Was he right?

I ... I guess I basically am. If he'd been told "kys retard" or ">2016, still falling for the noble savage meme" a couple times, his whole manifesto would've been a lot stronger.

"standard of living" is subjective. he wanted to increase it according to his opinions.

/thread

>subjective

Increased average lifespan is not subjective.
Medical, technological, agricultural, etc advances are not subjective.

Don't try to peddle the "it's just your opinion man" bullshit here. This is a history board.

It's pretty clear that hunter/gathers had a lot more free time than human beings after agriculture. Now they didn't twiddle their thumbs and "feel at one with nature" but its safe to presume they did things they found enjoyable, such as family bonding or art.

Standard of living is a meme. Human beings needs very few things to maintain happiness. We overproduce/overmanufacture just about everything and it's getting to the point of total ecological destruction. All because "muh things", an equally destructive force as "muh feels".

Modern people could use their free time better than any hunter gatherer could.

A longer lifespan is not always a good thing. Not all advances are for the better.

The argument is that the sense of community, purpose, empathy, kindness and understanding that seem to be lacking in the modern world were commonplace millennia ago. These feelings are preferable to any material benefits the modern world can offer, such as medicine or mechanised farming. Thus, the whole concept of civilization itself is a mistake as people were happier before it.

The concept of "advancement" is subjective. Why? Because we you make something easier or more attainable that always has consequences. Some people value the advancement over the consequences, but people who think long term (Aka nobody in positions of power) realize that said advancements could have been made differently, or in a way that dulls the consequences of said advancements. Just because more human beings are able to live doesn't mean it's better. Now I'm not that anit-natalist, wahhh humans are ebil kind of guy but more humans for the sake of more humans is only useful short term and only useful for competition (more people for farming, thus more people for war kind of thing) but in the long term it is not necessary or objectively an "improvement".

The other user is right, living standards are a meme. I mean the average guy in the 1400s probably had less shit than you but was more content, this insatiable thirst for shit we don't need is self-destructive in the long run.

>Increased average lifespan is not subjective.
Tell me how is longer average lifespan beneficial in any way? So a guy gets to live ten to twenty extra years functioning as a walking corpse with limp dick, shit memory and bowel control of a small child, what's that good for? Objectively it wouldn't harm society in any way if people started dropping dead in their 60s.

But there was an argument you retard

>use free time
>better

>
>Modern people could use their free time better than any hunter gatherer could.
In what way? Because you can have 3 screens blasting bullshit into your eyes while reading a book and talking on the phone at the same time? How is this "better" in any way from spending in person time with your family or practicing a skill that would help you in the future? I don't think"Better" is the word you're looking for.

>It's pretty clear that hunter/gathers had a lot more free time than human beings after agriculture. Now they didn't twiddle their thumbs and "feel at one with nature" but its safe to presume they did things they found enjoyable, such as family bonding or art.
Yeah, of course. And played with their pets (which a lot of them had, yeah), made music, gossiped, started drama with friends and family, fell in love, fell out of love, had affairs, made up stories and told stupid jokes, invented and played games, shot drugs up each other's noses and tripped out, jacked the fuck off, went exploring with their besties -- and murdered each other, of course. Basically all of the shit we do today to occupy ourselves. I mean, what are we doing right now? Chatting and starting drama.

I'm not sure whether you're trying to defend Kaczynski or not, but you're basically agreeing with me and disagreeing with him. I went to the trouble of digging up his full quote, to prove I'm not misrepresenting him.

"Many primitive peoples, when they don't have work to do, are quite content to sit for hours at a time doing nothing at all, because they are at peace with themselves and their world. But most modern people must be constantly occupied or entertained, otherwise they get "bored," i.e., they get fidgety, uneasy, irritable."
(part of a larger point about how the media pacifies the masses)

That's clearly a fantasy. We (and all sensible, informed people) are well-aware that "primitive peoples," whether we're talking about primitive agriculturalists or pastoralists or true hunter-gatherers, get bored just like us, and come up with fun shit to pass the time. Hand a hunter-gatherer a Gameboy and he'll probably take right the fuck to it. You can tell he's never actually interacted with "primitive peoples," nor talked to anybody who has, nor even bothered to read their papers. That's a serious fault, and not the only point in his manifesto where he just straight-up makes shit up.

>It's pretty clear that hunter/gathers had a lot more free time than human beings after agriculture.

Do you have a single fact to back that up?

Of course you don't.

>We overproduce/overmanufacture just about everything

Now why do you think that is? Think REALLY hard. Now think really hard about what life and civilization in general would be like without it.

Listen, sustainability is absolutely a problem. But your """"solution"""" is impossible, undesirable, and ultimately fleeting. We need a lot more than just "let's just reverse all the advancements we've made and go back innawoods".

>standard of living is a meme

He says as he browses the internet on his computer while being well-fed, well-housed, (maybe) well-educated, and not dying or suffering from tooth rot, dysentery, scurvy, smallpox, typhoid, measles, smallpox, the plague, I could keep going.

See above.

You idiots take your fortune for granted, and you have a rosy-tinted view of the past and "muh noble savage living with nature". It's all bullshit. I understand that it might feel desirable to you because you're depressed or "unfulfilled" or whatever, but that is the human condition. Happiness is a carrot on a stick. Any ideology that peddles inner peace or pure satisfaction is lying to you. It's romanticism of the worst kind.

Again, there are problems, no shit, but what you're suggesting is not a solution, by any stretch. It's impossible to implement, it will increase suffering dramatically, and it will ultimately be undone after enough generations go by and people rediscover civilization.

Find a better solution, what you're advocating is counterproductive and gives a bad name to actual critics of the system.

I wonder how you managed to quote while completely avoiding to address it

>It's pretty clear that hunter/gathers had a lot more free time than human beings after agriculture
*more free time than wageslaves after agriculture

>implying wages existed among the earliest agricultural communities

Wageslave and NEET, it is not only a distinction between employed and not-employed.
There is such a thing as 'wageslave in spirit' and 'NEET in spirit'. Those who toiled for the good of society, or to stand on their own two feet, or to be self-sufficient, etc are wageslaves in spirit, even if wages aren't there.

Too many people to reply to.

In your case, even if we ignore your generalization of elderly life, you don't understand how averages work. A longer average lifespan doesn't just mean living to old age, it means not dying during birth, infancy, childhood, and adulthood.

If we spent back innawoods then you'd have to deal with a resurgence in diseases and malnutrition. It would not be the lovely peaceful hike in nature that you'd think it'd be. It would be suffering, a lot of pointless suffering.

>Do you have a single fact to back that up?
He's not wrong, and I can back that up for him if need be; there's ample anthropological and archaeological evidence (I'd really rather not, pulling up citations takes time I'd rather not spend on something so tedious, but I could). Hunter-gatherers in general had more free time, were healthier, and lived longer than agriculturalists (although they were considerably more violent). It's only in the past couple centuries that we've dragged ourselves out of the post-agricultural revolution doldrums.

To be clear, I'm this guy:
I'm not peddling a noble savage myth, I think anarcho-primitivism is a bunch of bullshit, and I don't feel any particular need to scrap civilized society when we're just now starting to reap really substantial rewards from it, after paying a pretty steep cost for the better part of 10,000 years. I am not remotely defending the general "our society is saturated with consumerist bullshit, we need to go back to simpler times" point, just that one specific claim -- agriculturalists on average did indeed live worse than hunter-gatherers, for quite a long while.

>muh diseases
Right now we're literally close to being fucked thanks to the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria.

Things like rotten teeth rarely happened before people started chewing on sugary shit, you can see dirt poor people in Africa and Asia having healthier teeth than any westerner despite having subpar dental hygiene by our standards.

Smallpox and the plague spread throughout the world thanks to long trade routes, so a side effect of civilization.

Civilization diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer's, artherosclerosis, obesity or chronic kidney failure were almost non-existent, as well as the various forms of cancer caused by chemical air and water pollution, smoking, alcoholism or radiation.

You're a disingenuous faggot who's busy listing the benefits of civilization while ignoring all the drawbacks.

I think he's completely wrong. It's been a boon for the human race. If we're talking sheer numbers and population, the Industrial Revolution has been the greatest achievement of humankind.

But it has been a disaster for every other creature on the planet. Perhaps the planet itself.

>hunters gatherers gave up happy and healthy life full of enjoyment and free time for agricultural life, just so they can work more and put much more effort to get less in return
That totally makes sense

It's a mistake to act like it was a conscious decision, or a process that would've been apparent to anyone at the time -- it took many generations. Agricultural lifestyles may be harder and more tedious than hunter-gatherer ones on average, worse for individuals, but agriculture can certainly support larger populations and agricultural societies would've been more successful and outcompeted hunter-gatherer ones, relegating them to marginal lands.

tl;dr It was a disaster in the short term, but it's been a good thing in the long run.

People tend to over-romanticize life before the Industrial Revolution, but even so when it happened it was 100% without a doubt a bad thing for the average person. At least early on. The subsistence agriculture that something like 85% of people at the time got by on at the time was turned on its head by the changes in the social and economic order, and the people in charge sure as shit didn't make it better for them with things like the enclosure system. People were going into overcrowded, disgusting cities to keep from starving. Consumer goods were more readily available for purchase, yeah, but despite it being easier to buy food and clothes and shit quality of life still dropped off sharply because of things pollution, dangerous working conditions, and overcrowded conditions being a breeding ground for squalor and disease. It wasn't really until the mid 20th century that the dividends of industrialization really came in for the average person.

Safety regulations, the 8 hour workday, public education, unionization, advances in urban planning and medicine, widely available consumer goods, public healthcare, international shipping, and a whole fuckload of other things came about as a direct result of the industrial revolution, or to mitigate its worst excesses. It might be depressing to earn pennies on someone else's dollar, but I prefer it to having to worry about dying because it got cold earlier than usual, or I got a goiter, or the black plague, or any number of other things.

underrated

I said it in the last thread on this, even if he was right bombing random people is absolutely not justified.

I will concede that, historically, hunter-gatherers who SURVIVED until adulthood had longer lifespans than pre-industrial agriculturalists, because the latter had to deal with infectious diseases brought on by population density. I still reject any claim that they were objectively happier, especially compared to the contemporary era.

However, that's not a condition that we can replicate in any practical way, especially not on a planet-wide scale. There's no going back on the human population boom, there's no going back on disease, there's no way to convince a large enough amount of people to implement such a plan, there's no way to prevent the plan from being reverted, etc. Nor would it be desirable to enact such a plan.

>the emergence of antibiotic resistant bacteria

Which is absolutely a problem, but is still preferable to the "innawoods" alternative of having no medicine at all and absolutely terrible infant mortality rates.

>Things like rotten teeth rarely happened before people started chewing on sugary shit

It was less common but that doesn't mean that it didn't exist (obviously it depended on the diet which depended on the region), and when it DID happen it was more devastating because there weren't any good solutions. That is why I put it under the "death and suffering" category, not the "mild annoyance at having to brush my teeth" category.

>Smallpox and the plague

Good luck getting rid of those now without medicine. There's no going back.

I love how you call others "disingenuous" while trying to equate our modern ills with historic ills. If only there was a way to tell the difference, to measure it. hmmm

>listing the benefits of civilization while ignoring all the drawbacks.

Please, you think I don't know about all the problems we have? You haven't even scratched the surface.

Your solution is simply not viable. No amount of railing against modern injustices will make me accept your absurd plans, you're fighting a strawman.

>I will concede that, historically, hunter-gatherers who SURVIVED until adulthood had longer lifespans than pre-industrial agriculturalists
Oh, I agree -- and their overall life expectancy might still have been lower, because like I mentioned a significantly higher % of them died violently (can't be assed to crunch the numbers myself or find anybody credible who has, it's a big topic). I'm not trying to set up a primitivist wankfest here.

>I still reject any claim that they were objectively happier
And I'm not trying to argue any such thing (which I know that you probably realize, I'm just talking). It's not really a falsifiable claim (or even a meaningful one given how nebulous and hard-to-measure 'happiness' is) -- I'd be incredibly suspicious of any archaeologist/anthropologist who made it.

>However, that's not a condition that we can replicate in any practical way, especially not on a planet-wide scale.
Of course. Even if everybody on Earth simultaneously decided they wanted to do so, you obviously can't support 7 billion people with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and EVEN IF most of those people spontaneously combusted or whatever, we've meddled too much with the biosphere and the landscape for it to be practical to live off the land without recourse to agriculture. It'd be decades or hundreds of years before the natural world would've reverted enough for that to be practical or even possible.

Relevant 2bh.

youtube.com/watch?v=YQ-Upb4Szms

No, he's just a more violent, schizophrenic version of Edward Abbey.

It has made it easier to survive, but it has also made us softer.

I spend 2/3 of my life in a car, fuck your living standards meme.

>safety regulations
nice where they're applied, which pretty much means only the western first world
>8 hour workday
enjoy it while it lasts
>public education
arguably going to complete shit depending on where you live
>unionization
corruption
>advances in urban planning
I live in Melbourne, this place is a fucking nightmare of constant construction of shit we don't need while serious problems are ignored for decades.
>medicine
a meme, I'm an heroing the moment I struggle to remember stuff or shit normally

name one ideology that came into power without violence. Christianity only kind of counts.

Medicine memers read this: douban.com/group/topic/43140607/

Globalization induced population growth will destroy human dignity and wellbeing.

Do yo live in LA or something lmao.

I'm exaggerating, but I live in a shittily planned area where everything is far apart and there's no access to public transport to get to where I need to be.

>I'm exaggerating, but I live in a shittily planned area where everything is far apart and there's no access to public transport to get to where I need to be.

So anywhere USA?

No, I'm . The traffic in suburban Melbourne is fucking horrible. And instead of trams/light rails the local council just decided to spend 10x as much money extending a train station out 2 more suburbs so that we can shoot straight into the CBD slightly more conveniently. Awesome for the 1% of the population who do that regularly but for everyone else we get stuck driving the same shitty, constantly under work roads because everything's too far apart to walk too and the bus service here fucking sucks. This city is aids even without the /pol/-memery.

He wasn't right but he wasn't wrong wither.

It's mostly loser neets though

>Is modern life better or worse?
Literally just a matter of taste not worth discussing about. /thread

Ad hom can be an argument if related to the issue. If a pedo wants to open a daycare and has good financial plans and stuff, pointing out he's a pedo is an ad hom and a valid counter argument to him running a daycare.

> having famine every 10 years
no thank you.

I strongly disagree with him. His views are correct from a natural standpoint, however they aren't consistent with the changing tides of the human race.

Industrialization has devastated the planet to be sure, but with it has been a major boom to the human race's social and technological progress. As science and technology progress further and further, then the negative impact of industrialization will be diminished and the long term positives will be increasingly visible as the cost to other aspects of living is offset.

Don't let politics fool you, the future is bright.

>It's pretty clear that hunter/gathers had a lot more free time than human beings after agriculture.

They also died a lot more from small pox.

No he was a loser that couldn't get laid so he retreated to a tiny cuckshed in the woods to get "revenge" on society by blowing up a bunch of randoms.

>declares war on industrial society
>attacks them with materials and knowledge obtained from industrial society

lmao what a hypocrite

>name one ideology that came into power without violence
Indian nationalism. Yes I know there was some violence, but it went against official policy and that violence did not help the movement achieve its goals.

There are a bunch of examples in the us too, how about women's suffrage, temperance, the 60s civil rights movement, or the anti Vietnam war movement. There may have been some violence by radical elements but they achieved their goals through peaceful means.

We could also look at major societal changes like the industrial revolution which occurred without violence, the digital revolution of our age did so as well. A change towards primitivism need not be done violently.

How to win this argument, see pic.

/thread

What a pleb.

But why would such change even happen? Nobody would abandon their happy life of hunter gatherer for harder life of farmer.

But before cars you would have spent 2/3rds of your life in the same 1/2 mile radius of the place you werre born, and the other 1/3 no further than 10 miles.

Hey listen, I'm right there with you, sitting in fucking Boston traffic cursing the day Henry Ford was born. But the solution is more efficient transportation infrastructure, not less efficient.

I won't opine about Kaczynski's politics or murders, except to make a platitude that the latter are shameful.

However, I wish to state for the record that I have very recently tracked down and posted most of Kaczynski's professional mathematical output, which was variously published during the 1960s and is commonly available on the internet, or in better American university libraries.

The archived thread is still available here, for any who may care to page through it. It contains all of Kaczynski's mathematical publications that I am aware of, apart from his doctoral dissertation itself, simply titled /Boundary Functions/.

How would JRR Tolkien feel about him?

Things like women's sufferage and anti-war movements are not only side-agendas rather than full on power-shifts as well as being violent, but then the fact that you think the industrial revolution was without violence makes it pretty clear you haven't looked into this even remotely thoroughly. Do you know where we got the term 'Luddite' from?

Oh, we just have to make transport more efficient. I'll tell the local council and they'll get right on it because they care so much and are so competent. We asked for a light-rail to link the entire region but they gave us a minor train-line extension for 4 times the price instead.

I'd take never leaving this area over this bullshit. I've never left the country and find holidays boring and frivolous. Beaches are fucking boring and they all look the same.

Tolkien if I remember right considered himself something of an anarchist but specifically not of the 'mustachioed[...]bomb-throwing' variety. Tolkien for certain thought that the world was moving in the wrong direction and would have agreed that industry was a significant factor but he'd never approve of terrorism. He'd be more likely to send letters to the pope and maybe join UKIP and force it onto the agenda.