[X6S1x6Okd1st]

Yuval is that you?

I have some sympathy for this view, but there's also the fact that at this point we've basically solved hunger from a societal point of view.

Deprivation of calories from a population now happens because of war or intentional. At the current time we no longer are at the whim of natural causes of hunger.

[int_19h]

Well, it's not quite the same as saying that the invention of agriculture made the current state of affairs inevitable. There's a middle ground between historical determinism, and "anything goes" - some paths become more or less likely depending on how things go, but it's never a railroad.

So, I would agree with OP in that it started with invention of agriculture, in a sense that that gave rise to rigidly hierarchical societies, and centralized states that could extract surplus from their citizens and spend it on warfare and other forms of oppression. But we didn't have to take that route, and it doesn't mean that agriculture per se is bad.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

But the reasonably reliable provision of calories via agriculture is what allows the size of stable societies to grow, and also what more closely tethers them to particular places.

As I^HYuval would say, those are the things that help start the long journey to the mess we're today.

[X6S1x6Okd1st]

While I totally agree that it is necessary for the problems we have today, I disagree that it's obviously bad or necessarily creates many of these problems.