Category: Creating Reality Page 1 of 6

Continuing from Interaction Ritual

Rituals can fail. The Christmas party where everyone is awkward and not enjoying themselves. The sermon and hymns that are just so plain boring so that you can hardly wait to leave. The concert where no one is dancing. (x-Collins)

Putting on a successful ritual is a skill. Being good at it takes practice in moving the participants’ attention where it should be, in encouraging emotional focus and in physical entrainment. The surroundings should be suitable, the central symbol should be framed, costumes may be needed, and on and on.

We have a lot of standardized rituals: the wake for the dead, the marriage and the trial, among others. Watch a trial, the judge dressed in formal robes, and depending on the country, perhaps wearing a white wig. Always deferred to, always addressed as “Your Honor” or “Your Lordship”. The accused sits in a specified place, witnesses in another and so on.

This is high ritual.

The person who is the center of a ritual, who conducts a ritual, if it succeeds, gains stature and energy. Look at the way rock stars are treated for a concrete example. Money, fame, glory, and all the sex they want.

There is a certain divinity associated with big enough, successful enough rituals. Whatever the symbol, the person who conducts the ritual will also become a symbol and will take on some of the power and mystery of the rite.

Who performs rites and what their role in the rite is, thus, is central to how society is organized and to our personal perception of reality. By associating ourselves with various parts of the rites, we then create who we are: how others see us, and how we see ourselves.

Rites allow us to change stories.

Consider the God King. Ubiquitous in later ancient Mesopotamia and in ancient Egypt.

Think of our early religion and ideology. There is a God or Gods, who created all. There are ancestors we are descended from, and those ancestors created our way of doing things: our civilization.

The Divine created everything, and everything good comes from the divine. Our greatest respect is reserved for the divine, with lesser but still great respect granted to our ancestors. To the divine and to our ancestors we owe everything. No human is important in comparison (x-Flannery/Marcus).

This is a story which mitigates hard against inequality and against anyone becoming too powerful. Someone may be a good hunter, but the good things do not come from them, but from God. And however good a hunter they are, they are nothing compared to the ancestor who created hunting.

This question, where do the good things come from, is essential to the structure of every society.

If the good things come from you, then you should be treated with reverence, and since they come from you, they are essentially yours.

Consider the ritual of the Aranda in the previous chapter, where older men dressed as revered ancestors.

Imagine, now, dressing as a God. Playing that role in a successful ritual. The attention is on you, you are associated with the God, and it is from the God that all the good things come.

It takes many steps to get from egalitarian hunter-gatherers to God Kings, but this is the social logic by which it happens: rituals which associate you with a God, and a story that it is from Gods that all the good things come.

Lest you smile condescendingly and think we are beyond all this, I invite you to consider the concept of the “job creator”. A job creator is someone who hires people. In our society, for almost everyone, all good things come from jobs. A job creator is thus the person from whom all good things come. It would be wrong to tax such a person highly, or to burden them with legislation, because they are the source of the good. Not coincidentally, our taxation of the rich and on corporations it at multi-generational lows.

This wasn’t always the story, in the post-war liberal period the consumer was where all good things came from, and businessmen were just meeting public demand. And the consumer was able to spend because the government had fixed an economy private industry had trashed during the Great Depression. All hail the consumer, and the government which makes sure the economy works. And all hail top marginal tax rates of eighty to ninety percent.

Stories matter, and so does your ritual position. Rituals put you in a place in the story, and the story, if it is widely accepted, then works for you.

Note that the story has an element of truth, even if that truth is socially constructed. All good things do come from a God King: the Pharoah owned everything. God Kings had wealth and power and could give good things to people. Billionaires and big corporations really do decide, directly and indirectly thru the small companies which would not exist without them, who gets many of the good jobs.

These are self-reinforcing stories.

It is not hard to extend this analysis to today’s press, with their fawning coverage of CEOs and executives; of the stock market and so on. The beautiful people bow to the powerful people in powerfully choreographed images, and we too see them as powerful.

Certainly there is more to it, wealth and military prowess and so on, but all of those rest on people believing they should obey your orders and that you should have way more stuff than anyone else. During the Great Depression Americans decided that the rich, whom they blamed for destroying the economy, didn’t deserve so much stuff, and they instituted punitive taxes.

In the Great Depression it was clear that “the good stuff” didn’t come from the rich and corporations, because they’d been substantially in charge, and buggered it up. And who helped? Government.

So, when Reagan moved to decisively end the post-War liberal era, he said “The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'”

Reagan had a story about where the good things came from, and how to get them. And that leads us to our next topic: the storytellers and the ideologues.

 

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Three Chapters from the preview remain after this one:

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

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We have, so far, talked mostly about more obvious rituals like worship or signing the national anthem or saluting the flag.

But there is another class of ritual, interaction ritual(x). Interaction rituals are the small, repetitive ways you live your life. Think of meeting a friend: you greet each other, you ask how each of you are doing, you commiserate if the news is bad or you congratulate them if it is good, and when you leave you say goodbye. Depending on your culture you may hug them or kiss them on the cheek when meeting and leaving.

As suggested before, try this experiment, next time you meet a friend: don’t say goodbye. If your culture requires a gesture of physical affection, avoid it.

Feels awkward, doesn’t it? Feels wrong.

This specific ritual affirms that each of you is important to the other: worthy of consideration and affection.

We go thru this same form with strangers we interact with, but without most of the obligations. Next time the store clerk asks you how your day was, don’t answer.

A slight feeling of awkwardness, but nothing like doing that to a friend. And, in fact, the rules are different, when they ask you, aren’t expected to actually tell them, “well my Dad died today and I feel awful”, though if you do, most people will react with appropriate commiseration.

Interaction ritual is a subset of repetitive behaviour, but it is important because it happens with other people, and breaking the expectations of an interaction ritual feels awkward or embarrassing.

We’ll discuss interaction ritual in school in a later chapter, but remember how you act towards teachers and how they act to you? Different, eh? See how service workers act around the people they serve. Servants are the most extreme case: a servant always acts as if those he or she serve owns the space around them. They are unobtrusive, apologetic: the world belongs to the masters, not to them.(X)

Think about asking your boss for a raise or having to speak to a crowd. Imagine turning to the stranger in the elevator and saying something to them, even something nice “I love what you’ve done with your hair!”

Oops. You’ve just violated an interaction ritual: that put into close quarters with strangers, we will ignore them, not intrude further on their space.

Or just move closer to someone than feels comfortable. Or stand slightly further from someone than your relationship suggests. If you stand too close they’ll usually step away. Wait 30 seconds, take a slight step forwards. You can actually walk people dozens of feet across a room this way, but beware, they are likely to get angry, hurt, or scared. Possibly all three.

Interaction ritual is how social reality is reified every single day. It sets our relationships with other people, and it keeps them relatively stable, changing mostly as our roles, and thus, how we are supposed to act in such rituals, change.

Your co-worker becomes boss, and suddenly she has a desk which faces her door, rather than away from the door of her cubicle. The desk is, by default, thus, between you and her every time you approach her in her office. She asks you to sit or she doesn’t: that is her choice. People come to her for permission and she gives it or denies it. The very process of people asking her for permission means different interactions, and over time they will change her feeling of who she is. They will also change her former co-workers feelings towards her. If they don’t, she will likely fail as a boss.

Interaction ritual is endless and varied and entire books have been written about it.(x) The simplest way to see if social behaviour is interaction ritual is to change it: act differently and see if it feels bad or makes other people upset. Walk into the CEOs office without asking permission from her secretary. Sit down without being invited. Say, “hey Mary, how ya doing today.”

Well, do all this only if you’re about to quit or just have, so you don’t get fired.

But more subtle variations are all around us. In common speech, we call this violating etiquette. In a culture with strong queuing rules cut in near the front of the line, say.

Frost. Or worse.

Violating some ritual requirements is dangerous: cutting the line can, at the most extreme end, get you punched. Refusing to bump fists with the rowdy young man can make him and his friends decide you’re stuck up, and that can lead to violence. Even when it doesn’t, as with having a friendly chat with your CEO without permission, calling her by her first name and lighting up a cigarette without her permission, violating interaction rituals can mess your life up.

Failure at interaction ritual tells people you are not of the tribe, not to be trusted. You don’t act right.

So interaction ritual makes you into a certain sort of person both because successful interactions are rewarded, and because you will be punished for not going along. And if you insist on not going along too much, it will usually cut you off from power and money and influence.

That’s how successful ritual regimes work: they reward those who comply, and sanction those who don’t.

Bearing that in mind, let us talk about those who benefit most from rituals, their masters.

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Four chapters remain. We are a little over $1,200 from our final reward of the fundraiser ,an article on the Middle Ages Academic crisis (overproduction and collapse.) Chapters to come include:

8. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

Chapter 7: The Ritual

Humanity’s first invention was either simple stone tools or rituals.

My money is on rituals.

Moderns tend to think of rituals entirely as formal affairs, like a Catholic Mass or a flag raising.

Those are rituals, but rituals are far more than that.

A ritual is focus on a specific object or activity and the deliberate creation of a mood through repeatable stylized methods.

Rituals are strongest when done by a group with shared focus.

Rituals require substantially the same behaviour each time.

Sample Ritual

Sit comfortably or lie down.

Imagine a raindrop, suspended in midair before you, or place a picture of a raindrop in front of you at eye level. This represent Indra, he who brings peace.

Say, “Indra grant me peace.”

Tense your face muscles as hard as you can, then while imagining the raindrop, relax your face entirely and say “Indra, grant me peace.”. Do the same thing for your torso, each arm individually, your groin and thighs, and each leg. Then tense your entire body, while envisaging the raindrop, and relax.

Now stay where you are for five to ten minutes, gently returning your mind to the image of the raindrop whenever it moves away.

Stand, raise your arms wide and above your head, close your eyes, and say “I thank Indra for his peace.”

Lower your arms, and smile. The ritual is done. Don’t you feel better?

Congratulations, you have now performed a ritual. Do this every day for a month, ideally twice a day: once when you wake up, once before going to bed. After a month of doing this, whenever you feel stressed, say “Indra grant me peace” or imagine a raindrop (or look at a picture of a raindrop.) You will feel relaxed. You’ll probably also find a newfound appreciation of rain storms!

What you have done is tie a specific feeling in your body, relaxation, to symbols: the raindrop, and the words “Indra grant me peace”.

No matter where you are, this conditioning will go with you. You likely feel some gratitude to Indra for granting you peace, even if you believe this is irrational.

Human emotions are stronger if there is emotional entrainment. If I feel joy, or anger, or relaxation and someone in my immediate vicinity also feels that emotion, we will make each other’s emotion stronger. If we move together, the emotion will be even stronger. This is as simple as smiling or frowning, both of which are contagious, but much more complicated sequences of emotions can be involved.

Imagine a ritual much like the one above involving gentle swaying movements and chanting Indra’s name over and over again. Do it with another person. As you move together, you both become more relaxed and you have a new way of making the feeling portable: whenever you want to feel relaxed peace, even if alone, you can sway in place and chant Indra’s name.

Truly Indra is great, wherever I am, if I imagine his holy rain drop, speak his name or dance his sacred dance, he brings me peace.

Anyone you do these rituals with you will feel close to. Do you not both know Indra’s peace? Where you see someone wearing the raindrop symbol, you will feel kinship: this is a fellow knower of Indra’s peace.

Often rituals are done first by a group, even if that group is only two people – a teacher and an initiate. A strong track is laid down, then the initiate practices alone, hopefully returning to the group to lay down more tracks made strong by the entrainment and emotional contagion of the group.

Watch a video of the Nuremburg rally (really, watch), one of the most powerful rituals in recent memory. There are shared symbols (the swastika, Hitler himself). People move together. They make the Nazi salute, a salute specific to Nazis. They all concentrate on Hitler together and they are exalted together.

Later when they think of the Swastika, of Hitler or when they make the Nazi salute there will be an echo of what they felt during that ritual.

Those who performed the ritual together are Nazis like them, to be trusted and worked with, brothers and sisters. And since Hitler, it seems, made them feel that way and still makes them feel that way, well he is a great leader to be followed, for he has made them more than they were.

Do not sneer, this worked and it worked well. If you think it wouldn’t have worked on you, you are missing the point. It might not have, but you would be claiming to be a rare individual, because it worked on most.

A ritual that fails can do the opposite: it can attach negative emotions to the ritual objects. Hours of watching those fools and toadies salute “the Leader” and listening to Hitler rant and you aren’t going to be all sanguine about Hitler, the Swastika and the Nazi salute.

That’s important, because it will mark you as an outsider. Your dislike would be emotional and strong and when forced to say “Heil Hitler” and salute the Swastika, you would be unhappy.

That you were not a Nazi could well be seen by someone watching you not react properly to the symbols. You are not of the Volk, you cannot be trusted.

Not all rituals are large affairs. A romantic date is a good date if you and the person you are with emotionally and physically entrain. Analysis of dates which are going well shows that people start mirroring each other’s actions. Both lean forward together, they start breathing together and so on.

Later they may have their special place: the restaurant or park or museum where they first felt so close to each other. They may have “their song”, the song which was playing at the peak of this ritual. As the relationship intensifies they may wish to make it formal and eternal and one may give the other a ring.

This is what they wanted, the ring symbolizes that commitment and relationship. The peak feeling of the proposal and the acceptance is associated with the ring, and later when either wants to remember what is so great about the other person or the relationship they may touch or look at the ring they carry with them all the time.

Rituals.

Rituals are methods of conditioning. There are big rituals and small rituals. Saying hello and goodbye is a ritual, if you don’t believe that, don’t say goodbye to a close friend after talking to them, just turn around and walk away, and see how that feels to both of you. Goodbye and hello are gestures of respect to the relationship. (X – Goffman). Old fashioned bowing, kneeling and full prostrations were rituals too. Calling someone Sir or Madam who doesn’t call you that back is a submission ritual, and so is calling a teacher or boss by their family name while they call you by your personal name.

Rituals are at the heart of ideology and identity. They are one of the main means of creating both. They are almost always attached to stories, implicit or explicit, and the stories matter. Take the Australian indigenous tribe Aranda, and their identity rituals, as described by Anthropologists Flannery and Marcus (x).

Anyone who has ever tried to deliver a long, complicated lecture to young people knows that they do not always pay attention. Let them watch music videos over and over, however, and they commit every lyric to memory. Combined art, music and dance, throw in an intoxicating beverage, and they can not get enough of the awesome experience.

The Aranda held a secret ritual known as churunga ilpintia, which integrated art, music and dance. It was performed at a secret venue in the desert and began with a group of men smoothing an area of bare ground. One or or more would provide blood, often as much as a pint, from veins in their arms. This sacred blood was used both to dampen the ground and to serve as a medium for the paint. Impersonating legendary ancestors, the men serving as artists painted their bodies red, white, yellow and black, adding downy bird feathers glued on with blood. Using a chewed twig as a brush, they slowly pained the earth with white paipe clay, red and yellow ocher, and charcoal. As paintings took shape the elders sang ballads recounting the mythical exploits of the ancestors; less experienced men watched and learned.

That’s a ritual. It would also have been a peak experience for the Aranda men, something very different from their ordinary lives, something they would remember.

Note that what makes an Aranda an Aranda is a specific set of ancestors. There is a story of where the Aranda came from. You are who you are because of your ancestors, and their deeds. You also have Gods.

People who do not have the same ancestors are not of the people. Those who do not have the same Gods are even more alien.

This story creates an identity which is hard to share. It’s not that you necessarily have to be born to the people, though I don’t know whether Aranda allowed adoption, many Native American tribes did and so did Chinese ancestor worshipers and ancient Romans, but you do have to be initiated. You do have to be part of the story, have taken part in the rituals, have adopted the identity. You must belong to the cult: to the religion.

This very particular identity creates the background for much of history. Those who were not “one of us”, “of the people” were fair game for violence throughout the world. They could not be trusted. You see this in the early Chinese, the Greeks of Homer’s time and in classical times. You see it in Rome, and in Mesopotamia and so on.

Efforts to expand identity, to expand the number of people who can trust and who aren’t viewed as legitimate targets for violence, are much of the story of history and, one expects, of pre-history.

Take for example pantheons, groups of different Gods. How are they created? One way is that groups who wish to ally bring their Gods together. Another way is that when a group is defeated, their God is adopted into the pantheon of the conqueror. The Romans, when attacking a city, would invite the city’s God to join their pantheon.

If a new community was created, a new god would often be created for that community. Serapis, the God of Alexandria, was created for that city at Alexander’s command, he had not existed before then.

The history of Gods and religions, too, can be read almost entirely politically. Christianity’s adoption by the Roman Empire, its conversion of pagans by offering Kings legitimacy, literate clerics and trade, or Confucianism’s deliberate focus on providing Princes with officials and legitimacy are both cases in point. The rising and falling fortune of Egyptian Gods as dynasties rose and fell, was also about politics. Or perhaps, about faith as much as politics?

This is slightly too cynical, but only slightly. Those who desired to create kingdoms and cities and states whose people would work together needed identities and stories which made that possible. Those identities had to be emotional, they had to be felt, and religion and its rituals offered the obvious way to do that.

They also needed shared norms and morals, a shared idea of what was right and wrong, for without it conflict would be constant.

Ideology and identity were both thus served.

Modern ideologies such as communism, nationalism, democracy, human rights and capitalism, while divorced from Gods, are still descendants of this process and still serve the same purpose. They are successful to the extent that they create identity groups and that they put forth a clear ethical statement of how the world should be which is accepted by those who believe the ideology. Where and when they cannot do one or the other, they fail. When they do both, they can and often do change the world.

Rituals are thus key to understanding human history, society and how we create our worlds.

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This is chapter 6 of “The Construction of Reality”, one of the rewards of our 2023 fundraiser. We’ve now unlocked up to chapter 11 (There are 41 chapters in the whole book.) We are c. $1,800 from our final goal and the final reward, an article on the Middle Ages Academic crisis (overproduction and collapse.) Chapters to come include

7. The Ritual (how we create identification)

8. Interaction ritual (how daily life creates identification and personality)

9.The Ritual Masters (How rituals create different types and classes of people)

10. The Ideologues (How identity is tied into story, ideology and meaning)

11. Reign of the Ideologues (How ideology is used to create civilizations and the payoffs for ideologues)

***

We’ve touched on identification. I often say that identity is “who you feel it with.” Your tribe; your people—but that definition is not wide enough. Identity is your emotional body, which extends far beyond your physical form.

Identity is, to paraphrase Lois McMaster Bujold talking about love, “when they are cut, I bleed.”(x)

We see this, in pure form, when there are terrorist attacks. Most people are far more upset by terrorist attacks against people they identify with. Iraqis may suffer near constant bombings, but Westerners rarely hear of them, and when they do, most shrug. There may be a small pang, but most Westerners do not bleed.

But when there is a big terrorist attack in the West, in Paris or London, or New York or Manchester, many westerners become very upset.

People like us. People like them.

People we identify with.

People we identify as.

Identification is sense of self. If I identify with you, you are part of my self and while it isn’t 1:1, I treat what happens to you somewhat as if it happens to me. If something is good for you; if it makes you happy, I too am somewhat happy.

If something is bad for you; if it makes you sad or hurts you, I too am sad.

If someone is hurt while I’m watching who I don’t identify with the pain I feel, which can be measured, is much less or even non-existent compared to someone I do identify with.

Imagine for yourself someone you love being hurt vs. a stranger. If you’re very honest and have good introspection skills, you can do this exercise by degrees. Someone you love, a friend, an acquaintance, someone like you, someone not like you, someone whose culture or nation you dislike, fear or hate.

And all through it, you can feel your suffering decline.

This is why slavery requires, for most, the denial that the slave is like the master. Slaves are not equal, or not even really human. This isn’t just about race, you see this in Plato’s insistence that slaves, often fellow Greeks, were meant to be slaves, not the equal of citizens like himself.

Whomever you enslave, whoever they are, must be made something other than you; something you don’t identify with. Not “someone” but “something”. This is for your protection, so you don’t suffer when they do: this is so you can make them suffer without hurting yourself.

The same is true of war, and why in almost all wars the enemy is treated as subhuman, evil and vile. To the extent your soldiers don’t believe that, they won’t shoot. To the extent your civilians don’t believe that, they won’t support the war.

All of this is sometimes acknowledged; you may well have heard or read all this before.

But identification goes far beyond people, to objects and ideas and fictional characters.

Anything that is part of our identity is treated as part of our self.

If I am Muslim and someone destroys my holy book, the Koran, I am likely to suffer. This is not theoretical suffering, it will show up on brain scans. If I am Christian and someone desecrates an altar, same thing (especially if it’s the altar of my home church.) If I strongly identify as American and with the flag, and someone burns the “star and stripes” I will suffer. Hearing someone denigrate a person I love can make me angry or hurt, and that can be true even if the person is fictional. (If you don’t believe me, please go to a comic book forum and say bad things about a beloved super hero.)

If my house is burned down, or my possessions stolen, I will feel hurt.

If I believe strongly in, say, the right of people to have a trial, a high profile case where someone doesn’t receive a trial may make me angry or hurt or scared.

If I believe that people have souls, I may get angry that someone denies they exist. And, as anyone who has dealt with hard-core atheists knows, if I strongly believe there are no souls, I may get angry at people who insist there are.

Being upset at someone saying “your belief is wrong” is very human, but it only happens if we identify with the belief. Unless you pride yourself on your time telling, you’re unlikely to be upset if you say “I think it is three” and someone else checks their watch and says “it’s four”.

Of course you might if they imply you’re stupid for not knowing it, but unless they bring your self into it, you’ll likely shrug.

Now, imagine a baseball fan who prides themselves on knowing all the statistics is told he has some statistics wrong. Not hard to imagine that he might take that as an attack.

Identification is not all negative. If I identify with the Red Sox baseball team and they win the World Series, I’m likely be ecstatic. If I identify with Christianity, and I say a Christian prayer, it will almost certainly make me feel better, and it will be much more effective at doing so than if I am not Christian.

When the flag is raised, if I am a patriot who identifies the flag with my country, I feel good. When the anthem is sung I feel good, and I feel connected to everyone else who sings. Are we not all citizens of this glorious country?

Identity is expanded self. Anything I identify with allows me to be happy or sad or proud or loving when without that identity, I would shrug.

This goes to extremes in spiritual circles. Not only is there identity with God in theistic religions, but there is radical non-identification. In Buddhism, for example, the first great stage of accomplishment (stream entry) requires that you stop identifying as your body.

Buddhists value this because if you don’t identify with your body, when it is hurt, you suffer a lot less. It’s not yours, it’s not you, and you feel the pain, but a lot of the suffering is gone. (You may also have experienced this under the effect of some drugs, due to great tiredness or hunger and so on.)

A vast amount of our construction of reality can only be understood through the understanding of identity, and identification. Great religions, nations, philosophies, family and war, all are impossible without identification.

If we want to change reality, one of the most fundamental ways is to change who and what we identify with. Create a new identity, and you create a new reality. Destroy an old identity, and you destroy an old reality.

So, how do we come to identify with things? How do we create symbols, like flags and anthems and Gods? How does it come to be that when someone pisses on a statue of my God I get offended; and when someone says “I love Captain America” I feel warm, because I identify with him (though not as him.)

It starts with the ritual.

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This is chapter 5 of “The Construction of Reality”, one of the rewards of our 2023 fundraiser.

Human at Dawn

We humans adapt to the world in two ways: thru biological evolution and thru changes in culture: where culture is everything from tools and technology to language and philosophy. We are still evolving physically, and it can be seen in different human groups. Northern Europeans are more likely to be able to digest milk properly than those of African descent, for example, while whites have less melanin due to spending time in areas with less sunlight, and so on.

But cultural evolution is far faster and it is how we have done most of our adaptation since we started making stone tools.

How humans lived for most of pre-history is important, because it tells us what we are biologically adapted for: what sort of life is natural to us. Cultural adaptation often takes us away from what we were adapted for. The classic case, again, is agricultural adoption: humans became sicker, lived less long, developed serious dental problems and so on, because what they were eating is not what they were evolved for and because long terms settlements made disease more deadly. (Hunter gatherer bands move often enough, that crudely, they “didn’t shit where they eat.”)

This is a very important point and one we’ll come back to: the word progress does not mean “better life.” New technology, organization, ideology or identities may make most people demonstrably worse off and may do so for very long periods of time. Agriculture made most of the world’s population worse off for thousands of years. Yes, there were more us, and almost all of us lived worse lives than hunter-gatherers had had.

All that said, let us examine humanity at dawn.

For most of human existence we probably lived in small bands of about forty to sixty people, and interacted with other bands of similar size whom we shared ancestors or fictive kinship with. We hunted and gathered. We knew almost every person in our life.

Humans have the ability to know approximately one hundred and fifty people well (x_Dunbar’s number). This is the human span. When groups become larger than the human span we are no longer able to interact with others in the way our species was primarily adapted to do so: as individual members of our band, or of bands we have close relations to, and who probably split from our band in the past when numbers became larger than hunting and gathering could support in one location.

Within our span, we are able to:

• Surveil others. We know what they’re up to, through direct observation or gossip with others who directly observe them.
• Empathize and sympathize with them. Because we are physically with them much of the time, we feel their emotions almost as our own through the action of mirror neurons and bodily mimicry. We feel their pain and their joy, if not as strongly as our own, then strongly enough that their emotions matter to our own emotional well-being.
• Apply social feedback. Since we know what they’re doing, we can apply social sanctions. If we don’t like what they’re doing, we can let them know. This may escalate to violence, but in most cases it is verbal or non-verbal approval. Since we surveil them, we will know if these social sanctions are working to improve their behaviour. Conversely, we can apply positive feedback directly, approving of them: smiling, hugging, praising and so on.

Surveillance, empathy and sympathy, social feedback. We know these people, they know us, their well-being and behaviour is in our face.

When we belong to larger groups, we can’t do these things. We use hacks, like culture and identity and ideology and organization and technology (writing and radio and Facebook & TikTok!) to scale. But none of these scale properly, they are always different from what we evolved for, and these differences generally show up as social pathologies, though there are also advantages to larger societies, even socially, as anyone who has ever lived in a village or institution knows. (I grew up in a boarding school, those who have been in the military will probably be nodding as well.)

In addition to the problems of social scaling, hunter-gatherer band societies have five other features which are important. All of these features scale badly as the number of people in a society increases, and the cultural hacks used to scale them often lead to pathologies.

We’ll circle back to these features throughout the book, so as you read each one think “how do we do this today? What has gone wrong and right?”

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And here they are:

Equality, lack of surplus, reciprocity, ownership rules, and identity.

Equality. At humanity’s dawn we’re about equal. Some people may be better hunters, gatherers, talkers, dancers or singers than others, but generally speaking the differences are minor. Older people know more than younger, men are stronger than women, young people are generally healthier and fitter than older people.

And that’s about it, that’s the sum total of inequality. Any other variations are usually a result of lifestyle and geography. In colder climes hunting produces more food proportionally, and men are higher status because men are all or most of the hunters. In more lush climes gathering produces more food, women are the primary gatherers, and women have better status (though matriarchies are almost unknown, rough gender equality appears fairly common.)

Hunter gatherers who live in bands go out of their way to make sure that no one becomes unequal. Food sharing is generally enforced by social sanction, starting with mockery and humor but escalating to ostracism or violence.

Among certain tribes the hunter who made the arrow that kills an animal is considered to be the one who brought it down: but hunters share arrows and one check found that two hunters didn’t have a single arrow made by themselves in their quiver.

In Inuit bands every hunter had a group of 11 other hunters whom he shared every kill he made with, and they shared with him.

There is little material inequality in most band level societies, then (yes, there are a few exceptions). Sharing is enforced and in many societies if you want something another person has you simply admire it and they give it to you. (Then someone else may admire it and so on.) (X-Debt)

Equality here includes violence. Maybe somebody’s better at it than others, but generally one man is as good as another, and numbers are what matters. There is nothing like later societies where a few skilled, well equipped and disciplined men can defeat far larger numbers.

Lack of Surplus: Band level societies keep very little surplus. Either they have immediate return strategies in which it is not allowed to keep surplus, or they regularly use up their surplus in feasts and gifts. Surplus, and especially private surplus, is the beginning of civilization and inequality.(x-winter surplus.)

Reciprocity: Band level societies expect reciprocity: if I give you a gift, you will give me a gift, usually within one or two years. In many societies you are not allowed to give me a gift that is more impressive than the one I gave you or larger than I can reasonably be expected to pay back. Society mitigates hard against the equivalent of “overrunning your credit card” or “running up student loans.”

Ownership: The people who already live in an area have first rights to use the land. Others who have ties with them, such as kinship, fictive kinship or gift exchanges may also use the land, others who try to may be attacked. There is no concept of private ownership of the land, however, only group rights to hunt and gather. Private ownership of land is another marker of inequality and civilization.

Identity: Everyone has about the same understanding of who they are. They live the same types of lives (hunting or gathering); they spend most of their time not working doing the same activities (art, music, dance, gossip), they live in the same dwellings, eat the same food, have the same basic life experiences.

Different cultures had very different identities from each other not because they lived differently, but because they had different stories about who they were. They had different gods and most importantly, different ancestors. Identity was learned, as you grew older you would be initiated to become more and more one of your people.

It’s important to understand this: humans who weren’t part of your identity group were often considered, by default, enemies. Common humanity is not powerful for humans. Human bands are inclined to view other human bands who don’t have the same identity and, usually, also kinship (or fictive kinship) as other. People who aren’t “of us” are fair game for murder, theft and all sorts of nastiness. In this we are similar to many other animals: humans evolved to work the same ecological niches as other humans, other humans are our direct competitors.

In periods when there weren’t that many humans and when the land provided more than enough, we didn’t fight each other much: but as the land’s carrying capacity for hunting and gathering was approached violence increased.(X).

Identity told us who we should fight, who we should help and who we should ally with.

This problem, of identity, is one of the primary problems we humans have had to overcome as we lived in large groups and wanted to interact with other groups other than violently, such as for trade. Learning to expand identity also helped us be better at violence.

But identity is much more than who, it is what creates our self, the reality of who we are, and it expands far past ties with other humans. Identity, in a very real sense, is our body, expanded far beyond our mere flesh.

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