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I really don't like breaking apart arguments, but I think this will be the only way I can satisfactorily respond
 Originally Posted by Jack Sawyer
isn't the for profit system that all things, including agriculture, are a part of what drives all that expansion?
Not quite. Most historians believe that agriculture came about due to the natural human tendency to experiment, but then after it was discovered it spread like wildfire due to its ability to raise ecological carrying capacity (people wouldn't starve, wouldn't have to control populations).
Agriculture itself is a massive ecological paradigm shift. This shift then directly promotes shifts in society. Agriculture is the backbone of all modernization, and without it every society would revert back to primitive tribal conditions. Things like economy, science, infrastructure, large populations, cities, etc, are all 100% dependent upon agriculture.
agriculture is not at fault, but rather the need for the individual (company or person) doing the agriculturing that slowly drives " for humans far exceeding ecological carrying capacity, far exceeding normal power concentrations, and bestowing misery upon populations which far exceeds misery in hunter/gatherer societies. "
What I'm referring to is entirely different. Like I said, agriculture creates a complete shift in how societies operate. It allows for massive growth and regional concentrations. "Jobs" did not, nor could they, exist before agriculture. But due to agriculture and the vast overabundance of food supply and the great decrease in daily work per capita, population levels naturally skyrocketed.
Also, the ecological shift in agriculture is unsustainable. It destroys soil, and there is no way around this. We've already destroyed a chunk of arable land in about 10k years, and the rate of destruction is currently far beyond what it has been for most of those 10k years. Eventually, people will be talking about peak agriculture the same way we're talking about peak oil
you want your profits to be ever increasing, everyone wants their profits to be ever increasing, unless you find robots who would work for you (and their maintenance bill to somehow magically not increase, so the mechanics and the parts shop should be in on the 0 inflation thing too) you need more money in the long term than you needed in the past to satisfy your basic need of sustenance.
Sure. Agriculture is much more fundamental than this though. It is, after all, that which provides for every bit of modern society. Without agriculture, greed is stymied before it achieves even remotely close to the levels that it sees through modernization. This is simply due to things like population levels and density, infrastructure, jobs, etc.
Look at it this way: it is because of agriculture that Josef Fritzl was able to do what he did. The amount of horribleness that he caused those people could not even have come remotely close to happening in a non-agriculture society. This goes for just about everything evil. Stalin, Mengele, the Civil War, the Black Plague, the Spanish Inquisition, North Korea, slavery, clinical insanity, Rwandan Genocide.....all these and everything else in any way similar to these could not have happened without agriculture. I don't think there is any one other thing that could have prevented these other than never discovering agriculture. You could argue that the problem comes from human emotions, but reality is that if you were to alter our genes to the point that we're no longer capable of such evil, our species would most likely no longer be capable of surviving in the first place.
Originally Posted by Pelion
Social structure is responsible for all of the misery you talk about.
Agriculture is what necessitates modern social structures. Business, organized religion, organized government, etc are not even possible without agriculture
Firstly, there is no global food shortage. Farmers are still paid to destroy crops to artificially keep prices high. Communities where people starve are always communities where people are incredibly poor, and in areas which were first ripped apart by colonialists, and have often had continual civil wars going on around them since. This isnt a food shortage. These people simply cannot afford to buy food.
This is in a way true. However, agriculture is what allows this corruption in the first place. If the entire globe were hunter/gatherer, war and oppression would be far smaller due to population limits, travel and communication limits, technological limits, etc
Secondly, Im pretty sure its true that world food supply is increasing faster than world population due to improvements in technology and infrustructure.
Yet it's all unsustainable. Agriculture ruins ecology. There may be a glut on the market now, but in a few thousand years there will not be. It may be possible to be agriculturally green, but that will create a negative feedback which will be fought by the more powerful positive feedback which has been essentially created by building civilization upon agriculture
Finally, What do you think keeps populations down in hunter gatherer societies? Dying of things our society can fix. Things like food shortages and curable diseases.
Well, it's more along the lines of population sizes being purposely kept below ecological carrying capacity within each tribe. This allowed for the tribes to not become wiped out or suffer tremendously during times of scarcity.
This doesn't hold true post-agriculture though. Mass starvation and mass disease are impossible without agriculture, and history started these things long before capitalism was ever a thing. And it's not just that more people exist therefore in times of scarcity more people are affected, but that the societal and environmental shifts created by agriculture exacerbated the problems. The Black Death is a superb example of this. Waaaaaaaaaaay more people died in that than would have in an equal population level of tribal societies simply due to how society and infrastructure revolved around agriculture, and that itself creating previously impossible health, sanitation, and distribution issues.
Agriculture allowed societies to grow, and then a million different factors contributed to this temporary fuckup that we call capitalism. Just because agriculture allowed the existence of societies which later developed the problems we see today does not mean that agriculture caused (or always will cause) those same problems. That's as silly as saying evolution caused all of humanities problems since without evolution there would be no humanity to have problems.
The analogy doesn't really fit. Agriculture is an aspect of humanity. It is something we do, something we base our lives in, but it is not something that inherently sustains us. Evolution, on the other hand, is something that sustains us, and isn't something we do or choose/have chosen
Also, it's not about agriculture *allowing* anything, but necessitating things. Agriculture doesn't 'allow' for massive population increase, it requires it, because if populations don't increase then agriculture would no longer provide much benefit. These population increases are then held in density due to necessity, and they also begin developing mass infrastructure and economies due to necessity. Plus, it's not like tribal society with an overabundance of supply has any choice but to increase population size. The reason for this could simply be that they don't have much else to do because they're not spending all their time looking for food, and so they gravitate towards the thing they do when supply is not a problem.
Every single thing modern that we have or think is due to agriculture. Name one thing that is very, very bad, and try to figure out how that thing could happen pre-agriculture. Hunter/gatherers do have things like murder and rape, but they don't have much of it, and they are not even remotely close to the systemic evils brought on by population density, technology, and the overabundance of population that has to find something to do other than what their genome evolved for.
The bottom line is that humans are not inherently good or bad. We're humans. But what agriculture has done has promoted a natural development of extremes in every direction. For example: prisons are amazingly fucking evil places, but not only could they not exist pre-agriculture, but they must necessarily exist post-agriculture. It's possible someday way in the super sci-fi future the destruction caused by agriculture will be eliminated, but that would be very far off indeed, and wouldn't delete any of the colossal misery necessarily a result of agriculture of previous generations.
FWIW, while I'm not sure if there is a concensus opinion on something so speculative as 'if you had to choose the worst thing, what would it be', but as far as I've seen, agriculture is usually the leading candidate among scientists and historians
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