31. The Myth of Reform
32. The Myth of Meaning
33. The Myth of Eternal Necessity
a. A Brief Account ofthe Future
b. Anarchism at the End of the World
c. Afterword
i. Preface to the Series:
The Revolutionary’s Paradox
scentate [sɛnteɪt]
vb not being able to work out whether the problem comes from oneself, or whether it comes from the situation
is your sadness the terrible truth and your happiness a mask, or is your happiness the profound reality of your life and your sadness just a selfish episode? Is your difficult relationship with your lover causing you to be unhappy, or is your unhappiness making the relationship difficult? Is it your train that is leaving the station, or another train you can see moving through the window? Is it you, or is it the world?
On the one hand it is impossible to change your personal life — how you (and others) feel, perceive, think and act — unless the institutions which shape and subordinate your life also change. No matter how spiritually enlightened, cheerful, generous or creative you may be, if you have to live in the towns and cities of the world, go to its schools, travel its roads, eat its food, work in its factories and offices, use its hospitals and courts, not only can you do very little with personal or psychological freedom, it is eroded, cheapened and co-opted by its presence in the system. On the other hand it is useless to change the world while people remain essentially fearful, confused, violent and selfish. Not that people are essentially bad; but anxiety, insensitivity, cruelty and egoism are nearly always successful at resisting the healthy, the natural, the convivial and the fair. You don’t need a sociologist, a psychologist, a historian or an anthropologist to tell you that men and women are exceptionally good at making a prison out of their freedom.
This is the revolutionary’s paradox; a classic case of scentation. Is the problem out there, or is it in here? Do I change the world, or change myself? People tend to resolve this problem (if they are aware of it at all) by coming down on one side or the other. A prototypical world-changer — a committed socialist perhaps — might say that mysticism, psychotherapy, psychedelic drug use, even art — are kind of frivolous, self-indulgent; at best of private, personal value or even, in the service of socialism, of collective use; but, in the end, we’ll never really be happy until society has changed, until it allows us to express ourselves freely, cooperate creatively and reach our full potential. Until then we’ll always be frustrated. A prototypical self-changer — a hippy, let’s say, in the original sense, or a mystic — might say that faffing about with democracy, riots, unions, activism or revolt changes, essentially, next to nothing. The same groupthink prevails in radical organisations, the same bitchiness, the same dull scripts, the same debilitating compromise and the end results are always, essentially, the same. Changing the world without first changing your mind is the quintessence of futility and doomed to failure.
Taken as a whole these two books, 33 Myths of the System and 33 Myths of the Ego, make the case that both positions are wrong, and both are correct. Until the dissident uncovers the radical reality of his personal life he will never change the world. Until the mystic uncovers the radical reality of social life she will never change her self. To perceive personality and society as they are is no easy matter though. They are stupendously difficult to experience directly; to understand how humans created and continue create the world is like trying to understand a camera by peering at a photograph.
In a book like this, we can, of course, only look at ‘photographs’. My intention is to arrange them in such a way that the mechanism which produces them is seen more clearly, and in the seeing, a better camera comes into play.
ii. Foreword to 33 Myths of the System
The system has been ten thousand years in the making. During that time it has taken many localised forms — autocratic, democratic, socialist, capitalist — but despite superficial variations in structure and priorities, it has remained the same entity. It is now so sophisticated, so pervasive and so invasive, that it is almost impossible to perceive. We may know that something is very wrong with the world we have made, but it reaches so deeply into our experience that when it comes under radical criticism, we defend and excuse it as an extension of our own selves. The myths of the world are our own, and to expose them is to expose ourselves. Even, as we shall see, to read the words ‘the system’ can be enough to provoke discomfort, the sense of being under attack, or the feeling that the person using the term is an angry or immature misfit.
Chances are though you are aware that something is dreadfully wrong, that the world increasingly resembles hell on earth, that it is rapidly cracking up and that we need a revolutionary alternative. This book is an endeavour to strengthen this insight and to deepen it; to show that the problem is far worse (and, by implication, the solution) is far more radical than is currently and commonly supposed.
Although brief, I have attempted to outline the entire system; which means that some of what follows may seem obvious and quite right, and some not at all obvious; or dead wrong. Many people have a tendency to complain about the State of the World, but to keep one part of it — the part they are most dependent on — immune to criticism; this is the part I urge you to look for, and to have patience with those chapters that you are sympathetic to or familiar with.
One final note. This book is largely based on the idea that there is no fundamental difference between the left and the right. I criticise both, and in order to do so I occasionally draw on leftist critique of the right, and vice versa. This does not mean that I support any other ideas, much less the entire philosophy, of the authors I quote or reference (or the publications they write for), with the possible exception of Snufkin.
iii. A Brief History of the System
Our society resembles the ultimate machine which I once saw in a New York toy shop. It was a metal casket which, when you touched a switch, snapped open to reveal a mechanical hand. Chromed fingers reached out for the lid, pulled it down, and locked it from the inside. It was a box; you expected to be able to take something out of it; yet all it contained was a mechanism for closing the cover.
Ivan Illich
For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived well in peaceful, egalitarian, healthy societies, at the very least in comparison with what followed. We did not work particularly hard and the work itself (if it could be called work; pre-civilised societies don’t make distinctions between work and play), was enjoyable, meaningful and non-alienating. Activity is alienating if it makes you feel a stranger, or alien, to your own better nature, if you are forced to do it for someone else’s profit, for example, or for no good reason, or if you don’t feel ‘at home’ with its results. For most of human history (actually pre-history — properly speaking history begins with civilisation and writing) alienating work and ways of life were unknown; coercion and futility were inconceivable, as were property, religion, law, warfare, a great deal of superstition and what we could call ‘mental illness’. The fear of immediacy, when the senses sharpen to deal with danger in the present, was part of life — because there has always been danger — but fear of tomorrow, the profound and widespread care, anxiety, and worry that modern men and women are burdened with, was unknown.
Objectively it is impossible to know all this directly — but then it is impossible to know anything directly through study. Nevertheless, we can make some reasonably reliable inferences about our pre-historic past, just as we can about the surface of the sun or the outcome of climate change. Anthropologists can objectively assess what early people were like from studying soil, bones, tools and other archaeological remains, all of which indicate how early people lived, how violent they were, how healthy, how socially stratified and even what kind of universe they conceived themselves to be in.
Anthropologists can also objectively, albeit approximately, determine the earliest state of mankind by looking at how hunter-gatherers live today. Nobody believes that foragers today are the same as those who lived twenty-thousand years ago; groups which have had no contact with the modern industrial world or with the pre-modern agricultural world no longer exist to study, but those which, at least until recently, survived relatively independently all shared the attributes listed above. Naturally there is an enormous amount of variation in hunter-gatherer societies — far more than in any other kind of society — but generally the further away from civilisation, in time or space, the more egalitarianism, freedom and well-being, both psychological and social.1
There still remains, of course, a vast, impenetrable void at the heart of our objective knowledge of the distant past. We will never know, objectively, how people lived, felt and perceived for the countless dark millennia before civilisation appeared, blindingly over-lit. But if objective knowledge is notoriously limited and unreliable in matters that touch on human nature, where else are we to gain understanding from? Subjective knowledge is even more unreliable — plain deceptive in fact; it often amounts to little more than wishful thinking and emotional guesswork.
That there might be another mode of experience, an awareness of life that is neither objective — based on objects ‘out there’ — nor subjective — based on ideas and emotions ‘in here,’ is ruled out by the science, psychology, history, religion and art of the system and, with a language which inevitably reflects its and our concerns, almost impossible to express in ordinary speech. This panjective mode of experience forms the foundation of the companion volume, 33 Myths of the Ego. For now it is enough to note that there is a way we can penetrate human nature without recourse to either rational analysis or guesswork, but this mode of awareness is not available to either wishful thinkers or hyper-rationalists.
The freedom and happiness of early society doesn’t mean there weren’t problems — pain, frustration, hardship, danger and [increasing] violence — nor does it mean that we should up sticks and return to the trees. It means that what we call ‘progress’ has been, in terms of quality of life, peace of mind, collective joy and so on, a millennial decline. A few things certainly have improved — technique mostly — but these are almost entirely solutions to problems caused by ‘progress’.
This ‘progress’ began around twelve thousand years ago, when a catastrophe occurred in human consciousness and, consequently, in human society. Again, the nature of this catastrophe, or fall, is laid out in the 33 Myths of the Ego; here we shall confine ourselves to the demonstrable effects; social stratification, violence towards women and children, hostility towards nature, warfare, fear of death, superstition, shame, sexual suppression and extreme cultural mediocrity, all of which first appeared at the same time (around 10,000 bc) and in the same place (the Middle East / West Asia) with the beginning of the process we call history, civilisation or the system.
The civilised system began with intense superstition; the belief that ideas — in particular gods and ancestors — were more real than reality. Prior to the superstitious world-view, the universe was intimately experienced as benevolent, alive and mysterious. This life inhered in certain kinds of things — trees, clouds, rivers, animals and so on — as qualities, or characters, which were then integrated into myths. These stories mirrored the psychological experience of people, or of groups of people, in much the same way as dreams do; indirectly, metaphorically and strangely.
With the coming of the superstitious era these living qualities, and the myths by which they were shared, became objectified; which is to say cut off from fluid, contextual experience and integrated into an abstract mythic system, or [proto] religion. They also became saturated with extremely crude emotions; revolving around sex, violence and, the foundation of superstition, existential fear. Men and women had always been afraid of dangerous things in existence, but now they became fearful of existence itself, which became separated into two spheres; the reassuring, controllable known (the ideas and emotions of the self, ‘me and mine’) and its opposite, a disturbing-terrifying spectrum which ranged from the unknown (foreign people, new situations, etc.) to the unknowable (death, consciousness, nature, etc.).
The existential anxiety of superstition led, via the coercive absurdities of superstitious shamanism, to the intense abstraction of priests and early [proto] scientists. Prior to 12,000 bc man had thought and reasoned, but now his thoughts began to take on a life of their own, began to seem more real and more important than reality, which now began to be shaped by the structure of thought. It was around this time that a series of interconnected events occurred which were to define the future of the world.
Cereals2 were domesticated and incorporated into new agricultural societies (in the Middle East).
Related to the rise of the cultivation of cereals, which are, uniquely, easy to tax (‘visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable and rationable’), small, hierarchical and centrally-managed states began to grow in the Middle East, which experienced population explosions.3
Larger urban areas and more intensive agriculture led to catastrophic deforestation and even more catastrophic soil erosion, which led to the successive failure of the various states of classical civilisation, and to the climate of the near-east becoming drier and more hostile to human society.4
Writing was invented, in Sumer and Egypt, followed by the Phoenician alphabet, the principle use of which, for thousands of years, was bookkeeping; recording taxation and debt.
Work became overwhelmingly unpleasant — intensely specialised, monotonous and managed. Diseases (such as flu, tb, diphtheria, smallpox, plague and typhus) became, through contact with domesticated animals, common.5 Life span dramatically declined6 as did height and general health.
Finally, and perhaps most significantly, aggressive male ‘sun gods’ began to appear in the pantheons of the Middle East (in Egypt and then Judea) which were conceived as being the lords or kings of other gods.
These events took millennia to unfold, spread and integrate with each other, but by the time we reach the third millennium bc the Bronze-age near-east resembled the modern world in every crucial respect. Mesopotamia, for example, was a place of widespread misery, constant warfare, ludicrous superstition, mediocre art, useful science, wasteful over-production, artificial scarcity, massive inequality (the ‘original 1%’) exploitation of society and nature, over-population, coercive rites, capital investment, standardisation, division of labour, time-pressure, usury and debt-peonage, taxation, prostitution, ill-health, wretched toil, iniquitous hierarchy, alienation, specialist professionals, slavery, devastating deforestation, soil erosion, repression of minorities, violent subjugation of women, children and outsiders and rank insanity. This is what we call ‘the birth of civilisation’, an extraordinarily unpleasant state of affairs which everyone else on earth — the people known as barbarians — were desperate to avoid.
