Tainari88 wrote:What the USA propaganda doesn't say is that Cubans don't really pay rents. So they are not used to the pressure that poses for producing a certain amount of income a month.
And it is both the pressure of trying to "make rent" (or "make car payments if you live in the suburbs, like 80% of North Americans) is what breaks people here more than any other negative feature of our system.
By having to work 40 or 50 hours a week, you have no time to develop a community or to interact freely with a network of friends. So if you fail economically for any reason, there is no community
to make everthing better again.
So things get worse, which forces you to work even harder, resort to crime, or just give up and take pain killers until you don't feel "the pressure" that the masters - especially mass media masters - keep throwing your way. Alone, broke, but importantly, with no access to the network of millions of people living within kilometers of your house.
Some Cubans I met (working in tourism) complained about not having certain consumer durables. But they certainly didn't complain about what they do have - that is,
the time to talk to foreigners about not having those non-essential consumer goods. And the well-developed communities to make those consumer durables relatively unnecessary.
Sivad wrote:I wonder if there was like a Qatz caveman way back in the day that was all like 'fuck fire, we used to all group spoon every night before some fucker invented this fire thing and now our society is all schadenfreuded up and shit' ?
I can't speak for fire here, but I can confirm your "Qatz pattern" when it comes to "longer spears" technology. Longer spears allowed "advanced" human bands to drive large mammals to extinction in a few continents.
This meant that a major source of food was hunted to extinction within a few generations of one single tech. And beyond their "human food value," these large mammals had ecological purposes that continue to haunt us in the present.
The extinction of such an important food source may have driven the first human genocides as well as disrupted the settlement patterns of several traumatized generations of humans.
(here is a short reading list if you're authentically interested in human survival)
SAPIENSA Short History of ProgressCivilized to Death