More like paying to prevent someone from assaulting you and taking all your stuff. Literally all of society is built from this foundation. Monkeys will just fuck each other up.
Monkey pays to live. He pays in the form of the daily labor of foraging, avoiding predators and finding shelter. It’s just not converted to the generalized form of money and then back to the basic needs of the monkey like we do it.
Labor is the basic unit of wealth. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.
To be fair, we exterminate entire ecosystemss to build strip malls, then pat ourselves on the back for putting the ones we find cute or interesting to us in cages to be gawked at, and call it “saving” them, when the ones we have to breed in captivity for their continued existence are effectively extinct living ghosts for our amusement.
I wish humanity was humanity’s only victim, but it couldn’t be further from the truth. From the perspective of virtually all other terran life, we are a plague.
Living is free, enjoying the benefits of modern civilization is not. Don’t confuse the two.
Everything pays, just not with money.
Technically we pay for all the shit that makes living on earth less brutal than what the monke has to put up with on a daily basis
Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food
Also we have beer! No seriously archeological evidence suggests beer was the main selling point of settled civilization for a lot of groups, so much so that it was the money until someone in turkey figured out you could use weird metal disks for that instead.
Money tends to be less painful than getting mauled by a predator trying to scavenge food
Easy to say when you’re ensconced in the imperial core. But I wouldn’t want to be living on the periphery. Humans are far crueler and more destructive than any natural predator.
A jaguar won’t double-tap your house with a missile strike, to make sure it kills everyone inside and then any neighbors who rush in to help. An orca won’t spend six years running caricatures of you in a tabloid newspaper, in order to build up enough bigotry and fear against your neighborhood that there’s no push back when local politicians green light it for “slum clearance”. No chimpanzee ever worked at Abu Ghraib or Vladimir Prison.
What humans do for money is far worse than what any predator has ever done for a meal.
That’s because they’re not capable of doing those things, of the animals you listed, I could absolutely see them doing those things if they had the intelligence and capabilities to do so.
Especially Orcas, what you listed would be an easy day for them, they’re a bit of an asshole.
Most animals on this planet will do whatever it takes for their next meal that their capabilities will allow for because that’s the only way to survive in the wild.
Fr, capitalism sucks absolute ass and there are better systems we can revolve around.
BUT if it’s between capitalism and going back to having to forage, scavenge, fight nature itself on a daily basis and all the other crap all other animals have to deal with…mmm yea I’ll stick with capitalism lmao
Let’s go back to the beer economy, where your money goes bad eventually if you don’t drink it. Elon Musk would have the largest reserve of rotten beer in human history. He deserves it.
As satisfying as that would be parabley speaking, it’d also ruin our ability to organize commerce and infrastructure at a grander scale than a single region that happens to have a good breadbasket to get the beer crop from.
Don’t make it about our species. It’s capitalism
Only difference between us here is we pay with paper, they pay with blood
Go live the… Is that an orangutan? Life and get back to us.
If monkeys could exchange goods and services to have shelter, easy food, and entertainment, you bet they would.
It’s all about resource management and having skills to survive. Both monkeys and us - humans do it.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature. Both require work for survival.
Our economy is an abstraction of nature.
Its several layers deep in abstractions, which leads to some serious contradictions and faulty logic chains. Climate Change is probably the most current and obvious example, but we’ve got a host of instances in which we misappropriate or squander natural resources in a way an orangutan could not or would not. From the volume of trash production to the concept of financializing capital construction, we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.
When we talk about a distinction between natural and human activities, a lot of what we’re describing is the artificially rapid pacing and the subsequent over-consumption of our behaviors. No orangutan could deliberately accrue the kind of ecological debts that a human child incurs without even thinking.
we generate enormous amounts of excess capacity and waste very rapidly and then simply displace it onto distant habitats in order to keep it out of sight and mind.
In fairness, the other apes also tend to walk a little bit away from their nesting sites before they poop. The reason there aren’t great big mounds of orangutan poop visible from space is probably more due to the fact that there aren’t 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time than anything else.
And now I’m picturing 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time. Thank you.
The reason there aren’t great big mounds of orangutan poop visible from space is probably more due to the fact that there aren’t 8 billion orangutans all pooping at the same time than anything else.
The vast majority of human waste is generated by a fraction of that 8 billion. The Sentinelese Islands aren’t causing climate change.
That’s not even to say that primitive man wasn’t an ecological force. A great part of the Holocene Extinction came about during the Hunter-Gatherer phase of human existence. But mass migrations and displacements of native species aren’t unheard of in prior epochs. The bigger problem came with post-industrial development, wherein our share of “poop” ballooned from 320 pounds of fecal matter to 2000 pounds of excess plastic waste per capita. Its this 7x increase in volume of junk that’s causing us problems, not the short term jump in the number of subsistence farmers in central Asia.
The vast majority of human waste is generated by a fraction of that 8 billion
to what end do they generate all of this waste?
you can work for food or you can work for tokens then exchange tokens for food but to imagine that every other living thing is just having a lovely time vibing and munching on infinite, freely available grindage while humans are the only species that has to do shit that sucks is just ignorant Rousseau noble savage dumbness
I think we tend to greatly underestimate how much the average wild animal’s life completely sucks. Predators. Disease. Food shortages. Injuries that never fully heal. Teeth…you know what happens to teeth if you never brush them? A lot of animals are just scraping by. You know how most animals have pretty big litters, and quite often too? Yet their population stays roughly the same? Consider the implications of that fact on the survival rate for an average animal.
Wholeheartedly agree. The only thing I’d add is that I think it’s in theoretical discussions that we underestimate how much a wild animal’s life sucks shit. In the US at least there’s enough forest that if a person wanted to get lost and be totally self-reliant they could take an honest shot at it. I think each of us has had that thought deep down in our secret hearts and, when we do, in that particular moment we make a very frank, honest and accurate estimate about how much fun it would be dying of an infection while lying face down in the cold muck. And this coming from a person who prides himself on being “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The rabbit that my cat brought home today was definitely not vibing
I’m 14 and this is deep bro
