this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
1387 points (95.9% liked)

Memes

45753 readers
1824 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Back to Ted

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] Zengen 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Can you name me one single time in human history that this wasn't just the condition of the human race? Every time humans try to institute a wealth redistribution mechanism it becomes corrupted in less than 70 years and it just becomes feudalism again where the people are impoverished and starving and the only people living well are state officials lol

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Every pre-agricultural society? I'm not saying they didn't have their own problems, but feudalism wasn't one of them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Small scale hunting and gathering societies are universally egalitarian because it's impossible for any one person to accumulate significant wealth or to control resources. The way members of such societies gain influence therefore is through virtue and personal merit. This is the social system that we evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and it's why we still haven't figured out an equally amenable replacement in the mere ten thousand years since we adopted agriculture.

That said, for better or worse, agriculture is a trap, and once we adopted it, there was never any going back, so we have no choice but to keep trying with what we have.