Howdy folks, little continuation from my earlier blog post 'The Use of History', prompted by watching 'Life Story' and my general thinking as to why mankind seems to have a lust for killing one another.
If you look at nature then competition rules the day. Whether it be over food, home, mates or just to establish who is the more powerful, there is always competition. Those that excel at competition thrive and their descendants are placed well to thrive. Those that struggle at competition are left by the way side.
No matter how you look at it, if you strip away mankind's tendency to root for the underdog, then competition and the need to compete rules the day.
Factoring this into my observations of the human race, has rather clarified something. If you want a society where people are the most honest and trusting of one another then you need to go some where like the Arctic circle or the plains of the Maasai Mara. The reason? Because if you are not honest with one another, if you cannot trust each another absolutely, then your environment will kill all of you.
That is what I believe shapes societies more than anything. If Mother Nature provides a great enough challenge in the environment then mankind's need to compete is turned outward, the society acting as a unit to protect itself against hostility. In short, the group stays close to the fire for fear of the 'Boogie man'. If mankind has managed to strip away all of its environmental challenges it still feels, at the deepest level of its mind, the need to compete. Therefore that need turns inward and the society starts competing against itself. I suppose that you could say that war is the ultimate expression of that competition.
Corruption, corporate indifference, governments ignoring the voices of their people, these can all be taken a symptoms of a lack of natural competition, that is, competition with nature.
Therefore if you want to design a society in your novel that has no word for lie, has no word for deceit then you need an environment where nature is that aggressive that the people dare not break ranks for fear of the 'things out there'. The opposite of that would be a very rich land, with few natural predators and plenty of fertile land. That would breed a society where corruption would bloom like a well watered weed, unless the competition was found in fighting the corruption and it would take a very strong character to do that.
Something to think about.
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