thi vidal
107 posts

thi vidal retweetledi

thi vidal retweetledi

Humans invented writing to track debts. The world's first writing system, cuneiform, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3200 BC to record who owed what to whom. Clay tokens for accounting date back as far as 8000 BC. Debt isn't some corruption of a golden age. It's so fundamental to human cooperation that we created literacy because of it.
War is even older. At Jebel Sahaba in Sudan, archaeologists found a cemetery dating to 13,000 years ago where half the people buried had been killed by arrows, spears, and clubs. That's thousands of years before the first city, the first farm, or the first written law.
And about that beautiful planet of trees and sunshine: for most of human history, roughly half of all children died before age 15. Researchers who studied 17 hunter-gatherer societies found an average child mortality rate of 49%. Even in Sweden in the 1750s, 40% of children didn't survive to 15. Today globally, it's about 4%. In Japan and Iceland, 0.4%.
The systems the tweet mourns are the same ones that changed those numbers. In 1820, roughly 84% of all humans lived in extreme poverty (per economic historians at the University of Paris). Today it's about 10%. Between 1990 and 2025, roughly 118,000 people escaped extreme poverty every single day.
None of this means that debt or capitalism are without serious flaws. They obviously are. But the "paradise ruined" framing gets the history backwards. The planet was a place where burying your children was normal, and violence was a constant threat. Everything that makes modern life livable was built, imperfectly, by humans figuring out how to cooperate at scale.
le.hl@0xleegenz
I can't believe human were gifted a planet with full of trees, fruit, water, animals and sunshine and then they invented debt, capitalism and war
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GRRM himself does that
𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒔𝒆@ofthehighstone
Whoever said people treat houses of westeros like harry potter houses was right
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