Socially Useful

One of the interesting points of the previous topic is the question of what exactly is "socially useful." The answer depends on what you mean by "socially" and "useful." China reputedly spent tens of billions on the Beijing Olympics. Why?

It spent all that because it wanted to signal to it's own people and the world that it had become a great power. Most major nations now invest quite a lot in their Olympic programs with the objective of increasing their prestige. They do this because they realize that they are in competition with each other and that prestige matters in that competition. Do a few olympic medals make it more likely that other nations will buy your products or decide not to try a miltary adventure against you? Probably so, and even if they don't, they appeal to our primitive instincts that equate prestigious with "dangerous."

Humans tend tend to organize themselves into a heterarchy of social units, which both compete and cooperate. Those entities compete with each other, but they also compete for our loyalty. Badges of prestige are a key tool in that competition as well. Individuals and societies place high value on these badges because they link them with their prospects for survival and reproduction.

When we as individuals calculate the usefulness of an activity, we start with our Darwinian selves. Our parents make a similar calculation. It's no secret that athletic accomplishment brings sexual opportunity - in high school as well as the NBA. Wilt Chamberlain claimed to have had sex with 20,000 women - take that Tiger. All that sexual opportunity brings children, lots of them

I think libertarians may find these dimensions of human nature a bit hard to appreciate. By rejecting the collective dimension of human nature, they render themselves blind to much of how the world works. I would be curious if this tendency was innate rather than acquired - sort of another point on the autistic spectrum.