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Highlights
id811116573
“John Burroughs has stated that experimental study of animals in captivity is absolutely useless. Their character, their habits, their appetites undergo a complete transformation when torn from their soil in field and forest. With human nature caged in a narrow space, whipped daily into submission, how can we speak of its potentialities?” ~ Emma Goldman
👓 quote 🔗 View Highlight
id811116712
1:20 this is something I fundamentally came to understand while studying prehistory and paleoanthropology. The “humans are naturally evil” argument crumbles when you observe the lives of people who came before systemic oppression ever existed; before we lived in societies big enough for it to exist. It becomes much more obvious which qualities are innate to humans and which aren’t when you can actually remove us from the systems we live inside of, and paleo humans are maybe the one real way left to do that. Prehistoric humans took care of each other. They cared for their sick, wounded, old and disabled. They grieved, and they grieved hard. They buried their loved ones. They played music! They liked to make things. They liked art. They liked beauty, and adorning themselves, and using ornamentation as a way to both stand out and fit in. They were endlessly curious, and apparently willing to put literally anything in their mouths; like, concerningly so. It’s really the only way we discovered a lot of foods were edible. Humans have a natural capacity for things like othering and bias and aggression; but these things, in a vacuum, are mostly neutral. It’s when we’re all placed inside a huge, unbalanced system that is able to directly EXPLOIT these qualities that they appear inherently evil. And more often than not what’s being exploited are things like our need for togetherness and connection, our utter adaptability even to unimaginable conditions, our ability to compartmentalize and work in abstract. These qualities aren’t evil. They have just as much potential to be used for good. But that’s not what our societies are set up to do.
✏️ Something to consider.. and also to think about what happens when survival is on the line. 🔗 View Highlight