I had a reflection moment after learning about the lives of
the first human societies and how they did not have the need for the
“accumulation of goods”. It sounds like Paleolithic
people had the ultimate utopian society.
These societies were gatherer-hunters with a highly mobile way of
life. The need to be mobile arose from
the fact that resources are finite in a particular geographical area, and once
the resources were depleted, they needed to move on;
without agricultural knowledge there was no surplus production to store; hence,
no need to build permanent structures.
There were a limited number of rules which maintained the norms of
society but there was no need for a formal government structure; individuals in
Paleolithic societies knew what needed to be done and they did not perform more
tasks than was necessary. Individuals
had more free time to pursue their own interests, and in that sense they acted
as “wealthy people”. These societies had
no specializations, so individuals possessed a relatively equal skillset and
equality between man and women was “far more equal than in later societies.”
(Strayer, p. 21).
Here we have a society where everybody was truly equal;
people worked to survive as a group, sharing the resources they had gathered
from foraging and hunting. There weren't any rankings which could determine who was higher up on the class structure. So, when did
humanity lost this utopia? Where things
actually as good as they sound? Humanity
lost this—in my opinion—utopian way of life the moment there was a need to store
resources. The need to store resources
came when there was surplus production due to agriculture. Surplus resources equal wealth; it does not
matter what type of surplus one has, the fact that you have something to
protect, something to trade, something to differentiate you from another person
or group, in my opinion, is wealth.
Surplus resources (wealth) stimulate human greed and give
way to society’s problems. Greed makes
people want to steal, it makes people to go to war to capture the wealth, and
it also makes people to want equality.
The problem is the different ways that people go about trying to achieve
equality; while some may want to work hard to get ahead, others simply want to
take by force, and unfortunately the latter is the easier course of action. But what prompted the change to
agriculture? Things were not easy for Paleolithic
societies, proof of this is the small population numbers. Mortality was high and people was typically
at the mercy of the environment, which varied constantly during this era. Imagine humans living in fragile structures
at the mercy of wild animals, which were large and fearless of humans. Starvation was probably a leading cause of
death at the time and hence it prompted the need to find better and more stable
sources of food.
So, in my opinion, wealth is necessary but its consequences
are undesirable. Now, let’s take one
step further; agricultural societies stored goods to be used during times of
scarcity, but what is the need to accumulate immense amounts of money. Money, just like bushels of wheat, is an
accumulated resource (wealth). It is
well understood that some people accumulate more money that they will ever
need; yet, the more money we have, the more we tend to want to accumulate. I believe that the concept of scarcity is
encoded in every human’s brain; this is what has saved us through the
ages—arguably they may have been what made Homo sapiens prevail over other
species of hominines. However, the
practicality of it when it comes to money is sometimes unnecessary. Would you like to live in a Paleolithic
society?
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