I am happy to be working my way through this but it's interesting that so many of us are brainwashed into the possession of things being the key to fulfillment you know and then yeah it's like we bury ourselves in stuff and i go oh how can i get out now i have to pay for it take care of it get rid of it the ex took it etc you know it's just it really can be a trap again we live in their world it makes them happy that we buy all this stuff whatever that life form is that we're dealing with here right it doesn't make us happy but they convince us it does you know it's like convincing a horse that it's happy pulling a wagon i don't think so i think that horse would be a lot happier running around free and uh heard you know yeah yeah as would we all right,
So there's a couple things i want to touch on in civilized to death here i have my my official laptop because i didn't have a printer uh there are just so many great points and i like the way the way you approach the book is like you thought it was this way you're wrong here's why here's the history to prove it i mean not that it's antagonistic but it's just i like i like the crumbling of ideas based on falsehood and just and breaking assumptions right it's it it allows a guy like me to think oh yeah this makes sense you're talking about just fundamental truths and so they're some of my favorites are actually in your cheat sheet and um we'll put that in the notes cocktail party yeah the cocktail party chichi i think every author should do that totally,
You know totally just throw it up on the website you don't have to read the book folks just read the cocktail party chichi yeah i mean it's you know a lot of the main points are presented there and guys listening we'll put it in the show notes at lukestory.com chris ryan that's luke street.com chris ryan uh so the first one and i think this is one of the most common misconceptions about ancient peoples and hunter-gatherers is that prehistoric life was a constant struggle to survive yeah you know we think oh man you'll wake up every day and find water and food and you're freezing all the time and you know that's how i picture it and that we're you know we do nothing but work there's no leisurely time so why is that a false view well uh it's a false view,
I mean you know the most basic answer is because it's simply inaccurate um but the motivation for promoting that false view is interesting to me um because you know we could say it started with hobbes right before the advent of the state hobbes wrote in 1651 in leviathan uh human life was solitary poor nasty brutish and short incredibly famous sentence right like everyone who speaks english has heard that sentence and yet it's totally wrong on every count hunter-gatherer life was not solitary much more intimacy than we have you know as i explained earlier in the context of sexuality far more interaction and and interdependence and cooperation um in hunter-gatherer life than in the modern world uh poor poor is a measure of having less than someone else,
If everyone shares and has the same then no one's poor no one's rich no one's poor we all just are surviving together right um so there's no poverty in hunter-gatherer groups um in fact marshall salins uh an anthropologist wrote a very famous paper in the 70s that sort of started challenging this standard narrative of of perpetual progress and and the hobbesian the neohabsian view it's called the first affluent society and he made that point that affluence is when you have enough and hunter-gatherers generally have enough it's farmers who don't have enough it's farmers who start to have poverty and inequality of resource access to resources and hierarchical political structures and all that kind of stuff so hunter-gatherers can be seen as affluent because not only do they have enough but they see the world around them as being a place of great abundance right,
Because it's like yeah i mean there was this i forget which book i quoted it in but there is a case of a jesuit missionary in present-day canada in the 1600s and he was reporting about uh his time with uh indians there and he talked about how they were there was this feast going on and there had been a feast the night before too and they invite the neighboring groups in because they've got all these beavers that they're roasting and the missionary says to one of the men like why are you eating all the food right you could save some for tomorrow and you're sharing with all these people you hardly see them and he's like well we have lots of food let's eat it and he said well what are you going to do tomorrow he said we'll we'll find more food and he said well what if you don't find more food and he said we will be hungry for a day or two,
It's no big deal man and at the same the same party the women are going off and having secks in the in the shadows right with different men and and the jesuit is obviously noticing this and he's all upset about it and he says to the same guy like why do you let your women do this there like i know that woman you're with her but he's she's having femininity with that guy from the other group who came in and he's like yeah whatever it doesn't matter and he says well like how are you gonna know like if she gets a child how are you gonna know whose child it is and he and and the missionary wrote in his notes the man looked at me with great sadness and compassion and he said you french are very strange you only love your own children,
Wow i mean that just sums it up right it's like yeah what's wrong what's wrong and then the idea you know and the idea within that that you possess that's your child your wife and you only care about your child these are people who share their food right yeah these are people who don't have refrigeration they don't have preservation they don't have accumulated resources if you shoot a moose what are you going to do like you know cut off a stake for you and your wife and tell everyone else to piss off that's not the way it works so anyway the the so it wasn't solitary it wasn't poor it wasn't nasty it wasn't brutish and it wasn't short the human lifespan has always been into the 70s and 80s the idea that everyone died when they were 30 or 35 is total nonsense where does that fallacy come from is that because of infant mortality.
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