this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
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About 300,000 years ago, when the first humans were born.
The problems being described in this post are the result of the greed of the wealthy, and that has been menacing humanity for as long as there's been humanity.
Not at all. For the vast majority of our time as a species we lived in small hunting and gathering bands wherein the accumulation of personal wealth and property wasn't really possible and one's status instead depended on merit. It's only with the dawn of agriculture, about 10k years ago, that the accumulation of personal wealth and private property becomes a thing. For better or worse, for reasons I don't have the time to go into here, agriculture is a kind of ratcheting trap, and once we embraced it we could never go back and never will.
The thing now is to recreate the small-scale egalitarianism that we evolved to live in, but how we do that in the material world we've created is far beyond me.
Did the strongest tribesman not beat the shit out of all the other tribesmen, take their stuff, and bang their women?
No, we don't see any evidence of this at all in the ethnographic literature. To the contrary, what we tend to see is antisocial actors being socially ostracized or killed by the larger group. This is evidently a very old behavior since we absolutely see it in chimp bands as well which means that it goes all the way back to our most recent common ancestor which existed 6 million years ago.