>>7293538Its interesting you bring up ghengis khan.
When people try to give examples of 'functional egalitarianism', it is always things in extreme contexts. Frontiersmen, wartime economies, barbarian tribes, et cetera et cetera.
What all of these things have in common is that they are all *intimately grappled with being*. They are in contexts where A. Praxis is in many ways simplified, the direction obvious. And more importantly B. *the consequences of failure* are both swift, and often final.
In other words, they could *afford* not to consider such things, get away in spite of it, because when they didn't, *reality took care of it for them*.
Civilization, however, insulates man from reality. And so man must step in to consciously apply the rules of nature, in natures stead.
Man often fails in this endeavor though; people make bad choices if they can afford them, and civilization provides much surplus capital. When man is not in fear of his life, he is usually next in fear of his reputation. Man is a social animal, he desires validation. One of the easiest sources of validation is the appearance of holiness, and one of the easiest ways to appear holy is to mouth reprobrate platitudes of 'universal love', and appear concerned with garbage in human guise.
The kind of life that defies entropy on a local level is so often offensive to modernized sensibilities. In truth, it was often offensive to man sensibilities in past times too, but in past times they had the benefit of reality taking more of the choice out of their hands. That hoary phrase, 'Nature, red in tooth and claw,' was coined by the poet alfred lord tennyson, it was not a term of endearment.
The old law of gnon: 'the penalty for stupidity is death.' It is actually a very neat trap, man evolves only just enough intellect inorder to start civilization in the environment he finds himself in. After that, the selection pressures change, he thinks himself the master of his world, the old laws over-turned forever. He who would be devoured by red toothed nature now finds himself subsidised; "When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins." Indeed, it is his very defiance of nature that sets the stage for its riotous return; civilization eats that which makes civilization possible.
In time the house of cards topples, the great empire defeated not by war, but by peace. Prolonging the end through clever artifice, raising the malthusian limits ever higher, oft means the eventual fall is that much more spectacular. So as always the universe tends towards the more stable point, and the cycle continues; from the cradle of the old law a new nobility emerges, and thinks to themselves: 'this time is different.'
