[07] Agriculture
Title Card
YouTube Link
Status
Released
Transcription
Air Date
Oct 24, 2023
Script
Intro
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ZFi: GM and welcome to Moloch Traps, our new podcast here at From Aa to Zzz. I’m ZFi, this Zombie Shepherd, and we’re excited to be bringing you this new show in collaboration with BanklessDAO and its Audio/Visual team. To be clear, opinions in this series expressed by either of us are our own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of BanklessDAO at large.
This week, we will continue to study and discuss excerpts from the "Meditations on Moloch" essay, written by Scott Alexander. The essay provides examples of multi-polar traps and delves into various instances from history, biology, and economics to illustrate how competition often results in collective harm.
In today’s episode we’ll discuss one of the most significant social changes in history, Agriculture. Let’s start with Alexander’s words on this example.
Segment 2 — Agriculture
ZFi:
(reading from Meditations)
7. Agriculture. Scientist and author, Jared Diamond, calls it the worst mistake in human history. Whether or not it was a mistake, it wasn’t an accident – agricultural civilizations simply outcompeted nomadic ones, inevitably and irresistibly. Classic Malthusian trap. Maybe hunting-gathering was more enjoyable, higher life expectancy, and more conducive to human flourishing – but in a state of sufficiently intense competition between peoples, in which agriculture with all its disease and oppression and pestilence was the more competitive option, everyone will end up agriculturalists or go the way of the Comanche Indians.
From a god’s-eye-view, it’s easy to see everyone should keep the more enjoyable option and stay hunter-gatherers. From within the system, each individual tribe only faces the choice of going agricultural or inevitably dying.
Segment 3 — Open Discussion
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Zombie Shepherd notes:
I find this one particularly interesting because it seems that it’s the beginning of many of our Moloch Traps. Agriculture begins our journey into stationary societies thus bringing all of the many facets we fight about like borders, property rights, immigration, hierarchies, taxes, and distribution of surplus goods and crops which forms the basis of almost all societal disagreements. Who deserves to be cared for and who deserves to be excluded? Who contributes to society, in which ways, and does a particular society value those people and contributions?
Agriculture is what helped us to escape the Malthusian trap of food scarcity and caused a boom in population even while causing long term negative effects on individuals in the form of lower life span, decreased height, sedentary lifestyle, and proximity to disease by living closely with other people, animals, and all of their waste which includes farming and other burgeoning industries. It’s not to say that Moloch wouldn’t have taken root in a hunter/gatherer society but settling in one area gives you more of a sense of ownership and begins the game of cooperate/defect with your neighbors both on the macro level (other tribes and nations) then on the micro level of your literal neighbors and family. The Moloch trap of capitalism forms from this sense of owning pieces of the planet at the expense of others this could mean land or natural resources. Now, an individual is incentivized to protect what I see as mine from everyone around me to the point that community slowly shrinks from nation/tribe into family units, and finally into our current state of hyper-individualism.
The great thing about agriculture is that with readily accessible food and no need to constantly migrate we can better care for the children, elderly, disabled, and injured people. In a hunter/gatherer society these people are more at risk and likely to be excluded, or left behind as they hold the rest of the unit back.
One of the most fundamental values of any society is based around what to do with the surplus goods, and there are two fundamental ends of the spectrum: share with everyone or only share with those that own the property that society is built on. In between those extremes are the basis of all societies and economies. Under our current fiat and capital driven economic systems we recreate a false sense of survival-of-the-fittest by forcing individuals to compete in a race to the bottom in the form of wages while capital owners squeeze every last drop of money from the lowest person on the ladder. We then turn it on the individual and say “you are not fit to survive,” when we should be turning it onto the capital owners and say, “you are killing people with your self-interest.” In this way I see agriculture as the root of many other Moloch Traps. What should have been a boon to the entire human race is ultimately just another tool used to turn us against each other as we all struggle to escape the slavery that poverty forces people into. Now we are so addicted to the agricultural society that we are literally just consumers with no connection to our food, or ability to survive without the state.
ZFi notes:
we’re only “producing food” in letter, but not in spirit
providing nutrition VS producing food products
aquaculture and hybrid hydroponics
positive-sum polyculture = national security and healthcare
earthships, graywater, and holistic design
agriculture wasnt a mistake, we just arent doing it right yet.
we understood seed in dirt. water. sun. food.
we didnt yet understand the biosphere and its systems to the extent we do today
identify the system. harness the system. pamp yield AND improve the substrate of the system.
farmer with multiple herds (michael pollan example)
farmer grows grass. cows eat grass and leave cow patties. farmer moves cows to another pasture. fly larvae grow in the cow patties for three days.
Conclusion
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Zombie Shepherd: (start and then hand off as appropriate)
Summary
What would YOU do? @listener?
Outro
Zombie Shepherd:
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