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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   28929 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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Alice is 5' 2"/157 cm. Bob is 6' 3"/190 cm.

Expecting Bob to get something off a high shelf for Alice does not make Bob Alice's slave.

Years ago, anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture. The student expected Mead to talk about fishhooks or clay pots or grinding stones.

But no. Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.

A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.

Rejecting the notion that the more able ought to help the less able is rejecting civilisation itself.

It seems to me that a tall man who isn’t allowed to decide when and where and if he fetches things for shorter people is just a step-ladder made of meat.

What if there are 10 Alice’s who genuinely need things fetched down on a constant basis?

What if there’s only one Alice but she abuses him and makes her dislike of him known on a regular basis?

What if Alice and her fellow shorties have subjected Bob to a constant campaign of psychological manipulation since birth explaining that his tallness is a privilege to be used for the benefit of the short, or indeed is actively oppressing them by causing shelves to be built which they can’t reach, for which he must repent by obeying them?

In many of these scenarios Bob appeared to be… let’s not call him a slave to avoid the noncentral fallacy, but certainly slavelike. Similar to an indentured servant.

In practice, what seems to happen is that ‘we’ or ‘society’ determine how much labour Bob is required to do for the underprivileged (in our benevolence). In which case Bob is not only their servant but even more so ours.

Civilisation does require this to some degree but the scales have tipped far too far in the last hundred years and the racial version has finally tipped far enough that all of us are Bob and we’re sick of it.

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