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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

> Land used to exist without a monetary cost to access it. That was the natural way of things prior to the private property system and monetary system.

Yeah, the "natural way" of things was that you and your tribe fought off and killed competing tribes trying to access your resources. This isn't particularly desirable, which is why monopolization of violence by larger entities was established.

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> which is why monopolization of violence by larger entities was established

What are you even arguing against? The post isn't anti-government, and it's not advocating we go back to those times.

But it's grounded in an incorrect belief that humanity existed in some kind of idyllic prehistoric state before civilization where nobody had to work. And we can return to this state of life.

Most contemporary evidence on hunter gatherer societies indicates the opposite: it was highly violent with intense competition between groups.

> But it's grounded in an incorrect belief that humanity existed in some kind of idyllic prehistoric state before civilization where nobody had to work. And we can return to this state of life.

No, that's an enormous strawman. It's saying one particular thing was better.

This isn't particularly desirable

I disagree. It's stressful and dangerous, to be sure, but monopolization of violence by larger entities is fundamentally totalitarian. If I'm outnumbered and outfought by you, I have other strategic options. Under a state, merely expressing opposition to the way things are can be a criminal offense.

There's a huge diversity of social arrangements throughout history. Some of them communal and sharing, some warlike and taking; forced labor and not; monetary systems and not; etc. The quote you reply to is overly nostalgic and too simplistic to reflect realities of history, same with your comment.

Social arrangements throughout history are indeed quite varied. Social arrangements in pre-history and especially pre-agricultural societies less so. Absence of agriculture puts a much lower limit on the size of social groups, usually around 50-150. Rates of violent death vary from ~12-25% (as in asking the question, "what percentage of people died naturally or at the hands of other human beings?"), across multiple continents. This is considerably higher than agricultural societies, and vastly larger than industrial societies.

So what? Your utility function is one-dimensional, lifespan. Maximizing the productive lifespan of proles or serfs is optimal in a society where power is centralized, but you are discounting the value of autonomy to zero.

I reject the Hobbesian premise that other social forms should be dismissed as nasty, brutish, and short, and it's not for lack of familiarity with the anthropology of prehistorical conflict.

> Social arrangements in pre-history and especially pre-agricultural societies less so.

[citation needed]

Show me a hunter-gatherer society that has social groups spanning hundreds of people or more. There's fundamental limits of food production and social organization without tools like agriculture to support larger population density, or writing to organize larger groups of people. You're asking me to prove a negative here.

You’re conflating carrying capacity with social arrangements, and directly say that lower carrying capacity reduces the variety of social arrangements.

You really think that contemporary Pygmies of the Congo, the uncontacted people of the Amazon, the 19th century Australian Aborigines, Cheyenne, Inuit, and Shawnee, along with the prehistoric of Central Europe and East Asia, are culturally indistinguishable beyond silly hats?

This is laughable.

They're not culturally indistinguishable. But they absolutely share many similar characteristics distinct from both agrarian and industrial societies: all of them primarily interact and live in social groups much smaller than agrarian societies. All had rates of violence drastically higher than today.

Of course they have different languages, religious practices, etc. But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.

> But that's not particularly important relative to the point I'm making: none of the societies you listed were examples of the idyllic noble-savage kind of society that popular culture tends to portray hunter gatherers to be.

Literally no one is making that point. What people (or at least I am) saying is believing all hunter gatherer societies are dominated strong man violence is pure fantasy that is informed by they’re own biases and wishes rather than actual data.

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