Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

Because there are/have been cultures without sexism. There have never been cultures without something like prestige, AFAIK.

Is that true? Prestige seems to require a fairly advanced civilisation, no?

Hard to agree with that. Aren't dog packs basically governed by a form of prestige?

I don't think strength is the same thing as prestige.

Not being an animal pychologist I can't get into that analogy in depth but I really think you're off base here when it comes to humans. Prestige based valuation has been fundamental to human culture since as far as back as we have records. There's nothing advanced about it.

Hunter-gather communities didn't have a concept of prestige. Social hierarchy came about during the agricultural revolution, early communities were more classless. In bonobo society hierarchy exists but it's not as prominent and they are more philopatric. (Our closest cousins)

I'm not sure we know much about whether early hunter-gatherer communities had something like prestige as we're discussing it here. But I think we're drifting off topic. I agree entirely that prestige has negative aspects and we should work to mitigate the prestige-hyping.

Yup, to clarify, when I used social hierarchy twice, it referred to two different phenomena. Social organisation in bonobo society is without class (in the classical sense), but there exists a flexible hierarchy to allow for decisions to be made and resources to be distributed.