Re: Writing from the POV of older people than one's self

In article <1145302901.537868.154030@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Bob Throllop" <bobthrollop@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

David Friedman wrote:
In article <e1r1ie$jgn$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Mary K. Kuhner) wrote:

In article <m4GdneL0kL9Sb93ZRVny3g@xxxxxxxxx>,
<wendyg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <123ugkb6qmkb5e1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>, wswears@xxxxxxx (Bill
Swears) wrote:

some point in 300 years that shallow desire will be enacted, and
picking young fruit off the vine will seem so very easy...

I don't know any older people who think attracting much younger people is
easy. Do you?

It's part of a stereotype of the lives of very wealthy or politically
powerful older men, and there seems to be evidence that this is true.
Politicians who want to have affairs with their pretty young interns
seem to find opportunities regularly.

The two times in my life I have had a crush on someone much older
than myself, there was also a substantial status asymmetry in
the subculture we were in (a chess master in one case, a
martial arts master in the other). I find this embarrassing, but
there it is. Positive attention from someone who outranks you
is a powerful attractant.

We evolved in an environment where women provided the major biological
input to reproduction, men a considerable part of the external
inputs--food, shelter, protection. So it isn't surprising that men are
evolved to be attracted by characteristics that signal future
fertility--most obviously youth--and women to be attracted by signals of
wealth and status.

Which is probably obvious to you, but perhaps not to everyone here.


This may well be another scientific just-so story. There is no "the"
environment we evolved in; there is a continuum of environments and
social situations stretching over billions of years. The human
instinct towards power and status is probably inherited from monkeylike
ancestors living at least 20 or 30 million years ago, possibly much
earlier. How this pecking-order behavior transmuted itself into the
much more abstract notions of power that motivate us today--and which
are now far removed from practical notions of getting food and
shelter--is obviously very complex.

Seems to me that the pecking order is a socially evolved device for
maximizing the success potential of a group by minimizing the
tendency for individuals *within* the group to fight over scarce
goodies -- food, sex, etc. If you pin level of access to a generally
accepted status level within the group, when a mob from over the
hills invades your foraging grounds your group will have more
fresh, unwounded members to fight them off than it would if
every opportunity to get something good simply became a free-
for-all. It's just bloody old evolution in action, which is why it's
nearly impossible to beat. Groups that claim to be a-hierarchical
(usually on ideological grounds) are, upon close examination,
loaded with status rules and markers; see Communism in Russia
and hippie communes of the sixties (which became examples of
Freud's "primal horde" in which the dominant males grabbed
the best of everything first; same with religious cults, regardless
of claims of egalitarianism).

The pecking order is built into the groups which have survived
and flourished because it works better and longer than idealized
notions of egalitarian access to the necessities and the luxuries
of life. Nobody knows how to overturn this rule, although the
great religious leaders do tend to try -- that's why the rest of us
kill them.

Suzy
.