9 ms·

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities,

by terbo 4mo ago

"And here you find civilized man. Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he some how didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. So now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, just to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat they were born into. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy

_nxwj 4mo ago
> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.
- umeshunni 4mo ago
  This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).
  - petre 4mo ago
    > barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc). Russians? It's still true today.
  - 7bit 4mo ago
    What a load of bollocks, that can only be said by someone who clearly hasn't read a history book in his entire life ...
- lotsofpulp 4mo ago
  > This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.
  - Forgeties79 4mo ago
    Is that how we have to live?
    - lotsofpulp 4mo ago
      Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
      - ian_j_butler 4mo ago
        > Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse. If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started. Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?
        lotsofpulp 4mo ago
        Those people are free to move to Afghanistan or Somalia or the Congo. I doubt they will. > Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.
raincole 4mo ago
> his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.
- irjustin 4mo ago
  I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not. In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287
  - roenxi 4mo ago
    There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.
    - Supermancho 4mo ago
      [dead]
    - shawn_w 4mo ago
      That reminds me of James Morrow's This Is The Way The World Ends. After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.
    - kleene_op 4mo ago
      There is only one ethical way to solve that moral issue: Schrödinger birthing
    - latexr 4mo ago
      That doesn’t work, on multiple levels. Existing is a prerequisite to wanting; you cannot want if you do not exist. But even if you ignore that, it’s not immediately ethical or unethical to do or not do something just because someone else wants it. But even if you ignore that too, there’s no way of knowing that child won’t be the next genocidal despot. And even if you ignore all that, you could never birth even a fraction of everyone who could ever be born, since those depend on genetics and you can never have every combination of human mating with the other half.
Aurornis 4mo ago
There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival. Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them. Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past. The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages. Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.
- jmilloy 4mo ago
  I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
  - Aurornis 4mo ago
    > I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era. You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior. The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it. If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!
metaphor 4mo ago
> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
- latexr 4mo ago
  That quote gets less convincing by the day. It has reached a state where it’s regurgitated without proper context or consideration and is now no more than a deepity. There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.
  - krapp 4mo ago
    >Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse. But they are changing it. "progress" in this case doesn't imply change for the better, only the will to power. It's obviously wrong in the sense that the world is full of unreasonable men who only managed to ruin their own lives and the lives of others, and because plenty of change has occurred through "reasonable" means by "reasonable" people. What separates Bezos, Musk, Trump and the like isn't their unreasonableness so much as the power their privilege gives them. Trump was a C-tier celebrity known for being rich and playing himself on tv, then he was granted the privilege of the presidency. Musk and Bezos have the privilege of vast wealth and the control of companies. They have the power to bend reality to their will not because of their refusal to bend to the rules of society, but because the rules of society consider it reasonable that wealth should equal power. It's a Nietzschean statement about self-actualization undermined by the reality of capitalism.
  - ksymph 4mo ago
    > There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. You say that like it's a counterexample, but is that not literally what the quote is saying? I mean what's the difference between that and: > the unreasonable [man] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
    - 4mo ago
FarmerPotato 4mo ago
Much of our complicated, built environment has mediocre user interface design. If thought were given to that, it would yield humans more agency.
qsera 4mo ago
>But he some how didn't know when to stop. I think he perfectly well knows. It is just that capitalism makes him want more. No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..
- Levitz 4mo ago
  >No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola.. On the contrary, we looked for wine way, WAY before capitalism. Waged war and murdered a whole lot of people for spices mind you.
numpad0 4mo ago
The entire concept of kids and public schools is a wealth redistribution mechanism and a solution to problems created by the industrial revolution. The concept of younger humans always existed, but itwas supercharged to the degree we know today. Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem. Confession: never actually read Centuries of Childhood( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood )
- hashmal 4mo ago
  It's a solution only at a superficial level, regarding wealth redistribution. It's just very hard to leave the social class you're born in. Not everyone is doomed by it, far from it, but not enough to consider it a solved problem. Heck, it's not even considered a problem when your family is wealthy.
hliyan 4mo ago
Another framing of this is that once you have fulfilled your basic needs of healthy, physical safety and companionship, almost everything else you do is massively deleveraged: you move vast amounts of matter and energy in order to make minute alterations to electrical impulses in your brain.

by terbo 4mo ago

_nxwj 4mo ago

> civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. Another key human distinction is being able to think into the future, where we sometimes get stuck.

umeshunni 4mo ago
This has probably been true only in the last 300? 500? years. Before that, things were the same for 1000+ years for most of civilization, barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc).
- petre 4mo ago
  > barring any large invasions from neighboring kingdoms, or some far away empire (mongols etc). Russians? It's still true today.
- 7bit 4mo ago
  What a load of bollocks, that can only be said by someone who clearly hasn't read a history book in his entire life ...
lotsofpulp 4mo ago
> This feeling is exactly what I've experienced. Like we can never sit down without the walls changing around you. I always have to be on my toes. That is basically how all animals live, either under threat from competitors or predators.
- Forgeties79 4mo ago
  Is that how we have to live?
  - lotsofpulp 4mo ago
    Many/most people don’t, and haven’t for a very long time. Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse.
    - ian_j_butler 4mo ago
      > Being afraid of losing one’s job is quite a step up from being afraid of a rival tribe ransacking your village. Or a predatory animal. Or bacterial infections. Obviously, things could be better. But they could be much, much worse. If you talk to people, I think you'll find there are an increasing number who don't actually agree with your idea of worse. It's a question of comforts vs agency. Victims of slavery or displacement are not automatically happy just because the water is cleaner than where they started. Things we cannot control are a risk in any world. If you must die, do you want it to be because of bad luck and natural causes, or because you're increasing someone's profit margins? Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? Or do you want to live in a authoritarian system that's characterized by ignorance, misinformation, and disenfranchisement where any resistance to different kinds of faceless violence makes you the bad guy or the crazy one?
      - lotsofpulp 4mo ago
        Those people are free to move to Afghanistan or Somalia or the Congo. I doubt they will. > Do you want to fight and perhaps die in an desperate battle with a deadly but essentially honest viking invader? No, real life is not a hero wish fulfillment movie.

raincole 4mo ago

> his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school Who are, by the way, not going to have children themselves. So the problem will eventually fixed itself.

irjustin 4mo ago
I remember the story of the man who sued his parents for being born because he didn't consent to being born[0]. While as absurd as it is, as I navigate life, I legitimately ponder the question whether it is ethical to have children or not. In my aging, I am more unsure of the answer. [0] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-47154287
- roenxi 4mo ago
  There is also the reverse - is it ethical not to have children? Maybe the hypothetical children want to exist.
  - Supermancho 4mo ago
    [dead]
  - shawn_w 4mo ago
    That reminds me of James Morrow's This Is The Way The World Ends. After a nuclear apocalypse wipes out most of humanity, the ghosts of now-will-never-be-born future people hold the survivors to trial because they're ticked off at losing their opportunity to live.
  - kleene_op 4mo ago
    There is only one ethical way to solve that moral issue: Schrödinger birthing
  - latexr 4mo ago
    That doesn’t work, on multiple levels. Existing is a prerequisite to wanting; you cannot want if you do not exist. But even if you ignore that, it’s not immediately ethical or unethical to do or not do something just because someone else wants it. But even if you ignore that too, there’s no way of knowing that child won’t be the next genocidal despot. And even if you ignore all that, you could never birth even a fraction of everyone who could ever be born, since those depend on genetics and you can never have every combination of human mating with the other half.

Aurornis 4mo ago

There are many parts of the world that are less civilized: Where children do not get 10-15 years of schooling and life is reduced to more simple survival. Not many people try to move toward those civilizations. The people in those civilizations usually try hard to leave them. Underneath the elegant writing style in that quote is just another variation of nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist. We like to romanticize a version of simpler times where everything was better because it was simple. Maybe it’s because I was lucky enough to have a lot of conversations with my grandparents when I was younger that I appreciate the realities of our modern existence over how difficult things were in the past. The “hazardous habitat they were born into” part of the quote above hits especially hard after hearing my grandparents casually describe the number of their siblings who didn’t survive until adulthood and the number of their childhood friends who died working hazardous farming jobs at young ages. Modern life is easy mode. I do think this fantasy about the past is common right now. The quote above is just the high brow literature analog of TikTok tradwife content, both serving to feed angst about the present by contrasting with an idealized re-imagination of the past that only works if you don’t look too deep.

jmilloy 4mo ago
I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". Given the option of somewhere with or without modern medicine and housing, yes people choose the "civilized" version even when it is complicated, hazardous, meaningless, addictive. That doesn't mean it isn't appropriate to critique the parts of modern life that have more to do with people trying to have more money and power, above and beyond what's required to adapt our environment to our human needs.
- Aurornis 4mo ago
  > I think you are overlooking the part of the quote that says "but he somehow didn't know when to stop". I don’t think you can extract that point in isolation when one of the anchors for “didn’t know when to stop” includes 10 years of schooling for children as being too far. So the point in the past is at least anchored to the pre-education era. You seem to be talking about modern-modern era problems as you imagine them, but the quote above is clearly reaching much deeper into the past and hoping the reader’s imagination will fill in the blanks that is was superior. The construction itself is somewhat anachronistic: It relies on the reader imagining a point in time far enough back that they aren’t familiar with the challenges of the era, but distant enough that they don’t see their current problems in it. If you don’t know much about past life then it probably sounds great!

metaphor 4mo ago

> The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

latexr 4mo ago
That quote gets less convincing by the day. It has reached a state where it’s regurgitated without proper context or consideration and is now no more than a deepity. There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse.
- krapp 4mo ago
  >Bezos, Musk, Trump, they are all changing the world for the worse. But they are changing it. "progress" in this case doesn't imply change for the better, only the will to power. It's obviously wrong in the sense that the world is full of unreasonable men who only managed to ruin their own lives and the lives of others, and because plenty of change has occurred through "reasonable" means by "reasonable" people. What separates Bezos, Musk, Trump and the like isn't their unreasonableness so much as the power their privilege gives them. Trump was a C-tier celebrity known for being rich and playing himself on tv, then he was granted the privilege of the presidency. Musk and Bezos have the privilege of vast wealth and the control of companies. They have the power to bend reality to their will not because of their refusal to bend to the rules of society, but because the rules of society consider it reasonable that wealth should equal power. It's a Nietzschean statement about self-actualization undermined by the reality of capitalism.
- ksymph 4mo ago
  > There are plenty of “unreasonable men” adapting the world to themselves. You say that like it's a counterexample, but is that not literally what the quote is saying? I mean what's the difference between that and: > the unreasonable [man] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.
  - 4mo ago

FarmerPotato 4mo ago

Much of our complicated, built environment has mediocre user interface design. If thought were given to that, it would yield humans more agency.

qsera 4mo ago

>But he some how didn't know when to stop. I think he perfectly well knows. It is just that capitalism makes him want more. No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola..

Levitz 4mo ago
>No man, after drinking water to quench his thirst, automatically wished if he had a bottle of cola.. On the contrary, we looked for wine way, WAY before capitalism. Waged war and murdered a whole lot of people for spices mind you.

numpad0 4mo ago

The entire concept of kids and public schools is a wealth redistribution mechanism and a solution to problems created by the industrial revolution. The concept of younger humans always existed, but itwas supercharged to the degree we know today. Kids have infinite hit points and are easily manipulated. In a pure unregulated labor market, this drives out everyone but dumbest kids as laborers, and that's bad on many levels. Marking kids as legally incapable of labor and putting them into a 20-year timeout as they engage in educational busywork solves this problem. Confession: never actually read Centuries of Childhood( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centuries_of_Childhood )

hashmal 4mo ago
It's a solution only at a superficial level, regarding wealth redistribution. It's just very hard to leave the social class you're born in. Not everyone is doomed by it, far from it, but not enough to consider it a solved problem. Heck, it's not even considered a problem when your family is wealthy.

hliyan 4mo ago

Another framing of this is that once you have fulfilled your basic needs of healthy, physical safety and companionship, almost everything else you do is massively deleveraged: you move vast amounts of matter and energy in order to make minute alterations to electrical impulses in your brain.