1. Sometimes I do the "fantasize about singing/playing guitar on a song I really like to a rapturous audience" thing, too. I would just note that famous musicians seem to do pretty well in the sexual marketplace, so perhaps evolution is just trying to nudge us towards making use of whatever musical talents you/I possess? Just a thought. Not totally inconsistent with the concept that our desires are about preserving/raising our status, though.
2. Athens had unscrupulous aristocrats like Alcibiades who wanted to rule Athens like a king or a tyrant hanging around, no? Alcibiades is the only one I can name, but I doubt that he was unique, at least in terms of his desires. I guess that makes their habit of ostracizing successful people a bit more rational, although if there were enough votes to ostracize someone, did they really need to worry about that same someone being able to impose tyranny on an unwilling populous? I absolutely buy the idea that people want Elon Musk to suffer due to their own base motives. For some reason I want to spare the Athenians from suffering from the same foolish motivations, maybe because of their high status, historically?
3. Some of the stuff you wrote reminds me a lot of Rene Girard and his theories about mimetic rivalry and mimicry and more stuff that I don't know enough to speak about intelligently, but smart high status people like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen seem to take these ideas quite seriously.
Wow, that was a doozy. A couple random notes:
1. Sometimes I do the "fantasize about singing/playing guitar on a song I really like to a rapturous audience" thing, too. I would just note that famous musicians seem to do pretty well in the sexual marketplace, so perhaps evolution is just trying to nudge us towards making use of whatever musical talents you/I possess? Just a thought. Not totally inconsistent with the concept that our desires are about preserving/raising our status, though.
2. Athens had unscrupulous aristocrats like Alcibiades who wanted to rule Athens like a king or a tyrant hanging around, no? Alcibiades is the only one I can name, but I doubt that he was unique, at least in terms of his desires. I guess that makes their habit of ostracizing successful people a bit more rational, although if there were enough votes to ostracize someone, did they really need to worry about that same someone being able to impose tyranny on an unwilling populous? I absolutely buy the idea that people want Elon Musk to suffer due to their own base motives. For some reason I want to spare the Athenians from suffering from the same foolish motivations, maybe because of their high status, historically?
3. Some of the stuff you wrote reminds me a lot of Rene Girard and his theories about mimetic rivalry and mimicry and more stuff that I don't know enough to speak about intelligently, but smart high status people like Peter Thiel and Tyler Cowen seem to take these ideas quite seriously.