@cjd @Wolf480pl Since human history shows a long term, steady decline in death by violence in concert with the growth of agriculture, industry, urbanization, and technology generally, I'd say anarcho-primitivism has it exactly backward.

@Wolf480pl @cjd In fact, it was *trade* that created for the first time any reason at all for humans not to kill, kidnap, or rape any stranger they came across, because any other group would simply be a competitor for resources.

@freakazoid @cjd
I wonder how Mongol Hordes fit into this picture.

@Wolf480pl

Not sure about how this picture is framed.

Why does hunting big game = war

Also I dont think agricultural societies = peaceful societies.
Theres been very violent societies that practiced agriculture also hunter/gatherers that weren't aggressive. Also, as suggested, the inverse.
@freakazoid @cjd

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl It's just a theory I once read as to why humans have hunted big game for so long even when it was not the most efficient way to get protein that was available to them. The tools and techniques of big game hunting also work well for killing people. It could certainly be wrong, but nomadic hunter-gatherer groups that came in contact would have been competitors more than, say, nomadic herders.

@Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism And agrarians aren't nomadic, so they would only run into other agrarians if they were trying to expand their territory or had to move for whatever reason.

Of course, agriculture was a prerequisite for large scale war, but I think the scale of such wars was more than offset by the much reduced frequency. On average, of course.

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl Agriculture also created the surplus necessary to have a ruling class, and the dominance that came with that, of course. I just had that long monologue thread about agriculture and feudalism. But it also created the surplus necessary for trade.

@freakazoid
All sounds like a rather bleak theory of the human condition, where out of group interactions are driven only by harsh utility

Is this theory based primarily on one thing you read, (do you recall what?)

I like to think that theres always been more possible reasons/options for interaction than just trade or war- certainly for me this is the case.
I think that theres evidence that this has also been the case historically
@cjd @Wolf480pl

@dazinism @freakazoid @cjd

I think by Occam's Razor, there's no reason to think there are other reasons for interaction, until shown an example that can't be explained by "harsh" utility.

Can you enumerate some of those other possible reasons?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @freakazoid
This same question arrives again and again. Did we fall from grace or are we better every day ?
Plato clearly believed that we fell from grace, from the perfect republic with the perfect Philosopher King.
Lots of lore around this belief of fall from grace. The innocent and peaceful hunter-gatherers wiped out by the cruel and mechanistic Europeans is a really common belief system.

@cjd @dazinism @freakazoid
it's funny how ideas like "it used to be better" and "don't change things, you're making everything worse" are usually ascribed to right wing, while left wing is all about progress... yet these days what appears to be a left wing group also says it used to be better in the past, but it means much further past.

Is it all because we only remember the good parts of what it was like in the past?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd That's not "remembering". It's mythology.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
I meant a form of "remembering" which includes transitive memory, i.e. things that you remember that other people said from what they remember, etc.

But yeah, mythology seems appropriate.

@Wolf480pl
@dazinism @freakazoid
I think the difference of belief between "fall from grace" and "better every day" is at least as important a spectrum as right vs left. You see fall from grace thinking in leftist ethnic guilt and also in rightist traditional family. On the better every day side the left has scientific socialism and the managed society and the right has ethnic pride.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl I don't know anything about "managed society", but people are terrible at science and even if they weren't, the economic calculation problem is not solvable even in theory, so "scientific socialism" as I understand it is not achievable, and there are all kinds of ways that pursuing such a thing could get us into a really bad place.

Left libertarians are also "better every day" folks.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd Maybe I'm misunderstanding what "ethnic pride" is, but isn't it reactionary at its core? Or is it not because it doesn't advocate a return to ethnostates but segregation within multicultural states?

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl Of course, segregation is also reactionary.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
not sure what exactly you mean by ethnostates, but isn't the fall of Yugoslavia an example that ethnostates are a more stable solution?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd It shows that you can't make a multicultural state simply by fiat. Ethnostates are a "local maximum" just like tribes are. The multicultural states that have formed did so either because people chose to live together or because some empire or dictatorship managed to force them to live together long enough that they got used to it. Often that was enough better (or not sufficiently worse) than what came before that it didn't require so much effort.

@Wolf480pl @cjd @freakazoid @dazinism The balkanization of Balkan could be viewed more directly as evidence that people *believe* ethnostates to be more stable. But as social constructs are built on feedback loops, that may very well turn out to mean that they are, in fact, more stable. 😀

As I understand it though, the main problem with Yugoslavia was that the unifying force and idea was a personality cult around Tito, and the disintegration following his death was slower than might have been expected. A multi-ethnic state forged without force and with a more sustainable unifying idea than one person would stand a better chance.

@clacke @cjd @freakazoid @dazinism
But to have a unifying force, don't you need common values? And once you have common values, doesn't it become a single culture?

@Wolf480pl
I'm a bit pessimistic on the future of the EU because the US, with a single common language and national back story, still at some point it almost disintegrated and was only saved by a brutal show of force. Also the north and south have gravitated into the blue team and the red team who still fight like cats and dogs.
@clacke @freakazoid @dazinism

@cjd @dazinism @clacke @Wolf480pl The US did not end up in a civil war over cultural differences; it ended up in a civil war because the South was economically dependent on slavery, and the North was unwilling to share in the burden of weaning them off of it despite being just as responsible for it as the South. The "show of force" and reduction of states' rights has probably prevented a lot of conflict since then, but at huge cost and a missed opportunity to learn to live together better.

@cjd
IMO EU isn't supposed to be a single state. I'd rather it be an economical (and maybe millitary) alliance, aggregating the bargaining power of member states against giants like US, Russia, and China.

Haven't dug into it, but it looks like most of the major issues stem from the freedom of movement assumption. Now, I still think freedom of movement is a nice thing, but maybe we need to revisit its pros and cons, or tweak it a bit.
@clacke @freakazoid @dazinism

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd @clacke Specific values need to be shared. "Culture" is not a binary thing; you don't either have a single or different cultures. You have sets of values with different levels of compatibility. There are also values that are required to live with people who don't have all the same values as you. These values tend to develop over time as groups with differnt values live alongside one another.

@freakazoid
And then these values suddenly disappear if you give people "social media".
@clacke @cjd @dazinism

@freakazoid @dazinism @Wolf480pl
Hmm, interesting question:
Examples of ethnic/nationalistic pride with which I have some experience include French, Zionist Jewish, Turkish, Muslim, Chinese, American, and European/"White".

American pride stands out as perhaps the most non-ethnic. Some groups want an ethno-state, some have one, some (Muslim) seem largely uninterested. Hard to say if it's reactionary, but it's definitely optimistic.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @dazinism
My personal opinion of "scientific socialism" can be summed up in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. But that ideology continues to exist and I would argue that lots of "lets just pass a law" ideas (for which the Left is known) are rooted in this thinking.

@cjd @freakazoid @dazinism
461 pages is pretty short for a summary...

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl Oh yes absolutely. This is a common issue with people who pride themselves on being intellectual - they tend to overestimate the capacity of intellect to overcome problems. At least when it fits with their worldview. For things that don't they're perfectly happy to point out all the problems with human arrogance.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd This is why I like the idea of keeping interventions simple, transparent, and as measurable as possible rather than either avoiding them entirely or allowing unlimited intervention for any purpose. Try something. If it works, great. If it doesn't, get rid of it and do something else. When the sum total of interventions in any given area becomes complex, replace them with something simpler.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl (This can work really well with finance, too - avoid any instrument you don't *personally* understand really well.)

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
This.
This is Science.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd It's science in that it acknowledges the limits of our ability to actually measure or fine-tune the effect of interventions in society. It can easily depart from being science depending on what we call "measurable". I do not believe economics, for the most part. In particular macroeconomics is unfalsifiable, and things like GDP include economic activity we know is bad like cleaning up after Deepwater Horizon.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl (Not that they shouldn't have cleaned up, just that there's no way that should increase GDP. The total damage of the spill, which is not actually measurable, needed to be subtracted out.)

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
I think it's science in that it tries to perform experiments in controlled conditions.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd
Do you by chance know what complexity class is that economic calculation problem in?
Or have any links where I could read more on this topic?

@Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism It's not a computation problem. It's an information problem. The Wikipedia page is as good a place to start as any. The criticisms are primarily of the way libertarians have interpreted it, which is to say that "free markets" are always better than any kind of central planning, which is not what it says at all.

@cjd
Stumbled into this recent blog post, which I found an interesting read & is somewhat related to what we'd been chatting about

Living and Working together (1/3) The Social Brain Hypothesis Revisited – Unvirtual - https://unvirtual.us/2019/08/19/living-and-working-together-1-3-the-social-brain-hypothesis-revisited/

@Wolf480pl @freakazoid

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd Interesting. The article doesn't mention anything about how they handled conflict among groups, but this page says they ran away if they met any aggressive groups. That works right up to the point where there's actual resource pressure. They seem to want to blame agriculture, but it seems more likely to me that it was warfare and the need for protection that was the root cause of hierarchy and inequality.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism I suspect one could probably find peaceful agrarian societies that happened to live on particularly fertile land that then took a long time to become crowded and for whatever reason rarely got raided and had such high productivity that it was easy to recover from raids.

@freakazoid @dazinism @Wolf480pl
I think despite whatever effort researchers can make to be impartial, research will always tend to confirm the biases of the researcher.
I suspect the reality is that some immediate-return societies were idealic at some times (e.g. when resources were plentiful), others weren't, some were in some ways but would horrify us in others.

@cjd
Yeah I agree, think all research & presentation has bias, even if the researcher/author cant see it. This always needs consideration

I think that human societies & interactions are complex & its best to avoid generalisations about how humans behave, & why, unless backed up by **a whole lot of data** from a lot of sources (who have a verity of very different biases) with limited, weak counter theories/evidence
@freakazoid @Wolf480pl

@cjd

Theres widely accepted theories that dont stand up very well to investigation

Tangentially related to our talk of trade/war Graeber, an anthropogist examined the historical record on money/debt/trade

There is no truth to the widely excepted claim that money replaced barter

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/08/what-is-debt-–-an-interview-with-economic-anthropologist-david-graeber.html

Some stuff about quantifiying everything there too

Recommend the book
@freakazoid @Wolf480pl

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd The thesis seems to be that, because some societies already had money at the beginning of the written historical record, and because there were still societies using barter for a long time after, it cannot be that money replaced barter? I don't follow that reasoning. You can certainly choose a narrow definition of "money" that by definition must have been created by governments, but that doesn't really tell you anything.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism The thesis to me seems to be that everyone keeps saying that currency replaced barter, but in reality this has never been observed, rather barter occurs where currency has been in use but then failed.

@freakazoid
The interview only scrapes the surface, If you are interested in a pretty thorough investigation of debt (which by necessity also looks at money and trade) backed by the historical record and anthropological observations of different societies I'd highly recommend reading the book. Lots and lots of fascinating information / observations.
@Wolf480pl @cjd

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd A socialist system where the government has a monopoly over fossil fuel extraction and gets a lot of its value-add for its citizenry that way has even less incentive to deal with climate change.

@cjd @Wolf480pl @dazinism There are plenty of countries in the world where this would obviously not be the case, but interestingly those tend to be the same countries doing a good job dealing with climate change now. It might be instructive to use a hypothetical socialist US and Canada as thought experiments. Let's assume a democratic socialist system.

...

@dazinism @Wolf480pl @cjd If we're honest with ourselves we cannot assume that the government would have eschewed fossil fuels before global warming was widely known about. So each administration would use fossil fuels to help keep the populace happy and get reelected.

Does the government in such a country even fund research on climate change in the first place? That can only make people upset.

@Wolf480pl

>Can you enumerate some of those other possible reasons? (Than trade or war)

Us humans are curious beings - could be interested in the sound of their music, their clothes, their hunting methods etc. etc.
Maybe looking for love?

I know some may like to suggest these kind of interactions are trades, even go as far to suggest all human interactions are effectively trades. I dont >buy< that 🤣
@dazinism @freakazoid @cjd

@dazinism
But if they have differen clothes, that means they're doing it WRONG because OUR clothes are obviously superior...

or at least that I think is what many people's first reaction would be.
@freakazoid @cjd