* The trouble with objective principles for determining winners and losers is that there will be losers, and losing in the status competition game is serious business.
And since we are inevitably a mix of individual and group interests, both equally valid, it will always be in the interests of the losers to gain strength of numbers by embracing whatever group affiliations are not available to the winners, and using them to try to overturn the objective verdict by the only realistic means of victory ever available to losers – a fist in the face.
Of course, being losers, the odds tend to be against them, but every now and then, history has a way of disrupting the stability of the status quo – often exogenously – and the loser-groups may indeed succeed, at least for a while, in ‘decapitating’ the society.
See – the Bolsheviks, the Khmer Rouge, the Red Guards, the Jacobins, etc.
This is why a fixed, unwavering devotion to objective principles is not only naive, it will, with some predictability, at some point become deadly.
It must stem from the aforementioned fact that, in the eyes of natural selection, we are not merely independent and principled individuals, we are members of groups, and while there may be no group selection, there most certainly is a major group contribution to individual reproductive fitness.
* As if there were no correlation between group cohesion and shared devotion to objective principle. It’s not the only source of such cohesion, but it’s the dominant one in the long run.
* Thomas Macaulay: “The doctrine which, from the very first origin of religious dissensions, has been held by bigots of all sects, when condensed into a few words and stripped of rhetorical disguise, is simply this: I am in the right, and you are in the wrong. When you are the stronger, you ought to tolerate me, for it is your duty to tolerate truth; but when I am the stronger, I shall persecute you, for it is my duty to persecute error.”
