Humankind rutger bregman1/8/2024 He said he felt as if he were “at a firefighters’ conference and no one’s allowed to speak about water”. He briefly became an online sensation at Davos last year when he turned on his audience, condemning the absurdity of the rich taking 1,500 private jets to hear David Attenborough warn of the climate crisis and, above all, their failure to pay their taxes or even to mention the word. With luminous endorsements from a raft of big names, from Yuval Noah Harari to Stephen Fry an almost indecently readable style and a vast sweep, taking in history, archaeology, psychology, biology, economics, anthropology and much more, it’d be no surprise if it proved to be the Sapiens of 2020.įame would not be wholly unfamiliar to Bregman, who recently turned 32. Over centuries, marriageable daughters were reduced to little more than commodities, to be bartered like cows or sheep.At the very least, the book has all the right ingredients to be a hit. Sons stayed on the paternal plot to tend the land and livestock, which meant brides now had to be fetched for the family farm. The rise of private property and farming brought the age of proto-feminism to an end. Some theologists even suspect that the story of the Fall alludes to the shift to organised agriculture, as starkly characterised by Genesis 3: ‘By the sweat of your brow you shall eat bread.’29 Settled life exacted an especially heavy toll on women. Farmers, by contrast, had to toil in the fields and working the soil left little time for leisure. And why not? Nature provided everything they needed, leaving plenty of time to relax, hang out and hook up. For one thing, anthropologists have discovered that hunter-gatherers led a fairly cushy life, with work weeks averaging twenty to thirty hours, tops. “Rousseau saw the invention of farming as one big fiasco, and for this, too, we now have abundant scientific evidence. They have the ultimate secret weapon to defeat their competition.ĭe meeste mensen deugen. In a hierarchically organised society, the Machiavellis are one step ahead. The reason, says Professor Keltner, is that power causes people to lose the kindness and modesty that got them elected, or they never possessed those sterling qualities in the first place. Time and again we hope for better leaders, but all too often those hopes are dashed. It’s not surprising that American ‘democracy’ exhibits dynastic tendencies-think of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Bushes. Even now, though any citizen can run for public office, it’s tough to win an election without access to an aristocratic network of donors and lobbyists. It was never the American Founding Fathers’ intention for the general populace to play an active role in politics. Take the American Constitution: historians agree it ‘was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period’. It’s also important to realise this model was originally designed to exclude society’s rank and file. Instead we’re allowed to decide who holds power over us. “ Rousseau already observed that this form of government is more accurately an ‘elective aristocracy’ because in practice the people are not in power at all.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |