(This is the first part of a larger essay developing my thinking on international politics today. The whole piece should serve as a backdrop to some more specific ideas on culture that I hope to work out next year. I’ve written other newsletters on democracy:
The state is a social scaleup tech. It is more than 5000 years old. It is an add on to the early tech of chiefdoms, which was itself built on tribes, which are constitutive in humans. When the Holecene began the climate became less variable and it was possible for the population to grow. This led to increased competition for the best hunting&gathering lands. A competition between two groups will likely he settled in favor of the larger one because if it comes to fight they are likely to prevail.
Around 9000 years ago there was a town in Turkey called Catal Hoyuk where lived perhaps 5 or 10 thousand people. Imagine a tribe of less than a 1000 humans beholding this society with its thousands of guy. Would you take them on? Nope. And so they never needed to fight. There is no evidence of any fortifications at Catal Hoyuk. No evidence of social class, houses were all the same size.
Humans are Great Apes; they are *not* herd animals. Put 200 Great Apes into a group and violence will break out. And yet here was many times this number all living cheek and jowl. How the fuck did they do it? Nobody really knows. In other places people were not so lucky. Jericho around 10000 years ago showed evidence of extensive fortifications, but it was much smaller in population.
So the message is clear, get big or prepare to be warred on and if you don't have your shit together get wiped out. To get big a group needs social scale up technologies. To fight effectively, one needs effective leadership. How do you get this?
Humans are band animals and also cultural animals. Our chimp and gorilla cousins are band animals and use dominance hierarchy for organization. Humans still have dominance capabilities, but as cultural animals we also have prestige. A band can have dominant individuals and charismatic "big men" who have prestige. Dominance has become constrained once humans developed projectile weapons tech (i.e. throwing rocks, later spears, and then bow & arrow). Asshole alpha males could be eliminated from the gene pool by disgruntled beta males or females for that matter and humans gradually became domesticated. "Big men" (or "big women") became the influencers (we still have these today).
Unlike our ape cousins, humans are also tribal. It was possible for influencers from various bands with the tribe to collborate on shared projects. Monumental architecture like Gobekli tepe, Karahan tepe and other monolithic sites started to appear around 11-12 thousand years ago showing this capability was already present in humans and only needed the milder climate to grow the numbers needed to put it to work.
Well if you can get hundreds or a thousand or more people in a tribe to collaborate on something like Gobekli, you can get them to collaborate on group defense in the face of a threat. To fight effectively, you need a military leader. Such an individual would as sort of a dictator for a time and then retire back to normal life when the crisis is over. Over time the chief became a permanent position and eventually even a hereditary one. This set up is a chiefdom. In a chiefdom you have a chief and a groups of tribal leaders. Among this group the chief is first among equals replicating the band with "big man" leaders that is hardwired in, Each tribal leader had his own posse of near-equals, the big men of the various bands. What I am describing in a hierarchy. The tribal band is the base of the hierarchy, hard-wired into us humans (but not present in the other apes). Layered on top is a replica of this tribal band structure that is the chiefdom layer. An another layer on top and you yet a complex chiefdom or proto-state, and with another a state.
By the time you get to a proto-state or state level there is a vast gulf between the individual on top (often seen as a god) and the masses at the bottom. People at the bottom of the hierarchy could be and in some societies often were used for human sacrifices. These early states were frequently absolute dictatorships. Along with the expansion of layers of hierarchy came craft specialization and division of labor, which are one of the hallmarks of the state. By 5000 years ago there were states in Egypt, Iraq, India, maybe a bit later in Afghanistan and China.
The invention of horse-riding and composite bow tech that permitted mobile warriors wielding projectile weapons from much smaller chiefdom or even tribal societies to effectively raid state societies means more scale up, from state to empire. But empires constructed of conquered states with ruled by god-kings created a lot of rival. An emperor requires loyal vassals who operate as gods in their own kingdoms. It is hard to rule gods and new scale-up techs were needed. Modern moralistic religion (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc.) appeared and served this scale up function. Since then there have been more, capitalist, the Enlightenment/Science, Democracy.
So, anyway the state was not invented as an extraction scheme. Though this did okay a role in the evolution of capitalism.
What is often the case with pieces such as this is the underlying assumptions with the presumption of universal acceptance of what the author would presume is the default definition. What's abundantly clear if anyone cares to notice is that these "universal" definitions seem to have a subjective bent to them through the lens of Russell conjugations. What one can define as liberalism in the negative rights sense is not the same as when one views it from a positive rights perspective. The person or entities who effectively control/possess the default null hypothesis requires all challengers to effectively disprove the rule but it doesn't take into account that perhaps the rule is decided under a very subjective list of assumptions that again the ruler "assumes" all buy into or submit to. For liberal democrats, liberal democracy is the default setting and thus the null hypothesis that must be disproven. It just so happens that liberal democrats just so happen to reign triumphant in such a default setting but that may be perhaps just a coincidence. But are liberal democrats willing to entertain the possibility that perhaps this isn't a coincidence? The underlying problem in the modern world is modern people have a difficult time adjusting to world of unapologetic selfishness at scale and the denial of selfishness despite acting in a selfish matter is a source of much disorientation.
The state is a social scaleup tech. It is more than 5000 years old. It is an add on to the early tech of chiefdoms, which was itself built on tribes, which are constitutive in humans. When the Holecene began the climate became less variable and it was possible for the population to grow. This led to increased competition for the best hunting&gathering lands. A competition between two groups will likely he settled in favor of the larger one because if it comes to fight they are likely to prevail.
Around 9000 years ago there was a town in Turkey called Catal Hoyuk where lived perhaps 5 or 10 thousand people. Imagine a tribe of less than a 1000 humans beholding this society with its thousands of guy. Would you take them on? Nope. And so they never needed to fight. There is no evidence of any fortifications at Catal Hoyuk. No evidence of social class, houses were all the same size.
Humans are Great Apes; they are *not* herd animals. Put 200 Great Apes into a group and violence will break out. And yet here was many times this number all living cheek and jowl. How the fuck did they do it? Nobody really knows. In other places people were not so lucky. Jericho around 10000 years ago showed evidence of extensive fortifications, but it was much smaller in population.
So the message is clear, get big or prepare to be warred on and if you don't have your shit together get wiped out. To get big a group needs social scale up technologies. To fight effectively, one needs effective leadership. How do you get this?
Humans are band animals and also cultural animals. Our chimp and gorilla cousins are band animals and use dominance hierarchy for organization. Humans still have dominance capabilities, but as cultural animals we also have prestige. A band can have dominant individuals and charismatic "big men" who have prestige. Dominance has become constrained once humans developed projectile weapons tech (i.e. throwing rocks, later spears, and then bow & arrow). Asshole alpha males could be eliminated from the gene pool by disgruntled beta males or females for that matter and humans gradually became domesticated. "Big men" (or "big women") became the influencers (we still have these today).
Unlike our ape cousins, humans are also tribal. It was possible for influencers from various bands with the tribe to collborate on shared projects. Monumental architecture like Gobekli tepe, Karahan tepe and other monolithic sites started to appear around 11-12 thousand years ago showing this capability was already present in humans and only needed the milder climate to grow the numbers needed to put it to work.
Well if you can get hundreds or a thousand or more people in a tribe to collaborate on something like Gobekli, you can get them to collaborate on group defense in the face of a threat. To fight effectively, you need a military leader. Such an individual would as sort of a dictator for a time and then retire back to normal life when the crisis is over. Over time the chief became a permanent position and eventually even a hereditary one. This set up is a chiefdom. In a chiefdom you have a chief and a groups of tribal leaders. Among this group the chief is first among equals replicating the band with "big man" leaders that is hardwired in, Each tribal leader had his own posse of near-equals, the big men of the various bands. What I am describing in a hierarchy. The tribal band is the base of the hierarchy, hard-wired into us humans (but not present in the other apes). Layered on top is a replica of this tribal band structure that is the chiefdom layer. An another layer on top and you yet a complex chiefdom or proto-state, and with another a state.
By the time you get to a proto-state or state level there is a vast gulf between the individual on top (often seen as a god) and the masses at the bottom. People at the bottom of the hierarchy could be and in some societies often were used for human sacrifices. These early states were frequently absolute dictatorships. Along with the expansion of layers of hierarchy came craft specialization and division of labor, which are one of the hallmarks of the state. By 5000 years ago there were states in Egypt, Iraq, India, maybe a bit later in Afghanistan and China.
The invention of horse-riding and composite bow tech that permitted mobile warriors wielding projectile weapons from much smaller chiefdom or even tribal societies to effectively raid state societies means more scale up, from state to empire. But empires constructed of conquered states with ruled by god-kings created a lot of rival. An emperor requires loyal vassals who operate as gods in their own kingdoms. It is hard to rule gods and new scale-up techs were needed. Modern moralistic religion (Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam etc.) appeared and served this scale up function. Since then there have been more, capitalist, the Enlightenment/Science, Democracy.
So, anyway the state was not invented as an extraction scheme. Though this did okay a role in the evolution of capitalism.
In what sense is India not a democracy?
What is often the case with pieces such as this is the underlying assumptions with the presumption of universal acceptance of what the author would presume is the default definition. What's abundantly clear if anyone cares to notice is that these "universal" definitions seem to have a subjective bent to them through the lens of Russell conjugations. What one can define as liberalism in the negative rights sense is not the same as when one views it from a positive rights perspective. The person or entities who effectively control/possess the default null hypothesis requires all challengers to effectively disprove the rule but it doesn't take into account that perhaps the rule is decided under a very subjective list of assumptions that again the ruler "assumes" all buy into or submit to. For liberal democrats, liberal democracy is the default setting and thus the null hypothesis that must be disproven. It just so happens that liberal democrats just so happen to reign triumphant in such a default setting but that may be perhaps just a coincidence. But are liberal democrats willing to entertain the possibility that perhaps this isn't a coincidence? The underlying problem in the modern world is modern people have a difficult time adjusting to world of unapologetic selfishness at scale and the denial of selfishness despite acting in a selfish matter is a source of much disorientation.