Greetings. I’ve been scrolling through the forums and decided to start a thread right here—perhaps there is enough material for an entire sub-forum, given the sheer volume of lies and scams we encounter daily in our own circles. First and foremost, how does one actually protect themselves from fraud? Is there any specific entity tasked with defending the interests of those targeted by deception—an organization that truly protects individual rights? Let’s set the police aside for a moment; their primary mandate is maintaining public order and safety, so they often lack both the specialized resources and the time to deal with such isolated incidents. The judicial system is notoriously slow and bogged down; I suspect if I had posted this question there, I would have received nothing but a lecture on standard procedures that are far too expensive, and frankly, they might even mock me for asking something so seemingly trivial. My actual question is this: how do you confront people who peddle fake honey? Recently, I visited a local farmer's market, hoping to find some high-quality honey to help with a cold—which, unfortunately, eventually escalated into something much more serious. I purchased a jar from an elderly man, thinking it was chestnut honey; I was initially surprised when he didn't give me the item on display, but instead pulled something from his "reserve." I paid $33 for that jar of supposed "honey." It has been in my system for about ten days now, and I would bet anything that it isn't honey at all. It doesn't crystallize the way real honey should—according to my later research online—instead, it flows like a thin liquid, and every time I take a spoonful, it feels incredibly watery. Essentially, for $33, you receive health problems instead of a jar of wellness. And this happened at a public market, from people who should arguably be the last line of defense for the community—people whom one would expect to show at least a modicum of honor and dignity based on their age and experience, yet instead, they cheat, deceive, and exploit at every turn. Do we really live in such a wretched society where finding a shred of justice and truth is impossible?
I’m essentially arguing that we could—quite frankly—replace this entire class of people with computers that actually possess a functional IQ. Once you do that, you'll finally realize that this whole crowd of interlopers is completely redundant—and you'd be able to clearly distinguish what actually matters from the absolute noise.
You’re missing the point entirely—this isn't the moment to get lost in philosophical debates about causes or searching for excuses; we need to take a hard, realistic look at the situation exactly as it stands right now. We aren't a fully realized Western capitalist society in the truest sense of the term.
Listen, everyone—what is actually going on with these prices lately? Everything has become multiple times more expensive, and frankly, I don't even know where to begin my analysis. Food, utilities, gas, private services—it’s all hitting us at once. Why shouldn't private citizens demand that we strip away all these government impositions on our economy and trade, leaving only healthcare and social security intact? My focus is primarily directed at the entire tax structure—specifically the layers of management, bookkeeping, and accounting bureaucracy. In my view, that is a parasitic class—especially when it comes to those who constantly preach about Western values while draining the productive sectors of our country.
And why couldn't a single rocket from Ukraine just fly in the opposite direction for once? Honestly—they've really pushed it too far lately with this constant daily shelling of civilian areas.
I honestly can't say for certain what their endgame is here. From the perspective of the Kremlin, though—and this is just my take—it’s possible they might actually be setting their sights on that nuclear facility.
The Americans will likely throw some kind of psychological curveball at the loser once this war finally wraps up—just to make sure they feel the sting of defeat even after the fighting stops.
To me, the current state of affairs on a global scale is a clear sign that we are losing our grip on control. It feels as though politicians might no longer possess the capacity to truly lead their nations on the world stage—especially if this conflict were to escalate into a full-blown global struggle.
That said, I don't actually think we'll see a total escalation; instead, I suspect we’ll spend the next few months simply witnessing the meat grinder of Ukrainian lives. It will be a slow, relatively quiet tragedy—the steady suffering and death of a nation—while the European Union offers its sympathies through mere phone calls.
Sandra Murphy33 said:It always irritates me slightly when someone starts to debate—that is, presenting an argument using specific language and concepts—only to suddenly take a pseudo-religious leap into "intuition" and "ineffable truths" because they don't know how to develop their point further.😵 If you can't fully articulate something, then don't start in the first place; that seems like the only logical and honest approach to me. I am not imposing anything on you; I am simply asking how, within a materialist paradigm, you believe the freedom mentioned by John is possible—specifically, a type of freedom that can only exist if everyone is treated equally.
I am relying on pure physics here: enslaving someone disrupts the freedom of the enslaver, because their own freedom is reduced by the material obligation of caring for the enslaved. Anyway, I’m not imputing anything to you; I’m just asking.
There you go; you actually managed to use words to explain how those who infringe upon another's freedom simultaneously undermine their own. The difference is that those who practice enslavement don't perceive it the way you do. They don't feel the weight of power over others as a burden. Anyone who actually viewed power as a burden would abandon it immediately (and there have been such people). The reality is that in the materialist paradigm we live in—where we view ourselves as separate entities driven by the goal of physical survival—it is impossible for one group or individual to respect the freedom of another toward whom they feel no obligation or responsibility.
I want to emphasize that second paragraph. This is something that genuinely gets under my skin—I can't quite tell if what you've provided is meant to be an explanation, a personal stance, or merely a theory you're describing as we talk, but these are thoughts that a wild animal—say, a tiger—would express with equal clarity if it possessed the gift of human speech.
That is precisely part of what haunts me—something that develops within a person and has absolutely nothing to do with humanity or being civilized, even before this whole discussion even began.
It is something entirely primal and raw, which manages to find its way into the modern world, persisting even through our most complex linguistic terminology.
At the end of the day, just because something is printed on a piece of paper and stamped by an official doesn't mean much—it’s a cold comfort, really. There are so many rights out there that if you actually sat down to list them all, you'd probably hit at least three hundred; yet, the ones that truly matter by their very nature tend to get overshadowed, and they can be violated quite easily without anyone even blinking.
jedrilicar@ I haven't actually spent much time digging through theoretical texts—honestly, almost none—aside from those first couple of years in college before I decided to walk away from philosophy and sociology. I have read a handful of novels, though, and Jean-Paul Sartre remains my absolute favorite because he manages to be perfectly lucid and genuinely engaging at the same time.
ruggedraven36 said:Anyone who thinks you can grow your own freedom at the expense of someone else's clearly doesn't have a clue what liberty actually means. Advancing our understanding of freedom goes hand-in-hand with understanding equality. It’s baked right into the first article of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen: "Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good."
I wasn't presenting that as my own personal opinion, but rather as a historical fact which I was attempting to explain through logic. That entire document wouldn't even have been necessary if the circumstances I described hadn't already existed.
From every conceivable angle, early humans possessed far more freedom than we do today. It strikes me that as our collective consciousness evolved, we actually achieved the exact opposite—the individual expanded their own autonomy by encroaching upon the liberty of others.
Furthermore, if freedom is truly regarded as a core ideal within any serious, rational intellectual circle, why on earth haven't we developed a practical system to support it? Why does everyone continue to cluster together in these suffocating, smog-filled cities—places where you can barely find enough oxygen to breathe—while mindlessly chanting about "liberty" like some sort of hollow mantra?
Real freedom was an urgent necessity back when actual slavery existed, because under those conditions, true mental development was impossible. Today, we have every opportunity to cultivate our minds, yet we still exist within a different kind of bondage—the endless grind of the 9-to-5, where our entire mental capacity is consumed by the trivial task of managing pennies.
What does "freedom" even mean to people living like that? To them, it’s nothing more than empty rhetoric and hollow ideals. They tie it to notions of rights and equality, which ultimately serve as a smokescreen for the same old story: providing the perfect cover for more organized, more efficient tyrants than ever before.
Sam Martinez9 said:Everything that lives eventually dies, so death wasn't just stalking humans; it was stalking every living thing. Death is an inevitability for any biological entity.
If the fear of death is what drove humans to develop consciousness, then every single form of life—from the very first prehistoric bacteria onward—should have developed consciousness as well.
Scientists claim that at one point, the population of Homo sapiens dropped to perhaps only 2,000 individuals, bringing us to the brink of extinction. That is just one specific moment in our extensive history; everything else Harar writes about follows that timeline.
The same author and the same book will impact different people in different ways. I simply wrote down what struck me. If you're interested and it fits the topic, I'd love for you to go into more detail about what resonated with you.
That's obvious.
However, looking at your second point, I'd like to offer a slight correction—I would argue that it was precisely because of death that humans developed consciousness. Perhaps that's the fundamental trait that sets us apart from every other biological entity on the planet.
Sam Martinez9 said:Everything that lives eventually dies, so death wasn't just stalking humans; it was stalking every living thing. Death is an inevitability for any biological entity.
If the fear of death is what drove humans to develop consciousness, then every single form of life—from the very first prehistoric bacteria onward—should have developed consciousness as well.
Scientists claim that at one point, the population of Homo sapiens dropped to perhaps only 2,000 individuals, bringing us to the brink of extinction. That is just one specific moment in our extensive history; everything else Harar writes about follows that timeline.
The same author and the same book will impact different people in different ways. I simply wrote down what struck me. If you're interested and it fits the topic, I'd love for you to go into more detail about what resonated with you.
It seems we were truly on the verge of vanishing. Why do you think that happened, and how? Furthermore—and this is a bit of a heavy question—is it better that we survived, or would it have been better if the predators that once fed on us had remained in control?
Is it actually possible that our genes carry the lasting imprints of old traumas and deep-seated fears—residual echoes that continue to shape and dictate how we behave even today?
Sam Martinez9 said:I'm not entirely sure what you're getting at specifically; I've actually read and bought all three of Harrian's books. In *Sapiens*, he develops a few key themes. First, he argues that humans are inherently genocidal toward other species—essentially, our rule is to wipe out whatever else is in our path. He provides plenty of evidence for this, ranging from Australia to Europe, describing various animals that thrived until humans arrived and subsequently vanished. That part is hard to dispute. We talk about species extinction being caused by human activity today, yet we often forget that this has been our pattern since our very beginning. It challenges the idea that climate change was the primary driver of past extinctions, because it's quite obvious that species disappeared precisely when humans showed up. You see this most clearly on islands and in places like Australia. Places like Australia and New Zealand had completely different flora and fauna before humans set foot there.
The second and third theses involve the necessity of large populations and connectivity for the development of human society—specifically, the ability to communicate and exchange ideas among as many people as possible. He claims that the interconnectedness of the Eurasian continent allowed the people living there to advance much faster than those in the Americas or Africa. The American continents and Africa were simply less conducive to the movement of people and the exchange of ideas, plants, and animals compared to the Eurasian continent, which is why Native Americans and African Americans progressed more slowly than European Americans and Asian Americans.
To me, his theories are quite intuitive. If the human population were to drop to a small number, we wouldn't even be able to maintain what we've built so far, let alone create anything new.
So, for philosophy and the other products of advanced civilizations to exist, you need cooperation among a vast number of people. I want to emphasize that: cooperation, not war.
But what does the author actually mean by this? When discussing history, he points out that *Homo sapiens* likely faced near-extinction roughly 40,000 years ago. Given how many millennia we've supposedly been around, I find it entirely plausible that we hit those kinds of breaking points. All these years we've occupied this planet have essentially been one long, continuous struggle—a constant fight against predators, scavengers, and whatever else was trying to take us out.
It would have been quite easy for that "I am" to emerge from a simple realization of "he/she is not." Back then, death was a constant shadow lurking around every corner—and if those beings were even remotely similar to us today, they absolutely had to develop that fundamental sense of consciousness to survive.
That is precisely my assumption, and frankly, I find it staggering to think that this state persisted for tens of thousands of years before any semblance of "progress" began—though, looking back, that supposed "progress" was most often jeopardized by the most trivial of circumstances.
There isn’t much point in overanalyzing prehistory, if you ask me. Roughly 100,000 years of our civilization—all that history—is essentially worth about as much as a passing breeze.
The era was defined by an overwhelming amount of suffering and sheer futility—enough, frankly, that a modern person living a life of peace and quiet should feel nothing but gratitude.
But then again, that assumes we actually get to live in peace and quiet. It assumes people are actually out there working the land and raising livestock.
Instead, we have these modernists—these globalists. They undergo systematic training just to master new buzzwords, learning how to bill more, how to mask their scams, and how to consolidate power. It all stems from the exact same gutter of human nature—just as someone 60,000 years ago might have killed another person just to rip off a leg and eat it like a chicken drumstick, or committed an act of sexual violence.
There are plenty of cavemen left in this world today, and they are doing just fine. As for your "quiet"—you can let it simmer on a low flame for all I care.
If people were truly as they are today back then... it would mean the entire history of mankind is nothing more than endless suffering. I realize that we were dropped into this world without ever giving our consent—that where we are now, and where we have been, is purely accidental. And yet, by some strange stroke of luck, the world is beautiful. I can vividly imagine that same world as it was 100,000 years ago. The scents, the crisp air, that warmth someone once mentioned, the colors; it’s all so deeply alluring to me. So, even though we ended up here by chance, perhaps we actually wanted to be here after all.
But we weren't prepared for famine, or danger, or the biting cold—and what else? What has been holding us back from then until now? If we were to start philosophizing from prehistory, could we find some kind of cornerstone—some new maxim for living—that would still hold value in the modern day?
Or perhaps we can't, simply because we refuse to? Because we were attacked, so we struck back; because we were hungry, so we turned on one another; because, more often than not, we were driven by raw, primal passions—passions that, in some measure, still drive us today?
Furthermore, the practice of raising livestock and tilling the earth proved to be, in every sense, a lifelong way of life. So, I ask you: at what point did we, as a civilization, decide to push that aside? At what point did we shift toward an education system designed to turn young people into professional killers, soldiers, or absolute rulers? You might argue that these questions belong to other disciplines, but I am asking: how much has actually changed since prehistoric times? In the fundamental human spirit?
Greetings—I originally opened this thread over in the "History" section, but I didn't have much luck there. Aside from a few dry facts, I wasn't particularly satisfied with the responses I received. The reality is that prehistory is essentially shrouded in mystery; because there is no written record to lean on, we are largely left with nothing but speculation. That is precisely what draws me in—the opportunity to exercise a bit of imagination within that context. Perhaps we might uncover some hidden, buried truth, much like stumbling upon a treasure chest. And it doesn't necessarily have to be gold; regardless, I would love to see it found. __________________________________________________ ____________________:
Something has been weighing on my mind lately. I caught myself falling down a Google rabbit hole reading about *Homo erectus*, and I found myself intrigued by the fact that they lived 200,000 years ago before eventually going extinct.
It’s a lot to process. I studied history back in high school, though I wasn't truly grasping the sheer scale of it all at the time. If we are looking at 200,000 years ago, and considering we are now in 2022—plus perhaps another 5,600 years since the dawn of civilization—we have a massive gap. What happened during those other 192,000 years? Are there any historical facts or specific studies regarding that era? What other subspecies, similar to *Homo erectus*, existed and subsequently vanished?
I am not strictly looking for hard facts; I would actually like to allow ourselves some room for speculation. I am fascinated by questions like: how many times were we on the precipice of progress, only to regress as a species? How many times throughout history was fire sparked, only to flicker out again? What were our greatest obstacles—assuming we had met our basic needs for warmth and food—who was our most formidable enemy? And what was it like to face those predators hand-to-hand in the early days? Which animals were we actually fighting?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Could it be argued that *Homo sapiens* were somewhat rational 50,000 years ago, or at least driven by emotion? To say that we existed for 300,000 years—the final link in an evolutionary chain stretching back two billion years—only to finally stumble upon agriculture and animal domestication in the last 10,000 years... it feels a bit demoralizing for humanity, doesn't it?
If we have been around for roughly 100,000 to 150,000 years, there must have been culture, cave paintings, and a distinct sense of aesthetics. There must have been emotion, but surely there was also rational behavior—especially if they were hunting effectively. I realize language wouldn't have been fully developed—meaning a limited vocabulary made communication difficult, even when dealing with tribal hostilities—and, unfortunately, cannibalism was likely a reality.
But as you all suggest, we and they were biologically and physically similar. Could we say we were mentally similar as well? At least on a fundamental level—enough to conclude, "this is good," "this is wrong," or "this is necessary." Given all these circumstances, I find it hard to accept the thesis that we only turned to agriculture and domestication in the last 10,000 years.
Regarding the use of fire, some sources suggest it was being used 300,000 years ago, while others claim even longer. Initially, it might have been accidental—occurring during elemental storms—but later, it became a deliberate effort. This is where meat began to be cooked, which undoubtedly relieved some of our primal savagery and provided a sense of peace.
That is essentially what interests me: those small details, the nuances that helped us advance or caused us to regress as a species. Like a moment where fire might have spontaneously ignited, only to die out. One time, we cook meat and find peace, warmth, and protection from predators. But when the flame dies, do we simply return to the darkness?
Culture must have existed; I am curious about what propelled it forward or held it back. Animals—the larger ones certainly posed a problem. Especially the big cats. And which ones were the good ones—the ones we first befriended?