A strange realization overcame me today while I was taking a shower.
I was contemplating on how well the new shower head worked out for our family, making us fall in love again with the notion of taking a shower.
And I started thinking that I wanted to get another or two shower heads from the same brand name, given its proven quality. I said to myself I’d better get it now while they still make and retail it, because later I won’t be able to find it in stores.
Btw, did you ever notice how as soon as you find a product you enjoy, they stop making or selling it?! It’s as if someone decides which stuff gets made and which gets discontinued only that as of late, all the good useful stuff is abandoned and they make you buy cheap, broken and sad stuff.
It’s as if the powers that be want you, the consumer, to be despondent and feel bad and sad. And have no choice in the matter.
Remember the time when consumers used to dictate to the market what products got manufactured and supply and demand were as harmonious as a couple engaged in sexual congress?! It used to be consensual. But look at supply and demand now! It’s all BS they shove down your throat, while they shout at you “Enjoy!”
Those were the good times when we decided what we bought. Not others. Not government. Not corporations. Not the elites.
Something happened and now we are stuck operating in a society where the rules of the game are made outside our purview and control.
We have no agency any longer.
Government and corporations decide for us in all respects.
Somehow, we went from nomadic hunter-gatherers, organically democratic, whereby we used to mock our successful hunters bringing back the proverbial bacon, lest they become authoritarian and tyrannical, we went from that to this.
We used to shun any authoritarian tendencies back then. It was easier and quite straightforward. At the least exhibition of abuse from a hunter, the tribe would turn around and walk away from the would be dictator.
And that was more than sufficient to change anyone’s mind. Because going at it alone was, is and will always be, a death sentence. Social distancing and isolation is the killer of would be authoritarians and people, in general.
Around 8,000-10,000 years ago we started becoming sedentary farmers and coalescing into city-dwellers.
And that’s when power structures emerged whereby an individual or group of individuals gathered sufficient material wealth, which differentiated them from the rest of the community.
And that’s when these people starting behaving like potentates: issuing orders, enslaving other human beings, creating power pyramids that were not organic and thus, a social construct.
Power structures are artificial creations. They provide no advantage to the human race.
Remember this next time someone tells you people need structure, command and control, rules and regulations, or else they behave like animals.
If and when they do, tell them this. People have managed to live in bands, clans, tribes for a very long time. If we accept that Homo sapiens existed for the last 300,000 years, and if we were to adapt this timeline to the scale of one year, 25,000 years would fit inside a lunar month. Agriculture was adopted roughly 10,000 years ago or during the last 12 days or so of the human odyssey. Beforehand, for 11 months and 18 days, we were hunter-gatherers. As such, we banded together, bringing back the bacon to the hearth of the clan, tribe, extended family.
Sometimes, game was plenty, the hunt was good, and the daily pot received its share of meat. When a hunter stepped up to the plate, the tribe could eat. The social contract of those times dictated that the successful hunters share their spoils with everyone. No exceptions. This situation made some believe they earned special privileges and that, they could boss around other, less lucky fellow-hunters. When that happened, to their surprise, the entire tribe just upped and left them and their carcass in their back mirror. You cannot bloody lord it over a dissenting audience that just walks out on you. To add insult to injury, literally, many if not all tribes, as modern anthropology tells us by looking at modern tribes, many of our ancestors adopted another interesting approach to deal with successful hunters.
Again, this is the societal response to people who deliver the proverbial bacon home in a situation where that bacon ensures the survival of the tribe. Back then, there were no stores, depots, caches of food the tribe could tap into if all hunters returned home empty handed for longer than a few days. Starvation is a thing of the past now. But for 11 months and 18 days it was a normal Wednesday and maybe Thursday. If by Friday, no food was secured by the tribe, well let’s just say that anthropophagy wasn’t born yesterday. It was born in the depths of Time and was a component of humanity up until December 13.
People didn’t just decide to eat grandma all of a sudden. It happened when hunters and gatherers failed to hunt or gather anything for a stretch. If you think you got the munchies after a workout or a recreational ethnobotanic experience, think again. People are three square meals removed from their inner beast that made them into wolves towards other people. Literally.
Homo homini lupus est!
If no food was found in time, your buddy sitting next to you was going to do just fine on a bed of potatoes… that’s it if you were not on the menu yourself.
However, if a hunter returned dragging a carcass through the savannah, the tribe gave an inner sigh of relief, and then proceeded to overwhelm the lucky bloke with all the negative comments they could find in their repertoire. They criticized the size, condition, and state of the animal. They picked on how unlucky the tribe was to have such a poor hunter bring back such a lousy diminutive and wholly insufficient dinner.
Btw, that is exactly how I criticize my wife of these 20 years past, and how I used to complain back in my early formative days, when my mom and grandma used to cook for me. Somehow, I pulled this stunt organically without knowing that our ancestors did it all the time as naturally as kiss my hand, so to speak. I always remark the food is worthy of my palate but somehow it is quantitatively insufficient. Some things are atavistic, I guess. Including assholiness! Hahahaha
They basically trolled the man until the Sun went down, and the roast fire lit up the night sky. They did it throughout dinner, next morning, and for a few days thereafter. Each and every hunter got roasted each and every time they came back with fresh meat. Just as they were saving the tribe, their relatives, friends and neighbors, made sure not only that they stayed humble and modest. They ensured that not even an inkling of a shred of a thought would enter the lucky hunter’s mind that their prowess had anything to do with the survival of the tribe. Although it did and they had.
You see, folks, for the first 11 months and 18 days of the human story, nobody dared to dream that they were more than just contributing to the survival of the group, just as the group did its best to contribute to the survival of each individual it comprised of. Kids were born by their mothers, and raised, fed, nurtured, by all the women and taught how to hunt, cut a tool, survive in the bush by all men. The tribe was their mother and father. This is where the saying “It takes a village to raise a child” comes from.
Nobody had a chance to claim leadership of the clan, by any martial virtue or for any other reason. Humans are egalitarian because their survival is directly linked to cooperation. And cooperation doesn’t require leaders, chiefs, overseers, managers or directors. All these are artificial inventions that came later, much later.
If the entire human story took 12 lunar months, then it was sometime in mid-December that we discovered agriculture, and it was not until December 19 that we started to aggregate in greater numbers in sedentary fashion in the first cities.
By December 20, we started building big surpluses and hoarding the same against future droughts, etc., etc. It was then that these surpluses led to the private accumulation of wealth in the hands of a few. This is when we started to create the trappings of modern society including unnecessary power structures that made some of our ancestors into masters and others into slaves.
And this is where the entire concept of power becomes paradoxical. We crave power structures, claiming that there can be no civilized life outside them. But the same salutary power pyramids make us into slaves.
Once humans became sedentary and tied to the land, which by hard work could be coaxed into yielding food surpluses, they also accepted the yoke of materialism. They forwent the possibility of walking away with nothing from nothing, because now they had something to cling to, to hang on to.
Ownership makes one, paradoxically, into a slave.
Having stuff is the premise and necessary condition for the enslavement of humanity.
True Freedom requires Man to have Nothing they cannot walk away from in a second flat.
Material possessions are the basis of power structures, which are created to insure and ensure the private ownership. They were a power construct based on the premise that the rich man had the right to lord it over the non-rich people.
Then as now, this principle is the most single nefarious bit used by rich motherlovers everywhere to justify their sociopathic excesses.
In time, this was exacerbated until today, when billionaires believe they merit and deserve red carpet treatment just for existing. These rich pricks demand municipal authorities dismantle 500 year-old bridges so that their $500M yachts may dock next to their favorite coffee shops in downtown Amsterdam. Such nerve is unparalleled on the timescale of human happening.
I am not sure this counts as progress because to my mind, a Neanderthal or Homo sapiens from 100,000 years ago had more recourse in the face of authoritarianism and absolutism than we have today in this unjust but `civilized` world of ours.
P.S. This is not a rant against private wealth. This is a short foray into the timeline of our species and what we lost and gained to make it where we are today. I honestly believe that we do not require a power structure draining a large portion of our lives away to make sure that the social contract is kept intact. I think humans have the capacity to self-police and self-control that is necessary and sufficient to keep us safe while also protecting our own material assets.
Greed is human. But so is self-conservation.
Do we really need a master (Government) telling us what we can and cannot do?! Or do we just need to live and let live just like we’ve always done it, regardless of the local and distant potentates telling us otherwise? In the end, it is our rationality that allowed us to get here. Our ferocious, bestial nature, is a lesser driver by and large. It cannot be ignored but we cannot let our fear of fellow-man dictate our actions. The instinct to collaborate, to band together, to coalesce in larger clumps, to work in groups to solve problems is that which ensured the survival of our species. We did not choose to have Pharaohs and Kings, and Senates, and Police by instinct. We did all that by convention, by artifice, by design. And as always, we paid the price, as a species this time, for ignoring our gut feeling.
We allowed material wealth to undermine our basic will to and instinct to be Free and unencumbered by any physical chains, no matter how golden. This is where we went wrong. We thought we could not have both Freedom and Food Security. We imagined we had to give up one or the other. And in the process we lost both. But it turns out, we didn’t have to do either. We still don’t have to play it safe. We only need to keep doing what works. Working collaboratively with your neighbors, friends, colleagues – that is what works.
We better go back to basics if we want to survive because power structures are going to be the death of us else!
Götterdämmerung 