Comment on Alpha males
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day agoHumans in a civilized (meaning urbanized) society… are domesticated, are basically in captivity, from the comparative framework of wild animals.
What about urban existence resembles captivity? You aren’t constrained geographically or denied personal autonomy. In fact, you have significantly more freedom and autonomy precisely because you’re at the hub of a large, well-developed collection of infrastructure and accumulated resources.
I would not consider a human in a city any more “in captivity” than a duck in a lake.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Nation-State Borders.
Sorry, you can’t leave Gaza, you’re not allowed to.
You need a ticket to attend this concert.
You will be arrested or shot on sight if you enter this facility without authorization.
Sure, you can download a movie, but thats a crime.
Sure, you can hack into a Tesla and drive off with it, but thats also a crime.
Whites Bathroom on the Left, Negroes on the Right.
Only the Preist may enter the Holy of Holies.
And even less overt things than that:
You can’t go to this club, this bar, this concert dressed like that, talking like that.
No, you cannot go outside nude, thats generally a crime.
You can’t say those words, love that person, speak that language, not without social ostricisization or even incarceration.
Sure, if you’re in the global top 1% to 5 % of people wealthy enough to afford all those things that you can now do via the exploitation and reduction of freedom built off of the other 99% to 95%.
Everyone else has to go back to work, or they get evicted, starve and die.
The duck can fly away and never return, if it wants to.
A human can only do that to the extent it has money.
… We just live in a more complicated Zoo with more rules, that we built for ourselves, compared to ourselves 100,000 years ago.
I am not saying there are no upsides to civilization.
I am just saying you maybe need a different frame of reference to see the differences, the downsides.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Nothing you’re describing has to do with “cities”. Certainly, none of these conditions somehow improve in a state of nature, either.
If anything, the philosophic underpinnings of your critiques are rooted in the large, surplus rich, heavily bureaucratic academic institutions that civilization produces. “Open borders” without roads, “civil rights” without courts and adjudicators, “downloading a movie” without telecommunications and Hollywood scale production companies, “Desegregated bathrooms” without indoor plumbing… its all meaningless.
You can’t simultaneously insist shitting in the woods, bored out of your mind, stuck at the bottom of a gully, as you’re about to get pounced on by a wild cat is a valuable perspective and then complain that the public library you just drove to where you’d like to use the free wifi to steal movies doesn’t have egalitarian toilet setups. You’ve put the cart a mile ahead of the horse.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
Almost none of the things I listed could or have existed without cities, historically, anthropologically.
Civilization brings technologies and living standard improvements, and the price that is paid for these is a symmetrically increasing body of rules and norms… which definitionally restrict autonomy.
I am not complaining that a public library has segregated bathrooms and that this is objectively worse in every way possible than being pounced by a leopard while trying to shit in the jungle.
You are shifting the conversation to ‘what is generally better’… when the original issue was ‘civilization requires following rules that restrict freedom and autonomy.’
I am not an anarcho primitivist, I do not think ‘return to the wild’ is any kind of a good idea.
But, when I say that civilization roughly is domestication, is captivity… it is pertinent to fully compare and contrast all the actual differences, so that you can actually see, understand, and appreciate them.
…
Maybe a more simple example would work.
Your pet cat probably can’t actually hunt for shit.
It has been domesticated, learned how to scream when its food bowl isn’t full, not how to actually hunt that well.
Ok, now, humans, also, even pretending we haven’t largely destroyed the biosphere for the sake of an easier comparison…
We generally also can’t hunt for shit, because what we do when we are hungry is drive to the grocery store.
But, 100k years ago, no such thing as a grocery store existed, you more or less needed to be part of a small band capable of hunting and gathering and cooking their own food.
This is a rather straightforward example of how civilization roughly is equivalent (from the point of view of a wild animal, or pre-civilized human) to us domesticating ourselves.
…
Obviously civilization is far more complex than just domestication, but domestication is a pretty fundamental part of civilization.
Why did we domesticate dogs and cats?
Well, it was mutually beneficial.
We got uh… well I guess Gods and rodent control from cats, we got loyal hunting partners that are also goofy and doofy from dogs… and they got a lot closer to the grocery store paradigm, pretty quickly.
I am guessing you live in a home of some kind, probably?
Congrats, you are domesticated, don’t piss off your HOA, don’t forget to pay your mortgage, rent, don’t annoy the neighbors, don’t start an industrial machine workshop in your backyard, check your local ordinances before you set up a rain catcher, etc.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
There are two kinds of freedom, and you are mixing these up.
There’s positive and negative freedom. Negative freedom is “freedom of”, while positive freedom is “freedom to”.
Negative freedom means I don’t have to follow rules. Nobody tells me what to do or not to do. A man starving in the desert has perfect negative freedom. He can choose completely freely on which dune to die, nobody’s there to stop him or to tell him what to do.
Positive freedom means I have more choices. A good example is the highway system. I can drive at any time of day or night into any direction I want to at a very high speed and quite high safety. I have more freedom of movement than kings had 200 years ago.
Positive and negative freedom often contradict. Again, the highway system is a good example: The only reason I can safely and quickly drive wherever I want is because of the highway code (or equivalent depending on the country). There’s a huge rule work with rules upon rules on what I can and cannot do, and only the fact that most people follow these rules quite closely enables fast and safe travels for me.
A large portion about the “missing freedoms” you describe are only possible because people follow rules. If there was no rule of law, then there would be no club, there would be no concert and so on.
And that’s why the “domestication is captivity” argument of yours falls flat. Captivity takes freedoms without returning anything. If you sit in jail, there’s a lot less things you can do compared to when you don’t sit in jail. “Domestication” sacrifices some negative freedoms (aka you need to follow rules) but in turn you get positive freedoms that are completely out of this world compared to how people used to live.
Compare the things you can do (never be hungry, live in a heated/cooled building, travel around the world if you want to, learn whatever you want whenever you want, never be bored due to endless entertainment, and so on and so on) with the things a “wild” human from 100 000 years ago could do.
This massive increase in freedom is in no way comparable to captivity, which just takes freedom without giving anything in return.
sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I mean, your two types of freedom discourse is largely correct, but this is missing the point I am making.
My original point is that civilization essentially is a form of self-domestication.
Then comes someone to attempt to disprove this by basically turning this into a discussion of comparative freedoms and standards of living.
Sure, ok but thats a non sequitur, its talking around my point, my claim, instead of actually challenging it.
Yep, we generally have more freedom from starvation, disease, etc.
The trade off is that we have more requirements of other kinds and less freedoms of other kinds.
This has nothing to do with the fact of domestication, it has to do with determining whether or not it is good or desireable.
At no point have I said anything like ‘it was better before we invented cities and civilization and industrial technology.’
That would be a different claim, where what you point out would be relevant, but its not the claim I’ve made.
Also, captivity does not return nothing, strictly necessarily speaking within the original domain specific comparison of animal captivity, also the history of civilization very much includes the history of slavery, and yep, your definition of domestication agrees with what I am saying, have said.
You and underpantsweevil have both assumed I am making some kind of moral, ethical, ‘should be’ type claim.
Nope, I am not, I am just pointing out that civilized society is way different than 100k BCE society, and that if you time teleported a person from that era to our modern era, they’d likely describe the experience of integrating into our society as similar to being made into a pet, or perhaps highly ritualistic social role from their society, that they would feel like they were acting or performing in a world of millions of rules, and expected to do so all the time.
squaresinger@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You are using a motte-and-bailey switch right now.
Nobody was talking against the self-domestication point. That one is your bailey argument: A simple, easy-to-defend stantement that means very little and is largely correct.
The motte argument that everyone was contending was that domestication equals captivity. That one is a garbage claim that just doesn’t hold up.
You lead with the domestication equals captivity point and when you got called out on it you are now trying to switch from your motte argument to the bailey argument, claiming that this was what you were saying all along and not acknowleding that you switched arguments half-way in between.
And yes, equalling domestication and captivity is a moral, ethical, ‘should-be’ claim, and you repeated doing so in this last comment of yours as well by equalling the cuman condition with animal captivity while bringing up slavery in the same line which actually is quite close to animal captivity. The general human condition in 2025 does not equal slavery.
The only way you would seriously make that argument is if you either have no idea what slavery is (which I doubt) or if you want to claim that slavery is not “some kind of moral, ethical, ‘should be’ type” of problem.
And if you can’t see problems with slavery, we might have a bigger issue at hand.