Win or lose in November, more than 70 million Americans will likely cast their ballots for Trump. Most of them know who Trump is. They hear his vile words and heinous promises—and they like what they hear. They are the reason the election will be close.
I heard an interesting comparison lately saying basically that blaming the development of agriculture for late stage capitalism is like blaming calculus for the development of the atom bomb, and I would tend to agree.
It’s looking like agriculture was probably used originally to keep us longer in community at sites like Gobekli Tepe, and probably was absolutely life saving for us at that time.
The real issue arose from not persecuting those who would horde various types of wealth more severely (or at all).
I disagree with that last part. It wasn’t that we didn’t persecute the hoarders. It’s that we got into groups too large to achieve consensus and we forgot how to live without agriculture so we couldn’t leave. That’s why it was a trap: Suddenly we had to do it and couldn’t stop. Nobody has to be hoarding things if we’re all reliant on farming. We have to stick around.
What we did from there was just kludgy attempts to get a nomadic primate that lives in small groups to live in sedentary large groups. If we can’t fathom the cosmos because the notion of “one million” is too large for the human brain to comprehend, how are we supposed to make sense of a planet with eight billion humans? If we can only remember about 150 names and faces, how are we supposed to feel belonging in a community of thousands, let alone millions?
Also, I didn’t blame agriculture for late-stage capitalism. I blamed it for authoritarianism. Once you start having to enforce the will of the majority on the minority things start to suck fast.
I heard an interesting comparison lately saying basically that blaming the development of agriculture for late stage capitalism is like blaming calculus for the development of the atom bomb, and I would tend to agree.
It’s looking like agriculture was probably used originally to keep us longer in community at sites like Gobekli Tepe, and probably was absolutely life saving for us at that time.
The real issue arose from not persecuting those who would horde various types of wealth more severely (or at all).
I disagree with that last part. It wasn’t that we didn’t persecute the hoarders. It’s that we got into groups too large to achieve consensus and we forgot how to live without agriculture so we couldn’t leave. That’s why it was a trap: Suddenly we had to do it and couldn’t stop. Nobody has to be hoarding things if we’re all reliant on farming. We have to stick around.
What we did from there was just kludgy attempts to get a nomadic primate that lives in small groups to live in sedentary large groups. If we can’t fathom the cosmos because the notion of “one million” is too large for the human brain to comprehend, how are we supposed to make sense of a planet with eight billion humans? If we can only remember about 150 names and faces, how are we supposed to feel belonging in a community of thousands, let alone millions?
Also, I didn’t blame agriculture for late-stage capitalism. I blamed it for authoritarianism. Once you start having to enforce the will of the majority on the minority things start to suck fast.