The Revolution of Lowered Expectations

For the yin of voluntary simplicity, there is a yang -- increased complexity. While simplicity can provide us with more of what we truly want in life, like free time with friends and family, complexity and increased specialization do not benefit most people. They do, however, benefit the people on top of the hierarchy.

There is no cosmic law that necessitates an increase in complexity within an organization, nor is there a human gene that encodes a preference for byzantine systems of governance. These phenomenon have become endemic to our society by design.

Prior to 10,000 BC (12,000 years ago) humans lived in small tribes. These tribes were not technologically based, meaning that they were not defined by their use of tools like fire, stone, arrows or crop-growing. These classifications came much later, in the modern era. Tribes were socially based:

"Native people are not into technology. They spend only a couple hours a day providing for their simple needs, and they mostly use simple means. Look at their tools—few and crude, and their craftwork — basic and utilitarian. What a Native person excels at is what I call qualitative skills—how to sit in a circle with your clan mates and speak your truth, how to find your special talent so that you can develop it to serve your people, how to use your intuition, the ways of honor and respect, how to live in balance with elders and women and children, how to speak in the language beyond words, how to befriend fear and live love." Tamarack Song.

These social skills developed in adaptation to the tribe's local environment, as humans developed a unique niche in the African savannas through several million years of genetic and cultural evolution.

Humans excelled at cooperatively hunting and gathering food, with a particular focus on nutrient dense foods (like the internal organs of other mammals, wild herbs and vegetation). These nutrient dense foods allowed for increased brain development in their children. Pursuit of nutrient dense foods necessitated changes in human social organization, as even the best hunters and gatherers would regularly come home empty-handed. By banding together and sharing their food, as well as sharing skills and knowledge, a tribe became more robust and less susceptible to natural variations in food availability.

This diet allowed early humans to develop quite robustly:

“In the book, Nutrition and Physical Degeneration, by Weston Price, it was concluded that these primitives had unbelievable endurance, erect postures and cheerful personalities. They were found to have excellent bone structure and well developed jaw and teeth free from decay. In case after case, Price found no incidence of cancer, ulcers, tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, high blood pressure, muscular dystrophy or sclerosis or cerebral palsy. Source.

This diet also allowed early humans to develop larger brains, and the beginnings of a social culture.

If you've ever wondered why humans became capable of building skyscrapers instead of chimpanzees or dolphins, I believe that it was a combination of opportunity (starting with a relatively smart species), a unique yet sufficiently generalist strategy (hunting and gathering nutrient dense foods), particularly strong selection pressure (see below), and enough changes in environmental conditions to create a new niche for humans without killing them outright. (Note: this is simply my working theory, there is not enough data to fill in all of these gaps).

This niche put strong selection pressure on humans, and also provided them with the nutrient dense food needed to express the newly adapted genes to fuller potential. The selection pressure was quite strong because it was environmental, social and sexual in nature -- meaning that a gene that provided for a better ability to communicate and 'read people' would allow an individual to become a better group hunter, more effective at bargaining for food with the 60 other members of the tribe, and more attractive to a potential mate. Strong selection pressure allows a variation to quickly spread through the gene pool.

As social complexity within the tribe grew over the generations, the pace of change began to accelerate. Tribal customs and practices could change much more quickly than genes can. This allowed humans to adapt to changes in the environment even more quickly.

What developed out of this genetic and social selection pressure was a particularly human institution, the tribe. The tribal community came to dominate human culture:

“The community is the oldest human institution, found absolutely everywhere throughout the world in all kinds of societies. As Rene Dubos has pointed out, more than 100 billion human beings have lived on earth since the late Paleolithic period, and "the immense majority of them have spent their entire life as members of very small groups...rarely of more than a few hundred persons." Indeed, he believes that the need for community has lasted so long that it is encoded in our genes, a part of our makeup, so that "modern man still has a biological need to be part of a group" - a small group, the community, the village, the tribe.” Kirkpatrick Sale.

This form of social organization served us well for most of our history as a species.

There may have been other offshoots of the tribal community. But as Daniel Quinn wrote, "Humans may have tried many other social organizations in those three or four million years, but if so, none of them survived.” (Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, Page 62).

Within these tribal communities, egalitarianism among its members was common. Jason Godesky surmised that egalitarianism was an evolved response to the 'band together and pursue nutrient dense foods' strategy:

"Egalitarian societies built on sharing and cooperation and guided by consensus were much more adapted to the niche humans exploited than the hierarchical troops of other primates ... egalitarian societies–have an exponential number of relationships, as each individual relates to every other individual in new and different ways. As humans became hunter-gatherers, the simple hierarchical model that served so many other primates ceased to suffice. We needed to become egalitarian to survive, and in order to do that, we needed bigger brains relative to our bodies." Source.

The pursuit of nutrient dense foods required cooperation. Egalitarianism offered a survival advantage over simple primate hierarchies, but it also required a larger brain to keep track of the necessary social relationships.

Egalitarianism does not mean that early humans were free of bias, sexism, or fear of outsiders. It simply means that a social map of a tribe would display a swarm of connections, all relatively equal in stature within the community. A community based on hierarchy would be shaped like a pyramid, with the biggest alpha male on top.

Egalitarianism also does not mean that early humans were somehow better people, or free from social ills like violence and theft.

As Daniel Quinn wrote:

"Tribal life is not in fact perfect, idyllic, noble, or wonderful, but wherever it’s found intact, it’s found to be working well -— as well as the life of lizards, raccoons, geese, or beetles —- with the result that the members of the tribe are not generally enraged, rebellious, desperate, stressed-out borderline psychotics being torn apart by crime, hatred, and violence. What anthropologists find is that tribal peoples, far from being nobler, sweeter, or wiser than us, are as capable as we are of being mean, unkind, short-sighted, selfish, insensitive, stubborn, and short-tempered. The tribal life doesn’t turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.” (Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization, p. 61).

Tribal communities, by focusing on social technologies, found ways to keep members of their tribe working together in relative harmony. Tribes which were unable to maintain peace within their community certainly did exist -- but not for very long. Over time, the most effective means of social organization (the egalitarian tribe) came to dominate the human community.

The other defining characteristic of early humans was that they were mobile, hunter-gatherer societies that engaged in a moderate amount of agriculture.

Agriculture is a scalable activity, ranging from 'dropping tasty seeds along the path we take to get to the winter camp' to 'tear up the ground and plant rows of seeds, then water and weed and guard them against predation'. There are a number of variations inbetween, which have a tendency to become optimized to the local climate.

To a tribe that was mobile and placed little value on possessions or physical technologies, intensive agriculture was not a very attractive way to get your food. It was a lot of work! It also required you to stay in one place, which meant that other food sources would not be available in the same quantities (such as seasonal berries, wandering groups of animals, etc).

But let's get back to this 'more work' thing:

"Agriculture is the most intensive form of cultivation, often requiring massive projects such as irrigation or terracing. This is borne out by empirical data. Due to the law of diminishing returns, though agriculture produces the most food absolutely, the ratio of food per unit of labor is in fact higher than any other subsistence technology. Agriculturalists must work harder for their food than anyone else." Source.

Hunter-gather lifestyles, by contrast, were quite a bit easier. Studies of numerous tribes have shown a comparatively easy lifestyle in marginal lands.

I realize that this is counter-intuitive to everything we're taught about primitive people. However, it is a key element of propaganda that alternatives that do not benefit the status quo are targeted. This particular propaganda campaign has been waged for over 10,000 years.

Despite these shortcomings, at least one group of early humans in the Middle East traded a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for an agricultural lifestyle filled with back-breaking labor.

In addition to its other drawbacks, intensive agriculture produced a lower quality of food:

"Excavations at Dickson’s Mounds show a sharp drop in all the customary benchmarks of health and nutrition, and also signs of immediate malnutrition." Source

The same monoculture techniques are used today, and provide modern humans with a much smaller variety of nutrients. The majority of our food comes from only three species -- corn, wheat and rice.

What intensive agriculture did provide, however, was a stable food surplus. This was obviously enough of a draw for at least one group of tribal people -- and, really, that's all it took. Once a food surplus was developed and a generation of children was raised knowing no other way of life, it became possible to begin expanding the intensive agriculture into other lands by force.

Thus began the revolution of lowered expectations. It was a trade of egalitarianism, ample free time and high food quality for guaranteed food surpluses.

Intensive agriculture also provided a way for enterprising members of the tribe to create a hierarchy by controlling access to the food. Having a food surplus required a storage bin. Guards. Someone to measure and distribute the food. It required lots of farmers, people of low status to till the hard ground and do the grunt work. This form of organization was shaped more like a pyramid than an egalitarian swarm.

Thus, with intensive agriculture came hierarchy. This was a replacement for the tribal community. This new form of social organization can be called, in broad terms, civilization.

Civilization can be distinguished through its focus on physical (rather than social) technologies, a development of food surpluses, a hierarchy to protect these technologies and food surpluses, and a clearly defined line between people who are foreign (one of them) and domestic (one of us).

Foreigners became more of a threat to an agricultural community, because they could come in at harvest time and take away a full season's worth of food. Foreign groups of hunter-gatherers were seldom threatening on an existential level, as there was no concentrated store of food to fight over -- merely territory.

This clear definition of foreign, when combined with locking up the food, allowed those at the top of the new hierarchy to begin controlling others through hope (food! to give your new child!) and fear (look our for those nasty barbarians who want to take your food and your superior way of life!).

Thus began the transition from tribal communities to villages, towns, cities and nations.

Intensive agriculture allowed groups of humans to stockpile food and develop specializations like ‘soldier’, ‘leader’ and ‘farmer’. However, this specialization led to a deteriorating quality of life.

But why would people choose to work harder for a lower quality of life?

The answer to this, at least in its specifics, is entirely speculative. I can imagine many scenarios where a tribe might accept temporary measures to bump up food production. Climactic variation may play a role. After several years of drought and harder-to-find food, a tribe may have found intensive farming less onerous. It may have even developed as a long-standing adaptation to droughts longer than 5 years in duration -- on the sixth year, the tribe settles down and becomes farmers until climactic conditions return to normal.

There are many different ways to engage in agriculture, from throwing seeds to plowing up the Earth. There are also a variety of ways to adapt to a changing climate, ranging from 'full-time hunter-gatherer' to 'full-time farmer'.

What is important for the purposes of this discussion is that, at some point, intensive agriculture became dominant in at least one Middle Eastern tribe. This practice allowed the farmers to develop food surpluses, expand their population, and begin creating armies.

With larger populations, food surpluses and professional fighters -- it became possible for these groups to expand. This became necessary, because agriculture left the land denuded after several generations of intensive farming. It became necessary to expand or die, because it was no longer possible to return to hunting and gathering on the denuded land.

This aggressive civilization became dominant through selection pressures, as bordering tribes were left with a choice:

1. The neighboring tribes could adopt similar methods to the aggressive tribe, and start building granaries and armoires.
2. The tribes could do nothing, and be overrun by the aggressive tribe.
3. The tribes could run away, allowing their land to be overrun by the aggressive tribe.

With each expansion the elites within the aggressive civilization grew in wealth, power and influence.

This new way of life continued to spread to other regions, primarily through force: "Agriculture did not spread peacefully into Europe as savages grasped its superiority; it spread into Europe as part of a genocidal wave of conquest, as farmers expanded to find new lands where they had not yet killed off the soil." Source.

Today, this civilization is the dominant force on the planet. Other ways of living are purged, 1984 style, from our history books. We are taught that nothing relevant happened before the first village attacked its neighbor in pursuit of more farmland.

This world-spanning civilization has denuded the majority of arable land on the planet, and is quickly running out of fossil fuel resources. Humanity as a whole is now at a crossroads that will determine the viability of the Earth to support complex life.

Though Richard Feynman was addressing the role of science in society, he described the core of this problem quite well:

"The phenomenon of having a memory for the race, of having an accumulated knowledge passable from one generation to another, was new in the world. But it had a disease in it. It was possible to pass on mistaken ideas. It was possible to pass on ideas which were not profitable for the race. The race has ideas, but they are not necessarily profitable. So there came a time in which the ideas, although accumulated very slowly, were all accumulations not only of practical and useful things, but great accumulations of all types of prejudices, and strange and odd beliefs." Richard Feynman, The Meaning Of It All: Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist, p. 185).

Humans are unique among all species on Earth. We can come up with shortsighted and destructive ideas -- and then try to convince other people that we're right! This is particularly true of ideas that externalize the bad consequences to other people or other species.

The revolution of lowered expectations that led to modern civilization is one of these bad ideas.

It should not surprise us that this manner of social organization was not created to benefit us. It was created to benefit the intellectual descendants of the elites who insisted that, "Gee, wouldn't it be a great idea if you all would dig holes in the ground and grow more wheat -- while I sit here and guard it?"

Humanity has spent most of its history free of hierarchy. Equality is not a liberal dream -- it was the reality for nearly every human being who lived prior to 10,000 BC.

We should hold no false loyalties to the heirarchy of our civilization, the backbreaking toil it requires of so many of us, the degredation of our natural world in the name of 'bidness', nor to its proponents who insist that "someone has to be in charge!" This is is a false myth -- and it is a lie.