Quote Originally Posted by Roid_Rage View Post
Care explaining this a bit more? What do you mean we don't realize how prepared we are for tribal life but unprepared for modern?
Okay, this is going to be a long post, but I also think it will be interesting. Cliffs at bottom

The first thing we need to do is understand what humans are, and that understanding comes primarily through examining what evolution is on a fundamental level. So I'll try to explain that

We're not here for any reason other than the fact that we happened to have survived. We happen to have survived because we have conformed to our environment for the purpose of survival exclusively. It's not so much survival of the fittest, but more like survival of whatever isn't less fit than the competition. That fitness is not a moral or a good fitness, but simply the ability to exploit the environment just enough to continually reproduce. We're not here for intelligence or happiness or morals, we're here because we're the last things that haven't died

What this means is that everything we are is based on the environments which molded our evolution. There is always overlaps and vestigial products of that evolution, but we are mainly suited for whatever environment we have evolved for.

We evolved for tribal societies VERY well. We have not evolved for modern civilization much at all. Agriculture raised ecological carrying capacity soooooo much that it is no longer survival of the fittest, but survival of all. And it changed everything. We're not evolved to handle abstractions well, but modern life is a virtual abstraction. We're not evolved to handle things like jobs or large societies or crime or just about everything "modern". The vast, vast majority of our problems can be explained due to modernness.

This is so hard to explain because we take everything for granted. We don't even realize that things like mental illness, pursuit of happiness, crime, education and work are simply not things that exist in tribal societies.

Our biology has evolved to only meet a small handful of potential mates over a lifetime, for nearly every person we know to be family, and to have pretty much no choice of what to do with your life. We are meant to copy mom and dad, protect our tribe/family, and work together for things that we naturally want and have little choice about.

Now what happens when we expand everything like modern society has? We get sexual repression and adultery and divorce like crazy simply because we don't know how to handle the overload of potential mates. We get crime and prisons and hateful emotions because we're no longer a unit that relies on itself for sustenance. We get depression, self-loathing, confusion, etc because we have to do a job that doesn't come that naturally

In tribal societies, I guarantee that humans are miserable only momentarily and the mainstay is an unquestioned sense of happiness and purpose. In modern society, it's the opposite. Lots of people will say it's not, but they're kidding themselves. We all know we all walk around secretly thinking poorly of ourselves. This type of thing is not even chronically possible in tribal societies because it would effectively make the society unfit to survive.

Modern life is a virtual prison that we take for granted. This is nearly impossible to understand due to that grantedness, but also due to the strongest instinct we have: survival. Biologically, we are not that capable of thinking that survival itself isn't a fundamental good, regardless of whether that existence is one of suffering.




Cliffs: Tribal societies struggle to survive, and that struggle determines that chronic problems cannot exist. Modern society is so powerful it survives without even trying, and all the possible bads hidden inside humans and inside the world come to fruition simply because they can. People in prison are not bad people, they're people trying to live the way they're supposed to, but get screwed by modernism. Pedophiles aren't even bad people. Everything we know about pedophilia strongly suggests that its a product of modernism and that it couldn't survive in tribalism

When a species doesn't struggle to survive, they begin opening up the door for bad things that wouldn't exist otherwise. And it's not the same way about opening up for good things since good things are mainly just things we're adapted for in the first place