12 ms·

Human history in the very long run (2021)

• cratermoon 2y ago
  No Work, No Food Hyakujo, the Chinese Zen master, used to labor with his pupils even at the age of eighty, trimming the gardens, cleaning the grounds, and pruning the trees. The pupils felt sorry to see the old teacher working so hard, but they knew he would not listen to their advice to stop, so they hid away his tools. That day the master did not eat. The next day he did not eat, nor the next. "He may be angry because we have hidden his tools," the pupils surmised. "We had better put them back." The day they did, the teacher worked and ate the same as before. In the evening he instructed them: "No work, no food."
  • adrianN 2y ago
    What a brutal philosophy.
    • cratermoon 2y ago
      And the people doing no work taking food from the people who did the work to farm it? What do you call that?
      • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        If they take it, theft. If its willingly given, charity.
        • psychoslave 2y ago
          One have to recognize that manufacturing consent, including consent to give away to their threateners, is not necessarily always the most trivial job.
          • BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
            I genuinely do not understand what you’re saying, but my guess is that you’re saying charity sometimes isn’t charity because they’re manipulated into giving or something? In the parent story though, the person who would be given food is an old man for whom physical labor is difficult. It’s not manipulation, but kindness from someone who finds the work much easier to do. I want to throw you a question. If one man grows twice as much food as he can eat before the food will spoil (and has nothing to do with it etc.), but then refuses to give any to a hungry beggar, is he committing an immoral act?
      • locopati 2y ago
        a society that takes care of its people
      • harimau777 2y ago
        Society
    • DaoVeles 2y ago
      To be fair, cleaning the grounds and pruning the trees is not exactly brutal work. Like most koans, look at the broader message here.
      • adrianN 2y ago
        The broader message seems to be that the frail, the disabled and others who are unable to work don’t deserve food.
    • cratermoon 2y ago
      What's brutal though? The master chose not to accept the fruits of community labor he didn't personally contribute towards. Contrast that with a society in which aggregating the surplus labor of the community to persons that didn't contribute is celebrated and rewarded. Which is the brutal philosophy?
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
• darby_nine 2y ago
  The downside of using modern metrics to estimate the happiness of past people is that you won't ever measure the stuff that we've lost. We'll never really know, and you should look at all such comparisons with deep suspicion (especially eyeballing you, Steven Pinker)
  • Larrikin 2y ago
    What did we lose that you think would make us happier? I can only think of things certain people lost that would make them happier at the expense of making others as miserable as possible.
    • toufka 2y ago
      A representative idea: if you are the one to kill a deer to eat, you get a little bit of each cut - rib, loin, filet, heart, etc. When was the last time most people ate a filet mignon? And if you gather food like berries and fruits - you (at least sometimes) get to eat foods ripened that day in the field. How many today get that luxury? And if one of the things that provides joy to humans is to prepare their family’s food - many folks today would be disqualified.
    • DaoVeles 2y ago
      Now these are cherry picked which in my previous comment on this is cheating a little but I will give it a try. At a personal level, tools/equipment that is self serviceable and can be maintained for a long life span. While some of this is still around, it is much more difficult to find. At a moderate level. More time for family and community, unfortunately this one area that looking back we have slid backwards in. We are definitely better than the open century of industrialism but before that, hours were much more moderate, you also mostly worked near or at where you live. At a wide lens angle. A vast majority of our technique is now having the blow back of ecological destruction/instability and a long period of climatic instability. The kind of thing that makes planning 7 generations ahead near impossible except on the grandest and somewhat vaguest terms.
      • southernplaces7 2y ago
• kelseyfrog 2y ago
  Is there any writer who criticizes Marx on his own terms? Marx agreed that quality of life can improve under capitalism. The whole point was a ethical/social critique of mismatched incentives and power imbalances of such an arrangement. It doesn't matter if life improves if the only choices one has in life is either live under the power imbalance of wage labor or extract value from those who do. If folks can be blamed for commenting completely off-base takes on an article they didn't read, the author should also take heat for critiquing on a work they never read.
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • Yodel0914 2y ago
    I'm very much not a Marxist, but I think he is remarkably undervalued for his analysis of capitalism, particularly how specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness, the dissolution of family and social structures etc. His plans for how to address the shortcomings of capitalism are, um, flawed. But the analysis itself is incredibly insightful.
    • DaoVeles 2y ago
      There was a saying in the ruins of the USSR. Marx was completely right about Capitalism and completely wrong about Communism.
    • beezlewax 2y ago
      "specialization inherently leads to meaninglessness" what does this mean? Doesn't everyone want to specialise in something?
      • Yodel0914 2y ago
        As Adam Smith pointed out, specialization is the engine of capitalism. The problem that Marx saw (I think, correctly) is that capitalism will continue to push for more and more specialization until the jobs people perform are all-but divorced from meaningful outcomes. His example is a clock maker. At some point, a clock maker was a person who made every aspect of a clock. If we split the jobs up between someone making the cabinet, someone the clockwork, someone the face and hands etc, productivity will increase and more clocks can be made for less effort, and at higher quality. However it's not as fulfilling to create a component of a clock as it is to create the entire thing. I think a better modern example is the building industry. Back in they day, people made their own houses - very labour intensively and not particularly well. But I wonder if there's much more rewarding and meaningful than literally building the house your family will live in? With the the emergence of building as a trade, you get cheaper, higher quality houses. An individual builder still gets a ton of fulfillment knowing they built a house for someone they know to live in. As the trades become more and more specialized, there's less and less connection. Eventually you end up with someone working in a pre-fab factory making frames for a house they'll never see, for people they'll never meet. It requires a level of comfort with abstraction to be OK with being so disconnected from actual outcomes. You either have to substitute in a secondary meaning ("I'm supporting my family") or be able to hold the whole picture in your head of how your job eventually contributes to an meaningful outcome.
• codevark 2y ago
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• kmeisthax 2y ago
  Friendship ended with Fascist Hacker News, now Primitivist Hacker News is my best friend /s >It’s commonplace to refer to the slower productivity growth since 1970 as a “stagnation” relative to the 1870-1970 pace, but the 1970-2020 period still features more per capita growth in a 50-year span than was typical in human history. Much more growth. So what’s really the anomaly here? Energy. All the boons of the Industrial Revolution are downstream of the ability to harness and utilize large amount of energy for productive human purposes. The 1970s was when Saudi Arabia shut off the flow of cheap oil to the US; I would argue that we never actually recovered from this. We certainly got better at placating Middle Eastern elites enough to keep the oil flowing, but gas prices are still insane relative to pre-crisis levels, especially for a country which built so much car infrastructure[0] that the price of oil is a headline political concern. This is why I'm bullish on solar, BTW. It's better to have SOME energy, even if it's only daytime, than none at all if the Middle East decides it wants to veto the US again. >The social media experiment in “connecting people” is in some ways weirder and more contrary to history than I think we sometimes appreciate; until very recently, almost everyone was living in small towns. Dunbar's Number is the cap on close friendships a human can have. The number 200 is bandied about but I don't think the value matters. What matters is that people continue to organize themselves around this number, and social organizations larger than it tend to either lose meaningfulness or grow deep states[1] that tend to make all the actual decisions. >Human history is kind of bleak. There’s a lot of talk these days about the “dark parts of our country’s history” and how to think about them. But I’m not really sure we’ve had a conversation about the generally dark trajectory of all this history in general, which seems broadly lacking in uplifting themes about progress until suddenly it’s not. You want to know what would be even bleaker? Going back to hunter-gatherer societies[2]. Humanity did not adopt agriculture by choice; nor did roving gangs of thieves and self-appointed protectors force people to put seeds into the ground and wait for food to sprout out. Resource exhaustion did. The Earth's carrying capacity for hunter-gatherers is comically low; agriculture spread as hungry humans overhunted and overgathered until it was necessary to intentionally plant and grow energy rather than just rely on the Earth to store it in a form we can naturally digest. >The whole idea of trying to invent new ways of doing things seems to be perhaps more novel than you’d think. People were flaking stones the same old, same old way for unimaginably long spans of time. Human progress is a superexponential (arguably, superlogistic) curve. Educated[3] individuals are more likely to produce inventions, more educated people produce more inventions, but agricultural societies eat their own seed corn by treating education as something to be kept to the elites. [0] And KEEPS building car infrastructure, despite the risk being known for the last 50 years [1] In the "Tyranny of Structurelessness" sense [2] That joke about primitivists at the start was foreshadowing.
• openrisk 2y ago
  > there’s this new class of people who don’t grow the food and just take stuff Pretty good summary of the latest "tech" business models as well :-) The question is: why does this happen? Why do the many typically fail to limit how exploitative the few? People usually seek answers in morality (or the lack thereof) but morality is a complex emergent phenomenon that is always "too little, too late". One fundamental factor seems to be the difficulty of communicating and coordinating large numbers of people: The slow diffusion of technical knowledge means a gang of bandits with superior weapons can control an empire. Ineffective general education means vast human potential is wasted and accepts being raw material for stratified societies. Controlling message transmission and obfuscating the state of the world means people live in ignorance and manufactured realities which in turn makes them much easier to exploit. An interesting question is whether digital technology with its various extraordinary efficiencies and exponential capacities will ever help mitigate the fundamental flaws of large human societies. Idealistic hopes in this direction by tech visionaries have been promptly crushed, but what is important is indeed the long run effect.
  • Xen9 2y ago
    Organizations not connected to remote manipulation of public opinion have an evolutionary disadvantage. Were there no one using it, then it would be a power vacuum, and those tend to get filled regardless. My personal theory regarding morality is that since we did not spend long time evolving to world where writing is a technology, there is no emotional reaction to contract that will allow a factory to pollute killing humans, compare to woman who sees a man to stab a baby with a fork. Human society has three classes: owners, hermits, and pets. The owners have assets, do not need to work for money, and have means of influencing the public opinion. Hermits do not work for money, but also do not have assets or influence. Pets are 99% Same as you train a dog to sit and run, you train a pet to BUY and VOTE. Then you laugh in the room with your fellow owners because you've bought all the representatives, won the election, and can now use legislation to crush your opponents. Kropotkin was right one hundred years ago: "We are so perverted by an education which from infancy seeks to kill in us the spirit of revolt, and to develop that of submission to authority; we are so perverted by this existence under the ferrule of a law, which regulates every event in life — our birth, our education, our development, our love, our friendship — that, if this state of things continues, we shall lose all initiative, all habit of thinking for ourselves. Our society seems no longer able to understand that it is possible to exist otherwise than under the reign of law, elaborated by a representative government and administered by a handful of rulers. And even when it has gone so far as to emancipate itself from the thralldom, its first care has been to reconstitute it immediately. "The Year I of Liberty" has never lasted more than a day, for after proclaiming it men put themselves the very next morning under the yoke of law and authority." Were I to re-establish a society in an empty land with no worries about existing nations coming after us militaristically: (1) Supply of money would be limited, tied to gold (export controls), have demurrage (except for government accounts), be cryptocurrency so that one can near infinitely move it to smaller denominations (eliminating deflation). I have quite sepcific system for this, where even all property will be demurraged algorithmically—based on ∆ market value! (2) Direct democracy, EG everything would be directly elected. If you cant participate, that is ok, but the elections will keep flowing. The voting system will be tied to prediction markets, EG vote for a thing that fails to perform as predicted and you may have less votes for the next election. (3) System that connects the prediction markets somehow to how public is informed / educated, probably involving censorship or at least having news outlets that are recommenmded by state because no state that allows CIA type propaganda to flow in survives. These are only the policies that would affect the problem you brought to surface the most.
• thinkingemote 2y ago
  Painkillers are also very very new. People suffered pain much more frequently much more widespread. (Yet they probably thought the world was less bad than it was!)
  • Yodel0914 2y ago
    They also drank a lot more, understandably,.