Sorry, but "an escalating cycle of rebellion and repression" doesn't come under my definition of "stability." It may come under a President's definition of "stable until I'm out of office," but that's another story.

No and yes...yes to the cynical political definition of stability, but for the first part, I'm referring to a steady-state outcome in which, for years, increasing repression balances increasing discontent, resulting in net stability. The pressure cooker may blow, which I called the "collapse" of the tyranny. And then there's the death of the tyrant:

Unfortunately, the historical norm is for a tyrant to be replace by another one.

But nevertheless, it's the transition, whether by death or collapse, that's an opportunity for radical systemic change. The window of opportunity may close and another tyrant continues the system, but a repressive system is never more vulnerable to change than when its executive is vacant.

On to the meat...People don't appreciate what a historical freak democracy is until they actually sit down and make a list over all the societies of the past few thousand years.

Oh, I realize, from the longstanding primatology jones as well as recent reading like "The First Idea". The human norm is to form collectives, and taxonomically, they're either the traditional vertical kind, with a formal hierarchy; or they're the horizontal kind, like the US, lacking a formal hierarchy. In either case the hardwired dynamic is group loyalty, as expressed in a horizontal collective as patriotism. A vertical collective satisfies both the instinct to group loyalty as well as the need to know one's place in the tribe's hierarchy; but a horizontal collective satisfies only the loyalty instinct, which is why, to paraphrase your point, a horizontal collective--a free society--requires constant care and maintenance.

Note that in the midst of our formally horizontal collective, we freely and instinctively construct vertical collectives: Business and religion and all other organizations are put together hierarchically. (As an aside, this illuminates my problem with corporations: I don't like vertical collectives. I'm happy with the horizontal collective as embodied by American civil society. Powerful vertical collectives challenge, and are therefore a threat to, the horizontal collective in which they're embedded.)

I think that "The First Idea" has some ideas that are very relevant to this topic. You might find some of them provocative, because at a basic philosophical level they're challenging the Cartesian dualism that emotion is the enemy of reason...and we know where you stand on that debate. They make a good case that in fact human intelligence arises from emotion and is sustained by it.

For example, Cartesian Dualists like Jean Piaget maintain that humans learn about causality at around nine months through sensorimotor interactions, that is, see something, reach for it, grab it. But S&G's thesis is that the human mind learns causality almost from the moment of birth, through longer and longer chains of "co-regulated emotional interactions". It's brilliantly simple: "When I smile, mommy smiles!" The second step, of intentionality, follows directly: "I can make mommy smile by smiling at her!". At yet another level, care-givers engage in longer-and-longer chains of emotional interactions and co-regulate (soothe or excite) to develop the capacity for reflection rather than blind reaction. Makes a lot of sense. From this viewpoint, Piaget's thesis seems pretty weak, because infants fail at first when they try to grab things. There's only negative reinforcement, which could short-circuit further attempts, while the emotional interactions involve constant encouragement and positive reinforcement.

Anyway, lot more to it, but the relevance to airy discussions of grand themes of human affairs is that they map the stages of child development both on to the evolution of the human species (a little shakily, I thought); and on to the evolution of human societies (with much more basis in fact). Societies have, over time, corresponded to various stages of human development, in terms of their ability to share a common reality, relate to each other with an accurate model of the mind, and develop institutions that embody shared values (such as courts to satisfy a common value of justice). Those at a low level of development are somewhat like immature humans: Polarized, prone to catastrophic emotion (instinctive reaction to stimulii, e.g. fight or flight), tending to magical thinking (poor causality perception) and authoritarian (obedience over reflective thinking). Societies at a more advanced developmental level possess institutions of reflective thinking (deliberative bodies such as parliaments and courts), the rule of law (a formalized shared value system), tolerance for diversity (which promotes societal unity by minimizing internecine conflict), and so on.

The downside to recommending "The First Idea" is that it's 500 pages of turgid academic prose, and it's taken me about two weeks to get near the end. Repetition might help retention in an oral lecture, but not in a book. A bit pedantic, too. The ideas are percolating in my head and, as you noticed, they're working their way into my posts, so you'll hear more about the book that way if nothing else.

As for the Panda's thumb, it's sort of a nature-verus-nurture thing. If you take the materialist view that what matters is what's hardwired into the brain, then a theory of kludges (crossing tribal ape brains with intelligent reasoning brains) would be reasonable. But if you take the view that the human mind develops through its interactions with an external human social world, then it would be far more adaptive. In this view the brain is just the starting point (remember: The brain is the embryo of the mind™), and while it may be inflexible and kludgy, the rich soup of the social environment can build a mind of , uh, mind-numbing complexity and nuance. Minds can evolve faster than brains, in this view, and in the real world we do see a rapid evolution in the way that people think (the distance between the Enlightenment and today can't be explained by biological evolution of the brain)...as well as sometimes regression, as is pointed out in "The First Idea". This kind of mental evolution is also more volatile than evolution of biological brains.

Let's face it, the human brain is a conundrum to information theory: It doesn't have enough bits to represent all possible states of mind. The complexity of the mind could reasonably be explained by the view that much of it exists outside ourselves and is maintained by constant interaction with other minds. We talk about "shared realities", and that could describe an externally-maintained state of mind. Perhaps individual minds seem smarter because they're borrowing the processing power of this shared mental environment.

Another example is negative: The human mind goes off the rails when it's completely cut off from the support of human society. See Ted Kaczinksy.

I know it seems a bit mystical, but I don't think it's too spacey to think of human society as a "field" that we create and maintain, and in which human minds are embedded as nodes rather than being completely distinct and isolated entities. Something like this may be the source of Jung's "collective unconscious" as well as the persistence of archetypes and myths and other shared thoughts.

Hey? Didn't didn't this thread start out on the topic of "Kerry endorses Obama?!"?? Talk about going offtopic! Hope the moderators don't whack our hands with rulers.