RetroFedNo, it's not 'normal'.
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Cross-posted from "No, it’s not ’normal’." by @DougHolland@lemmy.world in !aiop@lemmy.world
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AllNewTypeFaceIn much of the evolutionary timeline that shaped our nervous systems, it was normal to be in a state of heightened awareness looking out for predators and other threats.
That’s true. But that’s not what defines being human.
We would have to look at the evolutionary conditions of the species Homo sapiens (whenever we define its beginning) as the evolutionary context, rather than the 4 billion years that came before. In doing so, it would probably still make sense to look at the most recent period during which our neural development was still able to keep pace with our social evolution… so somewhere between the emergence of the various human species and the Bronze Age, I suppose.
After all, we wouldn’t consider the lifestyle of a T-Rex to be a natural context for the evolution of the chicken.
OfCourseNotIs it not, tho? I mean no disrespect because I ain’t no anthropologist and I ain’t got no PhD in nothing, but, when was this time when humans where not in permanent competition, working most of their waking hours? She comments ‘a few hundred years’ ago which would put it in the Enlightenment, Renaissance, or Middle Ages? I do not think your average peasant got that great of a life back then either. Again I’m not saying it’s not true, but I would appreciate some sources or elaborating a bit further than a trust-me-bro appeal to authority.
Also, I’m not saying that, even if it were normal, we shouldn’t try and change it. Because if we don’t strive to make life better and more comfortable for us humans, what’s the point of all this civilisation shit?
Preagriculture societies as Hunter gatherers could have large amounts of idle time especially in the summer when food is abundant.
The time when all of that happened was from the beginning of humanity up until about the late 1600s/early 1700s
The average Medieval peasant worked less than half as much as a modern worker. And enjoyed a standard of living much closer to their global average than the modern worker in most cases as well.
Capitalism is a death cult.
.
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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.
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.
It drives me insane tbh
But then how could they feel superior over those “lessor thans” especially race related issues. I swear we would have such a better life of the whites in power were not doing everything they could to keep poc down
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.
Which means we need to get rid of most of the people in the world but then how do you decide who deserves to go?
Wow.
Back right up.
All they said was humanity needed to be precious again.
We never stopped being human, we did stop viewing each other as human in a lot of circumstances.
Your instant move to “get rid of everyone” is a bit telling itself.
There is more than enough to go around even now, stop letting billionaires convince you otherwise.
I knew very well it would be interpreted that way 😈
Even better that I figured how to mitigate depreciation issues anyway.
1: End the purely materialist/transactional society.
2: Ironically, more local and less global communities.
3: Less unplanned children pooped out.
Agreed on all 3 points lmao.
Well played 😂
Humans aren’t precious because there’s like 8 billion of us. 300 years ago it was probably more like 600-700 million (highest estimates around a billion) and it took more humans to achieve less work.
Under capitalism, more people means cheaper workforce because more competition between workers. Individual worker is valued less. Under communism you don’t put a dollar figure on a human the same way, but they’re still more expendable when you can just get another one to do the same job.
I’m not advocating for mass genocide or eugenics, I’m just saying that’s how it is and we better get used to it. Things are precious when they’re scarce. We’re not scarce.
No one is forcing you to feel that humans are or are not precious and this argument is very troubling..
If you cannot see why, please seek help.
I thought we were talking about society, i.e a collection of 8 billion humans, and how it values each of those 8 billion humans, not me personally.
How does having 8 billion people make them precious? You step on ants, yes?
I think the point was to choose to see them as unique vessels of beauty and consciousness and not as a pair of hands that can push buttons in the button pushing factory.
As you can see, we have succeeded in dehumanizing people so well, that they themselves will come on here and argue that they should also be a statistic. This is not ok.
Oh yes, do you also think the same of IDF soldiers as they bomb tents?
See who signs up for the Mars mission I guess.
Or just use a condom, and wait for the old people to die.
Not like you can save them anyway.
No one would have to go, we just have to stop having new people (aka no babies)
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.
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.
I’ve learned that some people hate starting projects but really like taking something that’s already been planned out and working it out to completion.
Made me feel better about getting my pleasure from planning and starting projects then losing interest once things started coming together.
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.
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’re intentionally misunderstanding what’s being said to strengthen your own argument. Nothing you mentioned is “modern” convenience by the way.
Life is harder now in some ways. The image posted is true in that under capitalism we’re subject to its oppression for minimal actual benefit.
Do you know what pedantic means?
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.
Why do you think we’re bothering with all this instead of “gathering berries for 40 minutes”?
People still throw random festivals, make art and spend time interacting with others. I’d absolutely not rather spend 40 minutes gathering berries than work 40 hours a week if the latter means I have a heated home, modern amenities, a computer, no worries about having enough food, etc.
Those things sometimes not being given even with more work is a fucking problem, especially since it’s only to make the rich richer, but gathering some food for yourself does not give you access to all the other things that other people made that you use daily.
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.
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?
Because that’s the foundation of a civilization? When humanity was able to produce more per farmer than they could eat is when society flourished the most. That allows other people to live off the farmer’s back and do other things. That might sound like they were taking advantage of them, but if Pythagoras and Archimedes and everyone else had to spent their days in the field, we wouldn’t have all that we do now. And I’m sure the farmers didn’t mind when those non-farmers came up with the tractor.
The invention of agriculture didn’t end the struggle for food. Early agriculture was a much harder way of life than hunting and gathering at the time. The first agriculturist peoples were severely malnourished compared to their h-g neighbours. They had a very poor diet of limited variety, and a lot less available meat.
Early agriculturists were also easy pickings for hunter gatherers to raid their food stores and plunder everything. Between the poor soil, poor variety of crops, poor nutrition and low protein, infestations of mould and vermin, and constant attacks by raiders, life for these folks was an extreme struggle.
Looking at that situation, it should be a lot easier to see why agriculturalist societies soon developed militaries and became warlike. And why local lords demanding 2/3 of your produce was a fair trade for having a military that would drive its enemies hundreds of miles away from your farm.
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!
Makes me a bit less proud to be their descendant. Why couldn’t we descend from the stately raven. Corvids consistently show that they have a lot of free time. Same with parrots.
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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.
Tell that to a farmer
1000%, these aren’t new concepts that were invented alongside coinage.
Tbh humans have it better now than ever before. Making claims of “normal” is pretty silly, lol. Long life spans aren’t normal. Retirement is not normal. Not living in fear of wild animals is not normal. Etc.
But yes, things can be and therefore should be better. That’s the only real argument. Saying anything else just harms the cause.
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.
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.
We didn’t design them though. They evolved. What people (economists and politicians) thought they were designing is not how things turned out. The end product was a result of social forces.
Like a bunch of bees inside a beach ball, all flying in different directions: what happens to the beach ball?
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/the-fallacy-fallacy
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?
I understand that “normal” is a confusing term by nature and isn’t the same as “natural”. The norm is pretty much what we can observe (plus bias), which might be natural or not (plus bias).
Here, i suppose it’s just a shortest way of saying “I think it doesn’t have to be this way”.
And yet we never designed a leisure society with all the resources we have.
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