Comment on Alpha males
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 1 day agoNothing 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.
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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.
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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.