Were the people of the Andes very peaceful relative to the rest of the world, aside for the Incan conquest? Their culture and technology seemed completely agricultural while remaining very primitive in respect to warfare. If so, it sounds almost utopian... at least until the techno-barbarians came.
>>843263
Noble savage never existed.
Also they had no slavery. Without war they had no supply of slaves nor a need for metal weapons from mines worked by slaves.
>>843282
he might in the future though
>>843282
That's why I called Europeans barbarians.
>>843287
Work was compulsory, though.
Not actually slavery but people lacked individual freedom even to leave their ayllu unless they were nominated merchants. It was a very well organized society but by no means an Utopia, and it's not like incans were completely peaceful. They waged a couple wars.
>>843318
I don't see necessary public service almost exclusively serving the greater good such as the mita as evidence against the Andes being near utopian.
But what wars are you speaking of?
>>843332
The concept of "Utopia" usually revolves around people being free to go anywhere they want and work with whatever they want. If you lived in Inca, you couldn't really chose. Some authors say people who didn't want to do what they were told to in their ayllu were "enslaved", but I might be mistaking it with the Aztecs.
Btw, Inca expanded north (Chan Chan) through wars. They did eliminate nearby rivals who didn't want to join them.
>>843350
I was careful with my words. The Inca were peaceful before and after the Incan conquests. It wouldn't be much of an empire if it didn't conquer anything.
I said "near utopian", and I'd say forcing assholes to serve the community by building food storage such as qollqa that they themselves benefit from is far from a bad thing nor a evidence against it being near utopian. Your definition of utopia sounds nice and all but your complaint seems rooted in an obsession with individualism. Everyone had life, liberty, and happiness.
And let's not forget those assholes who complained about serving the community got 1.5 acres of FREE land to work off of, land provided to them because of previous generations of public service.
Compare the Andes to any other part of the world. Were any other people so productive and so peaceful?
>tfw descended from the Huancas, the guys who backstabbed the Incas
Top lel.
>>843263
Weren't the Chachapoyans, that culture with huge stone walls and circle huts exterminated by the Incas?
>>843401
Does that give you any virtue? How can you claim the actions of your ancestors?
>>843404
I just think it's funny.
>>843263
>Their culture and technology seemed completely agricultural while remaining very primitive in respect to warfare.
M8 the Incas had bronze weapons and armor. That alone puts them ahead to the vast majority of pre-columbian cultures in terms of warfare.
>>843392
They didn't "get land for free", though. There was not a thing such as private property in Inca, all production went to the ayllu or the Inca.
You can't ignore the fact people were forced to perform activities they didn't want to without even having the right to own what they produced. I'm not denying compulsory work was necessary - it's part of what made Inca a very well organized and advanced society and it was definitely the closest to being a "perfect" society if you compare it to pretty much any other.
I understand your point, but I would not consider a society based on forced labor "near utopian".
>>843392
There's no such thing as a utopia
>>843428
Weren't their weapons mostly clubs and slings and bronze weapons rather rare? They used bronze for field implements too, and obviously jewelry and stuff to.
The fact that they didn't use the Afro-Eurasian strategy of using slavery to mine lots of metal to create weapons with which to acquire more slaves and wealth may speak to the peacefulness of the region.
Interesting thread.
Where to read up on the topic?
>>843429
I want to stress that your complaint is rooted in a sense of individualism not shared by all.
Most of the production went straight to the people, as opposed to wealth mostly following and polling into the hands of an "elite". No one ordered you to kill and die so that the rich could get richer. The only wars they fought were against the harshness of the land.
>>843465
I'm definitely sympathetic with the Incas compared to the Spaniards or other comparable pre-columbian cultures like the Aztecs, but I think the lack of serious warfare was more pragmatism than anything else. After the Incas conquered the Chimu kingdom there really weren't really any serious threats to their sovereignty besides rebellions. And it's not like the Inca army was something the Inca civilization didn't invest a lot of effort into: at the height of the Inca empire their army is estimated to have been about 200,000 men. As for slavery, there really wouldn't be any need to enslave people when your society has a system under which everyone has compulsory labor and everything goes to the state.
>>843431
That's why I said "near utopia".
>>843531
>I think the lack of serious warfare was more pragmatism than anything else
Of course. It's hard to overpower your enemy with numbers alone in mountainous terrain. That's why the hills have always been refuges from civilization. But all of our actions are largely influenced by our environment. That's part of being human. Understanding why something happened doesn't mean we can't make value statements about it.
In every other civilization, a wealthy elite exploit the masses to service war machines for the purpose of increasing the scope and scale of exploitation, all to increase the wealth of those elite. This is a rather bleak lens to view civilization and I don't wholly subscribe to it, but it seems like the Inca were one of the greatest exceptions to this dynamic. This was largely due to the hostility of the Incan land requiring most labor to go to simply surviving and the mountainous terrain which made warfare difficult and unnecessary, but that doesn't mean it isn't respectable.
>>843575
>In every other civilization, a wealthy elite exploit the masses to service war machines for the purpose of increasing the scope and scale of exploitation, all to increase the wealth of those elite. This is a rather bleak lens to view civilization and I don't wholly subscribe to it, but it seems like the Inca were one of the greatest exceptions to this dynamic.
I don't think the Incas were that exceptional, actually. Maybe if your scope is limited to Eurasian history as interpreted by Marx they would seem really bizzare, but there were actually several peaceful cultures in Peru before the Incas, some of which seem to have been substantially more peaceful. For example, the Caral civilization, the oldest known in Peru, was a highly developed trade center that existed for over a thousand years with no archeological evidence of human sacrifice or warfare (unlike the Incas, who practiced both.)
>>843605
>during times of famine they fattened up a child and dressed them in fine clothes for months or years, led them to the top of a mountain, drugged them to reduce pain and reluctance, and sacrificed them via strangulation or a blow to the head
Definitely a good point against the Inca in particular being near utopian, but not against the argument about the lack of exploitation and warfare in the Andes.
>>843470
http://www.ancient.eu/search/?q=inca&sa.x=0&sa.y=0&sa=Search
>>843754
cool, thx buddy
>>843263
>Spanish techno-barbarians
If only Atahualpa was the greatest psyker to ever live.
>>843510
It does seem very akin to feudalism, which is far from preferable.
When you use flowery language for something, it's going to sound good. When you use negative language for something, it will sound bad. But either example seems very similar to European feudalism or American sharecropping. Both of these things are generally frowned upon. Though whether or not they're actually better isn't something I'm prepared to gripe about.
>>845697
>Oh King Pachacuti, truly do they call you earth shaker,
>>845697
Pic related is the real most powerful psyker to have ever lived.
>>845753
Dumbledore?
>>843392
Wasn't there child sacrifices of hopping kids up on drugs and sending them off to freeze to death in the mountains?
>>846439
Yes, the qhapac ucha and the itu were two major rituals that involved human sacrifice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qhapaq_hucha
The extent of the sacrifices is unknown because of gaps in the archaeological records. Chroniclers state that at most 1,000 - 4,000 people were sacrificed during these rituals, though those might be symbolic numbers.
Inca sacrifice revolved around "sending your best" to the gods. They would find the most beautiful people, dress them up in fine clothes, and then either kill them on the peaks or sacrifice them by strangling or cutting out the heart. Llamas and alpacas were also frequently sacrificed alongside humans.
>>843510
>I want to stress that your complaint is rooted in a sense of individualism not shared by all.
I don't think you're quite arguing that the Incas had a "utopian" society; I think you have some as-of-yet undefined picture in your mind of what you believe to be a "good" society, in which individualism plays little or no role, but people have their material needs largely provided for.
I think you might be interested in studying the aristocracy of the Incas, because there was certainly a high degree of individualism at the highest level, namely amongst those being the Inca by Blood, and to a lesser extent the Inca by Privilege.
Keep in mind that Atahualpa and Huascar were embroiled in a war of succession when the Spanish arrived, and it was more due to this inner turmoil that the Inca collapsed - a sign that perhaps the Incan society was not quite as utopian as you imagine.
They did have extremely advanced socialistic policies at the time, and performed extremely beneficial agricultural research (modern China was built off of the potato). The image you have in the OP is of an Incan research facility called Moray, where each level of the terrace had soil from different parts of the Empire. The theory is that they tested various growing conditions there, to see what crops grew best in various regions
>>843392
"Utopia" is subjective anon.
>>846554
>They did have extremely advanced socialistic policies at the time, and performed extremely beneficial agricultural research (modern China was built off of the potato). The image you have in the OP is of an Incan research facility called Moray, where each level of the terrace had soil from different parts of the Empire. The theory is that they tested various growing conditions there, to see what crops grew best in various regions
Christ. That is some next level shit. No wonder the Americas had so many amazing crops. They were early bronze age but they were a lot more advanced in other ways relative to Afro-Eurasia during the same metallurgical state.
>>846554
That's actually really cool. Most rhetoric is that natives are either noble dindus or utter degenerate savages with no real respect to any kind of social structure.
Where can I learn more about their agricultural buttfuckery?
>>843263
Not especially, no
the Moche were pretty violent, man
>>846899
>One of the most remarkable features of the site is the vast difference in temperature that exist between the top and the bottom reaches of the structure, which can be as much as 15°C. This large temperature difference created micro climates, similar to what is achieved in greenhouses in modern times, that was possibly used by the Inca to study the effects of different climatic conditions on crops.
>It is no coincidence that the temperature difference corresponds to the natural difference between coastal sea level farmland and Andean farming terraces 1,000 meters about sea level. Furthermore, pollen studies indicate that soils from different regions of the Inca empire was imported to each of the large circular terraces. It is now believed that the Moray terraces were used by Incan priest-scientists to experiment with vegetable crops to determine which should be disseminated for domestic production to farmers with fields all over the Andean region.
>Another enigma is the way in which drainage for water flowing through the aqueducts worked. The lowest level is perfectly drained and never gets flooded even after incessant rains. It is suggested that there must be underground channels built by the depressions' bottom allowing water to drain. It is also argued that the bottom is over a very porous natural rock formation that enables water filtering toward the earth's interior.
>We might never know why Moray was constructed, but the agricultural research station is a very likely possibility. Perhaps it is not surprising, since about 60 percent of the world’s food crops originated in the Andes, including hundreds of varieties of maize and thousands of potato varieties.
http://www.amusingplanet.com/2013/03/the-mysterious-moray-agricultural.html
>>846928
The more I read the more it seems like the Andean people deserve so much credit. They made such good use of the land despite the harsh climate. They were relatively peaceful. They organized themselves so efficiently. And now it turns out they were scientists without so much as a writing system beyond fucking string!
I think I might be an Incaboo.
>>846908
Terence d'Altroy's book (simply titled "The Incas") is quite good and goes into considerable detail about Incan society, including their farming techniques and equipment.
The logistics of the empire were fascinating; every part of the empire was connected by the Inca Road, which had storehouses spaced every 20 km - the rough distance a llama could walk in a day. The storehouses were filled with vast quantities of food, clothing, and equipment to meet any need, to provide each region around it with the necessities it required. You can still see the ruins of the vast enclosures that once stood around these storehouses, enclosures that would have housed herds of tens of thousands of animals as they were brought up and down the road. The state maintained enormous flocks of llamas and alpacas, with estimates that the ruler himself had over a million animals, with lesser lords having 50,000 or more.
They produced vast amounts of alcohol (chicha) and jewelry made of gold and precious stones. They made high quality clothing with llama and alpaca fibers. Their architecture was extremely durable and brilliantly constructed - and all cut and placed by hand, no less - with excellent drainage.
They kept records using quipus, which were small ropes covered with colored threads and knots; the color, size, and type of knot, as well as the distance between knots, conveyed numerical and possibly logographic information (words) as well. They also had the yupana, a kind of abacus used for making calculations. And their astronomical understanding was very advanced as well.
It was crazy how well-developed they were. The Spanish were blown away by the sheer scale of it all. The Inca did have their fair share of degeneracy and weirdness, which no doubt bothered the Europeans. And the Inca were very prone to war and expansionist violence, typically mobilizing each year during the off-season before the harvest
>>846991
Be an Andeanboo. The Inca were definitely highly advanced, but they rode in on the backs of thousands of years of history in the Andes. The altiplano was definitely harsh, and I think that's the very reason why we saw so much technological innovation come out of that region. It took some very smart and hard-working people to survive in that place.
The Inca demonstrated what those people could accomplish within a highly organized society. Determination is what led them to innovation, but it was the logistics of the Inca that made them truly great. Unfortunately with those logistics came an increasing need for expansionism, and more and more tribes came under their thrall as a result. 95-98% of the Incan population were not "Inca by Privilege", but rather were simply considered peasant citizens of the Empire. They lived in towns and villages throughout the Andes, and these were ordered into ayllu kin groups. The reason everything worked so well was because these little communities - which had been around long before the Inca ever took power - stressed self-reliance, balance of genders, and shared obligations.
The Incan Empire was pretty much the culmination of thousand of years of progress in the Andes, but don't forget that it was basically an imperial power. It subjugated all these people and brought them together for the purpose of glorifying the Inca (who was seen as a living God) and the Gods of the Inca. The people were cared for but it was their labor capital that was truly valued - the labor they provided for the state. The elites of those tribes became subservient to the Inca, their sons became orejones and were educated in the ways of the Inca, and their daughers became priestesses and chicha-makers of the Inca. It was a unifying ideology, ultimately designed to buoy the Incas by Blood who lived in utter splendor in Cuzco and constantly plotted to kill each other. The intrigues in the court of Cuzco were incredibly complex and bloody
here's a short PDF talking about whether the Incan Empire could be considered a socialistic state; it concludes that it was a sort of mix of socialistic and monarchistic elements
http://www.eiu.edu/historia/Harris.pdf
>>843332
>the greater good
>>847086
can you prove that stirner's anti-spook spook is better and more logical than all the other spooks? that's awfully dogmatic of you
>>847046
>Andeanboo
I wasn't sure which way I should word it. But yes, I'm definitely falling for the Andean people in general.
>>847092
What is a "spook" any way?
>>847098
My property
>>847092
>anti-spook
So you haven't actually read the source material
Hmm
>>847098
>Stirner proposes that most commonly accepted social institutions – including the notion of State, property as a right, natural rights in general, and the very notion of society – were mere illusions,"spooks" or ghosts in the mind.
>He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a "spook" and that "the individuals are its reality."
Basically, Stirner regarded any arbitration of mankind to be a spook - whether that is religion, gender roles, or any kind of "social construct". He had a materialist view of reality; however as a prototypical anarchistic philosopher he did not fully comprehend the subjective limitations of materialism, nor did he seem to grasp the contradiction of rejecting all other spooks on the basis of his own spook (that is, his philosophy). That is because he rejected all other modes of thinking as invalid, considering everything to be his property, or his "food" as it were, and that others had no right to impose their spooks upon him.
>>847124
>rejecting spooks
There you go again
>>847132
>>847120
schopenhauer was the previous /lit/ meme before stirner the autist, and while schopy too was an autist I liked his advice about not reading garbage
if you want to weasel out of Stirner's patent rejection of spooks then go ahead. However he clearly saw "spooks" as being objects to be overcome so that the self could form
>>847124
>>He sees no rationality in taking the interests of others into account unless doing so furthers one's self-interest, which he believes is the only legitimate reason for acting. He denies society as being an actual entity, calling society a "spook" and that "the individuals are its reality."
Well coming at this never having heard of his argument until a minute ago, I'm a materialist and I think there is a rational reason tolive for more than oneself. I'd argue that the "self" is more nebulous than just your beating heart. It is the sum of your genes and memes. That's why people will die for their children. That's why people will die for their country. They are being selfish by protecting their genes and memes.
Kind of off topic of the thread though. Thanks for the info!
>>847140
>rejection of spooks
I'm getting tired of this
>>847158
then present your argument instead of wasting your own time
stirner rejected spooks he didn't like and replaced them with ones he did, and called that the formation of the self. he had interesting ideas but he is by no means an authority from which anyone should seriously derive their worldview regarding society and the self
>>847164
Stirner does not present an 'ought', there is no prescriptive ideology here. All he presents is a descriptive view of the world and he himself acknowledges that adopting his ideas will probably lead to unhappiness.
If he's promoting anything it's awareness that ideas are just ideas. That's all.
>>847173
I can appreciate that to a degree, yet the Stirner meme seems to have a deliberately prescriptive ideology behind it
>>847189
therefore I now understand better Stirner's position, but do not quite understand why he is memed in the fashion that he is
>>847189
That's because making it prescriptive is a lot more fun
You're spooked as fuck anon! WooOoooOOooo
>>847193
fugg you spooked me
>>847152
thank you for your thoughts on the matter
>>847190
He is obscure
His philosophy is unfalsifiable
He can be used to justify any action
Who else better for anxious/depressed 18-25 year olds disappointed with life and others? Literally anything you do is the right thing and nobody can say otherwise.
>>847207
I might add
He can also be used to participate in any ideological discussion to act superior.
Such as this one!
>>847164
stirner rejects spooks that do not serve you, not spooks in general. he is fine with spooks as long as you don't submit yourself to them at the expense of yourself.
this is apparent to anyone who read even the first 1/4th of the book.
>>847217
And the drawing of him is so smug. It's perfect for being a dickass.
What does this Stirner guy have to say about empathy and the instinctual desire to help others at one's own expense?
>>847381
>Where the world comes in my way — and it comes in my way everywhere — I consume it to quiet the hunger of my egoism. For me you are nothing but — my food, even as I too am fed upon and turned to use by you. We have only one relation to each other, that of usableness, of utility, of use.
>>847381
As long as you arent doing it for spooks he doesent really care. If helping someone makes you honestly feel good go ahead.
>>843401
>backstabbed the Incas
>people are called the wankas
Fuck, with all this talk about based Andeans, I want to reinstall Civ V.
>>846554
>They did have extremely advanced socialistic policies at the time, and performed extremely beneficial agricultural research (modern China was built off of the potato). The image you have in the OP is of an Incan research facility called Moray, where each level of the terrace had soil from different parts of the Empire. The theory is that they tested various growing conditions there, to see what crops grew best in various regions
I can't get over how amazing it is that the Inca, a barely bronze age civilization, was doing such advanced shit.
>>843263
Didn't Pizarro literally show up in the middle of a civil war? Or shortly after one?
>>851496
Yeah, smallpox killed their king.
>>852000
I always found that funny. Disease traveled faster than the actual people that brought it. Same for horses.
>>852014
Also pigs. The conquistadors would have had a hard time foraging for food if not for the pigs the Spanish before them introduced to the Americas. The conquistadors benefited from food they were familiar with while pigs became a major nuisance to natives as they would dig up their fields and eat their crops.
I would start dumping my Andean ruins/reconstruction pic collection but I don't have it with me right now however.
As another annon already said, the Incas had just fought a bloody civil war, moron.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inca_Civil_War
>>854336
What is with all the angles? Did their high priests predict angled earthen walls are the best defense against large bronze boom cylinders?
>>854454
>best defense against large bronze cylinders
I'm not sure I follow m8.
Anyway, this is a side view of the same reconstruction.
>>843263
The Inca empire was highly centralized as it was a military state needed to maintain a large professional army and control the various kingdoms it had conquered in the 15th century.
>>855914
Canons, m8. I was talking about canons as they would be perceived by Andean people. Those earthen angled walls are exactly the best defense against canons.
>>856042
Well, it is considered to be a fortress or something along those lines.
There are actually some pretty cool recent documentaries made about the inca and one partly on the chimu civilization by the BBC recently.
I want this meme of the noble savage to die.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/11/131119-moche-human-sacrifice-war-victims-burials-archaeology-science/
http://users.ipfw.edu/sutterr/SutterCortez2005.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huaca_de_la_Luna
>>856694
The point is that it looks more like a fort meant to defend against canons instead of catapults and trebuchets, which didn't even exist in the Andes. It doesn't make sense.
