Natural disasters are fine as a metaphor once you realize that we never left the jungle. Other people might be friendly or they might be tigers waiting for you to turn your back before they pounce.
Every utopian makes the same mistake: they see the sleight of hand we call technology and think that makes us different from the warriors who would bash each other’s brains out with clubs, steal all the women, and burn down the village. We’re not. We’re the same damn upright-walking, (mostly) hairless primates we’ve been for the past 300,000 years.
That shit didn’t happen in Australia. There’s very little record of precolonial warfare, especially on the scale you describe. Australian Aboriginal people had an assembly of nations that kept the peace through advanced political mechanisms. Capitalist society is simply far more primitive than Aboriginal hunter gatherer society.
Sure, hunter gatherer societies the world over tended to be more peaceful because they weren’t tied down to defending a piece of land and the food they worked so hard to grow.
The beauty of being a hunter gatherer is that when you get into conflict over a resource, you can just move to another area. Populations tend to stay low as everyone spreads out and develops large territories.
The hard part is figuring out how to get along after the agricultural revolution when people are living in cities, specialized into different roles, with larger populations (way above Dunbar’s number) forced to live in close proximity.
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Natural disasters are fine as a metaphor once you realize that we never left the jungle. Other people might be friendly or they might be tigers waiting for you to turn your back before they pounce.
Every utopian makes the same mistake: they see the sleight of hand we call technology and think that makes us different from the warriors who would bash each other’s brains out with clubs, steal all the women, and burn down the village. We’re not. We’re the same damn upright-walking, (mostly) hairless primates we’ve been for the past 300,000 years.
That shit didn’t happen in Australia. There’s very little record of precolonial warfare, especially on the scale you describe. Australian Aboriginal people had an assembly of nations that kept the peace through advanced political mechanisms. Capitalist society is simply far more primitive than Aboriginal hunter gatherer society.
Sure, hunter gatherer societies the world over tended to be more peaceful because they weren’t tied down to defending a piece of land and the food they worked so hard to grow.
The beauty of being a hunter gatherer is that when you get into conflict over a resource, you can just move to another area. Populations tend to stay low as everyone spreads out and develops large territories.
The hard part is figuring out how to get along after the agricultural revolution when people are living in cities, specialized into different roles, with larger populations (way above Dunbar’s number) forced to live in close proximity.