He was responding to msmith537, who said
and later described the system as dehumanizing. The contrast being, that while he finds modern society increasingly suppresses his individual needs and desires, others find that more primitive societies suppress their individual needs and desires.
I don’t know. Maybe by working in a Chineese factory making products for Walmart? Or maybe a sweatshop stitching Reebok sneakers together? Or how about crammed in with a thousand illegals in some industrial slaughterhouse? Or maybe if you are luck enough to be in a Western country and educated enough you can work in a nice air-conditioned office park as a faceless cog in some corporate beurocracy? I mean at least until you appear unprofitable on some vice president’s P&L spreadsheet and are laid off from the company.
Just do a search of this message board. How many people are in jobs they hate, working for abusive, idiot bosses and performing tasks they don’t particularly care about?
But I suppose that is the bargain we make in order to be secure and comfortable (or at least have the illusion). We are perfectly comfortable working jobs we hate for shit we don’t need so we can eat our crappy food, watch TV at night before we go to bed and not have to worry about being eaten by anything.
And sooner or later… we die.
And then we get eaten by something.
You’re not your fucking khakis!
Being able to leave that existence and go back to civilization makes a bit of difference, doesn’t it? Hobbies vs. basic survival, ya know.
I was hoping somebody could explain that to me, too.
The difference is seeing the immediate results of your labor vs performing tasks as a necessary but not particularly important cog in a much greater machine that you don’t quite understand. Which is more satisfying? Building something with your own two hands or pressing a button a thousand times that attaches Doohicky #3 to Your Model 69 Widget.
I think there is some middle ground between living in the jungle wearing animal skins and being permenantly hardwired into The Matrix.
Certainly. That’s where almost all of us live. But almost none of us, including outdoor sports enthusiasts, *have *to grub and hunt for basic survival, with no alternatives but death, thanks to technology. So why did you bring that up?
Reminds me of certain Dopers.
Regards,
Shodan
I don’t think I implied we should return to a agrarian or hunter/gatherer existence nor that we should do away with technology.
Absolute rubbish. Kacynski never read Lord of the Flies, or watched read history, apparently. Technology makes things like genocide easier, but liberal, technologically advanced democratic societies smother the worst of man’s impulses.
What if the two were linked? 
Sorry, couldn’t resist.
Anyway, I wasn’t making a qualitative judgement either way, I was just pointing out that an average life expectancy of 45 (or whatever the claim was in the original post) for pre-industrial cultures didn’t mean that most adults didn’t live to be 77.
However, one also needs to compare the health and wellbeing of the 45-77-year-olds in both cultures to make a proper comparison - there’s more to quality of life than its length. Which I think has already been pointed out to some degree by someone else in this thread, so I’ll continue reading to see if the subject is already being discussed.
I think these are key issues.
I’m fond of watching the recent attempts to experience the life of more primitive or less industrial times and cultures, and seeing the effects of the experiment on the people involved. The first was “Pioneer Quest”, undertaken in my province of residence at the time, Manitoba. The goal was for two couples to live an entire year like the prairie pioneers of the late 1800s. Those poor pioneer-wannabes got everything that Manitoba could possibly throw at them in a year, from the wettest spring to the most mosquito-infested summer to the coldest, snowiest winter in ages.
They worked ridiculously hard and, during the busy season, ridiculously long. They faced deprivation and hardship and trauma and loss, but they also gained a particular kind of satisfaction in working for themselves that is notably missing from much of the “modern world”. They also formed close bonds with each other and with the other less industrial community in the area, the Hutterites, for whom they worked in exchange for food when their crops failed due to the weather.
In spite of all the technical hardship, they were stronger and fitter and healthier and closer as couples because of the ways in which they were working together and literally “making a living” for themselves, rather than buying it in the store after working all day for somebody else. Even when the younger couple returned to their modern lives and had to work and go to school and such separately, they tried to retain that sense of closeness and common purpose that they had found when working together to build and maintain their home on the prairie. The older couple was fortunate enough to carry it back into their life literally, and run a bed and breakfast together and do speaking engagements and such.
I would like to see us reclaim something of that sense of satisfaction and working for oneself in the future, regardless of what kinds of technology we may be using in the process. It does seem these days as if we’re largely working for it rather than the other way around - we’ve become such slaves to our technology habit that we spend our hours in pointless meaningless jobs just to support it. It’s especially costly because it’s not satisfying that need in us for really meaningful living, so we spend more on more tech to fill a hole that never gets filled.
I don’t think that it’s impossible to cherry-pick the best parts of our technological advancement, advance further with those and leave behind the wasteful, unhealthy or antisocial bits, while at the same time cultivating our sense of community and all those things which satisfy us as humans. I think it would take a particular kind of mindfulness in our behaviour and decisions that we’ve largely abandoned, though.
I agree. It also contributes to social ills that make us care less about each other and our effects on things.
The closest word I’ve seen to cover all that is “community”.
Perhaps, but not enough to make a difference in this case. If you want to argue that the hunter gatherer lifestyle if more dangerous, less secure, more likely to end in a violent or painful death, or more likely to result in getting one’s hands dirty, then go for it. But dehumanizing?
Who has been dehumanized – the band of hunters who return home late, cold and exhausted, but successful in securing meat for their families? Or the checkout line worker who returns home late alone, exhausted and with an aching back from standing all day while performing tasks that a robot or chimpanzee could do equally well, but successful in securing a paycheck that will be consumed by rent, allowing him to do the same thing day after day after day? Which one will question where things went wrong as they try to sleep?
This is not to suggest that dehumanizing existences in modern society are restricted to those with low education. A friend of mine who received a degree in biochemistry worked at a job where he tested the adhesiveness of tape all day long. He went home feeling empty, wondering where things had gone wrong, and drank.
Again, you are arguing that a lifestyle consisting of activities that people turn to in order to feel alive and in touch with their humanity is somehow more dehumanizing than what many (I am not suggesting all) in our society experience --living as a cog in a giant machine?
What makes you think a hunter/warrior is any less of a cog? They are if anything less free to choose to do anything else.
They are less of a cog because they are not simply a small and often ignorant piece of a great, complex, and mysterious machine. They exist in a small group of people that they know intimately and there is a direct and visible link between what they spend their energy doing and the fruits of their labor. There is no wondering about the purpose of what they are doing, wondering if it is necessary, questioning why they are wasting years of their life testing the adhesiveness of tape day after day.
It is all obvious: I spent the last 5 days sharpening these arrowheads and now I am using them to hunt. I spend the afternoon gathering X and now I see my kid smiling as she eats X.
When you get hungry and need to prepare food, does it bore you? Do you question why you are doing it?
I think many of the tasks performed by people in our society are (1) joyless, and (2) lead to the question: why am I doing this?
In a larger society, the roles are much more specialized. More efficient as a whole, but more cog-like for the individuals involved. With a large enough and specialized enough society, it is easy to lose track of the purpose.
Yes. Necessary is not the same as “not boring”. I’m sure there were millions of hunters throughout history who found hunting equally boring. And just how fulfilling were such tasks as grinding grain by hand, or hauling around heavy weights without so much as a wheelbarrow?
I doubt that. I think hunting is one of those things that has been hardwired into our nervous systems over millions of years. It would be like a dog finding it boring to chase something. I think many have been surprised by the unexpected excitement that they find released in themselves when they are hunting/stalking/tracking – even if is only for taking a picture.
When a clear purpose is in mind and you are surrounded by others who you care about with the same purpose…I imagine it could be pretty fulfilling.
Have you ever gardened? If you break it down into tiny pieces and analyze them individually it is difficult to imagine what might be pleasurable about, say, digging a hole with a shovel. But gardening is almost universally considered to be an extremely fulfilling activity.