The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Hunters and Gatherers, Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers, C.Boehme, Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy, A. DeVries, Primitive Man and His Food, M. Gurven, H. Kaplan, Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers and D.Lancy, The Anthropology of Childhood. See also Daniel Everett, Don’t Sleep There are Snakes, Colin M. Turnball, The Forest People, E. Richard Sorenson, The Edge of the Forest and many others. Even accounting for the colossal differences between these tribes, the distorting and corrupting effects of living in the twentieth century, the cumulative change to their societies over countless millennia (and repeated, disastrous, contact with more ‘advanced’ societies), the bias and lies of some authors of who lived with them (e.g. van der Post and Turnball), the dreadful pains and discomforts of pre-civilised life (e.g. very high infant mortality rates), the all-too-human frailties of men and women throughout history and pre-history and the tendency many writers have to romanticise all hunter-gatherers; the qualities they share — with each other, with what we know of pre-civilised people and with all people at their best — are quite clear.
A crop which contains significant quantities of opioids. See Greg Wadley and Angus Martin, The origins of agriculture: A Biological Perspective and a New Hypothesis (also Pharmacological Influences on the Neolithic Transition).
Large sedentary but stateless societies had flourished before this. There is no reason to suppose that conviviality, equality and liberty are only possible in tiny groups or that inequality is impossible. See James C. Scott, Against the Grain, and David Graeber and David Wengrow, How To Change The Course Of Human History.
Edward Hyams, Soil and Civilisation, William H. Kötke, The Final Empire, David Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilisation, Clive Ponting, A New Green History Of The World.
S. Morand, Domesticated animals and human infectious diseases of zoonotic origins, N. D. Wolfe, Origins of major human infectious diseases, Burnet & White, The Natural History of Infectious Diseases. Diseases of modernity were absent too, such as heart disease and cancer. See A.R David, Cancer: an old disease, a new disease or something in between? Immune systems were also likely to have been far more robust.
Pre-agricultural people were and are as long-lived as modern people. See e.g. M. Gurven, H. Kaplan, Longevity Among Hunter-Gatherers: A Cross-Cultural Examination.
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God.
Aided by the domestication of the horse — the nuclear bomb of early civilisation.
Like capitalism and communism: see myth 22. Note that a parallel development occurred around this time in China and India also. The entire period, usually called ‘the iron age’ or the ‘axial age,’ represents a massive intensification of the ‘civilised’ project across Eurasia; more specialisation, more technology, more rationality and abstraction, more professionalism and more horror. See John Zerzan, The Iron Grip of Civilisation.
Before Homer and the Pentateuch, gods inhered in reality. After the Graeco-Judaic revolution they became separate from ordinary life, and the relationship between the two, between thing and god, became one of command; the beginning of science. ‘Abstraction stands in the same relationship to its objects as fate.’ Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment.
The so-called ‘collapse’ of many early states was often experienced as emancipation. Life outside the state could still be violent and precarious, but an end to oppressive taxation, serfdom, warfare, epidemics and all the horrors of civilisation at the very least did not necessarily lead to the brutal miseries its defenders are keen to present. See James C. Scott, Against the Grain and McAnany & Yoffee, Questioning Collapse. Likewise ‘defection’ or ‘going native’ — fleeing the oppressive state and joining ‘barbarian’ societies that were healthier, fairer and even more ordered — has been a common and persistent ‘problem’ throughout civilised history. See Christopher Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road and Owen Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History.
Almost one third of the year according to some estimates; and a four-day work-week was common.
E.g. the Beguines, the Jacquerie, the Free Spirits, the Lollards, the Taborites and many other mystical radicals of the late middle-ages.
Norbert Elias, The Civilising Process, Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilisation, Ivan Illich, In the Mirror of the Past, Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, William Chester Jordan, Europe in the High Middle Ages, R.I. Moore, The First European Revolution c. 970-1215, Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit and John Zerzan, Revolt and Heresy in the Late Middle Ages.
Although Romans law was the first the allow land to be bought and sold as a commodity.
Aka ‘technique’. See Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society.
What we call ‘the industrial revolution’ was a result of the technological approach, not its cause.
Of which control always comes first.
Or ‘labour power’, which was no longer allowed to become independent as it was in feudalism. The feudal worker began his working life in some form of apprenticeship after which he could graduate to mastery and significant independence Capitalism abolished this mastery, forcing labour into a lifetime of service. See David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs.
A situation compounded manyfold by technical specialisation. See David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs for further discussion of ‘capitalist feudalism’. Note also how the only way to get yourself property now is to inherit the manor from the landowning family.
‘A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude’. Aldous Huxley, Foreword to Brave new World.
Obviously I’m not suggesting that literacy is inherently or completely dystopian, but it is the beginning of an existentially degrading process, which starts with societies demanding literacy for participation — and devaluing orality and improvised forms of expression — and ends with the complete eradication of reality. This degradation of existence increases with every step towards virtuality (print, perspective, photography, television, internet) until, by the time we reach vr, there remains no possibility of reverie, transcendence, humanity, meaning or genuine creativity, all of which become suspect.
There were other powerful — meaning truthful — visions of Dystopia, but the four dystopias here were (with apologies to Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We) the originating trunks from which later branches grew. Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut, for example (Combination of Huxleyan with Kafkaesque elements), or The Handmaid’s Tale (Orwellian with a pronounced patriarchal-religious emphasis), or Anthem (generic Orwellian with a primitivist/pre-industrial Luddite version of Phildickian), or Fahrenheit 451 (Orwellian and Huxleyan), or Brazil (Kafkaesque with Orwellian elements).
The complementary Orwellian-Huxleyan polarity can, in some ways, be traced back at least to the Graeco-Judaic divide. Ancient Greece was roughly Huxleyan and Judea, Orwellian.
And great artists. If you’re looking to get published, a biography that shows that Van Gogh was really bipolar, or that Bach was really a shoddy brawler, or that the Buddha was really a misogonist, is a first-class ticket to a Guardian ‘book of the year’.
Polemics express negative qualities. It is generally best to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’, but there are are some aspects of reality which facts cannot speak for. At various points in this book I refer, for example, to the ‘nightmare’ of the system. To those who do not experience system-life as a nightmare (usually people in nice jobs), it will look as if I am ‘ranting’ — an accusation that I tend to take as a compliment.
1. The Myth of Economics
An economist is someone who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.
Lawrence J. Peter
Economics defines the entire universe as a rational market-system and human beings as wealth maximising things · · · The purpose of economics is to justify the activity of the system, and the behaviour of those who own and manage it · · · This is essentially a religious endeavour. Indeed economics is directly descended from ‘moral philosophy’, a form of religious instruction.
Economics explains everything, for all time. Economists either make this claim openly and directly,1 or they just assume that the entire universe and all life within it operates — and will forever operate — according to the core assumption of classical economic theory:
Human society is comprised of rationally self-interested individuals with unlimited wants competing over scarce resources.
This foundational premise, upon which a veritable citadel of academic endeavour has been built, is taken to be based on, or extend to, the entire natural world; and once upon a time even to God. All natural forms are self-interested competitors for limited resources, genes are microscopic capitalists, and all evidence to the contrary is instantly rendered invisible or unscientific (see myth 23). Thus a society which is based on prices and money transactions — a market system — is as natural as the human behaviour that economists study within it, a ‘propensity to truck and barter,’2 which has, in effect, been waiting since the dawn of life itself to unburden itself of the obstacles to behaving in the most natural — or most ‘developed’ — way possible; the perfect system we know as capitalism, which, logically, will endure for all time, or at least as long as human beings behave ‘rationally’.
This word, ‘rational,’ is a key component of economic theory, for two reasons. Firstly, because economists, like all capitalists, believe that only the scientific method can reveal truth. If something is ‘unscientific’ it cannot be said to meaningfully exist. Thus, the opposite of rational must be ‘irrational’— insane, unreasonable or ridiculous. The existence or the significance of non-rational truths is ruled out a priori by economists and the scientific establishment they like to believe they are part of.
Like to believe — but are not. Economics and science do share something in common; they are both founded on a disregard for the context and a focus on what amounts to illusions, but the illusion of science does partly, and demonstrably, mirror an aspect of the physical world3 which is how it can be used to make accurate and useful predictions about that world. The human world which economics claims to model, is, however, not reducible to ideas in the same way, nor, even if it were, can it be studied using the same experimental method scientists use on physical phenomena. This is why the theories of economists are illogical and superficial, why economists are unable to make reliable predictions, and why the predictions they do make are always wrong. This doesn’t stop capitalists following their advice though, because, in the real world, economics is not the study of the economy, nor of human behaviour in it, nor of any of the countless other phenomena that economists presume to explain. Economics, like so much of academia, like law also, and journalism, is ultimately nothing more than a means to justify the acts of the powerful and obscure or confuse any truth which might interrupt their ‘freedom’. Contemporary ‘neo-classical’ economics, for example, examines exclusively abstract models (empirical facts never appear) which assume that all people have the same measurable tastes (which amounts to assuming there is only one person in society) and that these tastes remain the same under radically different conditions (which amounts to assuming there is only one commodity)4. The resulting ‘laws’ are meaningless as far as furthering knowledge is concerned, but such an aim is far from the mind of economists and their sponsors.
When kings wanted to massacre their enemies or impoverish their people, they consulted priests, who were paid to explain to them why God approved of their actions. Now, when politicians and ceos want to do the same thing, they consult economists (or their pseudo-scientific colleagues, psychologists: see myth 27) who explain why it is good for business to enclose the commons so that self-sufficient peasants are forced to sell their labour, or why it is good for business to introduce starvation to a remote island so its inhabitants are forced to join the market, or why it is good for business to enslave half of Africa in ‘planned villages’ or on cotton plantations, or why it is good for business to privatise a country’s water supply so that it might be bought up and sold by Nestlé, or why it is good for business to exterminate the bothersome population of resource-rich country, or why it is good for business to generate unspeakable misery for the population of China, India and Bangladesh in order to manufacture all the goods sold by Western corporations. Economics magically explains away all this misery and ruin, for such immeasurable qualities as exploitation, suffering, servitude, alienation, ugliness and mounting horror cannot (like generosity, conviviality, mutual aid, love and beauty) appear in the company accounts or in the minds of economists. They are therefore non-existent.
Take, for example, the 2008 financial crash. All of the attention of the so-called left and right was focused on financialisation, credit and debt, lack of regulation, speculation and banking. Fascinating and significant to be sure (see myth 2); but not a syllable mentioned how the colossal economies of the corporate West, and its class of hyper wealthy ceos, shareholders and managers, actually gained their power to gamble humongous sums in the money markets; because this pivotal element of the world economy — the outrageously profitable class-based exploitation of land and labour in ‘developing’ countries, along with the bargain-hunting delight at home which makes it possible — simply does not exist for professional economists and capitalist journalists.5
Labour — which is to say, lived activity, which is to say, life — is invisible to economists, for whom all happiness, all ‘productivity’, all ‘progress’ (see myth 12) is not the result of living creatures doing things, but of prices, commodities and economic relationships such as ownership and investment; in short of capital. It is, says the economist, capital which produces food and fuel, not nature. It is capital which builds tools and uses them, not people. It is capital which is productive and creative, not life. The economist, both capitalist and Marxist, like the priest and the shaman, thus brings an idea to life, teaches the people to worship his invention and then conceals the outrageous fraudulence of this magical thinking behind complicated language acquired during specialist training. The people then imagine that their own activity is really the activity of capital (or ‘industry’ or ‘them’) which leads them to believe that they are only useful to the world while they are producing capital and serving the capitalist system; which is to say, performing activities which they have no interest or control over and paying for goods they themselves have produced with money they received in exchange for this activity, goods which, finally, they admire as alien-objects manifested from the heavens above. All of which ‘gives new life to capital and annihilates their own lives’6.
For economists such things are as ‘noise’ is to scientists; background ‘externalities,’ as unremarkable as the air which, nevertheless, must be sucked out of the vacuum of abstract economic thought. The dreamlike economic ‘reality’ which results can then be shown to mirror their inept and corrupt pseudo-science, thereby providing economics with a mask of respectable scholarship. Anyone who attempts to reintroduce oxygen into the void is dismissed, or, if their activities prove to be combustible, locked up or killed.
Ha-Joon Chang, Economics: The User’s Guide.
