this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
1537 points (98.4% liked)
Political Memes
5501 readers
2016 users here now
Welcome to politcal memes!
These are our rules:
Be civil
Jokes are okay, but don’t intentionally harass or disturb any member of our community. Sexism, racism and bigotry are not allowed. Good faith argumentation only. No posts discouraging people to vote or shaming people for voting.
No misinformation
Don’t post any intentional misinformation. When asked by mods, provide sources for any claims you make.
Posts should be memes
Random pictures do not qualify as memes. Relevance to politics is required.
No bots, spam or self-promotion
Follow instance rules, ask for your bot to be allowed on this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand why you feel the need to be hostile and make this about white men. This is about civilization theory.
If your point was that white civilizations made the world into the mess it is right now, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It is however not the point of my inquiry. I was generally curious about bigger societies that managed to stay relatively non hierarchial which would result in an equal share of ressources (what this whole thread was about) From what I have read, all bigger "successful" civs developed a strong hierarchy which resulted in a big wealth gap as well and/or built their empire through expansion and as a result slaves and POW who granted them free labour to built their infrastructure. Some examples:
Egypt (not white) China (not white) Khmer (not white) Japan (not white) Osman empire (not white) Persian (not white) Babylon (not white) India (not white)
Imo indigenous tribes are not helpful in this discussion because I am interested in examples or solutions for big societies and tribal structures are very different because people usually all know each other over 1 or two axis which strongly discouraged selfish behavior (it got you shunned).
I am very interested in African and ancient American civilizations but there is not a lot of unbiased literature out there (To my knowledge - which is why I asked for more info)
You are dancing around the issue without realizing it by focusing on "big" societies. Humans are social creatures, but only up to a certain extent. We like our tribe of a few hundred people and that's about it. When a society gets bigger than that, our brains naturally find ways to discriminate to create an "us" and a "them". Simply put, big societies are bad societies. Agriculture was a mistake (also because grain and an excessively convenient source of calories is bad for us).
Unfortunately there's no solution for this, outside of any number of apocalypse scenarios. But we can mitigate the worst of the issues by destroying the very idea that a greed or privilege-based society is permissable.