In Business Civilization, Money Trumps Gender
A man and a woman were trading barbs on a bus.
The man said, "At least I know whose child this is. Are you sure?"
The woman replied, "At least I know this child is mine. Are you sure?"
The Mosuo people
Pass things down from mother to daughter; the surname is naturally inherited from the mother.
The loophole in this system is glaringly obvious.
The men in each matrilineal clan are very lazy and have no motivation to earn money.
Those uncles raise children who share no blood relation to them, as they are born to their sisters with other men, so they naturally lack any drive.
Besides, it’s like a communal pot—why not free-ride if you can?
If you say, “I won’t give equity to whoever performs well,” then who would bother performing well?
After all, no matter how hard I work, the company isn’t mine. No matter how much I slack off, the company can’t fire me, so why not just coast?
Survival of the fittest: the tribe with stronger productivity has stronger military power and replaces the tribe with weaker productivity. That’s why most matrilineal societies disappeared and gave way to patriarchy.
In the old society, a surname referred to inheritance rights to property.
As a man, he never knew for sure if the child was biologically his. So someone needed a label, and that label is the surname.
No one in the village questions who your mother is, but who your father is does need explanation, and the surname serves as that explanation. We had to give fathers a surname as a label to distinguish Lao Wang from Lao Li.
If the father’s surname is Li, the child takes Li and not Wang. Because if the child took Wang, it would be unclear to neighbor Lao Wang.
Over time, based on this label, the property inheritance system was established.
As people have become more mobile and large families have dissolved, giving way to small nuclear families, those complex kinship ties are disappearing.
The only remaining function of a surname is to prove you have nothing to do with neighbor Lao Wang.