That's Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number, yeah. I'm sure you've heard about that. Yeah, I mean that might really be it. That might really be what we're programmed for. That's what Hunter Gather, that's where Hunter Gather groups always splinter. Or they never get beyond that. And I think that's why because you know, a hunter-gatherer group which is egalitarian and sharing and cooperative and all that, by necessity, right, because that's how our ancestors survived is by taking care of each other, mitigating risk. You need reputational damage. And if everyone doesn't know everyone, reputational damage is no longer effective. So if you, let's say you go and you're a good hunter and you kill an antelope and then you don't share it and you just keep it for yourself, that's not going to go over real well with a hunter-gatherer group. You're going to be ridiculed, chastised, maybe expelled from the group, maybe have a hunting accident and die because that hoarding, selfish behavior is extremely taboo in a hunter-gatherer society. Whereas, you know, you look at our society where reputational damage is no longer functional outside of your group of friends, as long as you're good to your friends, your golfing buddies, you can screw the rest of the world. You can not pay your contractors for years and become president. Everyone in New York, I worked in real estate in New York in the 80s, everyone knew who that guy was and what he was up to and you couldn't trust him. He was full of shit and they ripped everybody off. But that's how business works in New York. Even the company I was working for is really interesting to see how your leverage increased when you owed somebody a lot of money. You know, is there's that truism, if you owe someone five bucks, you have a problem, if you owe them a million bucks, they have a problem. You know, you really see that. Yeah, I think it's 150 is the cutoff for how many people we can keep track of, I think. Dunbar's number has proved to be pretty accurate. Well, it seems to be what we evolved to sort of be accustomed to, right? Yeah. That's the number of people. Well, that's the neocortex. You know, Dunbar was looking at the brain anatomy of different primates and by looking at the proportion of a neocortex to the rest of the brain, he predicted the maximum social size of those primates of each of the species. Wow. And that's how he came to the estimate of 150 for humans. And then they went and looked at people that they did, you know, data collection. That's so crazy. Yeah. That they can do the physical size of something like that. There's a direct correlation, like the direct correlation between the size of primates' testicles and the amount of promiscuous females in the area. You've read Sex of Dawn, Joe. Yes, I have. Finally. I read it a long time ago, man. I read it a long time ago.