this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
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A light form was tribalism. If you didn't go with the flow, you were expelled. With enough expelled ones, new tribes were formed. It kinda created human diversity for a while. There was only so much room on the river, so at some point more elaborate systems emerged. And the people with the biggest huts made those rules. Rules were made so that they could keep those huts. Extremely simplified.
We now don't have places to banish people to. That's why the cry for housing is emerging. Someone took the wild away. They should provide an alternative. I believe that's the whole idea behind wanting the rich to pay. For some reason they were allowed to own everything. Often for centuries.
It makes little sense to people today. How was anyone allowed to walk somewhere, stake a claim, and own it forever? Even defending it with lethal force? Why aren't we anymore?
We didn’t then either. The real issue is scale. What worked when the entire population of the human race was 100,000 doesn’t work when it’s 8,500,000,000.
You’re right that there are no wilds no, no one is getting 40 acres and a mule, and you can just inhabit a new area.
But let’s not forget that a lot of the stake a claim and defend with lethal force was literally colonialism. So many of those wilds were owned by other people, but the stronger guy with the bigger rock can kill him, take his land, take his wife.
Hardly utopia.
Exactly the point I apparently failed to make. It never worked. Yet we are holding on to it. Just with the added caveat that the weapons are now money, and the wilds are gone.