Can you rebuild society from scratch if we are bombed back into the stone age?

Not in your lifetime. Any and all books covering all required knowledge would be gone so everything would have to be re-invented in order.

I can improve on the current design, actually. We made some terrible mistakes when we switched from hunter-gatherer to agrarian society. Starting tabula rasa would allow us to benefit from the knowledge of the harm that propertarianism causes. The baubles and trinkets of technological development are immaterial, and will come over time again and again, since the basic principles remain consistent. It’s the social arrangements which need to be reorganized from scratch, and I am extremely qualified, almost uniquely qualified, to teach ordinary people complex social arrangements even and especially if they have no prior understanding or interest.

@SmashTheState – that’s just what the world needs, a megalomaniac dictator. That’‘ll work well.

@talljasperman – no. because even assuming we had the collective smarts, rebuilding society would require generations upon generations

- assuming that “bombed back to the stone age” means nothing technological, no power, no gas, no tools other than rocks – we would have to reinvent all of these things with the resources that we had at hand, which would be previous few. There’s a reason why it too hundreds of years of scribes before the printing press was invented—stuff just didn’t exist. So we would literally take hundreds of years, dozens of generations, for that collective knowledge to reappear and for technical advances to recur.

- – emotions – even if we had the technical knowledge, an even bigger problem is memory, People still living would have the horrible memories of the bombing back to the stone age. There would be generations of profoundly depressed people. They’re unlikely to jump back enthusiastically into building things – it would take time to plan and organize, even assuming that wasn’t some megalomaniacal dictator to begin with.

But the real reason why this wouldn’t happen for hundreds of years: In this case, the world would once again be split into tribes. No unified government, no common vision. There would be tribal leaders that would want to make war on other tribes for advantage and for their women. You would see all of the various wars – Crusades, country against country, dictatorships, and so on, as society matured.

And there would certainly be some significant bunch of religious wackos who would try and peddle their own approach to society and to salvation.

Eventually, a thousand years into the future, there might be something that resembles the Magna Carta or the constitution.

Bottom line… rebuilding society could happen over time, but we have to measure time in the hundreds of years.

@elbanditoroso “megalomaniac dictator”

Dude, what does the name SmashTheState imply to you? I’m an anarchist. I’m the exact opposite of a “megalomaniac dictator.” I’ve also been a street-level community organizer for more than 25 years, working mostly with the homeless and destitute, using horizontal, non-hierarchical organizing techniques to empower people to defend their interests while forging social bonds of solidarity with others in similar circumstances to both increase the overall strength of the group and help grow the movement.

@Smashthestate
What were those mistakes?
As if somebody engineered a “switch” from hunter gatherer to agrarian, like Edison engineered a successful light bulb after several mistakes that burned up.
I was sort of disappointed to read that.

Or as I should have said @SmashTheState

Being bombed “back to the stone age” implies a total loss of collective knowledge and technology. There would be nothing that anyone could restore. Human civilization would be once again like an infant learning everything for the first time.

@elbanditoroso

How on Earth did you derive “megalomaniac dictator” from what @SmashTheState posted?

Something I shall quote from @SmashTheState

“I am extremely qualified, almost uniquely qualified, to teach ordinary people complex social arrangements even and especially if they have no prior understanding or interest.”

OK, perhaps he isn’t painting himself as megalomaniacal, but he is certainly painting himself as the single person who can be the leader of the next civilization. After all, he alone is “uniquely qualified”.

@elbanditoroso ” ...he is certainly painting himself as the single person who can be the leader of the next civilization”

No. No, I’m not. I am uniquely qualified because I’ve spent my entire adult life teaching people how to organize themselves for defence, mutual aid, and sustainable growth. And the people I teach are the absolute hardest to reach, and most have zero interest in politics or political science. That makes me almost uniquely qualified for teaching desperate, hungry survivors of the Apocalypse how to rebuild a just, equitable, and free society that is still able to protect itself. More importantly, I can and do also teach others to do the same thing I do.

@josie Studies of modern stone age tribes show hunter-gatherers spend an average of about 14 hours a week supporting themselves. The rest of their time is spent teaching, learning, making art, or playing. While per capita productivity has increased more than three-fold since the 1970s, our standard of living has actually decreased despite working longer and longer hours. In fact, average lifespans have started to drop again. All of that wealth, for which we are raping the resources of the entire planet, are going into the pockets of sociopathic robber baron billionaires. This is neither sustainable nor desirable.

Furthermore, it is agrarianism which created the blight of propertarianism. Prior to the rise of the agrarian society, humans were either anarchic or matriarchal. Property not only didn’t exist, it couldn’t exist. Food was available to everyone for the taking since it could not be stored, and continent-spanning gift economies formed the basis of trade in luxury items like handicrafts and tools. All that changed when it became necessary to protect seeds from season to season. When the matrilinial line is all that matters (as it did before agrarianism) any number of women can share a single desirable male and be sure of passing on their genes. But when you suddenly require strong warrior men to protect your “property,” then it becomes necessary to guarantee patrilinial lines of warrior men. For a man to be sure his genes will propagate, he needs exclusive access to a desirable woman. That woman therefore becomes chattel, property. And from there all the evils of society originate: slavery, oppression, greed, warfare, inequality, patriotism, and so forth.

I think it is entirely possible to rebuild from scratch without taking on the burden of propertarianism by using the benefit of hindsight to circumvent the mistakes of the past.

@elbanditoroso

Right. As well all know people never employ a bit of hyperbole. When @SmashTheState says he is “uniquely qualified” he literally means that he is the only single person on the planet with such experiences, and who could be up to that task. He’s literally saying there isn’t one other single person out of 7,000,000,000+ who could. It’s just him and him alone. Just like that little second-hand nick-knack shop down the street from me, called “Unique Antiques”, mean they are literally the only second-hand nick-knack shop on the planet, and you literally won’t find anything they have in stock anywhere else in the world.