What's the craziest thing we just take as granted?

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Society. As much as laws and taxes and all the various things suck, it is still better than the alternative.
- Not trying to quibble or be pedantic, but I see it as a complex subject. Laws & taxes are extremely recent practices, while societies were probably around long before modern man came along, ~300kya.
  I would also think some of those societies functioned nicely indeed, and were arguably an improvement over what we have now.
  
  Try handling any society > 1000 people without any laws or taxes.
  
  i'm pretty sure a shared tradition and morality handled most of what we might call 'law.' as for taxes, that's something that works with lucre. the vast majority of human history did not seem to function with lucre.
  as for a threshold of 1000 individuals, i would tend to think most societies splintered in to smaller ones the larger they grew, as is natural.
  a lot of that is speculative of course, but generally seems supported by the history and clues we do have. meanwhile, what i know for sure is that this mega-society is headed for a massive collapse, and is certainly not self-sustaining, nor at equilibrium with nature. cheers.
  
  Even with all the scaling issue that having larger societies come with, I don't see how modern technology would be doable without it. Try running a chip fabrication plant using a highly distributed workforce.
  
  Well, we're way, way over the overpopulation limit, with too much environmental destruction in our wake, so I guess it's all pretty academic at this point.
  Also, I certainly don't find that a high-tech, capitalistic civilisation is required to maintain a society with high happiness & quality of life. We already know due to multiple encounters with existing primitive peoples around the world that people can be perfectly happy, content and occupied with far more primitive tech, without money.
  That said, primitive societies can also be quite violent, stressful affairs, too.

81 comments