<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Once that question is understood, civilization... > Once that question is understood, civilization itself begins to look different. Laws against assault, locks on doors, contracts, courts, restraining orders, professional sanctions, witnesses, police, prisons and reputational consequences are all variations of the same ancient intervention: attach a cost to an appetite before the appetite acts. {{Civilization works by making certain forms of predation expensive. Personal safety often begins by doing the same thing at human scale.}} {{Law is civilization attaching prices to appetite. A boundary is the individual doing locally what civilization does collectively.}} The point is not that every human being secretly wishes to attack everyone around them, but that civilized restraint cannot be understood without noticing how much architecture has been constructed specifically to ensure that exploitation, coercion and violence are no longer cheap. {{Human beings become extraordinarily well behaved when misconduct becomes expensive, and astonishingly primitive when someone else's suffering becomes cheap.}} The jungle discovered the arithmetic long before us: weakness invites calculation, isolation lowers retaliation, coalition changes the ledger, and opportunity expands where consequence disappears. {{You were never supposed to become more frightening than the predator. You were supposed to become more expensive than the opportunity.}} {{Civilization survives by raising the price of the animal. Sometimes surviving a person requires exactly the same thing.}} Beneath the apology, beneath the affection, beneath the moral story and beneath the civilized costume, the calculation remains, and beneath the calculation, **the animal remains.** **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Once that question is understood, civilization itself begins to look different. Laws against assault, locks on doors, contracts, courts, restraining orders, professional sanctions, witnesses, police, prisons and reputational consequences are all variations of the same ancient intervention: attach a cost to an appetite before the appetite acts. Civilization works by making certain forms of predation expensive. Personal safety often begins by doing the same thing at human scale. Law is civilization attaching prices to appetite. A boundary is the individual doing locally what civilization does collectively. The point is not that every human being secretly wishes to attack everyone around them, but that civilized restraint cannot be understood without noticing how much architecture has been constructed specifically to ensure that exploitation, coercion and violence are no longer cheap. Human beings become extraordinarily well behaved when misconduct becomes expensive, and astonishingly primitive when someone else's suffering becomes cheap. The jungle discovered the arithmetic long before us: weakness invites calculation, isolation lowers retaliation, coalition changes the ledger, and opportunity expands where consequence disappears. You were never supposed to become more frightening than the predator. You were supposed to become more expensive than the opportunity. Civilization survives by raising the price of the animal. Sometimes surviving a person requires exactly the same thing. Beneath the apology, beneath the affection, beneath the moral story and beneath the civilized costume, the calculation remains, and beneath the calculation, the animal remains.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-once-question-understood-calculation-animal-remains ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->