Frans de Waal on Chimpanzee—and Human—Politics

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.6 • 907 Ratings

🗓️ 11 March 2023

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Frans de Waal is a Dutch-American primatologist and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Primate Behavior in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. He is the author of, among other books, Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes and Different: Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Frans de Waal discuss how primate empathy forms the basis for human morality; the precedent for diversity in human gender and gender roles that exists in non-human primates; and why, despite attempts to separate human behavior from human biology, you can’t have one without the other. This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity. Please do listen and spread the word about The Good Fight. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following this link on your phone. Email: [email protected] Website: http://www.persuasion.community Podcast production by John Taylor Williams, and Brendan Ruberry Connect with us! Spotify | Apple | Google Twitter: @Yascha_Mounk & @joinpersuasion Youtube: Yascha Mounk LinkedIn: Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good alpha males and I think three-quarter of them are really good leaders.
0:05.0	Good alpha males they do much more than being the boss of the group.
0:08.3	They keep the piece, they keep the group together, they show a lot of empathy for others.
0:12.3	They can become extremely popular and loved by the group because they are good leaders
0:17.2	But they do in the business world they have all these books about how to be an alpha male and what they mean is how to be a bully and how to let everyone know that you are the boss.
0:25.1	That's not really what I consider the typical alpha male in a primate society.
0:30.1	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:39.0	A couple of days ago a new report by Freedom House has dropped. Now Freedom House is I think the most helpful
0:48.5	organization tracking the state of democracy around the world. And based on data from Freedom House as
0:55.0	well as some other sources, a friend of a podcast, Larry Diamond has pointed out
0:59.8	that there has been for a good number of years a democratic recession that for each of the last 17, 18 years
1:06.1	more countries have moved away from democracy than have moved towards it.
1:12.4	Now in the latest figures for 2022, that is still the case. We continue to be in the
1:19.3	Democratic recession, but we are in the democratic recession by the slimmest of margins.
1:26.0	There's just one more country that has moved away from democracy over the course of the last year
1:31.0	when there are countries that have moved towards it.
1:34.7	As the office of a report right, the Democratic recession seems to be bottoming out.
1:41.1	Now as they say on Wall Street past results are another a
1:46.2	guarantee for or an indication of future returns. It may be that
1:52.4	2023 will turn out to be worse for democracy again, that the recession
1:57.2	will steepen again. But I think there is at least reason to hope that we may be starting to come out of the worst of it.
2:07.2	There's a few reasons to think that. The first is democratic resilience. We have seen the success of countries like the United States
	...

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