@sickburnbro @Griffith @rher @Groomschild @jeffcliff Nope. Never said it was, that's just an example of the mechanisms by which it operates.

Do you think the government picking its own winners and losers, or the fact that so much of this is done by ideologues who have their own postmodern justification for everything they want to do changes this? This is a result of people doing what rationally seems "right" to them. It's an evolved system that doesn't rely much on the environmental context.

Humans have an instinct to set up a hierarchal society, the same way a caddisfly larva has an instinct to build a cocoon from pebbles regardless of if they're chert, granite or sandstone, or a rat digs a burrow, regardless of whether it's clay, silt or sand. We are generalists, we adapt the environment to our needs. And our most pressing social need is for hierarchy. It's the operating system that all our other social instincts run on top of.