"I feel hopeless at the macro level," said evolutionary anthropologist Paul Hooper in an interview published this year by Nautilus (also in August, as it happens). "But still I feel like there's untapped creative potential in determining the nature of our own society. Everything in this model works because of social action, because one strategy imposes constraints on the whole rest of the society, and then the society changes. We see radical, enormous shifts in social norms and institutions through history. I know that we haven't explored all of the possibility space yet. If we could tap that potential, and we could make egalitarianism truly a self-perpetuating cultural unit that also preserves itself, then it'll stay around. It'll be a new kind of society. The math points to those possibilities, so I'm not entirely pessimistic. There's amazing untapped potential that comes down to face-to-face relationships that endure over time."
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