Out in Vancouver archaeologists have been excavating an old site and some anthropologists have been trying to analyse what they have found to shed light on our innate ideas of fairness. What they think they found was a people who were very egalitarian with no class or social divisions until they settled an area where the salmon were plentiful and food scarcity became a thing of the past. Then they discovered evidence of individuals protecting certain areas of the river, giving food away in feasts to attract friends as ‘cronies’, they could count on and price fixing of brides. These negative attributes were not fought because no one was starving.
Further experiments on children as young as fifteen months have used observation to demonstrate our innate ability to know when someone is being treated fairly in the division of food stuffs. And they have shown that while we are selfish at age three by the age of eight we have a developed sense of fair distribution.
The age three interest me because that is the age when highly intelligent children have been shown to start to lie.
But the idea that we get lazy about social dynamics when we eat well is born out in revolutions which have always had elements of deprivation and hunger in them across the world.
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