Author Topic: How the Extinction of Ice Age Mammals May Have Forced Us to Invent Civilization (?)  (Read 491 times)

Zea_mays

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Re: Simple living movements
« on: November 08, 2021, 03:29:38 pm »


I think observing people's reactions to the sentiment in this image is a good way to gauge if they have gatherer blood memory or farming blood memory.

My first thought was that the poster was nostalgic for a pre-industrial simple agrarian life, but many people in the comment section seem to be interpreting it as hunter-gatherer nostalgia (and multiple people even repeat the assertion of Jared Diamond (chosenite) that agriculture was "the worst mistake in history"...)
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-worst-mistake-in-the-history-of-the-human-race


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Agriculture is where it all went wrong. We were better off as hunter/gatherers.

I feel like it wasn’t so much agriculture as it was the industrial revolution that lead us astray
https://old.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/qfs0u9/right/hi1r0lz/


For some strange reason, many communist-influenced people (like those on the Reddit forum linked above) idealize hunter-gatherer society because they believe it was "economically egalitarian" compared to the subsequent stage of civilization in farming societies.

Biologically, it's literally insane to think hunter-gatherers were somehow "egalitarian". The skeletons of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers are easily contrasted to later Neolithic individuals, because the hunter-gatherers had quite extreme sexual dimorphism. Sexual dimorphism is inequality literally written into our DNA and our bones. That's way more absolute, oppressive, and difficult to change than man-made economic systems which varied from culture to culture and time period to time period. (And, going on a tangent, I suspect that sexual dimorphism is why so many teenagers these days express gender dysphoria and call themselves "non-binary", since they developed a sense of personal "identity" prior to puberty and are psychologically unable to process the changes of their "new" dimorphic self and unable to transition into the social class of adulthood). Good luck abolishing the oppression of sexual dimorphism with a communist revolution. There was only one ideology which was actually capable of doing that!

Also, this isn't even pointing out the fact that hunter-gatherer societies observed historically typically had very very strong gender roles assigned to labor and social status/customs!!! ...So the communist assertion that hunter-gatherers are "economically egalitarian" isn't even accurate. The only thing stopping hunter-gatherer societies from reaching the same level of "class" stratification and material wealth accumulation as farming civilizations (and, later, industrialized civilizations) is that hunter-gatherer groups were much smaller. Even then, modern and historically-observed hunter-gatherer groups usually have an "elder" class,  priest class, hereditary leadership in one or both of those, special status for 'elite' hunters or warriors, etc.