Max Borders explains The Stone Age Trinity — and why human instincts don’t play out the way we’d like in modern, large societies:
The late philosopher Robert Nozick pointed out that when people compare themselves to one another, they are disposed to feel one of two emotions — guilt or envy. Guilt when someone has a lower station than you; envy when someone has a higher station than you. I would add a third to this mix: indignation. That’s when you compare someone of a higher station to someone of a lower station, and feel that something is wrong. I refer to this complex of emotional responses to unequal life-stations as the ‘Stone Age Trinity.’Why do we have these egalitarian emotions? Religious folks would say we have egalitarian feelings because a benevolent God wants us to be charitable; or that greed is a sin. Moral philosophers might give us grand theories about guilt, envy and indignation that have to do with the ‘moral law’ or some other high-falutin’ rationale — arguing, perhaps, that these feelings are a psychological complement to more enlightened reflection.
But I (and some others) think it has to do with the wiring of the brain — a neural circuitry configured over millennia in our evolutionary past.
Incidentally, the accompanying graphic is Frank Frazetta’s Neanderthal, with Marx placed in the background.