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Capitalism is a system that rewards people for antisocial behavior. 20,000 years ago, people engaging in antisocial behavior would have been thrown out of the tribe (or executed) for their selfishness and greed, but today they rule.
We can try to use the power of the state to reign them in and keep them under control, but it's a never-ending struggle. They will try to seize state control, to remove any systems that seek to moderate them. They believe that they are superior human beings, super human even. In their minds, their wealth proves their superiority. They have even convinced large numbers of us that they must be unrestricted, free to pursue maximum profits, otherwise modern civilization will collapse.
Maybe they're right. Maybe capitalism can't survive without sociopaths pursuing profits with relatively few restrictions. All the more reason to abolish capitalism, in my opinion, even if that means returning to a more communal existence.
I think you have a pretty romanticized idea about how society was run 20.000 years ago
According to "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow, if one were in the Americas, it could have been pretty okay. Depending on the tribe, a selfish person could have been exiled and many people's competed to be generous.
Rousseau and the European Enlightenment struggling against the weight of the Catholic Church, may have presented an overly negative view on life long ago. (Source is also "The Dawn of Everything".)
Anyone talking about society 20,000 years ago is bullshitting. We have no records for how these societies operated anything but a superficial level.
This is Jordan Peterson and Evelutionary Psychology levels of scientific rigor.
No written records, but "we" have found bones and pottery.
But yes, it is all extremely unclear and one should not draw many conclusions or generalities from those.
Great book that everyone should read!
How am I romanticizing the stone ages? By pointing out that members of the tribe who acted selfishly were often executed (and sometimes tortured)? Is that idea a romantic one, in your mind?
Selfishness wasn't so harshly punished back then because stone age people were noble savages, who were just more righteous than we are today. No, selfishness was so harshly and violently punished (even if the sentence was banishment, that was often a death sentence) because selfish people were a threat to the survival of the tribe, and thus a threat to the survival of every member of the tribe.
7000 years ago 95% of the male population died off. Based on our discovery of mass graves showing violent deaths from this time, the most likely explanation is that there was a globe spanning slaughter of people - prehistoric people were people too, they had the same flaws that we do now
Well for starters, the suggestion that everyone was part of the same tribe. If tribes had differences with eachother, how do you think that played out
The most likely explanation for why 95% of the male population died around 5000BC is because of a mass breakout of war, people forget that prehistory had the same humans that we have today
Also we still have something like 2-4% psychopaths in out gene pools. So they at least lived long enough to reproduce.
I wonder what and when the historical low % of them was.