It goes back to when good agricultural land discovered to be so ridiculously effective at feeding people.
Not the beginning of wealth, but certainly one of the oldest still used store of wealth.
So much has been fucked up by discovering agriculture, it was also the beginning of institutional slavery.
You’re not wrong but surely you don’t mean to say that mankind should never have discovered agriculture, right? At that point we may as well say that gaining sentience fucked everything up because it was the beginning of wilfully hurting others despite having the capacity for empathy (aka doing evil things).
No I’m serious, and I understand you mean well but I can’t have this discussion meaningfully with you without writing 8 paragraphs of context.
There’s a lot of what Pratchett called ‘lies to children’ when it comes to non-university anthropology, things we learned in school that were kind of outdated already and gross oversimplifications.
We were told that agriculture allowed the free time to specialize and was the beginning of culture but the truth is that all that hunter-gatherer man needed to hunt to feed himself and 3 other people was about 6 hours of actual work a week. And specialization already existed with stone knapping and pottery.
There’s a lot more to it but I don’t really have the patience to keep writing this.
Well, you did a good job condensing where you were coming from in two paragraphs. Enough to make me realise that I mistook your original meaning completely. I hadn’t heard the 6 hours of work a week number before. In fact, I’ve never really questioned the logic I was taught with regards to agriculture being the start of civilisation due to freeing up hands and allowing people to settle down, because hunter gatherers would have to roam around at least a little to follow herds or seasonal effects on available forage. That understanding was based on what I’ve learned in history 101 at high school though.
I started out a bit argumentative because I read your comment as an overly dramatic lamentation that I took to mean something like: “people are so bad I wish we weren’t born/evolved”. Thanks for taking the time to kindly explain. I’m always interested in having a possible blind spot or internalised assumption revealed and to reassess entrenched beliefs.
