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Comment by shrimpx | Hacker News Reader

I kinda think that caveman life was inherently temporary, as we advanced toward organized society. You could destroy society and information, sending us back into a caveman lifestyle, but it would only be temporary as we would immediately start to climb back toward organized society. Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups. You compete, you iterate on tools and strategy, you develop borders and politics, and eventually we’re back to some kind of global infrastructure, with everything standing in a complex tension where it’s no longer easy to expand quickly.

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> Organized society emerges out of the drive for survival. As you seek to secure food and security for your group, you build tools and you become weary of neighboring groups.

Ask an anthropologist if this is true.

You’re effectively just saying that whatever the status quo is right now, that’s what we naturally gravitate towards.

I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes. But for different reasons. (Basically: more population density leads to agriculture which leads to food stores which leads to a ruling class that can hoard the food stores which leads to things that can be raided (what’s there to be steal from hunter-gatherers except for slaves?) which leads to competition, and so on.)

> I think that we would get back to “organized society”, yes.

This is roughly what I meant to express. Didn’t mean to imply we’d return to where we are now, but ultimately the drive to survive and thrive would bring us back to some kind of organized society.

My core point being that “cavemanship” isn’t some kind of stable state like Kaczynski insists. It’s an ephemeral/unstable state on the way to some higher level organized society that balances tensions.

Really “cavemanship” was small tribes with basically a socialist economy and that only scales so far, what we have today is 14,000 years worth of societal progress towards social structures that can support more than 150 people who all live together and know each other. If we fell back to that state we'd start developing past it as soon as there were enough resources available to support more than that amount of people - the end result might not be what we have today, but it probably would be more similar to it than to the starting point.

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