Understanding human history in ten millenia following the Agriculture Revolution boils down to a single question:how did humans organise themselves in mass-cooperation networks, when they lacked the biological instincts necessary to sustain such networks? The short answer is that humans created imagined orders and devised scripts. These two inventions filled the gaps left by our biological inheritance.
那如果我们接受这个概念，在之后的生活里刻意地去破除自身已被动接受的imagined orders，那么在做事情或者思考的时候会不会跳出我们原有的以为的局限性也不再给自己设限，从心底建立起的一种力量，以所谓的上帝的视角，来看待或对待事物，结局会不会有些许不太一样？
All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences? Why did traditional Indian society classify people according to caste, Ottoman society according to religion, and American society according to race?
我也很疑惑，为什么会有等级制度，明明都一样生为人类为什么总有三六九等？为什么印度会有种姓制度为什么美国要有人种的分类，大家都一样其乐融融不好吗…
如果仅仅是因为a set of accidental historical circumstance and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations ，作者这样的判断是不是太武断了，忽略了人性及社会性，把这些事件看作是偶然的发生又经历时间的催发最终发展成现在这样
You might think that people would gradually understand that these stigmas were myth rather than fact and that blacks would be able, over time, to prove themselves just as competent, law-abiding and clean as whites. In fact, the opposite happened-- these prejudices became more and more entrenched as time went by.… Trapped in this vicious circle, blacks were not hired for white-collar jobs because they were deemed unintelligent, and the proof of their inferiority was the paucity of blacks in white-collars jobs.
同义替换 job ; activity, appointment, assignment, business, career, office, operation, place, position, post, profession, situation, spot, stint ,task, trade work
所有这些vicious circle让我想起了中国名校的农村学生比重越来越小以及教育资源的分配严重不均衡，不过这个现象的原因是不是能用作者的观点;a set of accidental historical circumstance and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations..Such vicious circle could be defined as a chance historical situation is translated into a rigid social system. Even, unjust discrimination often gets worse, not better, with time. Money comes to education, and ignorance to ignorance. Those once victimised by history are likely to be victimised yet again. And those whom history has privileged are more likely to be privileged again.如果历史是以这样的方式上演，那我们如今的教育现状会不会也会以同样的方式运行…
But ‘man' and‘women’ name social, not biological, categories. While in the great majority of cases in most human societies men are males and women are females, the social terms carry a lot of baggage that has only a tenuous, if any, relationship to the biological terms………Since myths, rather than biology, define the roles, rights and duties of men and women, the meaning of ‘manhood’ and ‘womanhood’ have varied immensely from one society to another.
personally thinking ,比较认同作者的这个看法，这让人想起波伏娃在The Second Sex 里第二部的开篇女人不是天生的，而是变成的。有异曲同工之妙~
The most common theory points to the fact that men are stronger than women, and that they have used their greater physical power to force women into submission.
However, if she wanted her children to provide her with grandchildren, she needed to carry them in her womb for nine arduous months, and then nurtures them for years. During that time she had fewer opportunities to obtain food, and required a lot of help. She needed a man.
The result of these different survival strategies- so the theory goes- is that men have been programmed to be ambitious and competitive, and rto excel in politics and business, whereas women have tended to move out of the way and dedicate their lives to raising children.
Particularly problematic is the assumption that women's dependence on external help made them dependent on men, rather than on other women, and that male competitiveness made men socially dominant.
If so, we should expect that dependent women, even of they are dependent on men, would use their superior social skills to cooperate to outmaneuver and manipulate aggressive, autonomous and self-centred men.
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