Quotes from Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony

By Robert Edgerton (1992)

• Compared with farmers, pastoralists in all these societies were more open and direct in their expression of emotion and in their interpersonal relations. Farmers tended to avoid conflict, presumably because their ties to the land made it impossible for them to move away should they make an enemy, while pastoralists could and did move their families and herds if they had a serious quarrel.#
  Anthropology
• Sociocultural systems and populations that fail to perpetuate themselves provide the most extreme evidence of maladaptation.#
  Evolution
• The root cause of inequality [is] not the inevitability of social differentiation, but the fact that all societies have rules that are enforced by sanctions. People who break those rules lose prestige and their claim to equality with persons who conform to the rules.#
  Anthropology
• Anthropologists often agree that there is equality among people in small-scale societies, but by equality (or egalitarianism, as they are likely to call it) they mean the absence of significant distinctions among people except for those based on sex, age, and ability. These distinctions are universal.#
  Anthropology
• Humans are forever betwixt and between, required (as Jules Henry put it) to “wring” satisfaction from a culture that represses many aspects of human nature, yet still dependent on that culture for all that gives meaning to life.#
• If humans are to succeed in adapting to one another and to the environments in which they live, they must devise social and cultural mechanisms to control certain aspects of their biological nature. It is self-evident that no population has yet done so with complete success.#
  Cooperation