Catherine

Thank you! That was brilliant. I’d never heard about the monkey experiment before but I have observed exactly that sort of behavior many times among male humans. The lower status ones become shrill and nasty and angry and it ends up being counterproductive to their cause. For examle, they just sentenced a local man to six years in jail because of exactly such behavior with respect to a judge. He was some sort of survivalist nut, very low-status. The judge was dominant. It seems to me the story of the Iranian girl who was hung that Roger has linked to several times is another grisly example of the same phenomenon from a different culture.

You’ll notice it’s usually low-power males in out of the way spots who become obsessed with guns and survivalism and all that. High power males running Citicorp and Disney and the federal government are calm and cool and collected, spending time at their local health clubs (or their ranches in Texas). When was the last time you saw Spielberg raging about anything? Serendipitously, I just this moment looked out my window and saw my CEO off on his daily bike ride: calm, cool, collected.

David Thomson

I’m afraid I have to disagree with you a bit. I’ve read both Bertrand Russell (nearly everything he ever wrote) and Wittgenstein and I have to say that Wittgenstein was definitely the deeper of the two. Wittgenstein was no mediocrity and the problems that obsessed him are serious problems. The philosophical underpinnings of probability theory are still quite shaky.