“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death;
And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
— Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1651
All cultures have founding myths. The Greeks believed that in the beginning there was only Chaos (a void). Then from the void sprang Gaea (Earth), Tartarus (the Underworld), and Eros (Love). Once Eros was present, Gaea and Chaos were able to procreate, and from them, everything known and unknown was made. These gods gave birth to other gods, who warred among themselves. Prometheus made humans out of mud, who came to life when Athena breathed upon them.
The Hebrews told a similar story: In the beginning god created the heavens and earth, but the earth was formless, “darkness was over the surface of the deep” and the spirit of god hovered over the waters. Then god said ‘let there be light’, and there was. He separated earth and water, made the plants, the animals, and finally man, to whom he gave dominion over all of nature, before sending him out in the world to work for his living.
What is our post-Christian culture’s creation story? We do have one — even (especially) the atheists among us. It goes like this:
In the beginning was nothing, and then came the big bang. The universe came into being as a swirling void, from which came galaxies, stars, and planets. Our solar system was created, and our earth, which was wracked by terrible volcanoes and earthquakes, but eventually cooled to become habitable. In the seas, primitive life formed, and over millions of years evolved through ever more complex forms of life, culminating with humans. But we were different from the other animals; we evolved consciousness and intellect. We tamed fire. We learned agriculture, and at that moment we entered ‘history’ — the last 10,000 years in which great civilizations have arisen.
Is this myth any more true than the Greek myth, or the Hebrew myth? It must be, right? After all, it’s based on science, and we’re rational people, and we all believe it.
But is it?
Our origin myth continues:
“Without man, the world was unfinished, was just nature, red in tooth and claw. It was in chaos, in a state of primeval anarchy. It needed someone to come in and straighten it out. Someone to put it in order. A ruler. A king. It needed man. The foundational story of [our] culture is: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
“But the world didn’t meekly submit to human rule ... the world defied him. What man built up, the wind and rain tore down. The fields he cleared for his crops and his villages, the jungle fought to reclaim. The seeds he sowed, the birds snatched away. The shoots he nurtured, the insects nibbled. The harvest he stored, the mice plundered. The animals he bred and fed, the wolves and foxes stole away. The mountains, the rivers, and the oceans stood in their places and would not make way for him. The earthquake, the flood, the hurricane, the blizzard, and the drought would not disappear at his command.
“The world would not meekly submit to man’s rule, so ... In order to make himself the ruler of the world, man first had to conquer it.”
And conquer it we did. Humans live in every conceivable environment the land on this planet has to offer, from deserts to tundras, equator to poles. We have done this not by adapting to the environment, as other animals do when they move into new areas, but by adapting the environment to us. We build homes, we divert and block rivers, we till fields — and we build great cities with transport networks that deliver mountains of food to our doors. If you live in one of the premier cities on the planet, you can have literally any food you care to think of, from any corner of the world, delivered to your door in any season.
There is little doubt that we have been not merely more successful in conquering the earth than any other species, but even than the humans of our own species that came before us in the 240,000 — 740,000 years (depending on estimates) before the agricultural revolution.
So why are we so miserable? Have we not won the war against nature, fulfilling our destiny? Could there be a flaw in the foundational myth?
Before anyone asks, I’m not for a moment claiming that the scientific explanation of how the material universe came about is not true. I’m sure it is. I believe in evolution. No, the part of the myth that I’m questioning is the part of the story that states: man is the culmination of evolution, and civilisation is the destiny of man — our preordained destiny, if you will (although that of course raises the question: preordained by whom?).
A cursory exploration of biology will tell you that the notion is fanciful. There are animals on the planet that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago and have lived, unchanged, through countless generations; did evolution ‘stop’ with those perfected forms? Are coelacanths (400 million years old) or jellyfish (700 million years old) or cyanobacteria (3.5 billion years old) the ‘pinnacle’ of evolution? Clearly not.
Why then, should we imagine that in our species, evolution has finally produced its greatest hit: one species to rule them all?
The answer is given by Daniel Quinn, author of the quoted section above, in his book Ishmael. In that book, he encourages the reader to step outside the worldview fostered by ‘Mother Culture’ — the foundational myth laid out above — and to look at human history in a different way.
He gives an alternative account of our history, one that goes something like this: there was a big bang, the material universe was created, galaxies and solar systems formed, our planet coalesced, life sprang forth, and species evolved. Human species emerged around three million years ago; homo sapiens around 500,000 years ago, and until 10,000 years ago, those humans — who were as fully human as we are — lived in the way all creatures do: in harmony with nature’s laws. That doesn’t mean they lived in a paradise; they were as subject to disease, famine and predation as any other species. But, like all evolutionarily successful species, they lived within the rules set by the community of life, never taking more than they needed.
Humans are a pretty successful species, evolutionarily speaking. By the time of the agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago, humans had already spread to nearly every continent on the planet; we formed millions of tribes each with their own cultures. And still, we all lived within the laws of nature, the circle of life… Until one tribe in the Fertile Crescent decided to do things a little differently. They decided that those laws of nature didn’t apply to them. Man wasn’t made to live within the community of life, they reasoned, rather, the planet and all its abundant life was made for man.
They began to bend nature to their own desires. Other tribes had engaged in basic forms of agriculture before, making sure that there was a little bit more of the foods they liked available for foraging, but they had never sought to out-compete their competitors. They simply took what they needed and moved on.
This tribe did things differently. They colonised land, cultivated the species they preferred, and drove off the competition (wolves and suchlike). They stored up more food than they required. This is Taker Society, so named because they (or rather, we — we are all Takers now) take their fate into their own hands, rather than leaving it in the hands of the gods — or the whims of chance, if you prefer.
As far as experiments in agriculture go, it was a raging success. More food led to more people, more people to more land colonisation, more land colonisation to more food surplus, and so on it went, until almost the whole of the planet did things the way that that one tribe first had. People started to trade their surpluses and to organise themselves into towns, then into city states, then into nations. By then, we were well into the realms of history. When tribes were encoutered who still did things the old way (The Leavers, who leave their fates to the gods), they were wiped out or subsumed. Agriculture was rapacious.
But matters evolve. What started off as an experiment in a different way of living took on a life of its own. People forgot that they had lived successfully within nature’s laws for countless generations. They developed a fear of uncertainty and of the danger of violent death. They came to believe that the life of prehistoric man had been “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.”
And as society grew, it became more complex. Whole mythologies sprang up to explain why man had been set over nature. Systems of governance arose to manage the food surpluses, and those in charge of the surplus lived in fabulous wealth (think of the Biblical Joseph, lording it over his brothers during the famine while riding in gold chariots). Philosophies such as those created during the enlightenment reassured us that history was moving us steadily forward to a future utopia, crafted through the creation of systems designed to keep nature (and man) in check. As technologies developed, those systems grew ever more complex, until, finally, we arrived at our current situation.
Here’s how Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein describe things as they now stand, in the introduction to their book A Hunter Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century:
The problems we face today are both more complex and simpler than experts make them seem. Depending on whom you’ve asked, you may have heard that we’re living in the best, most prosperous time in human history. You may have also heard that we are living through the worst and most dangerous time. You may not know which side to believe. What you do know is that you can’t seem to keep up.
The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society that is changing faster than we can accommodate is turning us into a people who cannot fend for ourselves.
Simply put, it’s killing us.
We are generating new problems at a new and accelerating rate, and it’s making us sick — physically, psychologically, socially, and environmentally. If we don’t figure out how to grapple with the problem of accelerating novelty, humanity will perish, a victim of its success.
Viewed from within the Mother Culture of Taker society, the problem seems baffling. If our destiny is to conquer the planet and create a paradise out of chaos, why do things seem to have gone so wrong? How can people be looking at the same picture and yet fail to agree on whether our times are the best or the worst? Which is it?
Step outside Mother Culture and the answer is obvious: it is the worst of times because it is the best. Our wild success in conquering the planet is the fatal flaw.
Here is Quinn again:
The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world—or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit—and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out—and we go on gobbling them up. It’s hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.
Only one thing can save us. We have to increase our mastery of the world. All this damage has come about through our conquest of the world, but we have to go on conquering it until our rule is absolute. Then, when we’re in complete control, everything will be fine. We’ll have fusion power. No pollution. We’ll turn the rain on and off. We’ll grow a bushel of wheat in a square centimeter. We’ll turn the oceans into farms. We’ll control the weather—no more hurricanes, no more tornadoes, no more droughts, no more untimely frosts. We’ll make the clouds release their water over the land instead of dumping it uselessly into the oceans. All the life processes of this planet will be where they belong—where the gods meant them to be—in our hands. And we’ll manipulate them the way a programmer manipulates a computer.
And that’s where it stands right now. We have to carry the conquest forward. And carrying it forward is either going to destroy the world or turn it into a paradise—into the paradise it was meant to be under human rule.
Does this seem familiar? It should — it’s the mission of the World Economic Forum, the UN, global governments, and transnational corporations writ large. It’s a philosophy that can be summed up in just one word: control. If we can just systemise everything and control it, right down to every grain of sand, then we can create of this poor, brutish world a paradise, as we were always destined to do.
But what goes up must come down. Just as a ball thrown high into the air is subject to the law of gravity, so all creatures are subject to the laws of nature that rule the community of life. Break those laws, and the price must be paid… eventually.
A Wheel Within A Wheel
They say that history never repeats but it rhymes.
The agricultural revolution brought more than just food surpluses. Arguably, the most important innovation our culture has ever witnessed came about directly because of that surplus, for along with plenty came people to manage that plenty, to make sure it was properly stored and dolled out at the right time to prevent famine (hello again, Joseph!). In short, along with grain surplus we got a manager class.
I’ve written before about Quinn’s theory of how the manager class arose, and of how they took full control of society, so I won’t repeat the story. You can read it here:
Rather, I want to skip forward 10,000 years, from the beginning of the story and ancient Mesopotamia to our own time and place at the end of it. A lot has happened in the intervening centuries, a lot of complexity has been built into the system, but at the most fundamental level, nothing has changed.
Read this account of the last 150 years or so to see what I mean:
Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place, occurring in parallel to and building on the industrial revolution. This was a revolution of mass and scale, which upended nearly every area of human activity and rapidly reorganized civilization, first in the West and then around the world: the limits of time and space produced by geography were swept away by new technologies of communication and transportation; greatly enlarged populations flowed into and swelled vast urban centers; masses of workers began to toil in huge factories, and then in offices, laboring through an endless paper trail trying to keep track of it all; [...] In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.
Rapidly accelerating in the 20th century, the managerial revolution soon began to instigate another transformation of society in the West: it gave birth to a new managerial elite. A new social class had arisen out of the growing scale and complexity of mass organizations as those organizations began to find that, in order to function, they had to rely on large numbers of people who possessed the necessary highly technical and specialized cognitive skills and knowledge, including new techniques of organizational planning and management at scale. Such people became the professional managerial class, which quickly expanded to meet the growing demand for their services. While the wealthy families of the old landed aristocratic elite at first continued to own many of these new mass organizations, they soon were no longer capable of operating them, as the traits that had long defined mastery of their role and status — land ownership, inherited warrior virtues, a classical liberal education, formal rhetoric, personal charisma, an extensive code of social manners, etc. — were no longer sufficient or relevant for doing so. This meant the managerial class soon captured de facto control of all the mass organizations of society.
[A] reckoning over which class now really constituted society’s ruling elite soon became inevitable. In some places the old aristocracy’s end was swift, and bloody. But in most of the West they were not eradicated but co-opted and absorbed [my emphasis], with the children of even the wealthiest aristocratic families eventually forced to themselves acquire an education in the same skills, ideas, and mannerisms as the managerial class in order to take on any prominent role, from CEO to politician, to philanthropist. Those who did not do so slowly faded into irrelevance. The managerial class had produced the managerial elite.
This managerial takeover was accelerated by what I call the managerial doom loop: the larger and more complex an organization grows, the exponentially more managers are needed; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power for the managers; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion, including by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucracy to take over ever more functions of the broader economy and society; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be educated, which requires more managers…
This is taken from an excellent Substack post by N. S. Lyons, titled The China Convergence, which explains in detail how it is that Western Democracies and Eastern Communism are converging on a totalitarian model of governance — but it’s also Quinn’s agricultural revolution replayed, simply with an increase in complexity.
What began as an agricultural land grab during the Agricultural Revolution was replayed as a social ‘land grab’ during the Industrial Revolution, was replayed yet again as a governance ‘land grab’ during the Managerial Revolution, and is being replayed yet again as a personal freedom grab in the 21st Century’s Digital Revolution.
And, just as the agricultural revolution required constant expansion to be maintained, so the managerial revolution demands constant expansion in bureaucracy to satiate an ever growing desire for order, which brings about the necessary displacement or subsumption of ‘outsider’ human populations even within geographical space previously conquered by the preceding revolution.
Here’s Lyon’s description of that process in our own time:
This did not mean, however, that the expansion of the new managerial order faced no resistance at all from the old order that it strangled. That previous order, which has been referred to by scholars of the managerial revolution as the bourgeois order, was represented not so much by the grande bourgeoisie (wealthy landed aristocrats and early capitalist industrialists) but by the petite bourgeoisie, or what could be described as the independent middle class. The entrepreneurial small business owner, the multi-generational family shop owners, the small-scale farmer or landlord; the community religious or private educator; even the relatively well-to-do local doctor: these and others like them formed the backbone of a large social and economic class that found itself existentially at odds with the interests of the managerial revolution. But, in contrast to what was originally predicted by Marxists, these bourgeoisie came to be mortally threatened not from below by the laboring, landless proletariat, but from above, by the new order of the managerial elite and their expanding legions of paper-pushing professional revolutionaries. The clash between these classes, as the managerial order steadily encroached on, dismantled, and subsumed more and more of the middle class bourgeois order and its traditional culture, and the increasingly desperate backlash this process generated from its remnants, would come to define much of the political drama of the West. That drama continues in various forms to this day.
The petite bourgeoisie, the kulaks, the middle class, call them what you will; in many ways life pre- management revolution mirrored the tribal living that preceded the agricultural revolution. Communities were small-scale and close-knit. Local burghers (wealthy businessmen who held senior positions in a town, such as mayor or town councillor), stand in for tribal leaders; doctors for shamen; midwives for, well, midwives.
In the shires, almost everyone farmed their own food and butchered their own meat, even if they also held other professions, just as everyone in a tribal community engages in hunting, foraging, and processing the finds and kills. Although the industrial revolution had already removed a vast proportion of the common people from the land, sending them into factories and cities, small community life was still common in Europe right up until the first half of the 20th Century, when technological advances gave way to industrial farming practices and the people were finally fully separated from the land.
It was only at that point that the agricultural revolution was, at long last, fully complete. Severed from the cadence of nature’s seasons and vicissitudes, the population became despondent yet restless, hedonistic yet depressed.
The War on Natural Man
So what exactly is this Taker culture that has given rise to all of this complexity, and has severed us from nature? Well, the millennia have decanted it to its current, purest form, that which Lyons describes as Managerial Ideology: “a formula that consists of several core beliefs, or what could be called core managerial values.”
They are:
1. Technocratic Scientism: The belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood and controlled through scientific and technical means. In this view everything consists of systems, which operate, as in a machine, on the basis of scientific laws that can be rationally derived through reason.
2. Utopianism: The belief that a perfect society is possible — in this case through the perfect application of perfect scientific and technical knowledge. The machine can ultimately be tuned to run flawlessly. At that point all will be completely provided for and therefore completely equal, and man himself will be entirely rational, fully free, and perfectly productive. This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. History now takes on moral valence; to “go backwards” is immoral.
3. Meliorism: The belief that all the flaws and conflicts of human society, and of human beings themselves, are problems that can and should be directly ameliorated by sufficient managerial technique.
4. Liberationism: The belief that individuals and society are held back from progress by the rules, restraints, relational bonds, historical communities, inherited traditions, and limiting institutions of the past.
5. Hedonistic Materialism: The belief that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally consists of and is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires.
6. Homogenizing Cosmopolitan Universalism: The belief that all human beings are fundamentally interchangeable and members of a single universal community.
7. Abstraction and Dematerialization: The belief, or more often the instinct, that abstract and virtual things are better than physical things, because the less tied to the messy physical world humans and their activities are, the more liberated and capable of pure intellectual rationality and uninhibited morality they will become.
All of these values reach their zenith in the creation of smart cities.
According to National Geographic:
A smart city is a city in which a suite of sensors (typically hundreds or thousands) is deployed to collect electronic data from and about people and infrastructure so as to improve efficiency and quality of life. Residents and city workers, in turn, may be provided with apps that allow them to access city services, receive and issue reports of outages, accidents, and crimes, pay taxes, fees, and the like. In the smart city, energy efficiency and sustainability are emphasized.
What this means in practice is that every single thing that makes up our modern world, from dustbins to fridges to lights to doorbells to us is to be tagged and tracked, connected to the internet through the Internet of Things, surveilled with countless cameras, logged by apps and fitted into a neatly organised, fully comprehensive schema that ensures complete conformity and — most importantly — efficiency at all times.
Nature, or rather, ‘the environment’ falls very much within the schema. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers has developed a “Plant Spike: A Low-Cost, Low-Power Beacon for Smart City Soil Health Monitoring” which could help “make cities more resilient to climate change and reduce their carbon footprint.”
In the Netherlands, “state-of-the-art IoT sensor technology as well as artificial intelligence (AI)” is being used to “collect soil, tree and bush health data that is compiled into easy-to-use dashboards” for use by groundskeepers.
And man in his original form, as a product of nature, must also be managed.
That particular project has in fact been underway for the last century, in both East and West, carried out Communists and Progressives alike. Lyons describes this procedure in great detail, in its manifestation as Communist “Thought Reform”…
Whether a targeted individual was guilty or innocent of anything, or even loyal or disloyal, was entirely irrelevant. Nor was the purpose to convince or persuade anyone. That was not the point. As one witness recorded after seeing an enthusiastically loyal CCP cadre mercilessly persecuted: “Only later did I perceive that the Communists had been fully aware of [his] loyalty to their cause and were equally conscious that after the ‘reform’ he was disaffected. They had succeeded, however, in terrorizing him so thoroughly that henceforth, regardless of what he thought, he spoke and acted during every waking moment exactly as the Communists wanted. In this state, the Communists felt safer and more secure about him.”
(Note here that the purpose is always to make the managerial elite feel “safer and more secure.” The elite, far more than the people, are acutely aware of the perpetual state of peril they are in, not (just) from the people below them, who might rise up to overthrow them at any moment, but more fundamentally from nature itself. Right from the very beginning, the Taker / Managerial project has been one of taking control to feel safer and more secure. It is, after all, deeply uncomfortable to live in a world in which plague could strike, or famine, or, if you’re a leader, violent revolution. Better to store up food, hoard up medicines, wear a mask, get jabbed, stay inside.)
… and also as the western “Therapeutic State”, which held that the old way of doing things was repressive and likely to foster fascism, as it had in Germany and Italy; the solution was to liberate people from their repression:
“The counter-culture revolution of the 1960s and its “anti-authoritarian” quest to “liberate” the self from restraints therefore served the managerial regime perfectly. It swiftly broke down traditional informal bonds of stable, resilient communities that had for centuries helped to shelter individuals, and tore up moral norms that had helped them structure and discipline their lives without the aid of the state. So liberated, the self-expressive individual was made a king in name, but left far more isolated, alone, and vulnerable in actuality. Such an atomized individual proved far easier pickings for the mass corporation, which swooped in to offer all manner of ready-to-purchase replacements for what was once the social commons, and for the state, which acted on demand to guarantee the sovereignty of these liberated selves and protect them from their own choices. Their capacity for self-governance thus degraded, and encouraged to think of themselves as reliant on the state for their freedom, the public’s demands for management by a higher authority then only increased relentlessly.”
Contrary to what the manager class and the world’s religions will tell you, man doesn’t need to be saved or perfected. We are not all born sinners, and there is no need for repentence. Nor are we machines to be run more efficiently. The world isn’t broken because we are broken. It is broken because we have rejected nature and ourselves as natural beings.
“There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people,” as Quinn puts it. “Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will act like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
The fear felt by the manager class is justified, in a way. It always has been, right back to Day One of this 10,000 year project. Nature is chaotic and unpredictable. A species of middling size and strength, such as our own, is both hunter and hunted. The snakes which haunt our dreams do exist. But it’s pathological to believe that the threat can be fully eradicated through taking total control, right down to the very last microbe in the soil. It’s clearly a folly, and yet that is the path our leaders have set us upon.
Their goal is nothing less than total domination of the planet and everyone on it. They want total control of your every thought and movement. They want to remake nature into a New Heaven and a New Earth, they want to build the New Jerusalem, and they want to turn you into a New Man. Only when that has been achieved, they believe, will the promised land be reached: at long last, they will finally be safe from nature, red in tooth and claw.
Reminds me of spending a year learning system analysis using SSADM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_systems_analysis_and_design_method
before I left the course realising this analytical tool was created to convert people into 'entities' to be slotted into a logical system ( think Tron) or simply eliminated.
If you know David Graeber, Donna, the author of the phrase "We are the 99%", an activist of the Occupy Wall Street movement, then you probably know his works. You may have missed the last one, since it came out only in 2021, after his untimely death in Sept 2020. It's called The Dawn: A New History of Humanity.