I was reminded that in the nearby (and not ironically named) city of Fountain Valley CA. my green poop and otherwise colored pee along with millions of gallons of other people’s poop and pee along with whatever illegally flushed bio-hazardous waste or pesticides or performance enhancing or mind altering substances and so on and so forth is collected and turned into perfectly safe and high quality drinking water.

see here: http://www.gwrsystem.com

I’m sure the HG societies figured out how to bathe downstream, poop and pee even further downstream and drink the water from upstream.

I’m kind of wishing I had a stream right about now.

Everything else I found much more rewarding to read.

Sorry, you’re wrong. I could cite various sources of evidence for that, but instead I’ll just cite my own experience as a person who grew up in the western world (and lives there now) but who lived for a few years in a foraging society.

Second, the complexities of living in the western world is not concentrated in operating the microwave but on how to acquire (afford) the microwave and the piece of meat.

I think you think that shopping at Target is a lot more complex than it really is!

all societies will collapse at some point (including the hunter-gatherer ones). Disregarding this trivial point…

You speak out of a different orifice than your mouth. Can you name a foraging society that went extinct on it’s own? Can you name fifty? You’d need to be able to name at least a dozen to be even a tiny bit credible in making your generalizations.

And no, no one thinks that civilization collapsing is a … trivial point. That made me lol.

In referring to historical societies that have collapesed, we are not referring to those that are not historical. Obviously.

Furthermore, you seem to ignore all those HG societies that have collapsed during history, or wiped out by neighboring societies.

Name them. I.e., show that you have a clue about actual facts. Name the forager societies that went under because of their own internal workings.

I suspect that tossing in this last bit about those wiped out by neighboring societies was your brain tapping on your head and telling you that you were stepping off an intellectual cliff by blurting out facts that were utterly fundamental to your argument yet little more than something you just made up.

That, by the way, is sloppy. So now you know.

I previously noted that to survive as a Westerner, you can get away with participating in a culture that asks of you little more than to understand the “one minute” button on the microwave,…

First, what is get away? You definitely need more skills to survive in the western world (unless you are a newborn in which case you don’t even need the “one minute” button).
Second, the complexities of living in the western world is not concentrated in operating the microwave but on how to acquire (afford) the microwave and the piece of meat. That you chose to compare the most complex part of a process from one culture against the simplest part of the same process from a different culture is intellectually dishonest.

Complex societies, it turns out, have this little thing they do now and then, that they have always done, that no complex society has ever escaped:

They collapse.

Given enough time we’ll go extince so obviously all societies will collapse at some point (including the hunter-gatherer ones). Disregarding this trivial point, you seem to say that since all the societies that we know of have collasped (which btw, is obviously false, unless you believe US and Europe are not complex civilizations), then it follows that all the future complex civilizations will collapse as well; this is of course sloppy reasoning. Furthermore, you seem to ignore all those HG societies that have collapsed during history, or wiped out by neighboring societies.

There are some weak points in the comparisons (which many commenters seemed happy to seize on rather than see the overall picture); but I’m happy to see someone taunting the sacred cow of “progress”.

I don’t know if I feel it’s instinctive or cultural, but there is a firmly entrenched religion of technical and educational advancement; recycling the old tenets “You shall have no other god” and “Seek first these things and everything else shall be given you”.

The main message being proclaimed is that mental, moral, and social progress are automatically carried along by the momentum of our technical and intellectual achievements. But television has not eradicated racism, the information age and complex economic theories have not eliminated fraud or unemployment.

The author even goes a step beyond my normal objections by questioning whether we as individuals are even losing intellectual and technical progress in the momentum of societies advancement; questions that can properly be asked and addressed in a scientific context.

“”The guy who lazily pulls the Lean Cuisine out of the fridge and microwaves it can be a very non-complex person and survive in our society.””

Oh, the irony.

They collapse.”

Um, no. They are collapsed. The vast majority of ‘complex societies’ – and in this context, I’m guessing, you mean any agricultural society from Sumer on down – come to an end due to outside forces, ie, invasion, or internal struggle between leaders, ie, civil war. And if you think war is a trait unique to homo agricolis, or that HG societies don’t suffer from it, I have some coastal property in Florida you might be interested in.

“Civilizations are moments of self-congratulatory faux brightness against a background of dark. As in dark ages.”

Tremendously exaggerated, unless you use definitions of ‘dark ages’ involving human rights, standards of living, etc, so stringent that all of human society until the 19th century was living in a ‘dark age’.

I think the problem with complex societies is that increased complexity needs increased use of resources (including energy) to maintain and eventually those resources get used up in all the easy to access and cheap locations, resulting in a rise in costs as more distant and expensive sources need to be found and exploited to maintain the society. Eventually costs (money, labour, war, human life) gets high enough that it is impossible to maintain the society and it has to collapse.

I like to think its possible to both have societal complexity, and its accompanying stability, without exploitation. I don’t see anything, in principle, that would make such a society impossible.