On the Farming of Humans

Do you wonder why people of all kinds in all places hate their jobs? 

Not everyone, of course, but most of us.  Even the ones that claim to love their jobs seem suspicious to me, like they are trying too hard to convince someone, perhaps themselves.

For three million years, give or take a few hundred thousand, there have been humans living quite nicely.  And none of them had jobs.  At least, not until the last ten thousand years or so.


3,000,000 divided into 10,000 is 1/300, or a third of a percent of the age of the human race.  For the last fraction of a percent of our time on this planet, humans got jobs.

Now I'm not the first person to think this up.  Most famously, Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael and several sequels, has pointed this out.  Prior to somewhere around ten thousand years ago, humans lived mostly in tribes of 50 to 150 people and used various combinations of hunting, gathering and small time agriculture to supply all their needs. 

Nobody had a job, though there was often some established division of labor.  Usually, but not always, men hunted and women gathered.  Old people made tools and looked after children  Life was nomadic; people went where the food was.  They worked about two to four hours a day, and short of the occasional lean times, had everything they needed.

Now this is very simplistic.  Tribal life today can often be very complex, and there's no reason to believe it was all that different a million years ago.  But the thing is, there are still hunter-gatherers today who are happier than the average person in more modern social groups.

So what happened?

Farming happened.  A nomad owns what he can carry.  Often, he can make whatever he can't hunt or gather.  There's no need to protect things, because you can always get or create more.  His worries are very clear.  Find the food.  Don't become food. 

Once you start farming, it all changes.  You put a lot of effort into a piece of land, over a long period.  You can't go wandering off.  Animals may eat your crops while you are not looking.  You start building fences and houses.  Since you don't have to carry all your possessions anymore, you become more attached to stuff.  You start comparing your stuff to other people's stuff.  Now theft is possible, because people have more stuff - and probable, because people want more stuff.  Starting to look more modern?

Who farms the farmers?

At some point, it becomes obvious that the real crop here is not carrots and corn.  It's labor.  It's people's lives.

I'm not the first person to think this one up either.  Stephan Molyneax has a great rant on this at Freedomain Radio.  His hardcore libertarian philosophy focuses it all on taxes, but isn't a long jump to see the broader sense of it in nearly all wage work, with or without government.

As the farms get bigger, the farmers have to pay people to work for them.  Or, buy slaves outright.  And as stuff gets more valuable, you need to protect it.  You pay people to guard stuff.  You pay overseers for the workers and slaves.  Other people think up all new kinds of stuff, and it needs manufacturing, warehousing, guarding.  All the while, the most valuable resource involved is people.

Fast forward a few thousand years, and only the types of stuff changes.  The system is the same.  People are still farming other people for their labor.  Now more of them work in warehouses and factories than food farms.  The guards have become aristocracies and governments. 

There is one big difference now.

In most of the world, there are no other options.  At least none that people are aware of, or are willing to try.  Even a few hundred years ago, if you didn't like working in a factory or on a farm, you could pick up an go. (assuming you were a rented slave rather than a fully owned one)  You could wander out into the wilderness and hunt, fish and farm, much like your distant ancestors.  But you can't do that now.  In most places, the land is already owned, or put off limits in some way.  You need permission to hunt and fish and camp.  And that's only the physical reality.

Much more insidious, is the way we have convinced ourselves that we could never do that.  Not only that, we could never take steps in that direction.  "Give up our shiny objects?  You must be crazy!"  And if we quit our job, there is an army of unemployed, ready to take that job and make you compete like gladiators for your next job.  There are those who do just quit being farmed.  We call them homeless.  Bums.

The farmers call us workers and consumers, because that is what is expected of us.  But it is WE who are consumed.  Of course we hate our jobs.  Of course our lives are boring.  We are no more than livestock.  We are crops, to be used up, and what's left, mulched.