this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Would you care to give an example of a successful society of the past that achieved what you are describing without slaves or other means of super cheap labor. I can't think of a single one but I am very interested.
Do the societies have to be mostly white people in order to count? Because before the white men came pretty much every indigenous society was living pretty in tune with nature and didn't suffer a few rich cunts exploiting the vast majority of the rest.
https://wechronicle.com/philanthropy/exploring-the-inca-tradition-of-ayni-reciprocity-and-social-welfare/
They also provided allowances (ie social welfare) to those who were too ill or old to work.
I don't understand why you feel the need to be hostile and make this about white men. This is about civilization theory.
If your point was that white civilizations made the world into the mess it is right now, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It is however not the point of my inquiry. I was generally curious about bigger societies that managed to stay relatively non hierarchial which would result in an equal share of ressources (what this whole thread was about) From what I have read, all bigger "successful" civs developed a strong hierarchy which resulted in a big wealth gap as well and/or built their empire through expansion and as a result slaves and POW who granted them free labour to built their infrastructure. Some examples:
Egypt (not white) China (not white) Khmer (not white) Japan (not white) Osman empire (not white) Persian (not white) Babylon (not white) India (not white)
Imo indigenous tribes are not helpful in this discussion because I am interested in examples or solutions for big societies and tribal structures are very different because people usually all know each other over 1 or two axis which strongly discouraged selfish behavior (it got you shunned).
I am very interested in African and ancient American civilizations but there is not a lot of unbiased literature out there (To my knowledge - which is why I asked for more info)
You are dancing around the issue without realizing it by focusing on "big" societies. Humans are social creatures, but only up to a certain extent. We like our tribe of a few hundred people and that's about it. When a society gets bigger than that, our brains naturally find ways to discriminate to create an "us" and a "them". Simply put, big societies are bad societies. Agriculture was a mistake (also because grain and an excessively convenient source of calories is bad for us).
Unfortunately there's no solution for this, outside of any number of apocalypse scenarios. But we can mitigate the worst of the issues by destroying the very idea that a greed or privilege-based society is permissable.
Most indigenous American tribes. Numerous central and south american ones as well. Plenty of pre-written history societies show no signs of forced labor or enslavement. Tons of early written societies as well. Currently existing examples include the zapatistas and rojava. They've built societies that are t dependent on a capitalist framework to persist. You can throw a rock and hit one.
Edit: sorry for the snark, I didn't check the usernames before commenting and thought you were the guy who was being an ass. I'll be happy to dig up some links for you in a new reply. If this is something you'd really like to dive into I can't recommend David Graeber's The Dawn of Everything enough. It's a fantastic read
No offense taken. But I am a bit worries sometimes about the hostility towards people asking questions.
Tbh. So far I mostly read about western, Arab and Asian civilizations and there really aren't many examples when you go bigger in size of small tribal living. In my opinion, tribal life is a lot different and naturally more non hierarchial because mostly everybody knows everyone and if you act too selfish you'll be shunned. From what I read it becomes problematic as soon as the civ reaches a high number of people. Then they tended to get expansionist and hierarchial which resulted in either slaves or prisoners of war with lower social status or some kind of caste system.
I will read into the dawn of everything and the other link you provided on the other thread and am happy for more fodder. I will be traveling through south America soon and wanna read up upon their ancient history anyway.
Thanks for taking the time to look it up and edit!