Although I don't think it's very wise to say we should try to reach for the ideal of the hunter-gatherer society, but it's undeniable that the combination of (i

Although I don't think it's very wise to say we should try to reach for the ideal of the hunter-gatherer society, but it's undeniable that the combination of (i) overproduction and (ii) machinery being used for short-term profit rather than meaning people have to work less is causing a lot of time used working when it could, in a society not driven by profit, be used for various kinds of fulfillment and sharpening one's intellectual faculties. As Oscar Wilde put it: Now and then, in the course of the century, a great man of science, like Darwin; a great poet, like Keats; a fine critical spirit, like M. Renan; a supreme artist, like Flaubert, has been able to isolate himself, to keep himself out of reach of the clamorous claims of others, to stand ‘under the shelter of the wall,’ as Plato puts it, and so to realise the perfection of what was in him, to his own incomparable gain, and to the incomparable and lasting gain of the whole world. These, however, are exceptions. The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation.