I was thinking today that humans are still hunter gatherers. We are just more refined at hunter gathering. Even your teenager foraging your refrigerator is an aspect of hunting and gathering food. Last night we were watching an old Travolta movie, "Saturday Night Fever" and I realized just how much more the average person in the U.S. is refined and educated since that that film was made when I was 29. I remember growing up with people just like in the movie on the west coast. But instead of Brooklyn habits on the west coast we were surfers and car clubbers and we surfed and raced cars on the streets instead of being in a gang which was a more deep urban thing when I grew up. There were not gangs usually in the suburbs because life was safe enough to usually survive without dying without being in a gang when you were in your teens.
But the main difference between the 1950s through the 1980s is that people were just generally a lot more ignorant about a lot of things than now. This all began to change when young people(especially boys got a lot of bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees during the Viet Nam War in order to not die as a soldier or be maimed for life or have PTSD for life like many Viet Nam Veterans who still wander the streets talking to themselves today in their late 50s through 70s or above. And girls followed the boys into college because all the smartest and most eligible boys were in College so many of them got Bachelor's degrees and advanced degrees during this time and after also.
This getting of degrees was both useful and not useful to our nation as a whole. What it did was to make people more intellectually aware but less mechanically aware and capable of taking care of themselves properly in all situations. When I grew up a man was an adult starting at 15 to 18 years of age. This is less true today because of there not being jobs for most young men that age because of those jobs being gobbled up by 21 year olds to 30 year old during these times.
So, as a result of our upwardly mobile society we have become very top heavy with a whole lot of people who can think critically but with less and less mechanically skilled people who are actually capable of doing "ANYTHING" because of more all around skills. So, younger people have become "Pampered intellectuals" who put down the blue collar work ethics and pride in blue collar work and working with their hands even though that is needed by our society as well to keep on going. This is very unfortunate because that means that capable people will NOT choose blue collar work because they feel it is beneath them. But this is not useful for all young people to think this way but they do.
When I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s it was possible for a young man of 17 to support with a blue collar job like being a garbage man, carpenter, electrician, plumber, or any other trade up to 5 people easily. So many young men married and stayed married and raised their families starting at age 16 or 17 or 18. However, this is not longer always true in our society as it once was. So, until the world starts to make more sense again in regard to people being paid what they are worth instead of a sort of fantasy world in which we now live, life is going to continue to be confusing for more and more people.
At this point I'm not happy with the title I chose for this article but I can't think of a better one at present so until I do I'm going to leave it as it is for now.
However, I do believe that we are still basically hunter gatherers. We hunt for food in a store now mostly and then we gather it. Some of us are farmers but I believe it is now less than 3% of our population at present. Just 50 to 100 years ago it likely was in the neighborhood of 30% to 50% farmers still in order to feed our nation. But when gasoline and diesel came in and gas and diesel powered tractors became possible everything changed. But what is going to happen when the price of gas and diesel is too high to make it practical to buy gas and diesel and make a profit selling food for farmers? This is a question that might be true already in many countries and will eventually be true in the U.S. and Europe as well.
So, I guess what I'm really saying is that our present top heavy education system cannot be sustained with Gas and Diesel slowly becoming too expensive to buy. Even in the U.S., Canada and Europe we either switch to other energy sources or all the intellectual progress we have made might be for nothing if starvation and the inevitable resulting conflicts become too prevalent this century from the end of cheap oil all around the world.
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