The Great Affluence Fallacy

[applegrove]

The Great Affluence Fallacy

by David Brooks at the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/09/opinion/the-great-affluence-fallacy.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region&_r=1

SNIP..............



Sometimes the Indians tried to forcibly return the colonials in a prisoner swap, and still the colonials refused to go. In one case, the Shawanese Indians were compelled to tie up some European women in order to ship them back. After they were returned, the women escaped the colonial towns and ran back to the Indians.

Even as late as 1782, the pattern was still going strong. Hector de Crèvecoeur wrote, “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those aborigines having from choice become European.”

I first read about this history several months ago in Sebastian Junger’s excellent book “Tribe.” It has haunted me since. It raises the possibility that our culture is built on some fundamental error about what makes people happy and fulfilled.

The native cultures were more communal. As Junger writes, “They would have practiced extremely close and involved child care. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.”


..............SNIP

[guillaumeb]

1. There is a reason for this:

The native cultures were more communal. As Junger writes, “They would have practiced extremely close and involved child care. And they would have done almost everything in the company of others. They would have almost never been alone.”

Humans are social animals that cannot exist for long alone. Unlike reptiles, mammals require a fairly long time to mature. But capitalism reduces people to consumers and competitors.

[Squinch]

2. There's also the fact that women had options. Many women who were captured

by the native people never wanted to come back because they had so much more autonomy and self-determnation.

Some of them were traded by the Indians to the French in Canada. Many of them refused to go home too because even in Canada, the options for women were vastly better than the options in the English colonies.

[Nitram]

5. This would have been particulalry true for indentured servants.

[Warpy]

3. When I was little and asked what I wanted to be when I grew up

I said "an Indian."

Like most kids in the 1950s, I was raised on a televised diet of cowboys n Indians in all sorts of flavors. The white women had to dress in long dresses, high button shoes, and corsets and they had to go to church on Sunday and work like rented mules the rest of the time and they never looked happy about any of it. The Indian women, poor extras with no lines most of the time, were dressed in short buckskin tunics and moccasins and looked really comfortable.

Had I been alive back then, I can easily see myself wandering far away from town and going "Hello, Sailor!" to the first native hunter I saw and hope he was horny enough to take me with him. No matter what the tribe threw at me, it would have been worth it to get out of that damned corset and skip being told I was damned to hell because I was a woman every Sunday. Being accepted as part of a strong community would have been the icing on the cake.

Of course none of the tribal people wanted to become Europeans. They had far better sense.

Nothing in this article is the least bit surprising, not even the swipe Brooks just had to take at Hillary Clinton without commenting on the appalling Trump family.

[niyad]

4. k and r

[shrike]

6. It was also easier to survive in Indian communities

The Indians had generations of experience. White colonists often starved or at least had a hard time feeding themselves. It made sense to go to an Indian community because your odds of survival would be better. Men often left and stayed with the Indians, too.