this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2025
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There wasn't really a material need to invent concepts such as agriculture, debt and other kinds of concepts we recognize as part of documented human history and development. There's no need to farm if few humans there are can sustain themselves via hunting and gathering, neither do you need wheels for transportation. Once there was a historical need due to higher populations or weather not allowing foraging, that's when the concepts got invented and allowed us to build on that with other discoveries and concepts that led us here.
If there's one hard lesson of history I keep relearning, it's that almost nothing ever happens until it materially is required to happen. Language and agriculture waited until population density was high enough. The industrial revolution didn't happen until the logistics and population sizes again necessitated massive changes, even though the steam engine was hundreds of years old. Revolutions don't happen until the population is starving.
If anything in history is impressive it's the rare individuals and societies that change before they're forced to by material necessity (and those cases are often debatable). Really dampens the notion of idealism being viable.
Congrats anon, you just reinvented Historical Materialism.
That is wisdom right there
Whoops, that's what you get when you don't read what you write