Humans, like other primates, are communal. Our ancestors spent almost all of their evolutionary history as humans living in small groups of interdependent individuals. At the same time, tribes were in competition for each other for natural resources: foraging grounds, hunting grounds, agricultural lands. The ability of a tribe to survive depended very much on the ability of its members to act in concert, while simultaneously maintaining the capacity for aggression against the members of competing tribes. This simultaneous capacity for both solidarity and aggression is not unique to humans. Chimpanzees (our closest genetic relatives in the animal kingdom) have been known to capture, kill, and even cannibalize the members of rival troops.
In general, humans can't and don’t live on their own in primitive conditions. Abandoning the tribe was not an option, unless one managed to join another tribe. Consequently, survival itself depended on an individual’s ability to sustain his or her membership within the tribe. (Any critic of libertarianism who asserts that libertarians assume otherwise is erecting a straw man.) This dependency on tribal membership for survival, combined with the inherently non-homogeneous distribution of physical and mental attributes amongst the individuals within a tribe, leaves room (evolutionarily speaking) for individuals within the tribe to extract privilege from the rest of the tribe.
Privilege is not always predatory in nature. Some individuals gifted with atypical physical attractiveness or skill in sports or the arts might enjoy social status and privileges beyond their fellow tribe members, for example with regard to the selection of mating partners. (Think rock star.) These privileges are volunteered instinctually exactly because these attributes and talents are outward manifestations of genetic fitness. The instinct to grant privilege goes beyond those who would participate directly in the perpetuation of those genetic tendencies. This is because even those who enjoy the elevated social status as gifted individuals still likely share the instincts to grant those privileges in other situations. What matters is that the overall effect of volunteered genetic favoritism is to make it more likely that the healthier genes will be passed on, but still carrying the instinct to volunteer genetic favoritism. The point is that there is an evolutionary explanation behind the human instinct to both extract and grant privilege.
Privilege becomes predatory when it is used to extract a disproportionate influence on tribal 'consensus.' Every member of the tribe might participate in, or influence the tribal decision-making process to one degree or another, but as a purely practical matter, the tribe would not vote on every issue, or discuss things in committee until everyone agreed what the best course of action was. Instead, tribal decisions would tend to fall on specific individuals. Those individuals would tend to be those individuals who are naturally more equipped physically or mentally to make decisions for the tribe, or simply more equipped to impose them. The other members of the tribe instinctually grant these individuals disproportionate influence on tribal consensus, especially in the face of immediate external threats (like another tribe). This is because the evolutionary advantage of doing so outweighed the evolutionary disadvantage of humbly submitting to tribal consensus as an alternative to expulsion from the tribe and certain death.
This form of privilege is predatory because the individuals who enjoy the elevated social status will tend to make decisions that favor themselves at the expense of other members of the tribe. The more successful humans become at survival, the more room for intra-tribal predations there is before the parasitic behavior impacts survivability of the tribe as a whole. At some point, humans became so good at survival that society could support a whole predatory class that could command the direct services of the other members of the tribe to their own individual benefit. This particular form of predatory privilege manifests itself as authority and it is difficult to overstate the degree to which humans instinctively submit to it in one or another of its myriad forms. Its most spectacular manifestation is the privilege and social status that kings and pharaohs enjoyed, but more commonly it takes on the form of privileged classes.
Now days, Karl Marx is credited with diagnosing class conflict, but the existence of the predatory classes used to be a fact of everyday life. The predatory classes simply were the priveleged classes. It really wasn't that long ago when it was taken for granted that for the members of the privileged classes, leisure was a birthright. Liberalism (in the classic sense, a.k.a. libertarianism) arose in response to exactly this institutionalized inequity. The response of the privileged classes to this onslaught of rationality was—and is—argument by obfuscation.
Thus, while Marx (a professional intellectual in the employ of the predatory classes) might acknowledge class conflict in the form of “free man and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman,” Marx conspicuously circumvents any suggestion that differences in rules regarding property were exactly what distinguished oppressor and oppressed in these class conflicts. Instead, we are supposed to concern ourselves with a newer notion of exploitation that is much more ethereal, but that draws a strong psychological potency from its resonance with tribal instincts.
By no coincidence, Marx’s diagnosis is that it is exactly the establishment of (mutually-binding rules of) property rights and free trade by which the bourgeois exploit the proletarian. By no coincidence, his prescriptions are that the means of production belong in the hands of ‘society,’ which, by no coincidence, in practice, puts the means of production into the hands of the State, which, by no coincidence puts the means of production into the hands of the predatory classes.
So-called modern humans may have politically rejected the notion of inhereted class
privilege in the form of royalty and nobility, and Marxism in particular might finally be falling out of fashion after being the root of far too much human suffering, but the human instinct to grant predatorial privilege didn't just go
away, and the predatory classes understand this and use it to their advantage. Specifically, a threat to the tribe will very reliably invoke people's instinct to shut off their own individual critical analysis and submit to tribal consensus. In our evolutionary past there were situations where this instinct was critical to the survival of the tribe as a whole, but as our ability to survive extended beyond a hand-to-mouth existence, such instincts increasingly served as a mechanism of intra-tribal predation. The predatory classes thus establish, concentrate, and institutionalize political authority by routinely invoking threats to the tribe.
"Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. ... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” ― Hermann Goering
Of course the critical-analysis-shunting effect of the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center was milked for all it was worth. The predatorial classes managed to use it to manipulate the U.S. government into invading and occupying an entirely unconnected and militarily debilitated country, not to mention institutionalize warrantless wiretapping and torture.
But a threat to the tribe doesn't have to be a traditional foreign enemy to be useful to the predatory classes. An icon of imending moral decrepitude or the environmental catastrophy du jour can be just as effective. The trick is to find a trend, extrapolate it to the point of disaster, and then blame the trend on humans in such a way that the only percieved solution requires the institutionalization of yet more political authority. The notion of anthropogenic global warming fits the bill perfectly.
Anthropogenic global warming is an entirely political phenomenon. The vast majority of the so-called greenhouse effect is caused by water vapor, which varies wildly. Carbon dioxide is responsible for only a tiny fraction of the greenhouse effect. And human activity is responsible for only a fraction of that. People like Al Gore will make a big deal out of the historical correlation between global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. But this has cause-and-effect completely backwards. As the oceans warm, they hold less carbon dioxide. This is a phenomenon familiar to any high-school science student.
If you actually read the arguments for anthropogenic global warming that actual scientists make, they are very strained and contrived. The sheer scale of the potential environmental disaster we risk is supposed to distract us from this, but anyone who thinks that a scientific consensus is immune to political influence, or who think the cost of avoiding global warming is slight, need only need look up "Lysenkoism." Note also that it was a mere thirty years ago that the so-called experts were just as adamant then that human pollution was inevitably leading to the next ice age.
If your goal (whether conscious or not) is to accumulate and concentrate political authority on a global scale, only a threat to the entire globe gets the job done. Such a global threat is psychologically attractive to those who suffer from extreme civilization-induced alienation, and instinctually perceive a one-world government as the re-establishment on a global scale of a longed-for primordial tribal consensus. This is what the issue of anthropogenic global warming is really about.