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I'm not making any claims about glorifying subsistence farming, that's a straw man. The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fu

I'm not making any claims about glorifying subsistence farming, that's a straw man. The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true. This is healthier for a society, not because of any high moral vision, but simply because the collapse of the ruling class does not mean the fundamental destruction of everyone. Peasants know how to till the land with or without a king. Today when have an unprecedented interdependence of the two classes. For example this is fundamentally incorrect: > people have the option to go back and start their own farm. A select few individuals do have this option, but all of society cannot return to an agrarian system because we do not have the resources for a population of our scale to live off the land without the massive industrial system required to maintain modern agriculture. Billions of people would die in this case. This interdependence is particularly troubling due to the inherent nature of the ruling class to seek to exploit the labor class. Though it is to the short term advantage of the capitalist class, in the long run it threatens all of industrial civilization. We are quite literally seeing the consequences of this right now.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago
> The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true. I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on. Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.
- soco 4y ago
  Stable, yes, until it's not. The OP point was that in case of an extraordinary event of a big enough scale - which your definition of a stable society doesn't exclude - most(?) of the people won't make it because of the very different nature of these relationships. So, while a disturbance is less likely, its effects would be more dramatic.

AnimalMuppet 4y ago

> The real distinction has nothing to do with how pleasant life is but the fundamental stability of society. For nearly all of human history since agriculture there has been a ruling class which survives through the exploitation of the labor class, but for most of the history there was an asymmetric dependance between ruling classes and labor class: ruling classes where absolutely dependent on labor class, but the inverse was not true. I don't think this is accurate. We are much less likely to suffer famine than they were (also epidemics, despite recent events). We are much less likely to suffer war. We are much less likely to suffer a neighboring warlord taking our stuff, including the food we need for the winter. And so on. Viewed from a high enough level, the society may have been stable. Stability wasn't really a characteristic of life at the individual or family level, though.

soco 4y ago
Stable, yes, until it's not. The OP point was that in case of an extraordinary event of a big enough scale - which your definition of a stable society doesn't exclude - most(?) of the people won't make it because of the very different nature of these relationships. So, while a disturbance is less likely, its effects would be more dramatic.