Makes total sense: who’s working for whom? Is wheat making an effort to till the soil and find fertiliser to help us grow, or is it the other way round?
This is like the question I’ve always asked about getting sick.
Do you produce extra mucous because your body is trying to get rid of what’s making you sick or does the illness make you produce more mucous in order to spread more easily?
I suspect the serious answer is that we produce mucus and sneezing as a natural response to microbes, and that’s the environment within which microbes have evolved to take advantage of the mucus and sneezing
Mucus is one of the bodies innate methods of protection, same with vomiting, same with crying same with sweating. The body knows something is wrong so it kicks the production of those into overdrive to hopefully force whatever was in it out. Its why we start sweating, salivating and sometimes vomit when we eat super spicy peppers despite the fruit being room temp amd full of water
And here we have a typical specimen exhibiting capitalist realism: Observe how the subject is analysing everything they come across on a “who works for who” basis, projecting human modes of production onto the universe. Applying it, even in vain, this reductive universality ensures that they will never think beyond it and, not thinking beyond it, not question either working for a capitalist or being a capitalist who is worked for, thereby in either case working for capitalism, a form of human cooperation in which happiness, well-being, yes even human connection (that necessitating eye-level communication) is traded for hastened advancement of the economy to achieve post-scarcity.
9 points out of 10, very good. Except that capitalism doesn’t want to ever achieve post-scarcity. They’re a dog chasing a car, without scarcity and demand their profit streams dry up.
Hence why post-scarcity is the natural death point of capitalism.
Your question is essentially the same as Freudians arguing among themselves about the existence of a death drive: How could it possibly benefit the individual? If it can’t in some way benefit the individual, how can it be a drive? How does it mesh with the pleasure principle? The answer is simple: It doesn’t benefit the individual. In certain circumstances it benefits the genome, that’s why us seed-pods can, in certain circumstances, enter states in which it is pleasurable.
And all-encompassing and all-powerful, indeed, religious, as capitalism may seem right now it, too, is a seed pod. It does not have to will its abolishment to bring about the material conditions abolishing it.
Of course there’s also nothing speaking against it not making things unduly nasty for us. But that’s mere politics, not fate.
All realism is bullshit http://soulism.net
Fool. Allow me to show you truth: https://timecube.xyz/
I suspect cats. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/9756-toxoplasmosis
one of the many reasons to keep your cats indoors.
Just like cats right?
Wouldn’t the cats have also been demesticated by the wheat? Since the wheat domesticated humans, stored the wheat berries in silos which attracted mice and is the whole reason cats were like… “I live here now.”
Haha. I’m reading Sapiens right now, too
I’ve never actually read any Harari books for some reason. Is his stuff generally “reliable”?
r/askhistorians on reddit always rails about it being, paraphrasing: too cut and dry for such complicated topics. I’ve the first half of the first one, and I don’t disagree, but I’m not a historian. Reductionism is definitely in play, and there’s certainly a narrative bias in there for entertainment.
It seems about as reliable as Isaac Asimov’s essays (as published in The Road to Infinity, or similar).
Thanks. So, interesting and generally reliable, but claims should be treated with caution?
His first book (Sapiens) does a great job of showing how frail is modern civilization, though. Its foundation is, like religion, only beliefs.
No idea, tbh. I’m nearly half way through it and I’ve yet to hear anything controversial other than religion is basically made up, but I already thought so. It’s really just super thought-provoking stuff.
If I were to describe it, I’d say it’s moreso an incredibly well thought-out narrative on the story of the human species and where we fit in time and space.
For example, the part this meme is from blew my mind. It’s a couple paragraphs and gets set up with the backdrop/context of the agricultural evolution and kind of comes out of nowhere.
Lastly, one interesting thought I had while reading it is how evolution doesn’t really “care” if we’re depressed, as long as we’re still reproducing the cycle continues (this was moreso a thought I had while reading the book than something explicitly said, I think)
The jays and crows around my house have domesticated us too
I so want to befriend my local crows, been meaning to buy some seeds for bribing them
Puck up the cheapest 40lb bag of dogfood you can find they’ll love it and its got the nutrients they need!
Isn’t this Michael Pollan’s theory?
That plants make themselves Delicious/useful/whatever so we’ll use them more?
