Throughout history society has collapsed over and over again either by mismanagement or by overthrow of the ruling class. It’s a natural cycle that we seem to be moving away from- Revolt has been mischaracterized and criminalized in an attempt to maintain the status quo. But things weren’t always like this. edit: I’m not advocating for anything, just stating some observations
Years ago - I believe in one of Dostoyevsky’s novels, but I haven’t been able to run it down - I read a wonderful allegory on this topic.
The basic gist of it, told nowhere near as well as it was originally:
Once upon a time, there was a peaceful village of farmers. They went through their days, tending their fields and caring for their livestock and each other and simply living.
Every few years though, a group of bandits would ride down out of the nearby hills and attack tge village and take all they could carry of the farmers’ crops and livestock.
Then one year, an entirely different group of bandits rode down from a different part of the hills, and they attacked the village and took everything.
So when, a few months later, the customary bandits rode down to attack, they found the village already devastated and everything they would’ve stolen already gone.
The bandits knew they couldn’t allow that - they depended on their theft of the villagers’ goods for their own livelihood. So they went back to their camp and, over a hard winter, thought about what to do.
The next spring - long before the harvest, so long before their customary attack on the villagers, they rode down and they approached the village elders with a proposal.
Instead of attacking the villagers and taking everything, they would settle for just taking half of everything, and in exchange they would protect the villagers from being attacked by those other bandits and having everything taken.
And the villagers, with no other hope - being allowed to keep hslf of the fruits of their labors was at least better than losing everything - grudgingly agreed.
And thus was government born.
Changing the title of the article isn’t helpful
IMO the title I used better reflected the author’s primary message … in his own words. It was TheGuardian which mis-directed it. Lemmy chose to run that blurb, I have no control over that (and when it does so, it’s often discouraging).
‘Self-termination’ was a stupid choice. I didn’t get a chance to see that or modify it when I clicked on ‘Preview’. Lemmy would be better if it would offer that choice and allow the poster to reject it. It’s rather authoritarian that way.
~~Definitely a better fit for
[email protected] ~~Edit: nevermind, its a quote from the author, not a creative reinterpretation by OP.
The impulse to follow big strong loud dangerous people is baked into the our tribal psyche since before we were homo sapiens
The bandits never had to come from outside, they were already the tribal ruling class
The idea of ‘a peaceful village of farmers just growing stuff’ is a very bad shorthand for how complex the tapestry of human culture has been
The first agriculture workers were likely captured slaves
So it’s more accurate to say: A bunch of bandits kidnapped other people and forced them to tend land, leaving the bandits the time and resources to get better at kidnapping, over time the slaves started becoming ambivalent and eventually respecting and in some cases worshiping the bandits that had kidnapped their grandparents, after enough generations are born under the yoke of servitude, it becomes just daily life
Its an allegory. We aint teaching a class on anthropology over here.
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.
