this post was submitted on 10 Nov 2023
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For one, hunter-gatherer tribes before the rise of civilisation were most certainly built on kindness and cooperation
Except towards other tribes. Can't have them clear our hunting grounds, now can we?
Check out The Dawn of Everything, puts to rest a lot of the myths about prehistoric societies that we tell ourselves. Early societies were consciously experimenting with different social arrangements and they were far more peaceful and egalitarian than we usually give them credit for. Their ideas on property were vastly different than ours as well. There wasn't really an "our hunting grounds" to speak of. If you're interested I'll leave this video by Andrewism about human history. It's well sourced and pretty informative
Turns out to have warring tribes you need to be organized enough to carry out a war.
Jericho had walls when most of the rest of humanity was nomadic hunter-gatherers.
City walls generally weren't built because people feel safe and secure already.
I think it sort of depends on what time period we're talking about. Jericho and other walled cities came about after a certain point. By then, there certainly were societies that lived off raiding the less nomadic agrarian societies, not very peaceful or egalitarian.
There was plenty for everyone since there were a lot fewer people, plus there were no real territories that people claimed over longer periods at all since we were nomads.
The only real solution is intentional population control. But I don't have high hopes we ever get there though.
Everyone could have way more resources than we'd ever want to even use. But instead, we seem focused on maxing out the world population leaving the least amount possible for each person.
The problem is the improper distribution of resources, not overpopulation. If we truly tried we could sustainably support our current population and work on healing the world.
Talking about intentional population control is a fat too slippery slope.
"Overpopulation" is a right-wing myth.
Are you suggesting that there's no limit to how many people the resources we have available to us can support?
Oh, there probably is. All things being equal (and that's the important factor) there is next-to-no chance of us ever reaching such a bizarre amount of people - you could triple the amount of people on earth, and, all things being equal, we still wouldn't be "overpopulated."
However, things are not equal - which means we are already existing way beyond that which our ecology can support. And it's all thanks to capitalist parasites - a very small group of people sucking everything dry at the expense of everyone and everything else.
What standard of living do you consider "all things being equal"?
I don't consider "standards of living" - period.
I consider this.
That's literally an article about how they don't have enough water. Yes, the rich are using twice as much as the poor and it would go further if it was distributed more evenly but the fact remains that there's a finite amount that is not sustainable beyond a certain population.
This...
...just went completely over your head, didn't it?
No? The article says rich people are using 2x as much water as poor people - 50% vs 23% and they are already having water problems. Assuming the water consumption was evened out this leaves the population room to go up no more than 4x what it is now even with equal consumption. That's hardly out of the realm of possibility considering the population already has gone up 8x since 1950
FTFY. That's just household use, Clyde. We haven't even started with the water usage that makes the rich rich - ie, the private ownership of industry and commerce (which, of course, externalizes the destruction of water resources).
That kind of population growth is a thing of the past. The only way to successfully reverse that would be by design - such as the measures taken by certain aspects of the US political establishment to enforce patriarchal norms through institutionalized violence (ie, the criminalization of women's healthcare).
Water used for industry is still going to be used regardless of who controls that industry. Poor people can be just as greedy as rich ones, they just don't have a means to act on it.
Population growth has slowed but it has not stopped. Even at 1 or 2 % per year it will be only a few generations before it becomes an issue. 1% of 6,000,000 people is a lot more than 1% of 600,000.
Absolutely not. Pretending that capitalism doesn't work the way capitalism works is a certain dead-end for your argument.
That is one piss-poor justification for the status quo.
The people at the top aren't worried about population growth these days, Clyde - they are worried about population reversal. You wanna know why?
Wtf does that even mean?. The point is there will still be a demand for goods whether it's produced by a farm/factory owned by one individual or a collective of workers. They'll still be consuming the water.
I'm not justifying anything. All I'm trying to do is explain to you that resources are finite and too many people will burn through them. If you don't think poor people can be greedy and wasteful then I encourage you to get out more.
The only reason I ever hear for that is from racists because it's the white people that slowed down the most. Population projections for the world do not show a decline. Unless of course you take the lack of resources into account...
Pretending that production for profit and production for need is the same thing is fallacious - end of story.
You still haven't managed to justify the right-wing trope of "overpopulation" - pretending that the vast majority's consumption is (somehow) the problem isn't proving it, merely regurgitating it.
Sooo... you have figured out that in a capitalist society access to women's healthcare is merely another commodity - and, thanks to colonialist pillaging and repression, white people do tend to have more access to that commmodity?
You don't say.
No... it shows a trend towards stabilization - which, just by itself, demoslishes the entire concept of "overpopulation."
What lack of resources. Resources being hoarded by a capitalist elite was as true in 1950 as it was in 2023 - so how does that affect the trope you are trying to justify?
Malthus and Erlich, right wingers?
I don't see many right wing people on this list. Thoughts?
Whether Malthus himself was a right-winger or not isn't really important... it doesn't change how the trope of overpopulation has been used to protect power and privilege (ie, the whole point of right-wing ideology). For instance, there is a very good reason why white supremacists support the criminalization of women's health care in (supposedly) "white" countries while demonizing 3rd world countries for their (supposedly) "explosive population growth."
It's a very old trope that flattens human consumption and therefore camouflages the reality that certain classes of people consume resources at astronomical rates in comparison with the rest. It's utility in shielding class hierarchies from scrutiny should be perfectly obvious.
What?
You read that correctly.
I was hoping I didn't.
Well now you did.
So now what?
I'm afraid that's it.
You do you.
The Agrarian Revolution really was where humanity started going downhill.
This is true, but agriculture is a trap in the sense that once we adopted it, there was no turning back.
Remind me again of how farming ruined people
The first written evidence of slavery in the ancient world comes from ancient Mesopotamia. However, slavery was in practice much longer than that. Slavery most likely began when the first cities needed labor to keep food production up to feed growing populations.
So you propose an anarchy? I dont think that would go well.
And your point is?
Simply trotting that out as a truth tells us nothing about how you propose to build a modern system that respects how we've evolved as a species.
I'm just answering the question. They ask what system rewards kindness, I say a hunter-gatherer one does. I'm not implying that going back to the stone age is realistic by any means.