hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Homo Apiens
"Researchers have laid bare the behaviour of Australian bosses, revealing how everything from the pink shirt under their power suit to the size of their leather-backed chair and their choice of jargon-heavy management speak mimic the strutting and chest puffing seen among our animal ancestors.They say bosses don't spend as much time reading or working at their computer alone as employees think they do, and instead pass the vast majority of the day in meetings where they stamp their authority with the biggest chair, a louder voice and frequent interruptions to conversation.
"What we found was universal animalistic displays of power, masculinity, sexuality and authority that seem to be hard-wired in," Prof Braithwaite said."
::View Article::
Despite our every-day intuitions, we're not all that much different from Apes. Our brains have been built upon and expanded at each stage of our evolution from ultra-simple single cell organisms to the relatively complex organisms we are now, and a large amount of our mental activity occurs in the more 'primitive' and archaic regions of the brain that we possessed when we were still swinging from trees, or earlier.
It varies according to individual genes and upbringing (we're not all equal in this regard), but our thoughts and actions are often characterised by purely subjective ego-centric emotional reactions and symbolic gestures of status rather than rational and objective reflection: i.e. the placing of our individual selves in the context of a greater whole such as our society or our natural environment.
This probably explains most of question time in parliament, and also why the results of democracy are sometimes quite painful to contemplate.
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