Page 149 - JOURNAL OF THE KRISHNAMURTI SCHOOLS

The Sweep of History … and Krishnamurti’s Challenge

whose gourd was half full and those whose gourd was half empty.
They lived without shops or bathrooms or cars. They hadn’t even
invented the wheel. Why would they? They had rivers and streams
to wash in and food in the jungle super-store all around them.
They shared everything, food, lovers and children. Their capacity
to damage their environment was limited, not by some inherent
respect for nature—they simply could not do much damage with
the tools available to them. Had their population increased we
would have a very different story.
There are many cultural features in these communities to be
admired. No two modern hunter-gatherer bands are identical, but
they treat everyone more or less the same. No one should be much
richer than anyone else or be much more politically powerful. Men
and women have roughly equal freedom to live how they think
best. People generally enjoyed good health, plenty of leisure time
and freedom from any form of government. They had fun. It was
wonderful to be in their company.
Then about 10,000 years ago hunter-gatherers started to settle
down and farm. We might note that Jared Diamond calls farm-
1
ing the worst mistake humans ever made, a catastrophe we never
recovered from. Well, there’s no going back; as we climbed the lad-
der of progress, we kicked out the rungs below.
The plough was the break-through invention that characterised
the farming age. Once the plough had been developed, farmers
were five or six times more productive than hunter gatherers; a
fifth of the population could feed everyone. The other four fifths
were freed up to cook, build houses, trade, smelt metal, weave, cre-
ate cities and establish armies to protect cities.
You need laws to deal with the problems that arise in a more
complex society. With laws came rulers and the ruled, masters
and servants. Women deferred to men. Very important people
appeared. Inequalities developed which were unheard of in hunter
gatherer communities.

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