According to Fukuyama the ties of tribal kinship must be broken down to achieve the large scale cooperation needed at the level of the scale of western civilization. In the west this was achieved through Christianity, a celibate priesthood and increasing property rights for women.GloryofGreece wrote:So do you think all humans are essentially more competitive than cooperative? Mutual benefit, aid, and/or cooperation doesn't really exist or play a large role in human character traits?
Christianity broke down tribal religious traditions and this seed of revolution continued to break down even the hierarchical system of catholicism itself with the protestant revolution, monarchical power with the Glorious revolution, the French Revolution and the American Revolution. The enlightenment enshrined these individualistic virtues and the west has since achieved a new pinnacle of individualism, atomizing the tribe down to the level of the nuclear family and finally making this an endangered social structure of it's own. Individualism now transcends even gender roles.
None of this is genetic... it is driven by social forces that come into play as humanity has proliferated and our cooperative tendencies have had to account for increasing contact across cultures as empires attempted to digest diverse cultures into a greater whole. Religions have played a major role in this process, but increasingly secular ideologies have taken over.
