Right. And then there’s the fact that agriculture is a trap in that once you adopt it you can never go back and anyone nearby who doesn’t adopt it as well will eventually be outcompeted and disappear as a people, or they will be driven into ever more remote and inhospitable environments. None of this requires anything like foresight or intention either.
I would argue the opposite; that semi-agricultural societies --pre-columbian California is a good example-- had no way of knowing where an increasing reliance on predictable harvests would eventually take them.
Small scale hunting and gathering societies are universally egalitarian because it’s impossible for any one person to accumulate significant wealth or to control resources. The way members of such societies gain influence therefore is through virtue and personal merit. This is the social system that we evolved to live in over hundreds of thousands of years, and it’s why we still haven’t figured out an equally amenable replacement in the mere ten thousand years since we adopted agriculture.
That said, for better or worse, agriculture is a trap, and once we adopted it, there was never any going back, so we have no choice but to keep trying with what we have.
I love arguement. Free Entertainment! (telegra.ph)
and where did that bring you? (lemmy.ml)
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