This view of prehistory is rooted in the Enlightenment-era philosophers, and does not really reflect what we’ve discovered archaeologically.
For example, the protocity of Çatalhöyük (c. 7000 BCE) was settled in a river valley, and populated by an egalitarian people who hunted and gathered while also using the natural flood cycle of the river to do much of their agricultural work for them. As far as we can tell, this settlement (about a thousand people) had no kings or rulers; no special buildings like temples or palaces for the thousands of years that it was inhabited.
There have been countless societies that made efforts to decentralize power, to “trap” would-be rulers in chiefdoms where their power is limited to how persuasive they can be or how much of their material wealth they can give away.
The Iroquois Confederacy was a matriarchal political system set up to disperse power from clan mothers down to various leaders and settle disputes through debate.
The reason the world is locked into the “strong man” era is that we’ve had our most basic human freedoms stripped away: the freedom to move away from a bad situation is our most fundamental right from which all of our others derive. The modern state restricts this, which limits our second fundamental human right: the right to say “no” to authority. And then, once the state has ability to control you with violence, we lose our last fundamental freedom: the right to remake our political systems.
It didn’t have to be this way; there’s nothing intrinsic about people that makes us want to be controlled. In fact, when we talk to and read writings from people who have always had these fundamental freedoms, they think our way of doing things is madness. Yes, there have likely always been raiders and bandits; but there has also always been an egalitarian streak in humanity.
This view of prehistory is rooted in the Enlightenment-era philosophers, and does not really reflect what we’ve discovered archaeologically.
For example, the protocity of Çatalhöyük (c. 7000 BCE) was settled in a river valley, and populated by an egalitarian people who hunted and gathered while also using the natural flood cycle of the river to do much of their agricultural work for them. As far as we can tell, this settlement (about a thousand people) had no kings or rulers; no special buildings like temples or palaces for the thousands of years that it was inhabited.
There have been countless societies that made efforts to decentralize power, to “trap” would-be rulers in chiefdoms where their power is limited to how persuasive they can be or how much of their material wealth they can give away.
The Iroquois Confederacy was a matriarchal political system set up to disperse power from clan mothers down to various leaders and settle disputes through debate.
The reason the world is locked into the “strong man” era is that we’ve had our most basic human freedoms stripped away: the freedom to move away from a bad situation is our most fundamental right from which all of our others derive. The modern state restricts this, which limits our second fundamental human right: the right to say “no” to authority. And then, once the state has ability to control you with violence, we lose our last fundamental freedom: the right to remake our political systems.
It didn’t have to be this way; there’s nothing intrinsic about people that makes us want to be controlled. In fact, when we talk to and read writings from people who have always had these fundamental freedoms, they think our way of doing things is madness. Yes, there have likely always been raiders and bandits; but there has also always been an egalitarian streak in humanity.
Well said!
This gives me hope for the future.