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A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

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Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#131

Post by s1artibartfast »

mikem170 wrote: post #61
kangnkodos wrote: post #17

He wants everyone to suddenly stop using money. If that happened, who would wash the dishes? Many communes have failed over this exact issue. They go on for several years with several people, usually women, making the sacrifice and doing what needs to be done. But eventually, the people who do the dishes get fed up and stop, or leave. And then the whole thing collapses. The alternative is for the leaders to have some…

Before money people traded favors. You help me butcher my cow, I help you rebuild your house (which was more work then the cow), so maybe later on your brother helps fix my plow knowing he'll eventually get something in return, and now I am trading favors with you and your brother, etc. This bonded people. It would have been insulting to say "here are two chickens for your lamb, we are now even, I owe you nothing eve…

Before money, people traded services and power. In this sense, money is just an accounting tool to track the same

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#132

Post by VictorPath »

seriousquestion wrote: post #106
VictorPath wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat. There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.…

Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?

It depends how groups are defined. Agriculture is a precondition for a society divided into classes (for social, not practical reasons). Groups from the beginning of human behavioral modernity to the rise of agricultural slave empires in Sumeria etc. 10,000 years back worked this way.

So from the drawing of cave paintings in El Castillo onward through the next 30,000 years, all humans lived like this. You could say it is human nature. Then class-divided society spread - 2000 years ago the modern Stockholm area was a classed society, whereas 200km north were hunter-gather bands. By modern day, hunter-gatherer areas have dwindled to remote areas.

The urge to have large numbers of people all under one grouping seems to be the impetus of a ruling class or ruler, from Alexander the Great to modern times. There are signs of hunter-gatherer bands in relations of mutual aid with other bands, for marriage and other things. One of the earliest pieces of literature, instructions of shuruppak, instructs rulers to get new slaves from far away lands.

(To reiterate a point from before - there is no evidence of class societies before 10,000 years ago. It is possible some tried to be a non-working ruling class, but the methods of production of migratory hunter gather bands made this difficult, and over a span of time impossible. Whereas with the rise of agriculture 10000 years ago, we have a mass of evidence of class societies.)

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#133

Post by ativzzz »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #117
seriousquestion wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?

I don't know of any, but does it need to?

Yes, unless you'd like our current society, which is astronomically larger than dunbar's number, to collapse, in a most likely very violent manner.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#134

Post by advertising »

Money is but a reflection of what we value.

Money is not evil, but the abstraction of “value” in modern life does cause the problems he blames money for.

Perhaps the jungle/forest tribes way of life is the best and simple way we can be happy. Yet tent communes like Johnston’s seem to be setup in the middle of a town square or within close proximity of a city, and not in nature somewhere actually sustaining themselves.

In the end if we blew it all up we would arrive back to same evolution of living we find ourselves in today.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#135

Post by code_duck »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #111
Aeolun wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion. Some good things come out of having them that do not come out of having another corporate drone.

> Supporting the odd philosopher poet is the exact function of society, in my opinion. Have you considered that society should also be the natural predator of the odd philosopher poet so that their numbers do not become problematic for their environment?

There are civil ways to discourage such behavior short of predation.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#137

Post by rootusrootus »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #116
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #74

I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death. Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans

It is incredibly ironic that the very people that claim the system is bad, effectively cannot survive on their non-conformist lifestyle without the current system. In a way though, it's no different than a religion. Priests cannot effectively survive without parishioners giving them money. Priests likewise preach things about the modern era of morality are bad and we must change them. So if you think of these vagabon…

Arguably a modern priest/minister/whatever is providing a service and getting compensated for it, just like any other job.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#138

Post by an_opabinia »

seriousquestion wrote: post #106
VictorPath wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat. There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.…

Are there examples of that in groups larger than Dunbar's number?

Indigenous Americans, prior to colonists’ arrival.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#139

Post by an_opabinia »

helsinkiandrew wrote: post #74

I’m not sure living in the city off handouts, charity, and free tax payer provided facilities exactly promotes his no money philosophy. His life relies on the things he despises, if the economic collapse he predicts comes he will be among the first to starve to death. Go into the wild and grow/hunt food or trade some skill - the post money society doesn’t need philosopher poets scavenging cigarettes from trash cans

We could probably 10x the number of “handouts” as you call them, at least in the US, and nothing would change. We’ve auditioned it already: $4T in stimulus, the $600/wk employment checks, etc. What negative negative impact really did that have on an average person’s day to day life? “Handouts” made pay rise for the first time in decades.

Even the landlords. I don’t know any landlords who are on the street because of the rent forbearance and eviction moratorium - and I don’t even agree with those policies.

Re: A Victoria man has gone two decades without money

#140

Post by VictorPath »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #125
VictorPath wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the society has no money, there's going to be a whole lot of punishment going on The mostly uncontacted hunter-gatherer bands in the Amazon jungle have no money, and not much punishment. Men all go out and hunt. If they are old or young or sick, the hunters give them food. If they are fine and refuse to go out on a hunt, they tend not to eat. There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt.…

>There is not much coercion. The women gather berries and the men hunt. Are you sure about this, or are you treating a "noble savage" fantasy as if it were fact? I've read some early settler accounts of Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society (especially women) on a regular basis. Sometimes the beatings would be followed up with rape, and the perpet…

> Australian Aboriginals, and they would beat the living shit out of the lower-status members of their society

As I said, there are societies where women gather berries and men hunt. There aren't really "lower status members" of those societies. Including the Aboriginal Australians who lived this way. As the book Dark Emu shows, some Aboriginals lived as hunter-gatherers, some as farmers. The aboriginal farmers did not live this way, and certainly may have had lower status members who were mistreated.

I should point out some people have qualms over portions of Dark Emu, but generally not over this. Even a critic of this point like Ian Keen admits there was some form of farming by some Aboriginals.

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