It was definitely there with agriculture. Hunter gatherers had a lot of different ways of organizing their societies but early agrarian societies quickly developed a military caste and despotic governments.
Agriculture seems to me to be the point where humans first started saying “this stuff, that stays in one place and is useful, is actually just mine/ours”. How that’s done varies tremendously over time and space, but it’s hard to imagine the concept of “ownership” in the way we now understand things, without agriculture. And it’s easy (for me anyway) to imagine the idea of “property rights” springing pretty naturally out of beginning to understand cultivation.
And by that, I really do mean, we doomed ourselves to fight over the very things we fight about today, starting then lol.
Yeah. When you’re breaking your back out in the fields all year and you’ve just barely managed to fill your granary with enough food for the winter, you’re not going to tolerate a band of marauders coming through and stealing all the food. Property was a matter of life and death for the entire village.
We’re all descended from these agrarian cultures (except for some of the indigenous folks who hail from hunter gatherer communities). These strong property rights are deeply rooted in our cultures.
Yep, couldn’t agree more really, the ways we’re built to think were useful and basically essential for all of human history.
But now things are very (eh, somewhat) different and we’re doing a shit job of updating our understanding of “how to be people”. Mostly (by my measure) due to the way our technology changes much much faster than human-scale “how to be” wisdom.
I agree about hunter gatherers. I was coming at this from the perspective of when civilisation started “in a dank river valley near you” as Bill Wurtz put it with a few small huts beside the field owner’s bigger stick figure hut :p
It was definitely there with agriculture. Hunter gatherers had a lot of different ways of organizing their societies but early agrarian societies quickly developed a military caste and despotic governments.
Agriculture seems to me to be the point where humans first started saying “this stuff, that stays in one place and is useful, is actually just mine/ours”. How that’s done varies tremendously over time and space, but it’s hard to imagine the concept of “ownership” in the way we now understand things, without agriculture. And it’s easy (for me anyway) to imagine the idea of “property rights” springing pretty naturally out of beginning to understand cultivation.
And by that, I really do mean, we doomed ourselves to fight over the very things we fight about today, starting then lol.
Yeah. When you’re breaking your back out in the fields all year and you’ve just barely managed to fill your granary with enough food for the winter, you’re not going to tolerate a band of marauders coming through and stealing all the food. Property was a matter of life and death for the entire village.
We’re all descended from these agrarian cultures (except for some of the indigenous folks who hail from hunter gatherer communities). These strong property rights are deeply rooted in our cultures.
Yep, couldn’t agree more really, the ways we’re built to think were useful and basically essential for all of human history.
But now things are very (eh, somewhat) different and we’re doing a shit job of updating our understanding of “how to be people”. Mostly (by my measure) due to the way our technology changes much much faster than human-scale “how to be” wisdom.
I agree about hunter gatherers. I was coming at this from the perspective of when civilisation started “in a dank river valley near you” as Bill Wurtz put it with a few small huts beside the field owner’s bigger stick figure hut :p