The First to Fall

Tag: climate-change

  • Where does the real control begin? (How did we get from egalitarianism to building permits and marriage licenses?)

    Let’s start with scarcity.

    When resources are abundant and accessible, individuals and small groups can meet their needs independently…there’s little to no incentive for hierarchy or some kind of enforced coordination. Scarcity (whether it’s real or engineered) creates conditions where access might need to be regulated. Control systems (chiefs, priests, bureaucrats) emerge to decide who gets what, when, and how. This doesn’t just apply to food…think of land, water, labor, and information. The more scarce these things are, the more power seems to concentrate in the people who manage distribution.

    As populations grow and density increases, resource demand outpaces availability in a given area. This creates a new kind of scarcity, call it structural scarcity…resources aren’t always “gone,” they might just be stretched or hoarded. Anthropologists (James C. Scott, Mark Nathan Cohen) argue that the rise of agriculture wasn’t a leap forward. It was a trap…higher population density leads to soil depletion, which leads to periodic famine, which leads to tighter and tighter social controls. Scarcity and density rise together, since density both consumes more and makes groups easier to control (rationing).

    Think of control as a feedback loop or a vicious cycle. Scarcity leads to control…and the more “successful” that control is, the more scarcity results. In irrigation states like Mesopotamia, drought and a high population necessitated a sort of irrigation bureaucracy. But irrigation caused the salinization of soils, which led to even more scarcity, when led to even stronger central control. Once a system of control exists, it doesn’t go away when scarcity disappears…it invents new scarcities (taxes, debts, borders, artificial shortages) to keep power. This happens regardless of the ideology or political system. This isn’t a fascism or capitalism story.

    Let’s look at this from a predictive processing angle. Scarcity increases prediction errors (will I eat tomorrow?). Control systems offer social priors (“obey the priest, follow the ration schedule”) that reduce uncertainty at the cost of autonomy. People trade independence for predictability. The control system becomes what guarantees your survival.

    Can you guess what peaks with resource scarcity and population density? You got it…human domestication (and domestication in general).

    After the last glacial maximum (12,000-20,000 years ago), we saw mass megafauna extinctions and human population growth. In other words, serious local scarcity. During the early holocene (10,000-12,000 years ago), human population density rose in fertile regions (Levant, Yangtze, Andes).

    And this is where we really see scarcity management become chronic.

    The average human brain shrank by ~10-15% beginning ~30,000 years ago, with the sharpest decline between 10,000-20,000 years ago…exactly the same window when density/settlement intensified. Bones became lighter and less robust ~15,000 years ago (this is linked to sedentism/reduced mobility). Male and female skeletal differences narrowed in the same timeframe. And signs of hierarchy and control systems all emerge right as density and scarcity peak.

    The feedback loop is hard to miss. Density produces scarcity (real and perceived), scarcity drives new control systems, control systems select for predictability/attenuation (flattening diversity of responses to it), domestication traits become more pronounced, and those traits, in turn, make populations more compatible with density and hierarchy…accelerating the cycle.

    The loop shapes landscapes, plants, animals and people. What thrives under high-density scarcity-control systems is predictable, compliant, and attenuated. And across millennia, this produces the domesticated phenotype…flatter, more manageable humans. The loop is called civilization. It entrenches domestication traits and expands until it collapses.

    (Christopher Ryan and some archaeologists have an abundance-first model…but it leads to the same loop…once the abundance is gone, you have a sedentary group of people living in scarcity…I think this probably happened in certain places at certain times.)

  • “The Dark Ages” (a civilizational propaganda campaign)

    What evidence do we really have of life between “great civilizations”?

    Most of what we know about (recent) past human activity comes from civilizations…they wrote the texts, built the monuments, and taxed the scribes. Between empires, and especially after collapses, the trail goes quiet. Still, there are important windows…

    Archaeological evidence tells us that after collapses (like the Late Bronze Age, ~1200 BCE), urban centers empty out and people scatter into villages, hill forts, and rural hamlets. It also tells us that nutrition improves after collapses…less dental decay, taller average height, fewer stress markers, etc. Peasants eat more varied local food when they’re free from (elite) grain monocultures. And they live in simpler dwellings with more egalitarian layouts (vs. palaces and temples), and engage in more local craftmanship (potter, textiles) when centralized trade breaks down.

    Some examples…

    Elite historians call the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire a “Dark Age,” but isotope and skeletal data show rural populations ate better when imperial taxation and grain export systems collapsed. Commoners gained land access (while the people at the top cried, “Barbarism!”).

    When (classic) Mayan civilization collapses around 900 CE, monumental building stops, but villages persist…there’s plenty of evidence of crop diversification and local resilience. People didn’t vanish, in other words…they just stopped paying for the fucking pyramids.

    In the Andes, after Spanish conquest destroyed centralized (Inca) systems, Indigenous ayllu (kindship networks) reasserted themselves as the real basis of survival.

    Anthropology also helps fill in these “dark” gaps by studying groups who lived outside or on the margins of states. Foragers like the Hadza, San, and Inuit show what lifeways look like without taxation, markets, and state coercion…and, again, what we see are rich social bonds, leisure, and diverse diets. In The Art of Not Being Governed, James Scott argues that much of Southeast Asia’s highlands were deliberately outside of state control, and people chose to exit civilization (they didn’t “fail to develop”).

    Skeletal trauma indicates that gaps between civilizations are marked by less mass warfare, and stress markers decrease in periods between states (life is much less of a chronic grind).

    Basically, the evidence we have suggests that during “dark ages,” ordinary people lived better. They were healthier, freer, less taxed, and more autonomous. They engaged in local culture and kinship that is probably invisible to historians.

    I think that what we call collapse now only looked catastrophic at the time to the few…scribes and kings. For most of the people we would relate to, it meant relief.

  • The sooner civilization collapses, the better.

    The “saving civilization” narrative smuggles in a bunch of assumptions.

    That civilization = humanity.
    This ignores the fact that for most of human history we lived outside of states, agriculture, empire…with better nutrition, more leisure, stronger community ties, and little to no hierarchy.

    That collapse = tragedy.
    In reality, archaeological and anthropological evidence shows that “collapse” of states meant ordinary people’s lives improved: fewer taxes, fewer wars, and more autonomy. The “dark ages” framing is a civilizational bias…the people writing history were the elites who lost power, not the peasants who gained freedom.

    That continuity of institutions is the goal.
    But life itself (biological, ecological, communal) can clearly persist (flourish, even) without those institutions.

    I enjoy reading and listening to thinkers like Schmachtenberger, Bostrom, Harari, etc., but they also frustrate the hell out of me. In their paradigm, civilization is taken as the frame of reference. The metrics are survival of states, stability of markets, and the continuity of technology. The assumption is always that if civilization collapses, humans (and meaning, and progress) go with it.

    It’s a selective view and I think it’s bullshit. It privileges what’s easiest to archive (stone, steel, writing, empire) over what’s hardest (oral culture, kinship bonds, lived quality of life). But the archive is far from the reality. Ruins, coins, monuments, and GDP have fuck all to do with lived experience.

    How do you look back and measure quality of life? There are some things we can roughly quantify…

    We know that declines in biodiversity track pretty damn closely with agriculture and state expansion. We know that height, bone density, and dental health were better among hunter-gatherers than early agriculturalists. We know that foragers worked ~20 hrs/week on subsistence, vs. 60+ in most agrarian/civilized contexts. We know that rates of disease, parasites, and epidemics increase with population density and domestication of animals. We know that foragers lived in fluid, egalitarian bands with profound interdependence between members. We know that inequality really only appears with agriculture and the state. Likewise mass/organized violence (wars, enslavement, genocide). We know that hunter-gatherers were happier because their needs were modest and easily met. We know that physiological stress markers (enamel hypoplasias, bone lesions) spike with agriculture and that culminate in today’s mental health crisis.

    Civilization leaves us records of itself and erases precisely what made life rich and bearable (simply being alive in small communities and the sensory ecology of a biodiverse landscape). We use those records to determine what’s important in life rather than seeing them for what they are–roads to failure. Repeated failures.

    Imagine a series of layered graphs (I’m shit with tech, so you’ll actually have to imagine them), not just with the usual axes (population, GDP, technological complexity), but overlayed with several “shadow metrics”…stress hormones (rising with states), storytelling hours per night (dropping with industrial time-discipline), biodiversity curves (next to depression rates), average hours of unstructured play for children (falling over time), etc. These graphs would show you a visceral contrast…material monuments climbing skyward as lived human experience goes to shit.

    I’m talking about an alternative history of experience (it’s increasingly the only sort of history that interests me)…”what did it feel like to live then?” instead of “what shit did we build?”

  • No Feedback = Dominance Hierarchy

    The problem isn’t the conservatives or the liberals. It isn’t capitalism. It isn’t democracy. It isn’t Trump. It isn’t corporations.

    The problem is simpler than that.

    In the absence of authentic feedback, power concentrates.

    Every.

    Single.

    Time.

    (10 unrelated (but related) examples off the top of my head)

    Irrigation Empires
    In rain-fed farming, drought or overuse directly affects local food supply. People adjust their behavior based on immediate ecological feedback. When irrigation systems emerge, they buffer these signals. Central planners control the water, so the consequences of overuse don’t reach them. This severance allows bureaucracies and elites to centralize control, since managing the infrastructure (not responding to the land) is what grants power.

    Bees and Pesticides
    In healthy ecosystems, bees rely on sensory feedback (smell, landmarks, hive cues) to forage and navigate. When pesticides disrupt these signals, bees become disoriented. Natural feedback about ecosystem health is silenced. As wild pollination declines, power shifts to corporations that sell commercial hives or artificial pollination services. The feedback loop that kept ecosystems adaptive is replaced with dependence on manufactured inputs.

    Five-Year Plans
    In a functional economy, local failures (bad harvests, overwork, material shortages) prompt direct corrections. Under Stalin’s central planning, officials fear punishment for failure, so they falsify reports. Honest feedback disappears. Quotas, not reality, guide decisions. Power concentrates in those who control narrative and allocation, not those who are responsive to conditions on the ground. Collapse looms, but the system can no longer see it coming.

    Social Media Algos
    In face-to-face interaction, people receive immediate social feedback (tone, expression, disagreement) that guides conversation. Platforms like TikTok or Facebook sever this feedback by filtering everything through opaque algorithms. What spreads is what generates clicks, not what builds understanding. Users can’t tell why they see what they see. Those who exploit outrage, manipulation, or performance rise to the top. Influence concentrates in those who bypass authentic social cues.

    Fragmented Elephant Herds
    In stable elephant societies, older matriarchs provide feedback…where to go, how to behave, when to fight or flee. Humans kill matriarchs and fragment herds…eliminating this feedback. Young males grow up without social correction. They become unusually aggressive or dominant, traits that wouldn’t thrive under proper guidance. Power concentrates in individuals unregulated by social memory, and the entire group loses coherence.

    The Founding Fathers to MAGA
    The U.S. system is built on feedback loops…checks and balances, press freedom, elections. Over time, these loops weaken. Media polarizes, districts are gerrymandered, campaign money distorts priorities. Citizens lose the ability to meaningfully influence power. Leaders rise who don’t need to respond to truth or consequence. Spectacle and branding replace accountability. The system rewards insulation over responsibility, and power concentrates accordingly.

    Foraging Societies to Aztec Empires
    Forage live close to ecological limits. If they overhunt or mistreat each other, the effects show up fast. Feedback is direct. As empires form, this feedback is replaced with hierarchy, tribute, and symbolic order. Rulers receive food, gold, and obedience, but not signals about ecological or social strain. They rule by ritual and abstraction. Power concentrates in those furthest from consequence, and collapse becomes inevitable.

    Small Family Farms to Monsanto
    On small farms, feedback from soil, weather, pests, and animals guides decisions. When industrial ag takes over, this feedback is muted by chemicals, contracts, and monoculture. Companies like Monsanto (Bayer) insert themselves between farmers and the land…controlling seed genetics, licensing, and supply chains. Farmers no longer adjust based on ecological feedback; they follow protocols. Power shifts to those who sell in puts and own patents, not those who observe the field.

    Socialism to Authoritarianism
    Young socialist movements promote worker feedback, collective decision-making, and material accountability. As these systems centralize, feedback gets buried. Leaders suppress dissent, equate criticism with betrayal, and create a climate of fear. The system stops adjusting to real conditions. Power accumulates in those who can enforce ideology and maintain order, not those who can listen, adapt, or serve. What starts as redistribution ends as command and control.

    Academic Institutions (from learning to gatekeeping)
    Initially, education is grounded in open inquiry and personal feedback…students ask questions, teachers respond, ideas evolve. As academia professionalizes, it filters feedback through credentials, metrics, and funding pipelines. Scholars no longer respond to real-world needs. They respond to peer review, grant conditions, and institutional politics. Feedback from the public, from learners, from reality itself gets severed. Authority concentrates in gatekeepers who control access to legitimacy.