Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

(I'm quoting myself from a few days ago, sorry)

Really it goes back to European vs. Native lifestyles and colonization. The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up.

People who could get away from the towns and join Native American societies didn't want to go back. Whereas Natives had to be forced (typically with savage brutality) to adopt European culture.

"Going native" was perceived as a serious problem, because it was: if you didn't like society, or your actual literal "master" (a person under the psychotic delusion that he or she actually literally owned you) you could try to escape to, say, the Sioux nation.

We mostly exterminated or marginalized these societies, and filled and/or enclosed most of the open land, so it seems like options are fewer.

And today we have "the homeless" to act as a goad: if you don't work you will starve in the street. There's not supposed to be a way out.

This is somewhat of a Noble native fallacy. Native American culture was diverse and a mixed bag. Some exercised extreme territorial claims and had very hierarchical societies. Some practice slavery and cannibalism.

Yeah, that's an unfortunate flaw in the above screed, and I appreciate you pointing it out. I do not mean that Native American cultures were or are some kind of fantasy elves or anything like that. Humans are humans.

I'm trying to point out the deeper currents that underlie the stuff the article is talking about. They touch on it but they don't cut to the bone.

I don't have time this morning to go into detail but the main points are:

1) The essence of state power is the ability of the king to command others to die for the state (often even before they reproduced!), this is almost entirely absent in Native American cultures. (At least in the ones we know about.) The Native view was that Europeans were not really free: they had to obey their kings.

2) There really was a serious problem with people preferring Native cultures to European cultures in the New World. Harsh measures were enacted.

3) Natives did not spontaneously adopt European cultures. Again, harsh measures were enacted.

4) Last but hardly least, Native cultures were integrated with ecological systems much more efficiently than European cultures. (This was almost certainly a major reason why Native life was generally more fun and easy than European life.)

In sum, the reasons why we are messed up in the heads about camping today go back pretty far, and tie in pretty deeply with the structure of our culture and society.

- - - -

I can't help but add that I believe there is a way to fashion a new kind of society that fuses elements of Eastern, Western, and Native American cultures with modern science and particularly ecology to, uh, make a really fun and easy way to live, but that's a whole 'nother story and it's a sunny Sunday morning, so it'll have to wait.

Guess you've never heard about the Comanches that would rape a woman, gut her then put burning coals in the gut cavity while they were still alive.

In addition plenty of really barbaric tortures done by the Aztecs documented.

You know, I have in fact heard this sort of thing all my life and I used to believe it too. But now I hear stories of Liberals who perform satanic rituals while they drink the blood of children or torture them in basements of pizza parlors that don't actually have basements, and I'm thinking some of those old stories might not be 100% on the level. Certainly there was some scalping going on back then, but the elaborate torture stories sure sound like something one ethnic group might say while de-humanizing another.

I've also heard that a lot of the medieval torture devices are actually just Victorian inventions made up for gawks which sounds plausible; you don't really need elaborate works of ironmongery to torture people when the time-honored methods of beating the shit out of them with fists or clubs or various forms of water torture seem quite effective.

I actually know a lot (relatively speaking) about the Comanches, including what kinds of experiences they had that drove them to be so vicious. Not to put too fine a point on it, they were responding to atrocities committed on them and their kin by the Europeans. Doesn't make any of it right though.

And the Aztecs were pretty far gone, in my opinion, they sound almost as bad as the old Assyrians.

> The Europeans were psychotic bastards who murdered and tortured and enslaved people, and who had absolute masters and abject servants, and all kinds of psychotic baggage. The native cultures were (and still are in many many places) not quite so messed up.

The natives never fought amongst themselves for resources or territory? No victorious tribes ever enslaved or murdered their defeated foes?

This whole idea of conflicts between ethnicity and tribes and nations, master-and-slave and hierarchical societies is just some weird European pathology that, like smallpox, was unknown in the Americas pre-1492?

> The natives never fought amongst themselves for resources or territory?

Of course they did, but they had forms and traditions that limited the (excuse me) savagery of their conflicts, for example "counting coup":

> Among the Plains Indians of North America, counting coup is the warrior tradition of winning prestige against an enemy in battle. It is one of the traditional ways of showing bravery in the face of an enemy and involves intimidating him, and, it is hoped, persuading him to admit defeat, without having to kill him. These victories may then be remembered, recorded, and recounted as part of the community's oral, written, or pictorial histories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counting_coup

> No victorious tribes ever enslaved or murdered their defeated foes?

Generally, no. Even N.Am. "slavery" was very different from, say, Roman or later (Euro-)American slavery of Africans.

IANAAnthropologist but it's pretty clear that Europe was a much more cruel and savage land than North America, at least (I don't know as much about Central and South American cultures.)

> This whole idea of conflicts between ethnicity and tribes and nations, master-and-slave and hierarchical societies is just some weird European pathology that, like smallpox, was unknown in the Americas pre-1492?

They had conflicts, and hierarchy, and even in some societies a kind of slavery, but nothing like the brutality, cruelty, and savagery of the Europeans.

Again, I'm not an expert, but as I've looked into it, I've come to see that Europeans pretty much were "infected" with hardcore trauma and resulting psychological repression and etc.etc. Freudian, etc... plus bad religion. I mean, the Spanish Inquisition much?

This is a tad romanticized.

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