tired: urban instant-gratification pod living and polyamorous mongrelising “found family” degeneracy will devolve us into a race of small-souled termite bugmen
wired: given that it meets the crucial preconditions of monogamy, relatively high levels of mate relatedness, large single-family territories guarding precious resources, low success rates due to an adverse environment, and strong family bonds, the true threat of emerging eusociality would come from traditionalist homesteading
I think much of the “pod-dwelling bugmen” impulse stems on a visceral level from seeing both of these and being struck by a consilient sense of interspecific spiritual kinship
But in fact the similarity is superficial. Termites do not live in those “towers” they are a mostly uninhabited cooling system
This is not actually a political argument so much as a shewing-the-fly-from-the-fly-bottle gesture at a bad metaphors limits but like. It does affect the emotional response doesn’t it?
Gonna say, when I was writing this it was very much on my mind that all the examples of human reproductive hierarchies I could think of were what could be broadly described as trad.
I don't think that's an accident; I think if there is a single unifying theme of right-wing vs. left-wing political conflicts it's that the left-wing is an expression of impulses toward social equality while the right-wing wants society to follow the logic of the pecking order, i.e. the right-wing likes hierarchy, and if I'm right about that it's only natural that this trend would hold for reproductive hierarchies too.