Rousseau

Rousseau, the philosopher, was a notorious libertine. He drank. He had a great deal of sex with a great many women. For that reason, I have always had a fondness for him. The man also speaks to me, centuries dead, for a more important and universal reason. He addressed the ubiquitous dilemma of human power- "Man is born free, and is everywhere in chains. This or that man may regard himself as a master of others but he is more a slave than they." These are the first words of the social contract.

Why is it that my hunter-gatherer ancestors, bucolically going about their business of gathering roots in a primeval forest, were forced to abandon their freedom for the drudgery of life under the implied threat of a police baton. Oh yes, it was my sword-carrying, horn-helmeted, Celtic ancestors that did it...by virtue of their own existence.

The only true mentor I had at UCLA was a man named Dr. Robert Boyd. He used Rousseau's Stag Hunt as an example of why animal societies exist out of self-interest alone.

Freedom at birth is only theoretical. In fact, we are born into social obligations. This applies to social insects as well. A halictid bee (Halictus rubicundus, for the sake of argument) born under one set of circumstances is destined to become a worker, another, a queen, of sorts. Unlike humans, or honeybees for that matter, halictids of certain species can survive if they go it alone. Alternately, they may choose to serve the greater good of the family. There are very few solitary humans.

Rousseau states bluntly that the olderst of all societies, and the only natural one, is the family. This is probably true even in the evolutionary sense, because kin selection is such a powerful mechanism driving the evolution of social behavior/ He states that when children are grown, they are free of any obligation to obey their father, and he is free of any obligation to raise them. Rousseau was, of course, a sexist.

Most often, in the animal kingdom, families revolve around the mother.

To obey one's parents is entirely a matter of self-interest. In the evolutionary sense, so is the act of raising them rather than abandoning them. Obedient or not, they carry our genes. The trick is to manipulate certain children into raising more of one's own children, rather than running off and starting their own families. This is how, in animal societies, social organizations can exist without a specific "agreement" of the weak to serve the mighty. Workers are born workers, in an ant colony, because their mother intentionally undernourished them.

Ant colonies, social bee colonies, social wasp colonies-all sisterhoods of the undernourished. Did I mention my loathing for the new film, Bee Movie, because of the male protagonist?

Males can be compelled to serve too. A Florida scrub jay male, lacking reproductive opportunities of its own, will stay with its mother and father to become a "helper at the nest", raising additional siblings at its own expense. This behavior is instinctive, and driven by kin selection. In a sense, it is "voluntary", because when circumstances are favorable to the establishment of new territories, the male helper will leave the nest and establish a family of his own. Certain bees and wasps take it a bit farther, providing offspring with limited food, so that they have no chance of reproducing on their own. This "parental manipulation" is the genesis of eusociality.

Basically, I am saying that if you have a daughter, perhaps a four-year-old, you should consider starving them. This is simply to point out that the family is the oldest, and only, insect society. If we had all the right instincts, we too could be eusocial, by underfeeding and reproductively castrating our children.