Why are humans so self-destructive?

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Azazel

DUH! I am not talking about mesopotamia. I am talking about this land!

Bah, Judea is close enough to mesopotamia. I've always used the term to referance everything between the gulf and mediterranean.

Eitherway, spliting hairs about geography and semantics doesn't change matters any. The societies you are talking about where agricultural, and that's what matters.

I believe I used the phrase "progress and profit" earlier, and agriculture is what made both of those concepts possible. Before agriculture it was impossible to grow a surpluss of food and store it for hard times - ie. profit. And with agriculture, we where able to create permanent homes/cities, and further develope the surrounding land to increase our profit and compete with neigbouring societies (and, I might add, the olden-day equivelant of CEOs - landlords and chieftains - became increasingly wealthy while doing less and less work) - ie. 'progress'. This is what made the goal of exponential growth possible, and if you want to see what it was like before then, you have to look at nomadic hunter/gatherers.