I don't think I am able to make this judgement but I can talk about what happened after hunter gatherer tribes disappeared.
If you are a hunter gatherer you just need a good hunt every now and then. There is no pressure to perform work all day if you get enough food.
This is different if you are a farmer. Farming is highly labor intensive. There is so much work to do that you are never done. You will have to repeat the same motions every single day. Swing the same tools the exact same way. People are tied to their land and it is possible to conquer the land violently. You are dependent on a military force which implies that a local ruler must collect taxes to pay the soldiers. That ruler also has power over you which can easily be abused.
Democracy is definitively fairer than having an authoritarian ruler but it can be subject to tyranny of the majority or the minority and still cause failure in leadership.
Or starvation, or being eaten by a grue. People who think being a hunter-gatherer sounds great should go try it, there's nothing stopping them from doing so. They don't because actually, living in civilization with abundant cheap food, clean running hot and cold water, indoor plumbing, heating, air conditioning, and entertainment is great.
This argument is a fallacy. There's plenty of stuff stopping me from being a successful hunter-gatherer:
1. HGs are very skilled, and they build their skills throughout their lives - crucially, starting with childhood and adolescence. I, an adult brought up in a Western civilization, would be totally clueless in a rain forest the same way that those HGs would be totally clueless in our world.
2. HGs live in groups. I would need to find a group of HGs that would accept me, which is highly unlikely because of the language and culture barrier, plus my lack of skills - why would they want to have anything to do with an useless guy in the first place? My CV full of accomplishments does not impress them at all.
Unfortunately, just like transplanting an adult HG into our society most likely ends in them becoming a homeless addict, most likely result for me heading for the jungle is fairly quick death.
I guess I should have said "there's nothing stopping them except lack of will to do the required work." Which I guess makes sense since the motivation generally seems to be a desire for a return to some noble-savage-in-Eden life of plenty and ease.
How do you integrate with a HG community that doesn't care about you or, even worse, kills you and eats you? It's not only about "required work" but also about serious life-threatening risks involved. Whereas if you were born as a HG, those risks aren't there.
The Missus and I tried to plan going back to nature as a quarantine thought experiment. The conclusion was that it's simply not possible in most of Europe unless one manages to find a Sami spouse, and even then, most Sami seem to live fairly modern lives. As a Nordic citizen the Greenland option is there as well, but the situation is similar to the Sami one.
And the above presumes the existing population would accept you, and it's quite likely they won't.
Deciding to live off the land without special privileges enjoyed by native populations is simply not possible; regular financial transactions between you and society is a requirement, and it's pretty much impossible to raise children without access to modernities and without having the authorities go after you for child abuse.
you can make a simpler experiment: try going a week with only food you can forage in nearby forests and fields, plus some meat you'd buy (you're not expected to be able to hunt).
I love eating wild weeds and berries, but it takes _a lot_ of time to get enough to fill yourself, and it's not a case that people have only eaten stuff like acorns only in times of famine.
This fact by itself made me question a lot of what's in "Sapiens".
Gaining acceptance by a tribe and finding ways to not die if you ever become disfavored seems like part of the whole hunter-gatherer package, don't you think?
They tend not to be very wealthy by modern standards. Maybe you could ingratiate yourself to them with them gifts of things that require modern manufacturing infrastructure.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily (exclusively? I skimmed your history and didn't see a single exception) for political and ideological battle. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it regardless of which side they're battling for.
You've also broken the site guidelines frequently with snark and attacks on other users. Not cool.
Seems better than perennial back pain from sitting long hours and getting brain fried from implementing same logic of micro-service 1000th time for a 'challenging' project.
