this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
71 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
43750 readers
1480 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Not trying to quibble or be pedantic, but I see it as a complex subject. Laws & taxes are extremely recent practices, while societies were probably around long before modern man came along, ~300kya.
I would also think some of those societies functioned nicely indeed, and were arguably an improvement over what we have now.
Try handling any society > 1000 people without any laws or taxes.
i'm pretty sure a shared tradition and morality handled most of what we might call 'law.' as for taxes, that's something that works with lucre. the vast majority of human history did not seem to function with lucre.
as for a threshold of 1000 individuals, i would tend to think most societies splintered in to smaller ones the larger they grew, as is natural.
a lot of that is speculative of course, but generally seems supported by the history and clues we do have. meanwhile, what i know for sure is that this mega-society is headed for a massive collapse, and is certainly not self-sustaining, nor at equilibrium with nature. cheers.
Even with all the scaling issue that having larger societies come with, I don't see how modern technology would be doable without it. Try running a chip fabrication plant using a highly distributed workforce.
Well, we're way, way over the overpopulation limit, with too much environmental destruction in our wake, so I guess it's all pretty academic at this point.
Also, I certainly don't find that a high-tech, capitalistic civilisation is required to maintain a society with high happiness & quality of life. We already know due to multiple encounters with existing primitive peoples around the world that people can be perfectly happy, content and occupied with far more primitive tech, without money.
That said, primitive societies can also be quite violent, stressful affairs, too.