It's a stunning and seductive idea. Yet it has a sinister epilogue. Because the loss of paradise seems to have had a strange and darkening effect on the human mind. A few years ago, archaeologists at nearby Cayonu unearthed a hoard of human skulls. They were found under an altar-like slab, stained with human blood.
Will the nonsense spawned by that idiot Rousseau EVER stop??
Man was never a "noble savage" living in harmony in a state of nature and at peace with his fellow man and environment, only to be "ruined" by society and civilization.
This idiocy was picked up by Marx who claimed that the development of human society had "alienated" man from his wonderful noble primitive self and we need communism to get back to the state of supposed wonderfulness. It's been the constant drumbeat of the Left ever since.
Hobbes and Locke got it right; Rousseau and Marx, not so much.
Well argued and absolutely correct.
Man was never a "noble savage" living in harmony in a state of nature and at peace with his fellow man and environment, only to be "ruined" by society and civilization.
This idiocy was picked up by Marx who claimed that the development of human society had "alienated" man from his wonderful noble primitive self and we need communism to get back to the state of supposed wonderfulness. It's been the constant drumbeat of the Left ever since.
Amen, Brother Freeper, and preach on!!
The idiots, usually socialists or communists, who think living in a primitive hunter-gathering tribe was paradise, don't know what they are talking about. Those ancient people barely survived and I doubt they had much leisure time.
I have read an interesting theory that collectivists adore primitive tribalism because their minds are not developed enough to appreciate any form of human society beside a primitive tribe run by a strongman or an oligarchy. For millions of years all people knew was primitive tribalism, so people are still hard-wired to like that sort of arrangement.
Collectivists feel that even agriculture is vaguely "unnatural" and a threatening innovation. And they have even stronger misgivings about the Industrial Revolution and representative democracy. They cannot understand the sophisticated concepts in the Magna Carta or the U.S. Constitution. But collectivists instinctively understand a Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini who rules the "tribe" by commands, and most leftists long to be a "priest" in a one-party state, lording it over people. They think that because, theoretically, the best hunter could run a tribe of a few hundred hunters, that somehow this model can be expanded and a dictator can effectively rule a modern society by decree. So really the "progressives" want to take us back many thousands of years.
No. Mostly because to stop it would mean taking a hard look at ourselves.