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Maybe by 'democracy' you mean 'intelligent social organization'. At the end of the day we don't need that much tech to have a great civilization and 'how to do
by alexasmyths 9y ago
Maybe by 'democracy' you mean 'intelligent social organization'.
At the end of the day we don't need that much tech to have a great civilization and 'how to do it' is not rocket science.
Eating shellfish, having a glass of wine with a beautiful woman on the cost of the Med recently made me realize that someone could have had this very nice pleasure 2000 years ago.
If people act intelligently and responsibly both in life, in work and in governance, there's no reason any country can't be fairly advanced.
Especially since the dawn of the industrial revolution - we have surpluses of almost everything.
Especially since mass information/media the knowledge for how to do this is widespread.
If individual actors act intelligently then they can make generally a high standard of living for themselves in whatever region.
For about 100 years now most people have not had to work on farms to establish the food base, and are freed up to do all sorts of other things, so it's a matter how how to efficiently deploy them.
- zzzzzzzza 9y agowow so shellfish and beautiful women are the hallmarks of civilization. amazing. Guess we should prioritze plastic surgery as a society, capitalism does that pretty well I guess.
- alexasmyths 9y agoFor a straight middle aged dude, sitting by the side of the Med on perfect day eating sea-food, drinking great wine in the company of a beautiful and interesting woman ... is pretty near the height of civilization, yes.
- zzzzzzzza 9y agointeresting is an afterthought. None of that has anything to do with civilization, aside from I suppose the lack of complete and utter destruction of the local ecology.
- Jesus_Jones 9y agoIt has to do with civ. in that with enough civ. a lot more of us have enough food and free time to have a little leisure time. It might be only working 5 or 6 days a week, it might be we survived heavy industrialization into the post period where we clean the air and remove dangerous chemicals from pollution.
- alexasmyths 9y agoAlso the height of human experience. The beauty and serenity of perfect weather, a perfect taste, a perfect smile - the moment. This is civilization, just not so much in industrial or even hard intellectual terms.
- zzzzzzzza 9y agoSlaughtering your opponent in a no holds barred contest of strength is also the height of human experience. Human experience is completely orthogonal to civilization. Civilization is found primarily in libraries and databases - civilization is an intellectual tradition.