Bare Necessities

Among all groups of human beings, the hunter-gatherers were the ones who consumed less energy, i.e. food than any other human category. Each material needs people might have were in fact fully satisfied, perhaps because they were so few of them, merely just the need to eat. So, if we are willing to accept the idea that those hunters-gatherers were leading a happy, bountiful life would also imply that this great distance between the increasing human necessities and the means to satisfy them is in fact a tragedy of our civilized society.

There are two solutions to this gap. First would be to produce more, and the other to desire less. This latter would probably be the most effective, yet the direction in which we are going prevents us from assuming such a simple attitude. It's as if we are bound to want more, to produce more, to consume more, and to increase our necessities evermore. Industrial productivity could thus fill in for the modern days' human needs. Human needs are not infinite; they can only be finite, whereas the human technology is always improving. If they embrace this perspective, people may lower their life standard and enjoy a plentiful life. For instance, hunters used to consume all their game at once, lest it would deteriorate, and then they had to go hunting again.

Although he was regarded as a "fish-blooded bourgeois doctrinaire", Destutt de Tracy, still he managed to force Marx to believe that "in poor nations the people are comfortable", while in rich nations, "they are generally poor". "Mere subsistence economy", "limited leisure saves in exceptional circumstances", "incessant quest for food", "meager and relatively unreliable" resources of nature, "absence of an economic surplus", "maximum energy from a maximum number of people" this is the traditional anthropological view on hunting-gathering lifestyle.

Yet how come we have gone so far from our hunting-gathering ancestors, and got to this consumerist age? When there is so much being produced, we want the latest stuff, although we could easily survive without most of the things we buy. We toil each day to make money that we are likely to spend on some highly-advertised products that could make us feel smarter, civilized and hi-tech. Is this the right path, though? How can we escape poverty and famine in the world? Should we stop producing so much, and enjoy fewer things, in order for us to make life easier and more enjoyable, perhaps even longer? Well, on the other hand, should we really idealize the hunter's capacity to get all the food he needed, to rely completely on what nature provides? Or perhaps we are all coming from the seed of Jacob, the brother of Esau the hunter, who had sold his birthright for a cooked meal. Perhaps we're a bit of both Jacob and Esau, having given up our natural resources and skills to hunt and find food.

Present-day economy naturally thinks very poorly of these ancient, redundant hunters-gatherers. Yet there still are tribes living on our planet, and they preserve their initial lifestyle, unless modern world and civilization hasn't already "enriched" them with its blessed technological improvements, stealing in fact their natural resources and their birthright to rely on their very own resources to survive. To look for satisfying the bare necessities, would that help us "forget about our worries and our strives", as Baloo the lovely bear sings in Disney's Jungle Book?

At any rate, we certainly have plenty to choose from in this consumerist times. We have this so-called "embarrass du choix", as the French call it. So it's really difficult to make up our minds and pick up a certain product from all those that are available on the market. It all depends on what we need, and the problem is we don't know that anymore. We are so blinded these days that we can't tell the things we really need from those that are simply within our grasp, and therefore easy to acquire. Recession threatens not only the US economy, but also the whole world seems to fear it. In this context, going back to the "bare necessities in life", thus becoming aware of our true needs, could be a solution.