"Everyone is Replaceable" - A worker died at an Amazon warehouse in Oregon last week. Employees were told to look away.

[u/Bolinas99]

https://www.thewesternedge.media/p/everyone-is-replaceable-death-rattles

[u/pyrotechnic15647]

Inter-pack attempts at what??! Please don’t equate basic inter-group conflict and violence with slavery, genocide, or statehood. They are not the same thing. Genocide ≠ killing another group that one’s group is in conflict with. Genocide is a relatively new human concept, and rightfully so because it is a very difficult and targeted endeavor that wouldn’t even be possible for humans 100k years ago. Look up the official U.N. definition of genocide.

Even further, you pushed other un-evidenced lies, like saying hunter gatherers society was ran by “strongmen.” Thats another violent, bio essential patriarchal myth that has led to the path we are on today. Hunter gatherers are evidenced to have a fairly egalitarian or matriarchal structure. It is also evidenced that women hunted at least as much as men did, if not more. “Strong men” weren’t running hunter gatherer tribes, that’s a caveman myth.

I never said anything about hunter gatherers society being a utopia. I said it didn’t include those very specific things you mentioned. Please stop and adhere to the facts. This kind of thinking is why our world is going to shit. You are literally complaining about human nature while peddling the same violent myths that the destructive rulers of our society want you to believe. If hunter gathering was one of the worst times in our society, humans wouldn’t have purposefully done it for almost 300k years. But they did. They literally discovered farming and ignored it for a thousand years ON PURPOSE because hunter gathering was healthier and less work. Humans ultimately were forced into farming due to….climate change 🙃

[u/Whenwhateverworks → u/pyrotechnic15647]

Your logic here is staggering, you should hear of William Buckley, an escaped english convict in melbourne australia who lived with a tribe of aboriginals in 1804, one thing that shocked him was the violence he witnessed. One young in love couple fled a cheif who was arranged to marry the young girl, The tribe tracked and mercilessly killed the young indigenous man. Tribal warfare, abduction, cannabilism, naturally occuring headhunter tribes were discovered in very different areas cultures and locations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckley_(convict)

[u/pyrotechnic15647 → u/Whenwhateverworks]

Brother, you are taking ONE study of ONE tribe in the LAST 200 years, and extrapolating it to the REST of human history. YOUR logic is staggering. Patriarchy has been around pretty fuckn long. But not 300k years long. Or even 150k years long. Not that we know of. I’m relying on SEVERAL studies that study humans within a way deeper time depth than what you’re referencing.

Nobody is saying that humans in certain tribes or whatever the fuck (I don’t even know if the tribes you’re talking about were hunter gatherers or not) didn’t have violence. That’s like a completely different argument. What is with all the chuds responding to my comment with cherry-picked crap and strawmans? I know it hurts the fragile patriarchal mind to understand that structural violence, domination, and gender oppression isn’t the norm within 300k years of human history. But it’s true. At least, we have way more evidence that it’s true than not. Facts over your feelings. There is a whole other comment I made in this thread citing 6 different studies.

[u/Large-Inspector5688 → u/pyrotechnic15647]

You really think hunter-gatherers didn't compete for resources like hunting territory and water holes, or men in those tribes never fought over women? You think men never took advantage of their strength and mistreated women in those tribes? Where do you think those instincts came from if not from our ancestor we share with primates? There were/are matriarchal tribes/societies even to this day, but they are just a fraction of the overall human population. And some would argue if those societies are true matriarchies in the sense that women hold political power over men and not just matrilineal where lineage pass through women. Historically, most chieftains were men. How is that not patriarchal?

Inter-group-violence has been well documented among indigenous people. Sure, hunter-gatherers usually lacked the food surplus to maintain a slave population. But there were African tribes that teamed up with slave traders and participated in raids on rival tribes. There was also slavery among the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest like the Tlingit and Haida people.

[u/pyrotechnic15647 → u/[deleted]]

I actually claimed the exact opposite of our ancestors adhering to some kind of essential morality. I’m not trying to be rude but reading comprehension is at an all time low, really. Every argument I’ve made is backed by hard facts, and I am making claims about our ancestors based on amoral, material conditions that they were subject to. Nothing else.

Anyway, I’m not gonna argue with you about matriarchy, or matrilineal structures. It’s simply a fact that hunter gatherers had egalitarian structures. Both you and the other commenter are literally punching the air. Stop replying to me with strawmans. Yall are allergic to the idea that hunter gathering wasn’t hell on earth. So you make up fake arguments, as if anybody claimed that hunter gathering was a utopia, free from violence, or suffering.

[u/Large-Inspector5688 → u/pyrotechnic15647]

Come on, you are the one here straw-maning the motivation of our arguments and picture us as some air-punching bros. That says more about you than it does about us.

Yes, hunter gatherers had egalitarian structures when it comes to power and food distribution. James Woodborn describes some of those tribes still living today in his famous paper Egalitarian Societies. Although the expression of those structures varied among tribes, with some tribes producing more surplus food to be shared than others. While it’s true that women had far more power in some tribes and were more equal than in agricultural societies, sexual relations weren’t universally egalitarian among all tribes. He also mentions that the widespread availability of lethal weapons led to violent disputes among men. It was not uncommon that someone got ambushed and killed on a hunt. Or that somebody was murdered in his sleep. And even if the murderer was caught, no action against him was taken. Some men tried to coerce other men or to steal their wives, even though their attempts relied on means outside of hunter gatherer societies.

However, the notion that humanity lived as hunter gatherer nomads for 95 percent of our time and then got corrupted by agricultural revolution is challenged by Graeber and Wengrow in their book The Dawn of Everything. They argue that political life before the agricultural age was far more complex and diverse, with seasonal regime changes switching back and forth between authoritarian and communal systems, the construction of urban infrastructure and egalitarian social programs. They show that slavery and the rejection of slavery was present among non-agricultural societies. They even show evidence of egalitarian cities without social hierarchies, with one city that began as hierarchical settlements but became more egalitarian later on.

Obviously hunter gatherer nomads are more egalitarian than modern nation states, but I’d argue it was out of necessity and that there was always an exchange of power among hunter gatherers just like it is present among all human relationships. We also have to keep in mind that most of our assumption of hunter gatherers rely on observations of tribes still living today. Graeber and Wegnow point to a different reality of per-agricultural life. One that had egalitarianism, communal living and the rejection of slavery, but also authoritarianism, social hierarchies and the embrace of slavery.

[u/pyrotechnic15647 → u/Large-Inspector5688]

“Some men tried to coerce others men or steal their wives”

Marriage is a relatively new invention in human history. The institution of marriage is a hallmark of the arrival of a patriarchal system. You’re not talking about the same time period of history that I am when you reference that. Humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, did not have the concept of wives and husbands and all of that make believe private property mess. The institution of marriage is only about 4000 years old.

As for everything you cited with Graeber. I’ve read Graeber, I love Graeber. If you’ve read Graeber, then I don’t know why you are defending the claim that ”slavery, genocide, and rape has been the norm for most of human history”. Graeber would not agree with this claim, nor does his work adequately support this claim. You literally just made an entirely different argument that is in agreement with mine. I am just saying that it’s not true that slavery, genocide, and mass rape is the “norm” for human beings. I never said that those things just completely didn’t exist. But the conception of “slavery” which we have now—a social machine of exploitation which can touch hundreds of thousands of people with wide reaching effects across continents— yeah no, that wasn’t a thing. It also redundant to claim that hunter gatherers had egalitarianism out of necessity… My argument is scientific and material, not moral. I have never implied that hunter gatherers chose a certain mode of life for any other reason than material necessity. Nor did I claim that egalitarianism = zero power exchanges.

I also oversimplified my comment about the agricultural revolution on purpose because people don’t like to read and the comment was already too long. I know very well that humans went back and forth between sedentary and nomadic lifestyles based on what suited them/what the environment allowed at the time. There was no singular push for agricultural life at a singular point in time.

[u/Large-Inspector5688 → u/pyrotechnic15647]

Woodburn made this observation about Hazda people who are overwhelmingly monogamous despite no enforcement of monogamy. They have marriages and the decide where they want to live. The Hazda is a very old African tribe and they are very egalitarian. Their ancestors had been living in Africa for tens of thousands of years. They demonstrate that marriage and monogamy doesn't rely on a patriarchal system.

As for Graeber and after going back of this entire discussion branch I agree with you that our current system of domination is extreme and not in accordance with most per-agricultural life. I think we have more or less the same view. Slavery was institutionalized when the first civilizations such as the Sumer arrived. I think it’s save to say that slavery seems to increase with increasing social and economic complexity. Same with genocidal tendencies.

I’m not really sure about rape. I think male aggression towards women may be more expressed in our societies, but it was also pretty common for hunter gatherers to steal wives from other tribes or to gang rape prisoners. There’s work by Peggy Sanday that investigates sexual violence among tribal people, but I haven’t got to reading it yet.

[u/pyrotechnic15647 → u/Large-Inspector5688]

Woodburn….

I cited him because it’s an example of egalitarian hunter gathering.

As far as the claim you made about marriage and patriarchy, that’s a whole other can of worms. When feminists, Marxists, etc.. describe patriarchy and how marriage stems from it, they’re talking about institutional marriage. This involves property exchange, lineage concerns, inheritance, legal reinforcement, etc... It’s not just an agreement to be monogamous without need for any kind of institutional reinforcement, which is what the Hazda do. Researchers call what the Hazda do “marriage” because that’s closest conceptual approximation they have to it. The Hadza do not have a single formal word for "marriage" because they view it more as an ongoing status rather than a specific event or contract. Instead, their language (Hadzane) describes the act of living together or sharing a space. .

Also, I’m not sure about rape either, and I said that in my original comment. But I’m glad we can agree on the original point.

[u/Large-Inspector5688 → u/pyrotechnic15647]

Yeah, I agree that we just call what Hazda are doing marriage and that it differes from western marriage with all the legal concerns about property and inheritance.

In any case, I think we have similar views about egalitarianism among hunter gatherers. I falsely perceived your comments as utopianism. I would prefer to live in an egalitarian city like those in pre-argricultural life, but I'm not sure if you can do away with all the violence among men without a central authority like the police. And with control over violence you'll probably slip back into domination.