Quote from: Doktor Howl on June 15, 2020, 07:43:02 PMQuote from: tyrannosaurus vex on June 15, 2020, 06:42:49 PM
As much as I respect everyone in this thread, I'm going to cordially invite every person who feels like it's their job to put words in my mouth to go fuck themselves. At no point did I advocate for returning to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, nor did I ever dismiss the entire notion of technological progress as a myth or the tangible benefits to modern Western humans of modern Western civilization as a fantasy. I apologize if my implication that hunter-gatherers are not missing out on some fundamental aspect of human existence just because they don't have Skype seemed like a personal attack. It was not one.
I am honestly sitting here trying to puzzle out what you were saying, then.
I am in Western civilization. I have stuff. So do people in Thailand and Japan and Africa. Some of them don't have as much stuff, but they are feverishly trying to get that stuff. Not because they have been brainwashed by mean old Western Civilization™, but because they are human and humans want stuff.
I imagine I should feel guilty for having stuff and wanting more stuff. I find that to be absurd, considering that my job literally requires me to find ways to kill every living human as efficiently as possible, and I don't feel guilty about that. Fuck the humans. They aren't my goddamn people, and they can all SHUT UP and maybe DIE.
I am not quite as cynical as that. For 20,000+ years, people who were every bit as anatomically modern and cognitively able as we are lived a whole different way in the Pre-Columbian Americas. Obviously it wasn't some idyllic Eden where everyone was happy and nobody wept and there were no problems - there were wars, andd famines, and diseases, and assholes and murders (probably). But they operated under a whole different set of basic assumptions and didn't engage in the same sort of resource hoarding and environmentally catastrophic exploitation that we take as a given today. They lacked access to anything we would recognize as basic modern amenities and infrastructure, but they had no concept of those things so they were no less satisfied with their lives than we are with ours.
I'm /not/ painting some bullshit picture about how we should give up on civilization and return to that. Im just saying that human beings are not actually hardwired to destroy themselves and their environment, and that what we think of as civilization is neither inevitable nor "superior", or even "more advanced," except by our own standards that only apply subjectively to us. And the reason I bring it up isn't to say we ought to mimick hunter gatherers, but only to be aware of our prior when we think about what is and isn't human nature and whether we are either doomed to blown ourselves up or destined to overcome: neither of those outcomes is assured merely by virtue of our human DNA.