Speaker 1: That's a horrible way to begin. It could happen here.
Speaker 1: That's how we start a podcast. And Robert Evans podcast,
Speaker 1: Things falling apart, put them back together, all that good stuff.
Speaker 1: Co hosts here today Garrison Davis, our our our buddy Chris,
Speaker 1: and of course the great Saint Andrew, Andrew Blessing take
Speaker 1: it away, Good morning, and in case I don't see you,
Speaker 1: good afternoon, good evening, and good night. Speaking of the
Speaker 1: Truman shoe, solid reference, well done, Thank you. I wanted
Speaker 1: to spend today's episode discussing a concept that has been
Speaker 1: brought up in the work of James C. Scott and
Speaker 1: Christopher Ryan, the idea of human domestication. And before people
Speaker 1: start clicking off, I'm not going to go all and
Speaker 1: pri him or anything, you know, It's just I think
Speaker 1: it's an interesting thing to think about. I think that
Speaker 1: Scott explores it in a very interesting way in chapter
Speaker 1: two of Against the Green, and so relating as I
Speaker 1: guess to the Truman Show, because I mean, why did
Speaker 1: I bring it up? Truman lives in a suburban picket
Speaker 1: fence American dream dome of a world that's meant to
Speaker 1: keep him, you know, contained and content and ignorant about
Speaker 1: the fact that he's on a TV show. Truman has
Speaker 1: trapped in this wound that he kind of conformed too,
Speaker 1: but he can't escape, at least initially, and so you
Speaker 1: could tell that you know, there's something wrong, and he
Speaker 1: probably felt that way for a long time. It's only
Speaker 1: over the course of the movie that he develops a
Speaker 1: sufficient awareness of his condition to leave home and become
Speaker 1: a true man, Thank you very much. Holy alright, alright,
Speaker 1: good episode, guys. Um and humans like Truman have been
Speaker 1: stewards and cultivators of the natural environment for a long time, right,
Speaker 1: one of the only creatures who do that. By the way,
Speaker 1: I see a lot of people who see who kind
Speaker 1: of like adopt this assumption that he wants just like
Speaker 1: imposing our will on the environment that is otherwise unscathed
Speaker 1: by our presence and all that. And I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: we do a lot of very very terrible stuff the environment,
Speaker 1: but a lot of our actions are also beneficial. And
Speaker 1: we have the only creatures to shape and sometimes harm
Speaker 1: and sometimes benefit the natural environment. I mean beavers, elephants,
Speaker 1: prairie dogs, bees, and tom not to mention the networks
Speaker 1: of trees and other plants that all manipulate the environments
Speaker 1: to soothe them and there comfort and their survival. You know,
Speaker 1: but there's no nature as we know it as we
Speaker 1: see it um that sort of untouched wild idea without
Speaker 1: the activities of humans. You know, humans have been planting
Speaker 1: seeds and tubers, shaping the evolution of many plants species,
Speaker 1: burning and desirable flora, weeding out, competition, pruning, thinning, trimming, transplanting, mulching, relocating, bark, ringing, compassing, watering,
Speaker 1: and futilizing. And for animals, you know, we have hunted
Speaker 1: even selectively, you know, spared females or reproductive age, or
Speaker 1: hunted based on life cycles, or fish selectively managed streams
Speaker 1: to promote spawning and shellfish beds, you know, transplanted the
Speaker 1: eggs and young of birds and fish, and even raised
Speaker 1: juveniles in some cases. That's kind of how we ended
Speaker 1: up domest skating a lot of animals. And I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get into that. So through fire, through plow, through hunting,
Speaker 1: through a whole array of different activities, humans have domesticated
Speaker 1: whole environments. You know, well before you know the full
Speaker 1: the full society is based on you know, fully domesticated
Speaker 1: wheat and barley, and goats and sheep. The spectrum of
Speaker 1: subsistence moods that we have utilized, whether we're hunting, foraging, pastoralism,
Speaker 1: or farming, have existed and complemented each other, you know,
Speaker 1: sort of harmony. Millennia and I mean those of you
Speaker 1: who have read don't have everything. You kind of see
Speaker 1: that picture coming into shape as it progressed through the book.
Speaker 1: But of course James C. Scott also discussed it years
Speaker 1: before in Against the Green so as he says, enter
Speaker 1: the Domas, just as we transformed our landscapes, we transformed ourselves.
Speaker 1: The Domas was a unique and unprecedented concentration of tilled fields,
Speaker 1: seed and green stores, people and domesticated animals and hangers
Speaker 1: on like mice and rats and covids, all co evolving
Speaker 1: with consequences no one could have possibly foreseen. You know,
Speaker 1: dogs and pigs and cats, all of them. Their entire
Speaker 1: evolution was shaped by their relation to this dom and
Speaker 1: humans are not the exception. Of course, there's some animals
Speaker 1: that easier to domesticate than others, which is why you
Speaker 1: don't see people commonly riding or hooding zebras and gazelle
Speaker 1: um they will make the best cattle or ride um
Speaker 1: and probably knock your brains out if you tried. So
Speaker 1: it's probably best to stick to the ones that we
Speaker 1: have sort of who evolved with, like you know, llamas
Speaker 1: and goats and sheep and pigs and over generations, you
Speaker 1: see the domesticated creatures, unlike their wild counterparts, developer level
Speaker 1: of submissiveness and a decreased awareness of their surroundings. Right,
Speaker 1: So that emotional dampening is basically a condition of life
Speaker 1: because when you're in that domas you know, yeah on
Speaker 1: the human supervision, that instant reaction to predator and you know,
Speaker 1: pray they no longer the most powerful pressures. Because you're
Speaker 1: in this sort of cultivated environment, your physical protection and
Speaker 1: nutrition is more secure than it would be in a
Speaker 1: more wild environment. So the mestigated animal is less allude
Speaker 1: to its surroundings, less away of its surroundings than its
Speaker 1: cousins in the wild. UM. And we could see as well,
Speaker 1: you know, with human sidenters, there's also been a reduction
Speaker 1: mobility UM and that of course had consequences for health.
Speaker 1: To be very honest with you, I was actually kind
Speaker 1: of consumed about covering this and I was trying to
Speaker 1: figure out how to cover this um in a way
Speaker 1: that doesn't make me look like I'm trying to like
Speaker 1: retire into the deeps of Amazonia or something. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: just I find it interesting to think about her environments
Speaker 1: shape us. Yeah, absolutely, I mean you can think about
Speaker 1: these things without becoming a hermit and hiding in the woods.
Speaker 1: As as as attractive as an idea as that, well,
Speaker 1: yeah for sure, for sure. I mean like I have
Speaker 1: this like kind of canon in my head, you know,
Speaker 1: like the whole idea of multi verses. Yeah. I figured
Speaker 1: somewhere in the multiverses a version of myself we have
Speaker 1: retired into the forest and gone through this whole kind
Speaker 1: of like anime training arc and emerged as this like
Speaker 1: one punchman beast of a human. I would I would.
Speaker 1: I would also like to be that tipeline. I think
Speaker 1: that would be very interesting, like a train so either
Speaker 1: all my hair falls out, able to snap trees with
Speaker 1: just a breath. It is like, yeah, the the the
Speaker 1: the quintessential wildman. That's yeah. I mean, I'm sure there's
Speaker 1: also multiverse version of me where I'm president or something.
Speaker 1: It would be pretty interesting to see, Like I should
Speaker 1: be kind of cool. I just had an idea of
Speaker 1: like this, um, this team of versions of oneself that
Speaker 1: team up to like fight the evil versions of themselves
Speaker 1: across the multiverse. It's kind of like kind of the Conqueror,
Speaker 1: except I think in most versions of the multiverse, he
Speaker 1: is evil. Yes, I have, I've definitely, I've definitely read
Speaker 1: that comic before of the good Ones fighting the bad Ones.
Speaker 1: I mean, the Injustice comics and video games are pretty
Speaker 1: pretty pretty big, pretty big staples of that genre. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course an Injustice it's different characters, Whereas it will
Speaker 1: be interesting to see like a cast that's all just
Speaker 1: one person, just like the same dude, the exact same person,
Speaker 1: but they all grew up in such different environments. Even
Speaker 1: though they share the exact same DNA, they're like different people.
Speaker 1: It would be an interesting commentary on society because we
Speaker 1: do live in one. After all, we do live in
Speaker 1: a society for better for worse. Yeah, But anyway, like
Speaker 1: I'm saying, you know, environments shape us. We shape environments,
Speaker 1: and to me, we need to start shaping our environments again,
Speaker 1: so we could either shape up or chip out of
Speaker 1: existence as a species, right, Um, you know, because the
Speaker 1: way the trajectory were on is not sustainable. Um. So
Speaker 1: we can see, of course, in this transition to domas um,
Speaker 1: the sedentary, green growing sort of community that you know,
Speaker 1: in archaeological studies of the bones of the inhabitants, you
Speaker 1: could see like repetitive stress injuries shaping their bodies, you know,
Speaker 1: like the skeletal signatures of like grinding grain and you know,
Speaker 1: like ah, cutting and sewing and kneeling and bending and
Speaker 1: moving in you know, very repetitive ways, you know. And
Speaker 1: of course with these concentrations of people, we also see
Speaker 1: like epidemics and stuff and parasites starting to fester not
Speaker 1: just within humans or just not just within species, but
Speaker 1: also like cross species pathogens and stuff. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: And so as we all on this kind of same arc,
Speaker 1: sharing this micro environment, sharing our gyms and parasites, you
Speaker 1: end ups getting more and more brutal versions of like
Speaker 1: wild diseases, you know, because they basically go through the
Speaker 1: the iron quantlet of you know, like that the disease
Speaker 1: thunder doom, We're only one could come out as Victoria's
Speaker 1: and so they battled out and became these more refined
Speaker 1: and more severe forms, which is why you see in
Speaker 1: Europe where they had this high population densities, they the
Speaker 1: diseases that developed there when they were introduced to the
Speaker 1: coote and quote New World. You know, the really ravaged
Speaker 1: population that didn't really live on that level of density.
Speaker 1: Not to say they didn't have cities, because they did.
Speaker 1: The had cities and villages and collaborations and such a
Speaker 1: people spanning across like large areas, but it wasn't organized
Speaker 1: in quite the same way. It wasn't generalizing quite fairly.
Speaker 1: But you know, it's two whole continents. UM. We also
Speaker 1: see that like ye, nutritional stress starts to develop in
Speaker 1: the bones and teeth of um more quote domiciled humans. UM.
Speaker 1: You see like I and deficiency anemia in people whose
Speaker 1: diets were consisting increasingly of grains and you know, as
Speaker 1: I said told, you know, their diets became narrower, you know,
Speaker 1: less variety UM in both plants and proteins. And so
Speaker 1: that ended up leading to you know, like declining tooth
Speaker 1: size and reduction in statue and skeletal robustness. And of
Speaker 1: course this change and like our physiology and dimorphism as
Speaker 1: a history such as like a lot fool of the
Speaker 1: pact than just in ulithic, but sidentis um and crowding
Speaker 1: definitely left and immediate and legible mark on the archaeological record.
Speaker 1: I do find it interesting. Um. I read this book
Speaker 1: I think last year called Botany of Desire, and in
Speaker 1: it the guy um what's his name? And in it
Speaker 1: Michael Pollan talks about all the plans we thought we
Speaker 1: were domestigating. Domesticated us too, you know, because if you
Speaker 1: think about it, you know, you up in the garden
Speaker 1: on your hands and knees, day after day, sun and rain,
Speaker 1: reading and fertilizing and untangling, protecting and reshaping an environment
Speaker 1: just to suit you little tomato plants. He'll potato plant,
Speaker 1: and I mean the plant kind of hasn't made you know, Um,
Speaker 1: they don't have to worry about the sort of things
Speaker 1: they would usually have to worry about outside of the domas.
Speaker 1: You know, you were there to make sure that their
Speaker 1: competitors are weeded out. You were there to make sure
Speaker 1: they get all the nutrients they need. You're there to
Speaker 1: make sure that do insects and stuff come and like
Speaker 1: ravage them, and you even help to fuutilize them as well.
Speaker 1: And so you know, it's kind of like I want
Speaker 1: to say, uh, mutual relationship because as you know, these
Speaker 1: domesticated plants have continued long this path of domestication. A
Speaker 1: lot of them can no longer thrive without our help.
Speaker 1: And in the same way, you know, we can't just
Speaker 1: not go on without them. You know, we also are
Speaker 1: dependent on like a handful of domesticated cultivars. Like we
Speaker 1: can't just certainly switch and just be like, oh, we're
Speaker 1: not gonna grow wheat and corn and potatoes anymore. But
Speaker 1: I mean that's been the foundation of all diets for
Speaker 1: too long. Now. That's what you know, most of our
Speaker 1: food production back you don't have percentages, I won't say most,
Speaker 1: or just say a lot of our food production is
Speaker 1: like centered around that, and so um, you know, we
Speaker 1: can't just jump out to that, especially with the population increases,
Speaker 1: so you just have grown increasingly reliant on a few
Speaker 1: like grains and cereals, um and starches. So yeah, we
Speaker 1: do we need them more than they need said a
Speaker 1: lot of senses. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly, because I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of them they do still have like wild
Speaker 1: counterparts that can always you know, take over. It's just
Speaker 1: a wild counterparts generally less appetizing than the ones you've
Speaker 1: gotten used to. I'm sure a lot of people have
Speaker 1: seen that picture of the different types of bananas out there, um,
Speaker 1: or you know, the different types of cooling out there. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, a lot of corn species that are edible
Speaker 1: because you know they were cultivated in massive America. UM.
Speaker 1: I would like to try them, be because the corn
Speaker 1: that I've grown up with gotten used too much of
Speaker 1: what it's called. But I don't like it. Um. I
Speaker 1: find the texture and taste of it to be kind
Speaker 1: of lack of a vet would revolting. So I mean, like,
Speaker 1: and I've been this way for like a long long time, right,
Speaker 1: Like I growing up used to be refusing to eat
Speaker 1: like an entire plate of food because it had corn
Speaker 1: in it. I didn't like one. And if people used
Speaker 1: to point out the irony and the fact that I
Speaker 1: would readily eat like corn pie, what would eat popcorn?
Speaker 1: What would eat like corn bread? Yeah? But to me,
Speaker 1: it's it's not the same, you know, like corn on
Speaker 1: the cob and and stuff is it's not the same.
Speaker 1: And so like I've tried some some different types of corn,
Speaker 1: Like I've tried it was kind of like soft baby
Speaker 1: corns that they're get in like soup songs. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: and those delicious you know, I wouldn't such your sights
Speaker 1: too much on those various corn varieties because one of
Speaker 1: the oldest ways of eating corn before we had really
Speaker 1: nice soft kernels. One of one of the oldest ways
Speaker 1: is we would we would take we would take the
Speaker 1: heart the hard corn kernels, um pop them inside a
Speaker 1: inside like a frying pan to make this tart expand
Speaker 1: then crush that up and mix it with like a
Speaker 1: liquid to have a very disgusting, starchy gruel. And that
Speaker 1: was the way that we ate corn for a long time.
Speaker 1: And eventually that was eventually we were able to to
Speaker 1: like um like tortise and stuff. But for a long
Speaker 1: time it was just kind of corn rule. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: was this was a problem. This was a major problem
Speaker 1: during the Irish potato famine because in short, the potato
Speaker 1: crops failed um and so the British government imported a
Speaker 1: bunch of what they called Indian corn at the time,
Speaker 1: which was corn grown in the Ad States um. And
Speaker 1: this was even though Irish people were growing plenty of
Speaker 1: corn to feed themselves, but that corn was being exported um,
Speaker 1: and the Indian corn was seen that it was harder,
Speaker 1: so it was seen as of lower quality. So they
Speaker 1: had to develop a bunch of methods of grinding it down,
Speaker 1: and eventually the government was just like, hey, just soak
Speaker 1: it for like several days and then boil it in
Speaker 1: water for hours and add some milk or some grease
Speaker 1: if you have it. And some of the problems that
Speaker 1: costes that, like the Irish people were starving to death,
Speaker 1: and because when you're starving to death, your your stomach
Speaker 1: is not as hardy as it is when you're not
Speaker 1: starving to death, and so the corn, even after being boiled,
Speaker 1: would cut their stomachs and there is some feel lining
Speaker 1: and cause like in some cases people would like die. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, corn, see I could I could add that's
Speaker 1: my reasons to despise corn, like anti Irish violins. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna I will briefly ranch about corn subsidies. People think
Speaker 1: I've actually done that on the show. Yet there's there's
Speaker 1: there's there's a there's a thing about that'll be high
Speaker 1: traffic domess. That's like like in terms of sort of domestication,
Speaker 1: in terms of human domestication, you know, and in terms
Speaker 1: of the the extent to which we're being shaped, you
Speaker 1: have to be I think, very careful to make sure
Speaker 1: that you're attributing agency to the thing that actually has agency,
Speaker 1: because there's there's a tendency to sort of attribute stuff too,
Speaker 1: you know, Okay, well, this is just a way the
Speaker 1: technical process works. And because this is the way the
Speaker 1: technical process works, here are the social structure is that
Speaker 1: inevitably results out of it. And that's true to some extent.
Speaker 1: But you know, for example, like if if we're talking
Speaker 1: about like whose domestic and whom we look at corners like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because we growing and grow an enormous amount of corn.
Speaker 1: But it's not because of sort of like like that
Speaker 1: that's the reason we have so much corn is entirely political.
Speaker 1: It's entirely about the fact that, like there's a corn
Speaker 1: lobby in the US that is enormously powerful. And because
Speaker 1: of the way the Senate works and because of the
Speaker 1: way sort of like the primaries work, you have to
Speaker 1: be pro corn. And this means that the American corn
Speaker 1: industry has billions and billions of dollars and subsidies that
Speaker 1: like this is this is like the only thing every
Speaker 1: economist across the entire political spectrum agrees on like you
Speaker 1: will you will get like the Heritage Foundation agreeing with
Speaker 1: like Marxists who are agreeing with like like that the
Speaker 1: standard LiPo comes. Everyone agrees this is awful to free
Speaker 1: trade people agree with this, the anti free trade people
Speaker 1: agree with this, and it just sticks there because of
Speaker 1: you know, because because because of a very sort of
Speaker 1: a very contingent set of political processes. And I think
Speaker 1: that that's something that's important to keep in mind when
Speaker 1: you're thinking about stuff like domestication, which is that like, yes,
Speaker 1: on the one hand, it is true that you are
Speaker 1: being shaped by the production process, but it's also true
Speaker 1: like for example, you know, if you go back to
Speaker 1: the women in the story who you know, you can
Speaker 1: see in in their bones right that they've been sort
Speaker 1: of like bending over like husking crops and stuff. Wells
Speaker 1: like well, that that it's true to some exat that's
Speaker 1: that's because of the production process. But the production process
Speaker 1: works like that because of social reasons, like okay, like
Speaker 1: why is it women doing this work? Right? Like there's
Speaker 1: there's always simultaneously sort of human constructive social systems operating
Speaker 1: at the same time as you have these mechanical systems,
Speaker 1: and people love to attribute all of it to the
Speaker 1: mechanical systems in a way that loses you know it
Speaker 1: it naturalizes things that are bad and could actually be changed,
Speaker 1: and loses the capacity for sort of well yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean our sort of culpability and both the fact that
Speaker 1: it could be different than the fact that we do
Speaker 1: it this way. Yeah, I mean, yeah, but it's still
Speaker 1: I think it's still important to like think about like
Speaker 1: how reliant we still are on it as a resource
Speaker 1: in terms of like maze and like you know, corn
Speaker 1: syrup and like getting like glucose get like, like it's
Speaker 1: so we rely on it for so many facets beyond
Speaker 1: just eating like a corn on the cob, and like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's kind of it's like it's like a it's like
Speaker 1: a it's like a figure right infinity loop here that
Speaker 1: we've kind of we've we've kind of like tied ourselves
Speaker 1: into a knot. Um. Yeah, but I'm saying like, like like
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff also has to do with
Speaker 1: the fact, like you know, part of the reason that
Speaker 1: there's we use corn syrup is they were like taxes
Speaker 1: on sugar and you could get you can get around
Speaker 1: and then has all there's all these like yeah, there's
Speaker 1: all these sort of feedback cycles of like we become
Speaker 1: dependent on something because of a social process, but now
Speaker 1: we're dependent on the physical process. And it's yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: so you can you can like tie this into the
Speaker 1: idea of like, once you switched over to large scale agriculture,
Speaker 1: we need to kind of have somebody that that governs
Speaker 1: how it works, because now we're no longer reliant on
Speaker 1: smaller more like individualized farms or forest farming. We're instead
Speaker 1: reliant on a bigger you know, like a bigger stake
Speaker 1: in the land. So if that fails, we're all more
Speaker 1: in trouble. Now, agriculture does not equal sieve. That's not
Speaker 1: that's not an actually sound um and the like like anthropology,
Speaker 1: Like if if you look at the anthropology, that's actually
Speaker 1: not a superstand argument. I think you can you can
Speaker 1: read the the not of everything that makes they make
Speaker 1: that point pretty clear. But still when you do have
Speaker 1: when you do have a large population relying on very
Speaker 1: few like um, very large crop like like of only
Speaker 1: a small diversity of large crops, and there's a lot,
Speaker 1: there's a lot, there's a lot more stakes on it,
Speaker 1: So you're gonna you know, there's gonna be processes that
Speaker 1: are going to have like authority, authoritative, hierarchical elements to
Speaker 1: help organize those crops so that they don't get you know, famines,
Speaker 1: which of course if you look at Maos China you
Speaker 1: can see that worked out very well. Yeah, and I
Speaker 1: should note for the record, when we're talking about the
Speaker 1: Irish potato fam and that a lot of people didn't
Speaker 1: die because the government imported corn, which they stopped doing
Speaker 1: after the first year of the famine because of TRAVALI. Anyway,
Speaker 1: what we're doing, we'll be doing an episode on the
Speaker 1: potato famine. I didn't want to completely shift on the
Speaker 1: corn that was imported by the government because it was critical.
Speaker 1: It's just also eating corn doesn't historically, as as was
Speaker 1: brought up earlier, eating corn historically does not mean what
Speaker 1: you you think about now. Yeah, well, and and you
Speaker 1: know what, we will also do things on on the
Speaker 1: Mao famines. And part of that also was that the
Speaker 1: centralization of agriculture was a like epocle disaster in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways that took like decades to recover from,
Speaker 1: which yeah, is a is a fun time. Yes, And
Speaker 1: when Chris says a fun time here, he is not
Speaker 1: the end the tru but there was new audias are wondering,
Speaker 1: thank you, thank you and Drew for that clarification. I
Speaker 1: was I was slightly I was slightly used. Yes he is.
Speaker 1: He is slash J. He is not slash SR. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean it occurs to me that I'm not sure
Speaker 1: I've ever gone back into the record to see if
Speaker 1: anyone in my family died from the famines. I know
Speaker 1: people died later, I don't know if people died specifically
Speaker 1: from that. Which is a good time again, but Chris
Speaker 1: has a good time. What they actually made is not
Speaker 1: a good time. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, back to against the grain,
Speaker 1: back to against the green. So as we're talking about,
Speaker 1: you know, this reliance on this one steep will whether
Speaker 1: it be corn or green or any cereal, really it
Speaker 1: kind of brings to mind um. And also we're going
Speaker 1: to talk about the centralization of farming. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: we've grown to be so reliant on these single things.
Speaker 1: And not only that, but less people know about the
Speaker 1: processes that go into a food than before. UM. We
Speaker 1: see and like as time progresses, UM and as James C.
Speaker 1: Scott points out, and to gatherers, you know, they had
Speaker 1: this ghost of natural rhythms that they had to observe.
Speaker 1: You know, they had like the movement of hoods to season,
Speaker 1: migrations of foods, you know, the resting and nesting places
Speaker 1: of fish, cycles of who holds the different fruits and nuts. Um.
Speaker 1: And if you in the Caribbean, you would know about
Speaker 1: things like you know, mango season and plum season and
Speaker 1: China season, all these different seasons at different times of year. Um.
Speaker 1: And to keep track of all those plus several more
Speaker 1: because they had such diverse diets, I mean, the way
Speaker 1: to attrack the appearance of you know, different mushrooms, um,
Speaker 1: the locations of different types of game. You know, it's
Speaker 1: all these activities that require tool kits, right in, different
Speaker 1: techniques that have to be mastered, have to be understood,
Speaker 1: have to be shared from generations generation. You know. They
Speaker 1: also in addition to that, you know, these foes they
Speaker 1: had the ability to cultivate you know, a lots of
Speaker 1: different stands of you know cereal. Um. They had the
Speaker 1: different tools they had to make sickles and you know,
Speaker 1: um what you call those again sling shots and blue
Speaker 1: dots and all these different tools would have used spears, arrows,
Speaker 1: and they also would have had to recognize the seasonality
Speaker 1: of sometimes different ecosystems. You know, they might have been
Speaker 1: crossing for white lands and forests and savannahs and arid environments.
Speaker 1: And so as they understood they had to understand these
Speaker 1: um these rhythms, and they had to be generalists and
Speaker 1: opportunists that could take advantage of these different rhythms, all
Speaker 1: the different episodic bounties that nature may provide or rather provide,
Speaker 1: but you know, bring their way that they would have
Speaker 1: to kind of fight four in some cases. But they
Speaker 1: have this sort of metronome. Right. Farmers on the other hand,
Speaker 1: you know, as we sort of moved to that sort
Speaker 1: of farming dominant, sedentary sort of way of life, you know,
Speaker 1: you largely can find to this one single food web. Right,
Speaker 1: your two routine has a particular tempo you s left, observe, observe,
Speaker 1: you know, different seasonalities and different movements. But it's a
Speaker 1: bit more limited. You know, you have a handful of
Speaker 1: crops that you have to bring successfully to harvest every year,
Speaker 1: and I mean it's complex. A lot of things have
Speaker 1: to look out for, whether it be you know, diseases
Speaker 1: and pathogens and you know different insects and and pests
Speaker 1: at me UM come at your crops. You know, you
Speaker 1: have to look out full of different things, but it's
Speaker 1: usually uh closer less expansive range of activities, at least
Speaker 1: in comparison to hunt gatherers. On the other hand, farming
Speaker 1: and the nuances of cereal grain farming um far more complex,
Speaker 1: require far more skill and much wider range of knowledges
Speaker 1: than you know. Working on an assembly line you know
Speaker 1: UM as believe Adam Smith points on Wealth of Nations.
Speaker 1: You know, you have all these people on this assembly
Speaker 1: line making pins. But Alexis they took a Ville asks
Speaker 1: what can be expected of a man who has spent
Speaker 1: twenty years of his life putting heads on pins? You know,
Speaker 1: this sort of a restriction in terms of a contraction
Speaker 1: in terms of the range of knowledges and expert teases
Speaker 1: that you know one can be expected to take on UM.
Speaker 1: And so I guess that kind of links into my
Speaker 1: whole idea of anti work. It's this idea of moving
Speaker 1: outside and beyond this kind of restriction to like one
Speaker 1: or two or a few rigorous activities that you expected
Speaker 1: to do for the rest of your life, and also
Speaker 1: opening people up to exploring a wider range of knowledges
Speaker 1: and expertises and experiences and practices that you know they
Speaker 1: can we eve into their everyday life rather than you know,
Speaker 1: just one minutely choreographed routine of dance steps. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a bit more expression, a bit more freedom in
Speaker 1: terms of, you know, how we live, in terms of
Speaker 1: how we work, in terms of how we educate, in
Speaker 1: terms of how we build um, are we socialize um
Speaker 1: being able to sort of much just smashed to one
Speaker 1: beat but sort of generally took a company of music absolutely, absolutely,
Speaker 1: because I think no matter whether or not you own
Speaker 1: a share in the pinmaking factory, I think you're still
Speaker 1: gonna face alienation from your environment by just doing the
Speaker 1: same repetitive taskt hours a day. Like I don't. I
Speaker 1: don't think that's actually much better. Yeah, yeah, exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: And it requires transmission. And so for those who haven't seen,
Speaker 1: you know, I did a video on anti work sort
Speaker 1: of discussing it, so we can check that out when
Speaker 1: this comes out. I suppose I just wanted to that
Speaker 1: right now, we live in a society that um, that
Speaker 1: is governed by institutions that often demand behavior that conflicts
Speaker 1: with our innate capacities and predilections. You know, the millions
Speaker 1: of years of us living in these you know, cooperative
Speaker 1: social sharing environments, you know, where community, communal and individual
Speaker 1: UM rights and and stuff and such were valued and respected.
Speaker 1: I mean to sort of draw back to the Truman
Speaker 1: Show analogy. It's almost as if, you know, we went
Speaker 1: from living in the world to living in a zoom
Speaker 1: of our own making. It were just being well, I
Speaker 1: guess we're watching ourselves in this suit. Yeah, It's it's
Speaker 1: like the zoo keeper who lives inside the zoo and
Speaker 1: is also the attraction exactly. And and so I think
Speaker 1: that while obviously we can't switch back to like foraging,
Speaker 1: you know, that's not necessarily desirable. I do think that
Speaker 1: we need to we consider our approaches to you know,
Speaker 1: health and security and work and leisure and the way
Speaker 1: we relate to the natural world. You have to sort
Speaker 1: of change the story and changed how we organize. It's
Speaker 1: going to take Charlione are of course, UM. Anyone who's
Speaker 1: organized can tell you that it is far from easy
Speaker 1: UM and is replete with setback and failure. But I
Speaker 1: think we have a responsibility to m remique. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: not as cool to write the wrongs of yesterday to
Speaker 1: the end tomorrow, nows it? WHOA throw in a couple
Speaker 1: of air horns here. Make sure they're pitched lower so
Speaker 1: that it's not horrible to listen to. No, never do that.
Speaker 1: It could happen here as a production of pool Zone Media.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
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Speaker 1: listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It could
Speaker 1: Happen Here, updated monthly at cool Zone Media dot com
Speaker 1: slash sources. Thanks for listening