34 Comments

Seems likely that many features that predate industry changed the payoff to self control, too. For example, a population can be kept stable by food, disease, violence, or social stuff like late marriage and infanticide. Which constraint operates most strongly at a particular time and place affects the payoff to all sorts of human characteristics including self control. In violence ridden low pop density areas worker productivity has historically reached absurd proportions, like 60 lbs of banana per hour in parts of Peru in late 19th century (greg clark). China for much of the last 1,000 years has been the complete opposite.

The payoff to self-control must have varied regionally long before industry, which explains why, out in the real world, it sure looks like self-domestication is easier for some groups than others.

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I've sometimes thought that if Aristotle was shown the modern factory worker, he would not have thought, "Ah, so my thesis that slavery is necessary is wrong," but, "Ah, you've devised an ingenious new form of slavery."

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Self-control is but a label in search of a mechanism. What kind of mechanism could it be if it can vary from one social regime to another?

In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud argued that the super-ego arrived with agriculture and, in his theory, the superego has self-control functions. Of course, "superego" is just another label for some mechanism we don't understand. But, at least it points to a mechanism. The task now is to figure out how that mechanism works. That's not going to be so easy & I rather doubt that it's going to show up on an fMRIs -- though, of course, we've got endless learned prattle about how the frontal cortex exercises executive control over our activities.

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"Our descendants may evolve even stronger self/culture-control of behavior." It does seem that this will be the direction of evolution, so long as evolution continues. Our "natural," "near-mode" behavior was adaptive to conditions that no longer exist, and it was only imperfectly adaptive--far from optimal--even there. "Controlling ourselves" ("self-control") is overriding those natural impulses in our own interests. Natural selection, because it is adaptive, should produce descendants for whom these natural impulses are less unruly.

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They could consume us for raw resources.

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For what purpose? We would have nothing practical to offer them.

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until we are enslaved by our robot overloards

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This is Michel Foucault's thesis given a more positive spin. As you might expect, I come closer to his assessment of the situation than to yours. Rather than reach new heights of conditioned self-control in the future, I hope automation frees us from drudgery.

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It seems that "self control" is used here in a slippery way - it seems to be defined as the implantation of societies norms in lieu of your own IN ADDITION to the enforcement of the norms deemed most dear to your self.

I somehow think that the latter not the former is self control. Whether you adhere to societies norms is your own choice irrespective of the consequences of that choice and the persuasiveness if those consequences. The adherence to your choice equates to self control.

Thus an anarchist may have self-control if he can adhere to his own choices, and a prisoner may have no self control if he cannot.

Obviously enough you can corrupt a person's choices through lies (in all forms). Here is where debate is formed and the need distinguish wisdom from intelligence. Assuming religion is corrupting or turns subsumes a persons choices with the choices of another is assuming quite alot in defining what a religion is or what it stands for. Moreover it assumes that presence or absence of a formalized religion denies a personalized use of what may equate to a religion.

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IIRC, slave imports into the US and the British Empire were illegal from 1807. The US, Barbados, and several other slave colonies had ceased to import slaves before that date. Barbados was a net exporter.

This in spite of the fact that the great majority of imported slaves were men, who tended not to bear many children.

The life expectancy of a newly landed slave in the Caribean was ~ 20 years - four times that of a newly arrived european.

(It is in Philip Curtin somewhere, but I don't have the exact references.)

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Have you read The Inevitability of a Medicalized Society?

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I don't think it's worth much without the consensus evidence of hundreds of years of social science research subsequent to Adam Smith.

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Fascinating post.I wonder to what degree mandatory military service, assigning status to sports or types of sports, and criminalizing/medicalizing lack of self-control plays into this.

For example, indentured servitude seems to me to be a self-control bridge to get more productive labor out of the worst resource managers in a population.

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Seth, free workers could work more if they really wanted to work hard, but they usually don't.

Tom, yes previous slave owners didn't have enough self-control to invest long-term in growing slaves.

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Robin, the Koppen-Geiger climate classification thinks it's subtropical (and also temperate):

http://upload.wikimedia.org...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Köppen_climate_classification

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In the New World, the self-sustaining system of slavery you describe did not arise till the slave trade was made illegal. It was cheaper to buy slaves and work them to death than it was to breed them.

There is the matter of slave rebellions.

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