by ninetyninenine | 2025-08-17 04:08:12+00:00
>You state this as fact, but the anthropological consensus doesn't agree with this.

Yes it does. This is anthropology 101. In hunter gatherer societies wealth doesn't really exist. People eat and get resources off the land without ever really accumulating wealth. For civilization to form, first wealth must evolve into a form where it is abundant, identical and useable like coins.

So like grain when extremely abundant naturally maps into something like coins where people instead of bartering can "pay" others with grain and save up on grain. If humans begin farming and then grain becomes very abundant in society, something changes.

It then becomes possible for the accumulation of resources by a central source as in one person owns more grain than another person. Wealth inequality so to say. When one person is much more wealthy than another, this allows him to gain a sort of artificial power over others by employing others and paying them a salary. This CAN only exist if some static countable resource exists that can function in place of a monetary denomination.

This is ultimately what causes people to coordinate. No amount of leadership or charisma is going to herd humans into a organized team of hundreds to build projects as complex as a boeing 747. You HAVE to pay people for this to happen. You have to offer them something that benefits them that's more then just your charisma.

These are the projects that define civilization.

This is IN FACT the anthropological consensus on how civilization forms in academia. I'm not making this up. Go read up on it, this is how they believe advanced civilization formed in some places and didn't in others. So places that are really tropical tend not to form advance civilization because things like grain rot. This prevents anyone from accumulating resources which prevents wealth inequality which prevents a single individual coordinating other individuals to create the public works that define modern civilization as we know it.

>Early hunter gatherer societies are thought to have been communal, with no notion of property. It's not "human nature".

You're describing tribes and hunter and gatherers. I'm describing civilization. The next step. Mesopotamia. The progression from tribes and cavemen to civilization involves the steps I describe above.

Also I'm not calling "civilization" natural. Nothing of the sort. The times we live in are not natural at all. Modern civilization is NOT natural. But. Capitalism, wealth inequality and business DOES form the basis of civilization as we know it. In short, IP is fundamental to civilization, but it is not necessarily natural. I am more appealing to whether you value the idea of civilization itself, and less to whether something is compatible to human nature in its earliest form as these are two orthogonal concepts.

>This is an ideological argument, which is fine, but nothing anywhere close to "the truth", and especially, not the only or best way to organize things.

Ideological my ass, there's barely any evidence of complex projects forming out of pure communal goodwill. The only time I've seen people do something like this of equal complexity out in the wild is Linux. And it only happened because Linux is uniquely a software project which is very cheap to develop for. And EVEN then open source developers for linux need corporate jobs in order to get paid a living wage so that they can afford to have spare time working on a charity project like Linux. Linux exists because developer time working on Linux is paid for by FOR-profit corporations.

>You want to have this argument, fine, but you'll have to step down from the teaching desk and accept your belief is not universal.

It's not a belief. That's what you're missing. The logic composes into a singular conclusion. I'm right. You may not agree with me now and that's just part of human nature. Maybe think about it for a couple months and eventually you may hit the realization that your idea of how the world works was a little off. Yeah I know I'm an asshole for sort of bluntly burying everyone I see with the brutal truth, but think about it for a bit.