"The Original Affluent Society"

God is NOT an Asshole:

"The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, surveying the data on contemporary hunter-gatherers, exploded the Hobbesian myth in an article entitled 'The Original Affluent Society.' They work a lot less than we do, and their work is hard to distinguish from what we regard as play. Sahlins concluded that 'hunters and gatherers work less than we do; and, rather than a continuous travail, the food quest is intemmittent, leisure abundant, and there is a greater amount of sleep in the daytime per capita per year than in any other condition of society.' They worked an average of four hours a day, assuming they were 'working' at all. Their 'labor,' as it appears to us, was skilled labor which exercised their physical and intellectual capacities; unskilled labor on any large scale, as Sahlins says, is impossible except under industrialism. Thus it satisfied Friedrich Schiller's definition of play, the only occasion on which man realizes his complete humanity by giving full 'play' to both sides of his twofold nature, thinking and feeling."