Yeah but then you also don't have medical care and climate controlled housing, or video games, so....
I'm so sick of people idolizing shit like this. Go walk around a fucking cemetery from the 1800s or early. All you see is headstones with several dead babies on them. All of whom would have survived if they were born today.
Literally every society from all corners of the globe had a 50% mortality rate for children prior to 1950.
The reason why civilization is what it is today is because people didn’t like what civilization was before. (Yes, drastic simplification and yes we have lots of problems today, but at least everyone is less likely to die of disease and starvation.)
Interestingly we still have hunter/gatherer tribes around today, but only in the lush rain forests. I always feel like the progress (especially towards agriculture and thus permanent settlements) only happened with migration to colder climates. Which makes sense, as it sucks being a hunterer/gatherer when there's snow.
You can even experience it today: in the rain forests there's shit growing everywhere. Hungry? Walk around randomly for 5 minutes, there's bananas, or mango, or star fruit or whatever.
So the real question to me: why migrate in the first place?
Being nomadic hunter/gatherers was so amazing, we invented subsistence agriculture just to get away from it. And people would abandon subsidence agriculture in favour of a career as a beggar/day laborer.
So yeah, have fun going back to that.
Being nomadic hunter/gatherers was so amazing, we invented subsistence agriculture just to get away from it.
David Graeber and David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything) disagree. It was always very labor intensive with significant drawbacks (especially during seasons where crops won't grow), to the point that many groups openly dismissed the idea of being farmers of any kind. It took ages to get "large scale" (plots larger than 1000m²) agriculture "right" enough for it to actually be worth the time spent.
The reason for the insistence on agriculture, despite all the hardships, among groups with all sorts of hierarchical organizations, is the real million dollar question.
I know at least two family members who would have died if they had been born even ten years earlier
Or food security. But there's definitely a golden middle, most of our work seems to only serve the enrichment of people who are detrimental to society.
Lol who needs videogames when you are literally free to do what you want?
Edit: I would miss videogames and i would probably be slimed in one week. It was lowkenuinely a joke.
I guess you have the freedom but not the ability
As is the case now.
Are you free, really? Free to do what? To live as you please? To do what you please?
Let’s see. How do you live? What does your freedom amount to?
You depend on your employer for your wages or your salary, don’t you? And your wages determine your way of living, don’t they? The conditions of your life, even what you eat and drink, where you go and with whom you associate, — all of it depends on your wages.
No, you are not a free man. You are dependent on your employer and on your wages. You are really a wage slave.
The whole working class, under the capitalist system, is dependent on the capitalist class. The workers are wage slaves.
So, what becomes of your freedom? What can you do with it? Can you do more with it than your wages permit?
Can’t you see that your wage — your salary or income — is all the freedom that you have? Your freedom, your liberty, don’t go a step further than the wages you get.
The freedom that is given you on paper, that is written down in law books and constitutions, does not do you a bit of good. Such freedom only means that you have the right to do a certain thing. But it doesn’t mean that you can do it. To be able to do it, you must have the chance, the opportunity. You have a right to eat three fine meals a day, but if you haven’t the means, the opportunity to get those meals, then what good is that right to you?
So freedom really means opportunity to satisfy your needs and wants. If your freedom does not give you that opportunity, than it does you no good. Real freedom means opportunity and well-being. If it does not mean that, it means nothing.
from Now and After by Alexander Berkman, Chapter 3: Law and Government. Available to read for free here.
But roaming the savanna with some stinky people, scavenging won't give you the freedom to whatever as well. Don't want to add to the pile of food because today you're not feeling it? They'll kick you out and you'll get eaten by wolves by next Tuesday.
Edit: Hate it all you want, you're not alone and in a society there are rules. Getting rid of capitalists is a good idea, but you'll still have to contribute to the pile. Just way less and with a purpose beyond creating the next billionaire.
But complete freedom comes with complete loneliness. And all on your own, you'll have a hard time.
Who said anything about being alone?
One of the core tenets of anarcho-communism (which this book is explaining and advocating for) is mutual aid.
Anarchy doesn't mean no rules, it means no rulers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_aid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:_A_Factor_of_Evolution
Therefore I must tell you, first of all, what Anarchism is not.
It is not bombs, disorder, or chaos.
It is not robbery and murder.
It is not a war of each against all.
It is not a return to barbarism or to the wild state of man.
Anarchism is the very opposite of all that.
Anarchism means that you should be free; that no one should enslave you, boss you, rob you, or impose upon you.
It means that you should be free to do the things you want to do; and that you should not be compelled to do what you don’t want to do.
It means that you should have a chance to choose the kind of a life you want to live, and live it without anybody interfering.
It means that the next fellow should have the same freedom as you, that every one should have the same rights and liberties.
Rules without people implementing them are useless and people disobeying the rules need to be reminded that they are there for a reason. I am sure your ideas sound beautiful, but we as human beings are flawed and this will probably never come.
You seem to think I want to adhere to the current system. I don't, I think capitalism is cancer and needs to be eradicated. But I also think you don't have the answer.
You clearly don't know what anarchism truly is, but rather have an idea of what you think it is. I suggest giving the book I linked a quick browse. It's not very long and is written specifically to be accessible to those who have never studied anarchism in depth.
But before I tell you what Anarchism is, I want to tell you what it is not.
That is necessary because so much falsehood has been spread about Anarchism. Even intelligent persons often have entirely wrong notions about it.
Link again for your convenience.
Bru, stop it. Wrong tree, go bark at another one.
I mean absolutely. And in the tribal past you wouldn't have had many of the global and even regional supply systems we now have making much of our (limited) life possible now
you can probably find something that runs DOOM
Imagine a long day chasing a deer on foot for 10km, drag it back home, and then start playing Monster Hunter while your group preparing the meal. That would be the bestest day.
Don't forget the many, many hours spent weaving simple fabrics and baskets, cutting down and grinding wood and rocks into tools, lifting small wooden houses, fighting off annoying and nasty bugs, the many trips to bring water from a reliable source to the camp, maybe going 1 or 2 days without food because there are no edible plants/fruit around and the hunter party couldn't get shit. You better not be squeamish about eating just about every part of animals, including brain, tongue, eyes, intestines, lungs, bone marrow.
Probably little to no seasoning to whatever you happen to eat, either. Salt? Good fucking luck if you're far from the sea.
I invite everyone who holds this opinion to go do some reenactment. The earlier the better, but really, anything pre 1800s will do for an idea of what life was before modernity.
When you have to work to eat and survive you quickly stop giving a shit that you're "working." It doesn't feel like work to chop wood all day knowing it's gonna keep you from shivering or freezing all night.
That doesn't make it easy, it makes it less deflating. Work feels more like "work" when you're just doing it to make some other asshole rich.
Do they have any hunter gatherer reenactment societies?
Apples to oranges comparing the early modern era, anywhere back to classical days, to prehistory.
It is. Being a hunter gatherer is significantly worse, but you won't find many reenactors who will go for a weekend of prehistory.
I disagree if you are claiming being a hunter gatherer was worse than being a farmer. As do a lot of archeologists. For the reasons I already stated.
Farmers are at the mercy of the rulers of that region. They can't just leave. They become slaves.
Spend all day carving up a big booty "fertility goddess" to use later for "Ceremonial purposes"
You also lived for 32 years, tops, and had 9 children for 3 to survive
No, half the people died in early childhood and most of the rest lived for around 40-70 years. Agriculture also sometimes made life expectancies worse, even in the year 1900 life expectancy globally was still less than 35.
Year 1900 life expectancy seems like it would be more severely impacted by industrialization than agriculture. But yeah, hunter-gatherers don't just drop dead at 32.
I think one thing that kept life expectancies low was high child mortality, that will skew the average downwards. Unless they were accounting for that measured separately
Have to look deeper. I definitely want to spend thousands of hours playing games created by people with jobs and provided to me by people with jobs, and I don't mind having a job of my own. But the fact that I am gaming mostly to retain some semblance of sanity indicates something is seriously fucked up
Cave Inc. looking for Troglodyte Equine Prototyping Technician - We offer a competitive salary & free berries in the break cave. You bring: 5 years experience in cave painting and drawing, good team working skills.
You forget the hunting part. And caves were a not an all time thing, most had to follow the herds, or move to find game. You couldn't stay in the same cave without exhausting the resources.
But hunter gatherer societies had a more egalitarian society, and had a lot of free time. After agriculture took off, armed groups could force them to do stuff and make their lives tougher a lot easier.
Agriculture also happened as an on/off season thing, with groups being nomad for a season, then "settling" and planting for another. No point in keeping a land year-round when half of that time there's no actual land (underwater) or people around and the other half needs a lot of manpower to work it; manpower that is very ready to pack their shit and leave. There are many ways agriculture showed up and not all of them had an asshole bossing everyone while saying "MINE!"
And this is why I waste as much company time as possible 💅
I wonder how much I've saved over the years from almost only pooping at work.
my gut knows when I’m being held hostage in the office
I think we'll get back there eventually, if we don't murder ourselves in the process. This time though we'll have chilled beer picking sessions and no large animal is going to crack our skull open when we try to cook supper.
And try not to die from the dodgy meat you were forced to eat, becuase its the only meat you have seen in the past 3 months.
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