Date: 01-07-2026
Tags: psychology growth integration
Source: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race - Jarod Diamond
Quote:
“There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants—wheat, rice, and corn—provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.)
Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed.
Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.)
Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp.
Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities.”
Thought:
It seems whenever there is a major leap of progress in terms of humanity coming together into larger and larger communities, there is alongside it some sort of plague. I think of the analogy in terms of psychological development and the thresholds we cross in our journey to more and more wholeness and integration. As we cross into this new threshold of globalization, we are encountering novel plagues (e.g. Coronavirus)…
“…Human cultural evolution [is] a story of growth, followed by crisis, followed by breakdown, followed by a renaissance: the emergence of a new kind of civilization, an Age of Reunion to follow the Age of Separation. Perhaps profound change happens only through collapse. Certainly that is true for many on a personal level.1”
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