[Note: This was written in the hours immediately after the announcement on Sunday, so much may be expected to change in the days following]
The Italian vote delivered the most unsurprising surprise yesterday – another rejection of the elites by the people.
Oh the humanity!
Time for the elites to get out of their echo chambers and find out what life is like for the people suffering under their poorly thought-through and sometimes inhumane policies.
Remember, we humans like it better when things are fair and just. Heck, it goes further than that; primates like it better when things are fair and just.
For my new readers, an experiment I draw upon a lot because it perfectly illustrates the fairness dynamic, and which every ruler should be forced to watch until its lessons sink in, is only 2.5 minutes long and involves Capuchin monkeys being given different rewards for the same task:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gOtlN4pNArk
How many of you laughed, like I did, when that monkey on the left threw the cucumber at the researcher? How many of you, like me, could honestly see yourself and your own innate reactions in that monkey's reaction?
Well it turns out that evolution has decided that a sense of fair play is so important to social animals that it has coded in a pre-determined response when we're faced with an injustice. Maybe it has something to do with how sharing and cooperation are vital to a tribe or troop’s well-being.
There are always injustices associated with any hierarchical human organization, whether that was the Aztec’s a thousand years ago, or communists and capitalists today.
The trick isn’t to try and make things completely fair — that’s pretty much an impossibility in any hierarchical society — but to make them fair enough that your social pyramid is stable.
With too much injustice, people will figuratively throw their cucumbers at first by opting out of society’s demands. Rules are not followed, advantages are exploited, effort is withdrawn, and civility declines.
With a little bit more injustice, they'll begin to throw their cucumbers literally; by engaging in overt protests ranging from mild to violent.
What the Italy vote — following on the heels of the Brexit and Trump votes — is telling us is that the Little People are somewhere past the figurative stage and a good ways into the literal stage of cucumber tossing.
by cmartenson 
