Comment by jinjin2
1 day ago
> society is reverting back to factory settings of human history, which has always been a feudalist type society of a small elite owning all the wealth
The word “always” is carrying a lot of weight here. This has really only been true for the last 10,000 years or so, since the introduction of agriculture. We lived as egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before that. Given the magnitude of difference in timespan, I think it is safe to say that that is the “default setting”.
Even within the last 10,000 years, most of those systems looked nothing like the hereditary stations we associate with feudalism, and it’s focused within the last 4,000 years that any of those systems scaled, and then only in areas that were sufficiently urban to warrant the structures.
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>We lived as egalitarian bands of hunter gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years before that.
Only if you consider intra-group egalitarianism of tribal hunter gatherer societies. But tribes would constantly go to war with each other in search of expanding to better territories with more resources, and the defeated tribe would have its men killed or enslaved, and the women bred to expand the tribe population.
So you forgot that part that involved all the killing, enslavement and rape, but other than that, yes, the victorious tribes were quite egalitarian.
Sure, nobody is claiming that hunter gatherers were saints. Just because they lived in egalitarian clans, it doesn’t mean that they didn’t occasionally do bad things.
But one key differentiator is that they didn’t have the logistics to have soldiers. With no surplus to pay anyone, there was no way build up an army, and with no-one having the ability to tell others to go to war or force them to do so, the scale of conflicts and skirmishes were a lot more limited.
So while there might have been a constant state of minor skirmishes, like we see in any population of territorial animals, all-out totalitarian war was a rare occurrence.
what is so bad about raping and pillaging
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> and the defeated tribe would have its men killed or enslaved, and the women bred to expand the tribe population.
I’m not aware of any archaeological evidence of massacres during the paleolithic. Which archaeological sites would support the assertions you are making here?
What an absurd request. Where's your archaeological evidence that humans were egalitarian 10000+ years?
The idea that we didn't have wars in the paleolithic era is so outlandish that it requires significant evidence. You have provided none.
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Population density on the planet back then was also low enough to not cause mass wars and generate mass graves, but killing each other over valuable resources is the most common human trait after reproduction and seek of food and shelter.
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Back then there were so few people around and expectations for quality of life were so low that if you didn't like your neighbors you could just go to the middle of nowhere and most likely find an area which had enough resources for your meager existence. Or you'd die trying, which was probably what happened most of the time.
That entire approach to life died when agriculture appeared. Remnants of that lifestyle were nomadic peoples and the last groups to be successful were the Mongols and up until about 1600, the Cossacks.
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