I never argued for chasing buffalo or living in a tent. I don't think any of these are required. Are you responding to someone else's post or confusing me with someone else?

What I said is that the primitive life is objectively better than being a child laborer in a toxic metal mine or a wage slave in a sweatshop.

I don't think we have to give up a comfortable lifestyle because we transition to a more functional and ethical system than capitalism.

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See, this is why we ignore people like you- you'd offer up a life chasing buffalo and living in a tent as a better alternative to a modern industrial society. For those of us not into permanent camping as a lifestyle, there is no way we want you making economic decisions. And fortunately, since your choices lead to being impoverished- by the actual productivity standards, not some equality metric- you get steamrolled by our way.

Because your non-capitalist societies had one crucial, critical, inescapable flaw: they couldn't defend themselves. Everything else they did was rendered irrelevant by that.

But a group of hunter-gatherers who have free time, personal autonomy, and the basic necessities are a lot richer than the coffee plantation workers that drug LA, the meat industry workers that prepare the flesh they consume, the sweatshops that churn out their fast fashion, and the children in lithium mines that supply the raw material for their "green" transportation.

Where the hunter-gatherer doesn't have many luxuries, the average LA resident's luxuries come at the expense of human dignity and happiness elsewhere.

Inequality isn't poverty. A tribe of hunter-gatherers who have some furs and spears shared equally between them is not richer than modern LA.

I’m sure you can afford $1 a day to keep a starving kid alive. Yet I’m pretty sure you don’t do that…

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I suppose you might characterize the empathy deficit as the other side of that same coin. If so, then sure, that's a strong candidate to place at or near the very top of the pile. Unfortunately, the solution becomes even harder to discuss once you add said other side of that coin to the mix. How do you craft a sustainable substitute to literally feeling the pain of eight billion people, all at once, all the time, such that you genuinely care about what happens to them?

The other missing piece of the puzzle is an intellectual deficit. Humans are very bad at dealing with anything that's much bigger or much smaller than they are in part because they have trouble intellectually grasping it. That includes timespans that aren't even necessarily longer than a single human life. We also don't deal well with proper risk analysis for probabilistic harms on large scales, which may or may not be part of that same issue.

Provincialism in the broadest sense, then? Locality bias? Collectively, we have achieved so much that we've blown past our individual capabilities. Does that mean that, in some perverse sense, it was actually cooperation that killed us?

I don’t think humanity will ever unite.

If there are no natural enemies, we create them from ourselves.

It’s how we are wired. Maybe it will change someday but I doubt it.

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They mean, so long as we are wiling to enslave ourselves to others.

I don’t disagree with the point about distinguishing between one being more worth of love but individuality is really only existent because of group thought. Everything you have ever learned was a linguistic depiction of reality or events told by someone else. There is one human knowledge that is constantly growing that you can choose to learn from and eventually build up on if you focus on a field of study and make some discovery. I believe in subjective morality and that it is ultimately learned unless genetic conditions. Although it’s utterly impossible to have a definitive answer on morality at all in my opinion

It's more than tribal instincts. It's the rich getting a whole lot richer and not wanting to do anything to change that (and having the power to control it).

Well, it's not my Nordic model to be fair.

Inequality today is the highest in recorded history, so technically, all other economic systems have a better track record for reducing poverty. Additionally, crashing every 4-7 years, capitalism is the least stable of all historic economic systems. It isn't the dominant system because of either of these reasons.

Very well stated and helpful contrast. This sentence is sooo good:

" In tribalism, the decision process is short circuited so that arguments, value systems, and even one's own self-interest aren't taken into consideration."

The price of tribal membership is steep indeed.

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This is more than a bit of a strawman. If I lose 99% of my wealth, I can't get to work, I can't have a roof over my head, and I go to join the starving because I won't be able to afford food. If we take away 99% of the wealth of a person with a single billion, they still have 10 million dollars. Think about it like this: if you made 100,000$ (which most people even in the US would consider a very good income) every year for 100 years (which would most probably cover the entire period of cradle to grave), that's 10 million dollars. That's what would be left if we took away 99% of the wealth of a person worth a single billion and there are well over 500 of these individuals in the US not to mention many who are worth tens or even HUNDREDS of billions. And these are the same people who fight tooth and nail any measure to increase taxes even the slightest. Thanks to "Citizens United", we have no idea how these people influence federal elections not to mention those like Rupert Murdock who own multinational media empires.

I don't think the rich want "starving people" around. But I'm sure they want anyone outside of their influence to have as little power as possible and people who are worried about things like food and shelter have far fewer resources to oppose them.

Then do non-capitalist economies have a better track record at reducing poverty than capitalist ones? Because even your nordic-model states are capitalist.

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Absolutely, we are hard wired to create in groups and out groups. It’s just herd mentality as part of being a mammal, so it’s a very old (on the evolutionary timeline) and deeply rooted part of being human. The sense of fulfillment really comes from feeling a part of a group that is better than another group in some way. Makes sense evolutionarily but it’s difficult to bypass in modern times when it’s no longer necessary to survive.

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A fundamental idea in Democracy is that in any decision process, opposing viewpoints should be argued and the decision makers (voters) ultimately make their decisions based on the relative merits of the arguments as well as their personal interests and values. This isn't (necessarily) the same thing as tribalism. In tribalism, the decision process is short circuited so that arguments, value systems, and even one's own self-interest aren't taken into consideration. After a decision-maker has aligned themselves with a particular tribe, the arguments and relative merits of policies may no longer be looked at because they just care that whatever positions "their" tribe has made "win". In fact, they may not have any notion of how their tribe even came to their decision in the first place or any idea how that decision will ultimately effect them.

Having differing political views does not mean that tribalism has a place in the government. Though I absolutely agree with the necessity of a plethora of viewpoints & societal practices to have a healthy democracy, that should not infer sociopathic partisanship has a role in those discussions. In the States, one particular sect (mostly, Republicans) believes denigrating your opposition while making wild and atrocious unsubstantiated claims is now normal behavior.

The fact this picture & this illustration exist while actively reflecting a significant portion of the electorate’s perspective of those they label “liberals” (US Democrats are not politically liberal with respect to European politics). When you consider a foreign government as corrupt & bereft of integrity as Putin’s Russian Federation to be better company than your own countrymen, you have passed the threshold of tolerance and factionalism.

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