this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Do the societies have to be mostly white people in order to count? Because before the white men came pretty much every indigenous society was living pretty in tune with nature and didn't suffer a few rich cunts exploiting the vast majority of the rest.
https://wechronicle.com/philanthropy/exploring-the-inca-tradition-of-ayni-reciprocity-and-social-welfare/
They also provided allowances (ie social welfare) to those who were too ill or old to work.
I don't understand why you feel the need to be hostile and make this about white men. This is about civilization theory.
If your point was that white civilizations made the world into the mess it is right now, I wholeheartedly agree with you. It is however not the point of my inquiry. I was generally curious about bigger societies that managed to stay relatively non hierarchial which would result in an equal share of ressources (what this whole thread was about) From what I have read, all bigger "successful" civs developed a strong hierarchy which resulted in a big wealth gap as well and/or built their empire through expansion and as a result slaves and POW who granted them free labour to built their infrastructure. Some examples:
Egypt (not white) China (not white) Khmer (not white) Japan (not white) Osman empire (not white) Persian (not white) Babylon (not white) India (not white)
Imo indigenous tribes are not helpful in this discussion because I am interested in examples or solutions for big societies and tribal structures are very different because people usually all know each other over 1 or two axis which strongly discouraged selfish behavior (it got you shunned).
I am very interested in African and ancient American civilizations but there is not a lot of unbiased literature out there (To my knowledge - which is why I asked for more info)
You are dancing around the issue without realizing it by focusing on "big" societies. Humans are social creatures, but only up to a certain extent. We like our tribe of a few hundred people and that's about it. When a society gets bigger than that, our brains naturally find ways to discriminate to create an "us" and a "them". Simply put, big societies are bad societies. Agriculture was a mistake (also because grain and an excessively convenient source of calories is bad for us).
Unfortunately there's no solution for this, outside of any number of apocalypse scenarios. But we can mitigate the worst of the issues by destroying the very idea that a greed or privilege-based society is permissable.