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UnionPacifik t1_jaaoojh wrote

Reply to comment by V_Shtrum in Is style the next revolution? by nitebear

You might enjoy “The Dawn of Everything” - it’s a recent work on early human civilizations that debunks a lot of what you’re saying in this post.

Human civilization is much more diverse and many society’s operated as truly egalitarian, with no centralized authority just fine. Also, many of those so called “dark ages” when kingdoms collapsed managed just fine without a structured society.

“Trade” as you’re describing it is also not a common feature. Humans are generalists usually or that social role wasn’t defined by what you did, but by your birth or the season of the year or any other number of factors.

I really would urge you to challenge this notion that “work” or “labor” is a natural part of the human condition. We live in a super hierarchical society at the moment, with power concentrated in a handful of humans, so it might seem “natural” but we’re a lot more than our ability to produce goods, services and capital in exchange for economic security.

I think humans should still explore and contribute and make things, because that is in our nature, but if we can automate the necessity for labor and work out of existence so that our efforts are directed towards our interest and not our needs, I think we would wind up with an infinitely more productive, diverse and happy society. Do what you want!

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CertainMiddle2382 t1_jabnruo wrote

Well that book is very explicitly written by a anarchist activist with the intend of making the concept relevant in modern politics again.

It is not a scientific book, and I must say I have some sympathies towards anarchy myself.

Problem is, those very primitive and unspecialized cultures weren’t advanced enough to invent writing, so most if not all of their culture is lost in time, forever.

People with a political agenda have time and time again tried to make them say thing we are mostly unsure.

I am more interested in living ethnology, especially the study on native cultures around the world.

Their societies obviously are not very specialized, individuals mostly segregated by sex, age and power.

An interesting point is their demography, if life was so great, a “saturating” fertility level should easily allow their population to double every generation.

And that was never seen.

Life witnesses, for example in very early colonial Brazil seem to point that those native cultures were far from being food limited (they had plenty of free time to increase harvest intensity), but they were waging constant extermination war with “neighboring” tribes.

In fact, land was plentiful, they had to travel extensively to meet those adversaries.

The goal was genocide of all the opposing men (and not land as said by the natives themselves), either directly or after a variable period of slavery followed by ritual torture, execution and often cannibalism. Women were taken as brides by the young winners (not much polygamy in what I read it seems).

This live experience bears much stronger witness about the quality of life in those happy times.

What saved those cultures was in fact that they were not specialized enough to create more advanced weapons…

IMO

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