Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people throughout the history of agricultural societies have been landless peasants working as serfs for the local lord. The utopian dream of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer has mostly been a rare exceptional case.
I'm neither an anthropologist nor a historian so my weak grasp on the details is probably going to get me in trouble if I get much deeper into this argument. I'll just say that personally, I feel that such sentiment is primarily a construction by the same people who are trying to sell us the need for every adult couple to get a new mortgage, to have six figures on loan for education, to pay $75k+ for new cars every 6…
I promise I’m not trying to sell you anything. I hardly ever drive a car and only own a used one because my wife likes road trips (I’d be happy to get rid of it), have mostly avoided student loans, live relatively frugally (with the notable exception of buying too many used books), and think it sounds just fine if you do the same. If you want to argue for Marxist critiques of late capitalism or for Buddhist asceticism or whatever, I’m happy to concede the point.
In general, I’d say the people who are trying to sell you something don’t give a damn about economic or social history, and aren’t going to bother “constructing” some vast conspiracy to trick you about the past.
My direct experience is mostly with researching my own ancestors, who were landless peasant farmers living in Ireland, and with decades of close experience with indigenous rural peasants in Mexico (such as my godparents), whose families were mostly quasi-slave migrant agricultural laborers for the past few hundred years, under the oppressive control of the Spanish.
Admittedly, both of those cases were people living at the fringes of empire under an imperialist/capitalist global order. But my research of other times and places suggests that conditions were much the same in most times and most places (e.g. throughout pre-industrial Europe, China, India, and the Middle East). If you want a nice introduction, try Graeber’s book Debt: The First 5000 Years.
Whether rural peasants would view their situations with “suspicion or contempt” is something you can directly ask of the remaining rural peasants in the world. I don’t know about suspicion per se, but for the most part they would prefer to have running water, electricity, televisions, cellphones, modern medical care, non-leaking roofs, a stove that didn’t fill their rooms with outrageous quantities of wood smoke, education for their children, a stable source of income, etc., even at the expense of leaving their families to work in horrendous factories and live in urban slums.
Obviously it’s harder to ask people from a few centuries ago, but I’ll note that my own ancestors took the first available opportunity to flee their ancestral homelands and travel across an ocean away from all of their support networks at great risk and expense, for the mere promise of a better deal.