C (19:52)
I mean, we certainly don't know his name, right? Like. Cause here's the thing, and this is. Cause I've talked a lot, you know, about, like, Something that gets that anarchists bring up quite frequently, which is how you had a lot of, in prehistory among these hunter gatherer tribes, a lot of extremely egalitarian communities, right? Particularly compared to, like, a lot of the settled cultures that followed them, right, where there was significantly more equality between men and women, there were significantly flatter hierarchies, you know, a lot less power being invested in single individuals. And I talked about in the manifesto episodes about, like, the. That ikong ritual, like the shaming of the meat to, like, try and stop young men who are hunters from getting too big an ego because they think that hunting is all that matters. Because it's like the cool, sexy job to have, right? And if you're focusing on that, you're ignoring how well most of our calories come from people like gathering nuts. And a lot of that work gets done by women. And also people need clothes, people need tools, all of these things that are just as important as going out and killing a deer. And in fact, necessary precursors that are a lot less sexy. So if you let, like, the young hunter boys get, you know, a ego about them because, like, well, I'm the one who brought home the meat, then you're ignoring everyone else's contributions. That makes your whole community weaker, right? And it creates the opportunity, at least, that one of those young men is going to lose their shit and bring terrible, terrible suffering onto the rest of the community, right? But I think when we talk about that, we talk about all of these different sort of, like, rituals and like, like ceremonies and rules that different, like, societies adopted to deal with the problem of power to ensure that they had flatter hierarchies, right? There's a tendency then to kind of forget something, which is that those were not part of those societies because they were more enlightened than modern people or at least than the people that followed them. It was not like, oh, we used to understand how to be good as a society, right? Or as human beings. We used to have better cultures, we used to be more ethical, we used to treat each other better, and we stopped. I think it's more accurate to say, well, all of those different rules and practices are evidence of the fact that there's always been a problem with power in human cultures and that individual people taking too much power for themselves has always been a danger. And our ancestors recognize that and have throughout the entire history of human events and some of cultures developed methods of dealing with it. But ultimately we have to assume all of those methods hit points of failure, right? Because Those cultures didn't last. Right. And they didn't beat out in a lot of cases, the more stratified and hierarchical cultures that followed them. And so while I think it's really valuable to look at here are solutions. Different cultures have proposed the problem of power. The fact that those they had to come up with so many different solutions is evidence of the fact that that problem is kind of universal. Right. And that hints at a long history of bastards of individual and cadres of assholes that have sought in every kind of society, including ancient hunter gatherer societies, to try and take much more than their fair share from everybody else. Right. And so there's certainly a long prehistory of nameless bastards out there. And I think it behooves us to remember that both because I am one of those people who says we should be looking at what other older, different cultures developed as ways to deal with the problem of power without pretending that they definitely had it figured out. Because again, none of that stuff lasted forever. Right?
