4 ms·

The noble savage is just a fictional trope. No one denies that people in past times had materially worse-off lives than we do today. But they probably had more

• vacri 9y ago
  That's a very romantic view of medieval times (link is broken, by the way). Half the year off for vacation? I hope you enjoy vacationing at home, because if you're a serf, you're going nowhere. If you're a noblewoman, you're as likely to be married off for politics as not. Women in general were markedly less free - barred from education, property, public life, so on and so forth. To further your analogy, would you prefer to be a diabetic paraplegic in the modern era, or the medieval? Because you're not going to be able to medicate yourself with the insulin you need, and there's not much work for paraplegics to do if they're not born into money. > Our 60 years of wage slavery in windowless offices might seem unconscionable to a medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends, even if he ends up dying at 50. We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism is the whole reason why this site exists. For a medieval peasant, they can't move into the nobility, their inventions are not protected, they frequently aren't allowed to move around, travel is dangerous, communication with anyone outside the area they grew up in is more difficult due to language differences, hobbies are limited largely to what you can build yourself, since trade for items is difficult and expensive... the list of restrictions goes on and on. In any case, the peasants of yesteryear are analogous to the working class of today, and they don't work in offices, windowless or otherwise.
  • TeMPOraL 9y ago
    I generally agree with your line of reasoning but for one part: > We have the opportunity to change our lives if we don't want the wage slavery; entrepreneurialism Entrepreneuralism often is just another form of slavery. You exchange serving your boss 8 hours a day for serving your customers (and/or investors) 16 hours a day. Most businesses are not innovative problem solving endeavours, they're mundane servitude in highly competitive markets. If you're lucky, it may lead you to significantly more wealth than your dayjob; if you're not, you just wasted years of working 16h/day for less reward than you'd get working 8h/day in a regular job. The slavery only ends when you don't have to do work for other people in exchange for resources necessary to live a decent life. As a society, we're nowhere near that yet. (Thinking that starting your own business is freedom from the man is confusing irrelevant freedoms, like the ability to choose your customers, choose your logo, choose your working machine, with actually important freedoms, like choosing whether to have customers at all.)
    • ppeetteerr 9y ago
      We are all bound to our basic needs. Whether we satisfy them by earning a living in a windowless office, or hunting for food and potentially dying in the field, does not change the reason we all do what we do: for survival. A person today is less of a slave to his environment than in the past, although this is more the case in Canada and Scandinavian countries, than in the US. Now you could say that people worked less in past times, but you could also work half a year and enjoy the rest of your time labour-free, so long as you sacrifice a lot of luxuries (running water, police service, paved roads, fire department, any means of connectivity, etc.)
• jules 9y ago
  If you are OK with medieval levels of wealth then you can also take half the year off. In fact, you could probably take 11 months off if you live in a hut and buy a sack of potatoes once a week.
• icebraining 9y ago
  What about a prison that was full of your closest friends, versus a world of your enemies? You wouldn't be sent to prison in the first place. "The tortures and punishments of civil justice customarily cut off hands and ears, racked, burned, flayed, and pulled apart people's bodies. In everyday life, passers-by saw some criminal flogged with a knotted rope or chained upright in an iron collar. They passed corpses hanging on the gibbet and decapitated heads and quartered bodies impaled on stakes on the city walls."
• rypskar 9y ago
  >medieval peasant drinking mead all day by a stream with his friends Mead was expensive since it require lots of honey and was mostly used for special occasions. Most they did drink weak beer because they had learned that in some places peoples drinking water did die more often than the peoples drinking beer. The beer was weak because they did not know how east works and it was probably flat. So don't confuse it with what we know as beer now. I do also have a hard time believing they in general had more freedom, maybe the top 10% had more freedom than what many have now? Which is far from what the top 10% have now