Relativism or an absolute truth?
Are social animals just following a linear trend in a progressive system of psyche or did it occur randomly and through evolution? To me they seem to follow a trend.
How often do you hear of a socialist, liberal, humanist, et cetera converting to a “every man for yourself” social Darwinist? I think we acknowledge certain objective truths such as that other beings are sentient, and they could have thoughts, feelings, and reactions similar to our own. Even recently it’s been found that bacteria have a complex inter- and intra- species communication network, leading to the new sensation of quorum-inhibiting antibiotic research.
I consider animals to have the most pragmatically built psyches that are very well tuned to their environment, but humans make their own environment. Is our sprawl of philosophical and sociology theories the result of true chaos in an isolated system or does sentience fly in the face of pragmatism? It’s hard to say since progress in sentient beings would be individual, and a single individual can cause a lot of societal changes merely by writing his ideas down for someone else to read. Perhaps there are certain philosophical and sociological absolutes as defined by some cognitive process of sentient beings.