Our hard-wiring imposes limits

The late philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out that when people compare themselves to one another, they are disposed to feel one of two emotions -- guilt or envy. Guilt when someone has a lower station than you; envy when someone has a higher station than you. I would add a third to this mix: indignation. That's when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong. I refer to this complex of emotional responses to unequal life-stations as the "Stone Age Trinity."

I (and some others) think it has to do with the wiring of the brain -- a neural circuitry configured over millennia in our evolutionary past. In other words, I agree with the likes of some of the original evolutionary anthropologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby who, in their Primer on Evolutionary Psychology, write:

"The environment that humans -- and, therefore, human minds -- evolved in was very different from our modern environment. Our ancestors spent well over 99 percent of our species' evolutionary history living in hunter-gatherer societies. That means that our forebears lived in small, nomadic bands of a few dozen individuals who got all of their food each day by gathering plants or by hunting animals. Each of our ancestors was, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted an entire lifetime, and this way of life endured for most of the last 10 million years."

Now, folks who've encountered Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point may recall the "Magic Number 150." This number seems to be a kind of cut-off point for the simpler forms of human organization. Gladwell reminds us that communal societies -- like those our ancestors lived in, or in any human group for that matter -- tend to break down at about 150. Such is perhaps due to our limited brain capacity to know any more people that intimately, but it's also due to the breakdown of reciprocal relationships like those discussed above -- after a certain number (again, around 150).

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Had anyone known about this circa 1848, someone might have told Karl Marx that his theory could work, but only up to the Magic Number. Turns out, we had to go through 150 years of misery, totalitarianism and broken humanity to learn the limits of communism. And even though we've grasped many of these intellectual and practical lessons, Folk Marxism persists -- and so also does the Stone Age Trinity. And these likely reinforce each other.