Perhaps I should study bonobos, I don’t fully understand why exactly the gorilla style males competing for building harems does not work so for them, what exactly prevents it.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn’t yet left the “project one’s ideals onto the noble savages” phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is “idealism porn” on the left, there is also “dark romance porn” on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias—I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
My theory about bonobos is that since they live in such remote locations, fewer people have had a chance to study them. Thus the scholarship on them hasn’t yet left the “project one’s ideals onto the noble savages” phase. Similarly it took Jane Goodall a remarkably long time to realize/admit how her beloved gorillas were actually behaving.
The reason I try to stay close neutral in such issues is that iti is perfectly possible that both sides of the debate project what they like into the data. There are also red-pill / reactionary types who like the idea of a harsh world red in claw and tooth, who like a dark Nietzschean romance of a brutal world, who liked it when Raistlin turned black robe. Maybe you know some of them :-) So while there is “idealism porn” on the left, there is also “dark romance porn” on the right and it is really hard to avoid both biases. My own leanings tend to actually towards the dark romance bias—I always played evil characters in RPG and as a teen I was a huuuge Nietzsche fan, and escaped Atlas Shrugged fandom only because I was too old when I first met it. So I have to be cautious of that. Quite possibly the world is more forgiving and nicer than what I like to think. Plato the philosopher actually impressed me when he argued justice often means efficiency. It was fairly new to me, and far too optimistic compared to what I was used to.
There are a lot of idealists on the right (and “dark romanticists” on the left) as well, they just focus on different ideals.