[idiotsecant]

>We have become alienated from the environment we evolved in.

Before we start painting with all the colors of the wind too much in this thread, this is not entirely a bad thing. We are removed from stressors such as 'being eaten by large predators' and 'dying of infections from wounds'. There is a lot of 'nature' that out ancestors would be quite happy to be 'alienated' from.

[taurknaut]

Sure, but this completely neglects the aspects of humanity we left behind moving into sedentary communities. We will be forever blind to what we lost, and the morons among us will claim we lost nothing.

[theshackleford]

> morons

Ah yes, that old chestnut. “Anyone who disagrees with me is a dum dum”

How persuasive your arguments are.

[serf]

do you have a better word to describe people who explain that they know every fork in the road that humanity has taken so far was the best choice?

Best they can do is point at our current existence -- something that individual forks may not have ever had the ability to change the outcome of.

I agree that 'moron' is a bad choice - this type of bad actor we're describing isn't as innocent as a moron.

[talldayo]

Which parts are you referring to? The part where you kill a guy with a rock if he looks at your wife funny?

We always lose something when evolving, that's okay. You can keep living in whatever way you want to, as long as it doesn't disrupt the liberty of another person. If you're mad that the world embraced secularity over spiritualism, or that men aren't fist-fighting for resources, blame yourself for not modernizing. Without any serious examples, your comment basically just reads like a trad dogwhistle.

[taurknaut]

When someone gives this opinion, I think to myself they surely must be terrified of a stranger killing their wife with a rock (or merely desiring it themselves). How else can you excuse or explain such an impoverished imagination?

If you are actually looking for an answer and not simply to comfort yourself, I heartily recommend Shaman by Kim Stanley Robinson.

[serf]

>We always lose something when evolving, that's okay.

no, it's not necessarily okay. Nothing to do about it, and we can't change a thing , but we're not guaranteed more success in the future, and plenty of genetic mishaps occur that aren't okay -- so not every change is guaranteed to be 'okay'.

>Which parts are you referring to? The part where you kill a guy with a rock if he looks at your wife funny?

you can frame it both ways.

You say we lost the ability to bludgeon each other with rocks. (we haven't..)

I say we lost the freedom to live without social caveats like "...as long as it doesn't disrupt the liberty of another person.".

I am happy with our trajectory, but it takes a supreme blind eye to ignore that we've taken forks in the road that we can't walk back on; and i'd contend that most of what we're talking about here has nothing to do with biological evolution and everything to do with social evolution and progress.

Many of us still have the drive towards violence upon sleights, this hasn't been somehow removed by evolution -- social evolution and culture however came about and had some strong words to say about murder and what shall happen to murderers.

Social evolution used the traits of self-preservation and bent the blade backwards to provide compensation towards society for an actors bad motives. Murder didn't somehow get bred out, it became a penalized act -- those with self-interest then began to avoid penalized acts. We still have plenty of murder.

Furthermore, parent that you are replying to explicitly says that we'll be blind to what we've missed. They're absolutely right. You can oversimplify that statement into meaning cave-men headbashing each other, but there is a lot more in that statement than you seem to be willing to unpack.

We had a field where any form of philosophy, governance, or religion could have taken hold and we chose a single trajectory for our future. Of course we had to do that, that's how things work -- but the field of choices initially was so immense that it seems in poor taste to presume what parent must have meant was just barbarian violence.

Why not be altruistic in interpretation here and presume the parent wanted to speak on the difference between sedentary and nomadic life-styles?

Time and time again the issues our society faces prove to us that we have yet to find an optimal way to do things. No one can really say whether or not we're getting there faster or slower than another path would have taken us..