Reply #81: Imperialistic culture [View All]

[tama]

is hierarchic system that destroyes the carrying capacity of its natural environment so that it must expand and conquer more territory and carrying capacity to avoid collapse and stay functional. So, as it behaves like a cancer tumour, which gives a sound measure of the relative health of a culture. Cancer like imperialistic cultures that destroy natural carrying capacity are inherently suicidal in terms of evolutionary adaptation and thus unhealthy. Cultures that live sustainably and even find ways to increase the local carrying capacity are healthy in terms of evolutionary adaptation.

I'm not an expert, but I have no argument against the claim that some native american cultures have behaved imperialistically for some period of time in the enviromental and evolutionary sense described above. Most didn't and many found ways to increase the natural carrying capacity of their local ecosystem - e.g. "indian fires" of Californian forest garden.

The hypothesis that "the problem is a human one", not cultural, meaning that all humans and human cultures behave imperialistically, ie. destroy the carrying capacity of their ecosystems, gets falsified with even one counter example and cultural anthropology offers more than enough counter examples from all continents. The view that 'human nature' forces all human cultures without exception to destroy the carrying capacity of the ecosystem they belong to (biosphere of Earth in the final regard), is thus not only empirically untrue, it is also hopeless.