You do make good posts, sadlife. Don't sell yourself short. Sometimes the lack of high flying intellectual words and wordings keeps the intellectuals real. The ivory tower is always pretty, but the real world is beyond its gates.

My morals are my own and apparently unique - I have no idea where they came from or why I even have them.

All morals are own. Predestination, religiosly. Or, scientifically, no two organisms are the same.



On to your post:

Rousseau and Engels are wrong. But not because Rousseau and Engels are wrong, their direct opposition is right.

[Rousseau: good savage. Engels: primitive communism]

(I have previosly made this point re: Objectivist anti-primitivism)

Humans didn't start out with morals or religion or science. Totally uncivilized, we savagely took what we needed or even wanted.

This is attractive to say, but false.

We do not observe that behavior in any animal. There is no reason to suppoze this behavior would have evolved in proto-hoomins or early hoomins.

We like to say it because it allows us to portray ourselves as civilized and our own epoch as better. It doesn't matter, for this, what we attribute the improvement to. Some will attribute it to better science, some to better technology (not exactly the same thing,) some to improvement in material and economic standards; and yes, some to the diffusion of the known mainstream religions (while the narrative is very explicit in this sense in Christianity and Islam, it is also there in Hinduism and Buddhism,) and I would argue that along with religions we could also include ostensibly secular ideologies, because in treating them as linear progress from savagery they are not different from how the aforementioned religions view their mission: human rights, democracy, socialism (yes, socialism too,) liberalism and libertarianism…

Generally speaking, I do not believe history has that clearly and unmistakably linear component anywhere. Sure, today we do have better science, better technology, better material standards, more universalistic religions, and several broadly universalistic prima facie non-religios ideologies; all of which probably improve our lives in measurable ways. But I really do not think that the way we behave today is either significantly better or significantly worse than it was in the Neolithic, or in the Paleolithic, or even before Homo sapiens stages. I think we are the same overall; and that good and bad (we have not defined good and bad, but generally speaking, any behavior we see today) always existed in the same proportions and in the same ways.

There is no evidence for caveman rapists anywhere. And it makes no sense with what we know of other animals' sexualities, or our own in history since the Neolithic for that matter.

I could further analyze the game theory involved in the incentives to rape and the social dynamic which it would produce, but that is beyond the scope of your post as I understand it.

Men raped enough fertile women to populate rapidly.

Not so. Population increases are and always were directly linked to resorces available. There are three effects at work for this to happen, all because more resorces mean better nutrition: With more resorces, women are more fertile, children are more likely to survive until fertile age, and men are less likely to kill each other over resorce access. Generally speaking, hunter-gatherers sustained a smaller population than shepherds did, shepherds than agriculturalists, agriculturalists than industrialists, and now industrialists than post-industrialists. Each one of these steps brought about population explosions, and even improvements in technology within each step created bursts of population increase.

(Of course, the switch to post-industrialism seems to be the exception: the only production leap which reduces, instead of increasing, population. Which, yes, terrifies me to no end. There is still no good explanation for this phenomenon which isn't about culture, though.)

Because, before industrialism at least, production was inextricably linked to the conditions of a natural environment, some environments never increased population beyond a comparatively small density: polar areas, deserts, small islands, inaccessible rainforests, and places without native domesticateable work animals. This explains why the temperate area from Western Europe to Eastern Asia was always the most densely populated part of the world, while sub-Saharan Africa, Australia and the Americas never matched them. (Asia is more populated than Europe as an effect of the Black Death.)

Then we had to learn to live together in groups that included people that were outside our immediate sexual family.

Now this part is true. And it is the part of the Rousseau and Engels analysis which is true. And yes, it is a complete game changer, as now the survival of the tribe is no longer equivalent to the survival of the family, muddling the original genetic incentives.

Although neighbor attacks continued, they were not powerful enough and our numbers grew rapidly.

Historically, barbarians have always been able to destroy centralized empires. Several reasons for it. The point is that no, neighbors are more often than not powerful enough.

As said above, numbers increased through technological improvement, not new or better rules.

Today our numbers have exceeded the planets' ability to adequately support us. We are TOO MANY now.

This is false. We already produce enough to sustain every human on the planet and even send aid to the aliens. And technological improvement is leading to producing ever more while using ever less inputs (ground, air, sunlight, water…) What happens is that it is badly distributed. A lot simply goes to waste in the First World. Trade barriers and subsidies, both in the First and Third World, perpetuate the situation and make a better distribution impossible in the short term without radical change.

homos, pedos, zoo-os (??), jerk-offs, etc. have probably always existed in the soup but not until recently have they become so important.

This is also just a product of numbers. Suppoze 5% of all hoomins are one of any non-reproductive sexualities (a conservative estimate, but let's run it.) 5% of a tribe of 100 are 5 individuals. 5 weirdos in a tribe of 100 doesn't seem like much. 5 individuals would also be unable to really create any subculture. Maybe they wouldn't even like each other!

But 5% of a city of 1 million are 50k. 50k weirdos can gather together and make a parade, can gather in a neighborhood and create a subculture. And if any two or three don't like each other, there are other 49k who they can meet.

The 5% was always a 5%. But in a tribe of 100 it wasn't visible as an independent force. In a city of 1 million, the 5% surely is visible and surely can become independently important.

But, uh-oh, the same rules are in place that were used to grow the population. And the religions are still active that invented morals against non-reproductive sex, again to grow the population.

This is a very narrow interpretation.

By and large, prohibitions on non-reproductive sex are not about increasing population. (This is proven by the lack of rules against abortion or infanticide in most religions - again Christianity and Islam being the largest, albeit not only, exceptions) They are about keeping the family unit stable and re-creatable with every generation. Non-reproductive sexualities have three big problems: one, that they do not create a next generation of workers. Without young workers, when the elders can no longer handle the same workload, either capital goes idle (leading to society-level economic stagnation,) capital has to be sold or is robbed (leading to the elders going poorer and poorer,) or unrelated workers have to be hired (at a greater cost than keeping it in the family, thus reducing profits; increasing the danger of transfer of capital outside the family, even by force; and if they are not just unrelated, but from elsewhere, possibly leading to tribal death by assimilation and cultural shift, as happened in parts of Europe and North Africa first by Romanization and then by de-Romanization.) And two, that they still create a generation of elders that have to be sustained by others. If they had reproduced, they could be sustained by their children and grandchildren. But if they did not, they either become a burden on society entire or have to resort to becoming beggars. Today the First World produces enough wealth that it can give itself the luxury of pensioning all its elders, rendering the need for reproduction for old age sustenance moot. But this is a historical exception. Finally, even before that happens, non-reproductive sexualities easily create inheritance conflicts: siblings will want to reduce the inheritance of their non-reproductive siblings "because I need it more for my children" and nephews and nieces will want to become the inheritors of their non-reproductive uncles and aunts and will try to silvertongue their way to it. And we know how this goes.

Sure enough, a side effect of frowning upon non-reproductive sexualities is that reproduction is enhanced. But the most important aspect was not to increase population as to the effects on inheritance and old age sustenance.

My message is to encourage patience, tolerance, love and understanding in our debates and disagreements. It's so important that the future of our species and the planet itself, to some degree, just might depend on it.

Sure!

That's why I love you!