People might be wondering how authoritarianism came to be. Some say it was because humans were so bad at organizing that we needed someone to become a leader and whip everyone else in shape while centrally controlling all resources without giving anyone else a say. However, others think many authoritarians happened because you have a Charles Mansion type who took over resources from other people. While it is possibly true a lot of authoritarians were in charge because of the former, some of us at Mint Message believe it could be the latter because of chimpanzees.
Chimpanzees are some of the few creatures with intelligence close to that of humans that form groups and that is why we frequently look at them and other apes to get an idea of how humanity was like in its early days. One of the things we learned from this is that apes like chimps can have psychopaths and apes born with brains similar to those of people born with Antisocial Personality Disorder. On top of that, we see that many of these less empathetic apes can form into groups similar to warlords and invade other chimps to take their land & resources. These less empathetic apes are able to survive for generations despite their cruel behavior and expand their influence.
On top of that, one of the reasons for this ape warfare is when ape warlords find that there is a lack of fertile females and realize they can just take someone else’s. This is similar to the Gombe Chimpanzee War that was started due to a lack of female chimps, but the Gombe war was not necessarily started by psychopathic apes like the ape warlord issue. Many people who studied apes in the past believed that apes lived in generally peaceful groups with few wars but on top of wars for resources, we basically have seen potentially one of the first examples of authoritarianism among non-human animals and similar to the rise of Hitler & his histrionic personality disorder, this wasn’t caused by a well-loved leader wanting to help their people for good reason. No, this was started by power-hungry primates born with a lack of empathy realizing they could work together to take over the lives of others by force without contributing to society themselves.
Potentially similar to human civilizations, you might have ape warlord-ships where the majority of apes do not want a psychopath in charge, but you have the ape equivalent of an ape cult of personality that allows said warlord to stay in charge like the cult of personality/imperial cults of humanity’s past. So while it is possible that in humanity’s past, there were benevolent kings and leaders who came into power due to being good people who cared about others but went about it by consolidating their own power, this evidence that many of the authoritarians of our past might have gotten power the same way the narcosatanists, Charles Manson, imperial kings with imperial cults, dictators, or other powerful cultists got their power: convincing enough people to go with their sociopathic plans with psychological manipulation and power plays without being much of a decent person.
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