Most people alive today do not know that much of human history was spent in small, non-hierarchical groups with little-to-no incidence of mental illness. These were the times before large scale agriculture which began with the Neolithic Revolution in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago. (Modern humans appeared at least as early as 230,000 years ago). Some such immediate return hunter gatherer cultures still persist today, but, of course, they are threatened. Our lack of awareness about these other ways of living in what could be called primal anarchy (without hierachy) - indeed the purposeful erasure of these peoples and the vanishing of the knowledge of their lifeways - has extremely grave consequences for our lives today. It means that virtually everybody thinks that we have to choose between three relatively miserable options: Capitalism, mass scale authoritarian "communism" or feudalism. Obviously, social democratic countries offer a more humane form of capitalism than what we have in the US. But even those nations are still mired in work-as-toil, severe hierarchy, "race"/class/gender–based oppression, ecological alienation and the destructiveness of the extraction economy. We need settle for none of these miserabilism-based options. The idea that we must settle for one of them is the lethal canard rocketing us and our planet into the inferno. (Link to a relevant TED Talk video below, "Depression Is a Disease of Civilization," by Dr. Steven Ilardi, KSU).
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