- cross-posted to:
- aiop
- cross-posted to:
- aiop
Cross-posted from “No, it’s not ‘normal’.” by @[email protected] in [email protected]
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Don’t you ever think, how is it possible most people does not realise how much better life could be? How good we all could be living right now.
Say it louder please.
There’s 8 billion people on this earth and the competition is getting really tiring. It’s not even merit based any more and I’m not sure when it last was.
Well, there’s the issue, human lives have been cheapened way too much.
Humans need to be so precious, that people beg for babies again.
Appeal to nature is not a valid argument.
Can’t believe this stupid shit is being upvoted. We are perfectly capable of designing our own social structures using our brains.
Appeal to nature is not a valid argument.
She’s an anthropologist, she’s referencing what was normal during much of human history/prehistory.
Its worth pointing out it wasn’t always this way, its not inevitable. Its all optional. We designed these social structures with our brains.
The post appears to be an overall response to the idea that modern society as we know it is “just how it is.” The point isn’t “be like our ancient ancestors” so much as “the system we have now isn’t the only way things can be.” That is, we’ve all grown up in this society with the work grind as our default. Some people will defend the way things are on the basis of it being some aspect of “human nature” to always compete and work hard, but societies of the past survived through co-operation and sharing resources. It’s pretty much the opposite to what is expected today.
What’s a valid argument in favor of today’s system? Wouldn’t that be a recency bias?
We’re running hunter gatherer hardware with intense survival instincts designed to protect us from getting eaten by sabretooth tigers in the age of anxiety.
We pay in sabertooth tigers for sabertooth tigers, and hey, your sabertooth tiger boss would like to show you a sabertooth tiger, just scroll down on your mobile sabertooth tiger, skip a few sabertooth tigers, click the tiger, and then you should see a sabertooth tiger.
And do not sleep. There are tigers.
I beg to differ.
An anthropologist should know about food scarcity. For thousands of years the family unit, tribe or village was under extreme competition from neighboring people and animals for resources.
There is a video from cameras on monkeys. They literally spend their whole day looking for food. Or in other words, every waking hour is spent in the pursuit of sustenance. Pre-tractor man was the same. Without modern capitalist agriculture you would be toiling on the farm tending to sheep, chickens, plowing fields, milking cows and all the myriad of tasks needed to fulfill the food groups you so nonchalantly stuff your face with. It be non-stop work for all the variety you currently take for granted.
The world, with low life-expectancies, was hazardous with no medicines, protections from the weather or modern law. Which i think brings a bit of stress when a festering carbuncle could mean your death. But thanks to innovation, it can now be easily cured by companies who seek monetary reward. I’ll take this normal over the other one.
Serfs also had to pay like 2/3 of their produce to their lords. When was the last time, humanity really had to struggle for food (and not because they had to enable a wasteful upper class)? Before we settled down, invented agriculture?
Dr. Agro doesn’t reference ancient history. Her work centers contemporary cultures as well as those historically concurrent with capitalism. E.g. within those few hundred years.
You’re severely underestimating the emiseration that happened under capitalism. Yes, peasant work is hard work. But living standards for the proletariat plummeted during the industrial revolution. Peasants didn’t have 14 hour shifts in the factories.
And you conflate technological progress with capitalism.
Also: if your environment can sustain a hunter-gatherer mode of production, you actually have quite a lot of leisure time.
This is true, but I think that it might also be true that capitalism has gone a bit overboard lately.
And I live in the EU!
Buddy, I grew up in the south where most of our food came from a vegetable garden and canning. We cut firewood for heat and had water from a spring. I can tell you it absolutely does not take all the waking day to tend to all that.
And did you tap latex trees for the rubber? Did you smelt ore for the metal? Did you buy the glass from a company that was used to can those vegetables or did you refine it yourself?
No. The seeds came from a catalog. The hatchet to chop the wood from a store.
Modern conveyance made it so you wouldn’t have to spend all day tending to survival. Yet the author seems to imply that life is harder now, than in the past.
Im smelting some iron now to make my first car.
You could have agriculture without modern capitalism.
We have people who treat Eve online optimization like a full time job for example. If their needs were met, I think they’d work happily on optimizing tractor schedules and crop rotation plans
I would probably do my job for free if I didn’t have to think about retirement and keeping my house and filling my belly. I just like what I do and I find it rewarding. The problem is still resource allocation.
No, I don’t think centralizing power and central planning will solve this either, I’m just saying people will be productive even without money.
I would probably start 30 unfinished projects.
Nobody cares if you beg to differ if your examples are all about farming. Farming was historically a last resort when you couldn’t live off the land by foraging and hunting. It was more common in less fruitful locations. Read some anthropology before you speak on it. Or learn more about modern agriculture and how shitty its returns are for the investment. Which is unsurprising considering modern agriculture is just shoving 3-5 crops in a bunch of places where they don’t want to grow and praying there’s enough nitrogen in the soil this year.
I’ve read Wrangham, Haw, Girard, Fields and others, but for the sake of brevity I chose one of many facets.
The author states that modern life is stressful and not normal. Personally i rather walk into an air-conditioned market than worry if my arrow hits home after sweating in ambush all day just to eat.
I think it was more normal to work hard, experience competition, and feel stresses of survival for most of human kinds existence, and that only now in the last few hundred years have we had it truly easy, even with poor agricultural returns.
Don’t know what to say! Branch out maybe.
Of course you’d rather have an easy moment in time than a hard day. If your air conditioned trip to the market is preceded by ten hours combined time commuting to, from, and performing work then I think you just prefer being inside to out. Because that’s a long day for a hunter and not something they’d do five to seven days a week. For a lot of human history people had so much time on their hands that they would throw random festivals, make giant earthworks, form intricate gift giving rituals to keep up relations with faraway tribes. Not everyone, sure! But enough that you know about all of this.
I’d rather gather berries for forty minutes! Or wade around on Californian shores trapping fish in the silty shallows. Or live in a world where we ate what we grew instead of feeding it to cattle or turning it into ethanol fuel. All of which are ways of life that have been practiced before, and ways of life that are perfectly possible, which begs the question, where on earth does the opposition to doing better come from? You’re not a fuckin monkey.
Even though I agree that peasantry fetishizers are retarded and reactionary, the mode of production and technology are two different things, albeit they do have a connection. The technology or means of production by themselves are neutral, nothing stops them from existing in either a capitalist or a more rationally organized society (i.e. planned economy), but what it produces for is what’s being dictated by the latter, and thus all the social relations that dictate the species being (currently it being insanely alienating and destructive).
Hey, I dont think using slurs is a good thing and while I usually disagree with you, I am suprised seeing you using one, because I thought you can do better.
Saying how a system of production that the entire world had adopted for at least 100 years now and one that history was continuously progressing towards for a couple thousand years isn’t normal is a bit wild ngl. What is normal then, the previous mode of production which was feudalism? Primitive communism which wasn’t a thing in the majority of the world for thousands of years? Or is it some different ahistoric ideal that somehow is the normal despite never existing?
Edit: Was made aware of this person’s website and holy fuck, not only do they have nothing of value to say (like the quote in the post) but they’re also one of those spiritual grifter types selling overpriced courses. Imagine falling for this crap
