
Barbarian Virtues - benbreen
https://www.thenation.com/article/barbarian-virtues/
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jpzisme
Given the choice between having to constantly fight the masses and having to
sometimes fight a state that was designed to safeguard freedoms but sometimes
infringes upon them, I'll take the latter.

A quick look at how the natural world works is a good enough deterrent:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/](https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/)

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wu-ikkyu
This seems like a false dichotomy. Finding the right balance between
individual autonomy and working together for mutual benefit might be a better
way to frame it.

>A quick look at how the natural world works is a good enough deterrent:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/](https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/)

What does this prove? No being can survive without destroying another being.
Moreover, no plant or animal has threatened the entire Earth moreso than
nuclear armed States

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jerf
"Moreover, no plant or animal has threatened the entire Earth moreso than
nuclear armed States"

Cyanobacteria have accomplished far more than we have on that front:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event)

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merpnderp
Has there been a peaceful time before civilization, where people weren't
fighting over territory?

Without modern political organization and agriculture, we'd spend all of our
time either trying to hunt food or steal hunting grounds from others, or we'd
wind up right back where we are (likely after another 10,000+ years of
slavery).

~~~
dredmorbius
Possibly, though in large part because the population densities and
portability of food afforded were insufficient to allow for widespread warfar.

You'd have had inter-tribal conflicts, but almost certainly of limited and
brief duration. Quite probably intra-tribal as well.

I believe it's Jared Diamond who discusses how the introduction of the potato
(a calorically-dense, portable foodstuff) changed the nature of warfare in New
Zealand as tribes _with_ the potato could sustain far longer military
campaigns than those without. "An army marches on its stomach."

Not so much "weren't fighting" as "couldn't fight as much, as hard, as long,
or in as organised a fashion".

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QAPereo
Evidence of cannibalism, violence, etc in early hominids suggests that low
population numbers didn’t offer a cure to the problem. We _are_ the problem.

~~~
dredmorbius
Agreed. Again, it's not the _existence_ of conflict I'm considering, but the
_scale_.

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QAPereo
Fair enough, but remember to put a “per capita” section in the scale.

~~~
dredmorbius
It's ... more complicated than that.

I've just recently run across a reference to a metric for military force and
capability, though I can't recall at the moment what it is based on. Though I
believe it related to the capacity to project force.

The size of an army, its relation to the total population size, the distance /
range at which it can act, the quantity, accuracy, and efficacy of force
project, and much else.

Just by way of example, I've been looking at WWII history, particularly the
fall of France. On base specifications, French armour was actually _more_
capable than German, with one critical exception: German tanks had radios. The
ability to act _in concert_ and respond _in realtime_ to changing battle
circumstances proved critical. Against a relatively numerically-balanced
French force, the German military was tremendously more effective. Blitzkreig
tactics _didn 't_ work against numerically-superiour, and largely technically-
matched, US and British forces on and after D-Day, though.

Quantifying fitness metrics is complicated.

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jessaustin
_That Scott presents as his major finding that eons separated the development
of cultivation and the rise of the state not only cuts against any conclusion
that the pathways into state bondage were inevitable; it also goes far to
undermine Scott’s entire outlook. The fact that nothing about the innovations
of fire and agriculture and “incipient urbanism” necessarily required states
and their iniquities means that many of the good things “civilization” has
brought are indeed separable from its greatest evils and therefore do not
necessarily deserve the opprobrium implied by both the title and the argument
of his book. Though Scott does not observe it, the first half of Against the
Grain reads like a paean to a different style of agricultural civilization in
the making: the best of a stateless hunting-and-gathering society tweaked in
the name of bread. It also suggests a lesson that Scott would never draw: that
the state itself has never been given on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. He
acknowledges that there is no decisive moment when the state emerged and no
single feature that defines it. In his challenge to the inevitability of the
state after fire and even agriculture, Scott misses the chance to develop a
theory of the variety of governments, not only in the past but also in the
future._

This has a hint of a valid criticism, but isn't logical enough to get there. I
haven't read this book, but in general Scott is most critical of the state and
its direct effects, and mostly considers agriculture and urbanity guilty by
association. It is no contradiction of this position to observe that these
behaviors emerged before the state did (after all, many theorists consider
these prerequisites to the creation of the state), nor does the proposition
that some states could be of net benefit to humans necessarily follow.

TFA explicitly associates Scott's leftist anarchism with Those Damned
Libertarians. In this context that's (unintentionally) amusing, since it reads
so much like the standard anti-libertarian status quo-affirming don't-waste-
your-vote-also-don't-say-voting-is-a-waste screeds that are so banal where
politics is discussed online. When one's response to criticism of a way of
life is a desperate "it's not that bad!" rather than a curious "how could it
improve?", it's clear that one values the maintenance of power over the
refinement of its exercise.

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zokier
That is ultimately pretty scathing review. Is the book really just another
iteration of the noble savage idea?

I do wonder why this landed on the frontpage, is it because the attractiveness
of the basic idea, or because the dialogue here presented some new insight
(that I might have missed)?

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steauengeglase
No idea why it was posted. I've only started this one, but what Scott seems to
be advocating is essentially Anarcho-syndicalism.

Where Marx said that hunter-gatherers were engaging in Primitive Communism,
Scott argues that they were engaging in Political Anarchy. He kinda has a
point (at least when you look at hunter-gatherers who are still around 10,000
years later). We just assume that Marx must have been right since he was
taking a diagnostic approach, but without archeological, genetic, and
anthropological evidence, can we be certain that it was anything other than
hypothesis? If Marx was wrong about man's "year zero", what else was he wrong
about?

Not that I'm totally on board with Scott and his critique of civilization, but
I do think he has some useful views when it comes to pre-history.

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jim-davis
Could not read the article (the paywall locked me out) but the benefits of
states in reducing violence are discussed in Jared Diamond's "The World Until
Yesterday".

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frgtpsswrdlame
[https://outline.com/72Fz7D](https://outline.com/72Fz7D)

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anon404123
too many dangerous questions..

