solarpunk memes

The "Gift economy" is another vision of mutual aid.

Most traditional societies were practicing a form or another of gift economy, basically the idea is that when you are gifted something you feel obligated to return another gift.

So if your neighbor gives you the extra apples he gets from is orchard, then you feel obligated and later you might give him extra potatoes, or offer to help him if you see him find work in his roof ...

The constant gifting and reciprocating gifts is how this traditional form of economy runs. Unlike what economists are thinking, bartering was very rarely used in the economy of traditional societies.

This form of economy is building and consoliding communities.

One human being, even armed with a spear or a bow and arrow, can do nothing to a mammoth but watch from a very safe distance. A cooperating group of human beings, armed each with similar primitive weapons, can destroy a mammoth, and, indeed, such hunting groups managed, long before the birth of civilization, to drive these magnificent creatures to extinction-as well as other large, but insufficiently intelligent, species.

Of all tribal species, only Homo sapiens developed a technology, and, as it happens, there is very little in the way of technology that a single human being, starting from scratch, can develop. A group of human beings, with diverse talents, are much more likely to have the succession of ingenious ideas that bring about the growth of technology.

Not only that, but the growth of technology seems to require, inevitably, the development of larger and larger co-operating groups to maintain that technology at its level and to bring about further growth.

The development of agriculture required a large population of farmers not only to till the fields and weed and hoe and sow and reap and do all the work required to produce a year's supply of food, but also to make the implements needed, to construct and maintain the irrigation ditches, to build walled cities and collect armaments to protect themselves from surrounding tribes who, not having sown, would be glad to collect the reapings by force.

Fortunately, the development of agriculture made it possible to support a larger population than would have been possible without it. In general, it has been true that advances in technology have both produced and used a larger and denser population than before.

To make the technology work, moreover-and this is the crucial point-there must be co-operation at least over a political unit large enough to be economically useful. Through history, as technology has advanced, the size of these economic units has necessarily increased from tribal patches, to city-states, to nations, to empires.

—Isaac Asimov, Nice Guys Finish First, collected in The Sun Shines Bright, 1981

Exactly. Literally what Kropotkin meant when he called it a "factor in evolution." Mutual aid can be just as useful of a survival mechanism in nature as predation. Maybe even more depending on the situation.

"I don't like when people do things to be nice, I like it when they do it transactionally."

Where meme

Give what you can, take what you need. Sometimes it can be worth it to bring a egotistic justification into it for the benefit of those that don't think like you do.

Even the most selfish person in existence should see that something like eradicating poverty in the third world might help them.

Imagine all the potential Einstein's, Newton's and Curie's that never got the chance to study physics or chemistry or engineering or art or agriculture or anything but instead died of sepsis at the age of 4. We literally all benefit from giving freely.

Heh gud1

Sorry to reference an old reddit post, but this reminds me of Today you, tomorrow me.

Solidarity is grounded in self interest. Altruism is not. And that's a core difference between materialsts (solidarity) and idealists (altruism). Or Marxists (materialists) and Liberals (idealists).