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Eggtimer
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Old Idea I had never heard put this way before
#22104989 - 08/18/15 12:00 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
The study of war
Because the first civilizations had no competition, the ancients were able to develop an astonishing level of knowledge of nature and remained largely ignorant about making weapons (hence the destruction of the Aztec empire by a handful of iron-clad Spaniards). Iron, namely, is good for nothing except making weapons. The element has been known about since long before the iron age formally started, but there was little use for it. The ancients didn't use iron because they didn't need it, and not because they couldn't hack it.
It requires a critical mass of centers of civilization in order for all of them to start "studying war" as the prophet Isaiah puts it (Isaiah 2:4). When the focus of humanity shifted towards combat and commerce, the knowledge of the world shifted out of the cross-hairs, and was replaced by a new technological evolution, namely that of the technology for warfare, and that's the one we look back on now: a narrow corridor from us to the caves, with somewhere half way Stonehenge, the Giza plateau and the Nazca Lines that cannot possibly exist.
Wonderful writers such as Graham Hancock insist on a pre-historic global civilization, that left its traces deliberately in buildings all over the world, but the truth may be quite the opposite. Unchallenged human civilizations built similar for the same reason that honeybees and ants construct highly similar buildings all over the world without a common directorate. Hancock famously calls us a species with amnesia, but it's worse than that. We are a species with a roving eye or a shifting pole. The need for iron came with the invention of international competition. But before the invention of war, the ancients knew much more than conventional historians give them credit for.
Do you guys think it's possible that some civilizations became extremely philosophically advanced then were conquered by dumb technologically advanced savages? This idea actually makes a lot of sense to me.
-------------------- It's all for the s
Edited by Eggtimer (08/18/15 12:01 AM)
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ReposadoXochipilli
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Eggtimer]
#22105022 - 08/18/15 12:13 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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we have i think almost always a dog eat dog mentality, not saying there has not been many examples of exactly what you are suggesting.
i think isolation itself lends to localized unique cultures but our knack for destroying all remnants of the subjugated populous identity is very historically regular among conquest. plunder and pillage and throw away the rest...
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Edited by ReposadoXochipilli (08/18/15 12:14 AM)
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Eggtimer
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Quote:
ReposadoXochipilli said: we have i think almost always a dog eat dog mentality, not saying there has not been many examples of exactly what you are suggesting.
i think isolation itself lends to localized unique cultures but our knack for destroying all remnants of the subjugated populous identity is very historically regular among conquest. plunder and pillage and throw away the rest...
I don't know why but I always thought about them as being mostly "dumb" with a few very smart people. Now I think it's more likely there were some very smart ancient civilizations as a collective.
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ballsalsa
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Eggtimer]
#22105082 - 08/18/15 12:55 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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humans are no smarter now than 50,000 years ago. the only difference is the total accumulation of knowledge and and the pace of that accumulation.
think about this: Someone invented writing. its a pretty good thing too, because without it, humanity has to rely on oral tradition to pass knowledge from one generation to the next. In prehistoric times, people lived in relatively small groups and were relatively isolated. imagine that you are the first hunter-gatherer to invent writing. you live in a group of 30-60 people. you try to teach your idea to your tribe, but they don't really see the purpose. nevertheless you press on and actually teach 10% of your tribe to read and write. before you can meet some strangers and show them your new invention, early snows catch you unaware and your tribe is wiped out. how long before someone else in another place invents writing? how long before someone does it under conditions that allow the idea to spread? this is the pace of accumulation. obviously, the more people there are, and the greater their ability to communicate rapidly, the faster that pace must become. We aren't any smarter than cave men. We just have more people and greater communication technologies available through accident of birth.
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Shroomslip
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Eggtimer] 2
#22105088 - 08/18/15 12:59 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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I see a problem with this in the very opening of the quote

That right there is the Aztec (and others in the region) weapon of choice. There is nothing ignorant about it. It is designed for a very specific purpose, and that is to kill. This weapon is actually probably much more suited to killing than a traditional sword of the era. See that black shit? That's obsidian. It is so sharp they make scalpels out of it. In the right process, they can trump the more widely used metal ones. Even in basic shaping/crafting it is still extremely sharp.
There are other things to point towards their war like nature as well. I've been interested in Mesoamerican culture for quite a while now and have read or watched a good deal on it. I don't really feel like trying to come up with a bunch of examples to cite, but anyone who has actually looked into it will come to the pretty clear conclusion that they were driven heavily by war. Though it was usually meso empire vs meso empire.
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With my face against the floor I can’t see who knocked me out of the way. I don’t want to get back up but I have to so it might as well be today. Nothing appeals to me no one feels like me, I’m too busy being calm to disappear. I’m in no shape to be alone contrary to the shit that you might hear. You can't wake up, this is not a dream. You're part of a machine, you are not a human being With your face all made up, living on a screen. Low on self esteem, so you run on gasoline
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ballsalsa
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Shroomslip]
#22105102 - 08/18/15 01:07 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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i like the hawaiian version
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Eggtimer
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Shroomslip]
#22105107 - 08/18/15 01:09 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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How do you feel about the idea though? I got this from a very unreliable source. It's like batshit crazy but the idea sounded interesting. The idea being warring civilizations are fueled but materialism and non warring are more likely to be fueled by philosophy
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ballsalsa
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Eggtimer]
#22105115 - 08/18/15 01:12 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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I think that the point was that having civilizations in close contact automatically breeds materialism, competition, and war. One simply follows the next.
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ReposadoXochipilli
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: ballsalsa]
#22105116 - 08/18/15 01:12 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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emril style, bam
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Eggtimer
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: ballsalsa]
#22105123 - 08/18/15 01:17 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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Quote:
ballsalsa said: I think that the point was that having civilizations in close contact automatically breeds materialism, competition, and war. One simply follows the next.
Yeah this makes sense I guess I'm just really baked so it sounded like a good idea haha
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Shroomslip
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Eggtimer]
#22105148 - 08/18/15 01:35 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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It's not without some merit, but that's honestly looking at things as being far too black and white. The fact that materialism would drive people to war and philosophy wouldn't be as inducive to begin warring, is kind of an overly obvious observation. In simpler terms, "duh". People who put value on knowledge, have no real need for wealth. They only need to sustain and any civilization ran right, can sustain without war.
But saying materialism automatically leads to war, or that war only appears in those who are materialistic is just wrong. There are a lot of reasons behind it. For instance, and you can argue it was about wealth and power, but the Crusades were driven by religion, not materialism. Maybe at the very top levels it was materialistic, but a lot of the people who went to war over it, believed they were doing right by their religion and that is what drove them.
There are other issues with this philosophy though. It's simply looking at correlation and calling it causation. The Earth isn't infinite. Sooner or later war is going to become very popular. As civilizations grow they need more and more just to support it. So eventually there are going to be clashes. At that point, it's not materialism, it's survival. Most any living being is going to fight when their survival is put on the line. Animals fight each other all the time over territory, not because they're materialistic, but because their very survival depends on it. The only real difference between us and them in that aspect, is that we have the ability to amass/coordinate with huge armies and all agree that vast expanses is "all of ours" and fight over them together.
tl;dr, the argument is flawed from the beginning and demonstrates a lack of understanding on what war really is or what causes it.
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With my face against the floor I can’t see who knocked me out of the way. I don’t want to get back up but I have to so it might as well be today. Nothing appeals to me no one feels like me, I’m too busy being calm to disappear. I’m in no shape to be alone contrary to the shit that you might hear. You can't wake up, this is not a dream. You're part of a machine, you are not a human being With your face all made up, living on a screen. Low on self esteem, so you run on gasoline
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Eggtimer
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Re: Old Idea I had never heard put this way before [Re: Shroomslip]
#22105242 - 08/18/15 02:52 AM (8 years, 5 months ago) |
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Religion has become extremely materialistic and lost all spirituality. They only have faith because they're told their whole life to be a good person you have to have faith. Faith usually means you don't believe something but trust the word of others that it is real. Just look how materialistic most Christians are in the US. Have you ever been to a funeral where they're really happy because the dead person is with God now? They say well... I guess they are with God now. If they believed what they claimed you would think they might treat immragrents a little better
You can't make someone believe something as much as you can force someone to love you. Have you ever been in a relationship where you lost your love for someone but they still had it for you? You didn't end the relationship right away because you don't want to hurt them for the same reason people have faith in my opinion.
Of course this isn't every case but I think it's pretty common.
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