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Comment by TaylorAlexander | Hacker News Reader

Many indigenous cultures. The Iroquois native Americans might be one example. There was no notion that a minority got rich off the labor of others.

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> There was no notion that a minority got rich off the labor of others.

    Northern Iroquois Slavery
    https://www.jstor.org/stable/482790

I do not argue that the Iroquois were perfect, but we are not comparing them to a perfect society.

a tangent: I remember reading that historically, Chinese doctors were paid by the healthy people in order to keep the community healthy, and a sick person would not pay until they recovered. I would compare it to insurance, but that's not really the same, it would be of doctors were the insurance providers, but the current model just makes a third party really rich and incentivises the doctors to wish general cough and cold on the community (I'm not saying that doctors are evil, just that the current system doesn't make sense to me) I'd love to hear an opposing view, and why you think that way. cheers, have a great day yall

Any that definitely supported some form of individual rights? As a total weirdo it frightens me to think that I might have been born into a society where my differences may have caused me great suffering at the hands of tradition.

I’m not sure I follow? In today’s society a lot of people suffer because they are different. Disabled people for example, who would have been cared for in indigenous cultures. Yes the Iroquois supported individual rights. They just had a culture where whatever you did, you kept the needs of others in mind and did what you could to help. You were still an individual.

While true, without advancements in modern healthcare, many of the disabilities people go through life with today would result in a much earlier death. Cystic fibrosis for example is to this day incredulously expensive to treat but with a much greater life expectancy than during the heyday of the Iroquois.

I believe we can to some extent have both: a culture that supports all people and also produces high end medical equipment. The point of mentioning other cultures is to point out that human nature allows it.

I'm willing to believe that we could continue to produce the equipment we do today. But what's the motivation to advance?

Take programming: we could all easily cut down our work hours by just maintaining current systems, which do a huge amount already. There are artificial forces that make us continue to trade one-time innovations for the same living standards as yesterday. Why not automate food production etc, and share the minimal maintenance required?

I think the reason societies that stand still in this way haven't stuck around is ultimately that nations compete with each other, and will come and take everything once they advance further.

There are a lot of motivations to advance. Why do we research cancer cures? We use profit motives to encourage the formation of specific organizations but the reason we really care about curing cancer is that we lose loved ones that mean the world to us.

Similarly, the developers of Blender are able to get paid for their work, but it seems that they choose this particular task because it interests them. If they had all of their material needs met, they might take a break and work fewer hours but I’d bet they might still work on blender for fun.

That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m just obsessed with designing new robots because it’s fun. In the last three months I’ve created a four axis robot arm from scratch (each gearbox is custom designed and integrated with the 3D printed frame)[1]. Nobody is paying me. The only reason I do paid work is that I need money for survival. But I would still be working on robots if all my material needs were met by machines. And I’d also teach classes on how they work and how to design them, and I’d be in the shop making new designs because that’s already what I spend all my time on.

And we can automate food production! See my profile for the open source farming robot I am designing. And the robot arm I am working on as a personal project is something I hope I can use in a free food production system. You can make a super healthy vegetable and lentil curry for $2 per dish in raw cost. The machine that makes it can be the size of a van and it doesn’t need human workers. If a community owned such a machine they could all eat a really healthy diet for a few dollars a day.

[1] https://twitter.com/tlalexander/status/1453238105230675976?s...

I took a 100% pay cut to work on D. But there aren't enough people like that to run a society like that, not remotely close.

I think it depends on the society. With automation to reduce absolute labor needs and a people that prefer living in community with the basics to slaving away at a retail job, I think it can be done. People like to work and they like to help one another. We've created a system that isolates people and many of us are sick of it. We would way rather have a hot meal and the company of friends (who are not themselves stuck at some job) than slave away for hours at some retail store that jerks you around for a pittance.

I think if you could build the systems and attract some early adopters, you could prove how much better it is. Once people see it, they would fight to keep it running. They would volunteer their time to keep it going. Or they would agree to a more defined schedule and voluntarily participate in this work agreement to keep it going. The alternative is that they're forced to work for survival so I still think it could be a better deal.

Who is going to clean the toilets?

Same as today. Very little.

Servicing village sized tribes in relatively plentiful biomes, vs nation-level populations (serviced by machines) seem to be very different things.

And how did those indigenous cultures fair when they came in contact with Western systems of resource collection and distribution?

How can a system be both agrarian and strong enough to survive contact with non-agrarian systems? How do you stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?

Well, we just watched the greatest military in the world™ scuttle out of Afghanistan with its tail between its legs, so we know that a primarily agrarian society CAN resist a militaristic society as long as its prepared.

Pre-Colonial American societies were decimated by the biological warfare of the Europeans first. Now America turns its taste for biological warfare on itself. But, anyway, I digress.

> so we know that a primarily agrarian society CAN resist a militaristic society

America did not invade, or go to war with Afghanistan - it was attempting to liberate it, not annihilate it.

America absolutely invaded Afghanistan. I don't see the point of this line of questions but if you want a better example see Vietnam.

I think you're ignoring the context of my comment.

The USA entered alright, but the common meaning of invade is

> (of an armed force) enter (a country or region) so as to subjugate or occupy it.

and subjugate in turn:

> bring under domination or control, especially by conquest.

American did not intend to annihilate Afghans, nor the Vietnamese.

> I don't see the point of this line of questions

That the resistance you describe depends on the behaviour of the aggressor. Could the Japanese resist the atomic bomb? Could German Jews peacefully/non-violently resist the Nazi regime?

False. We learned that an agrarian society can resist democracy and nation building. They were incapable of withstanding military destruction. They didn't even last 90 days.

In fact they've already destroyed the military infrastructure we left them. "Soldiers" are literally parting out $20 million helicopters for $10,000 in scrap metal.

They didn't really resist, because they knew what the long game was. The people who planned the war didn't.

We should have bombed them for 90 days and declared victory and went home -- it would have been symbolic and pointless, but a lot cheaper in treasure and blood.

> Pre-Colonial American societies were decimated by the biological warfare of the Europeans first.

Pizzaro defeated the Incas before the diseases did.

> How do you stop 10 people from secretly working hard and producing an extra ration of gruel right under your commie nose?

I am talking about a voluntary system that works in some ways like wikipedia. I want to get together with others, under a libertarian system of free exchange, and build systems that are designed to meet core human needs as cheaply as possible. Then people can band together and buy those machines if they want, and they can share the output or whatever.

If 10 people want to go do something else, that doesn't affect me any more than Apple affects Wikipedia.

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