The First to Fall

Tag: history

  • Scarcity -> Conflict

    I believe it was Geoff Lawton who said the next war would be fought over water. A liter of clean water is already more valuable on the market than a liter of crude oil…and in the systems we’ve created, scarcity always leads to conflict.

    In ecology, scarcity is feedback. Hunger pushes foraging…drought pushes migration. And in small-scale human societies, conflict over scarcity was usually managed by mobility, sharing, or groups splitting. But once we settled, scarcity became inescapable. Fixed fields…stored food…property…nobody wants to leave those things behind. We became “invested” and conflict became largely unavoidable.

    To prevent collapse from the inside, human coalitions developed ways to suppress reactivity. Strong reactivity (aggression, dissent, or any kind of stubborn autonomy) is dangerous in a sedentary groups subsisting on scarce resources. So selection shifted toward compliance and conformity…enforced first by gossip and ostracism (see Wrangham), then law, ideology, and force.

    It’s dangerously tempting to read civilization as a suite of conflict management “technologies.” But they’re not technologies…they’re stories. They’re descriptions of what is.

    Religion frames inequality and misfortune as God’s will. The doctrine of free will reframes poverty or failure as your own fault. Markets channel conflict into competition, but “solve” scarcity by creating…(artificial) scarcity. States monopolize violence to keep conflict from fracturing the states themselves. And AI is already talked about as a promise…a promise of an environment managed so perfectly that conflict never arises…where error signals are resolved (i.e. smoothed) even before they appear.

    These are stories. Post-hoc rationalizations and buffers. Each of them suppressing the conflict signals they themselves generate.

    What do I mean by that? Think of scarcity as resulting in prediction errors…unmet needs…violated expectations. Conflicts are behavioral responses to those errors. And civilization is the inflation of social priors (shared fictions, ideologies, gods) so that individuals suppress their error-driven responses in favor of compliance. This produces short-term stability…but it also severs feedback. And where feedback is severed, ecological and social errors accumulate.

    In other words, you should never see civilization as a solution to scarcity. It’s never been that. At best, at the smallest scale, it’s a short-term solution to conflict. By suppressing reactivity, it buys stability at the cost of accumulating and unregistered error. Like everything else civilization touches, it makes conflict less surprising…by smoothing, scripting, or relocating it.

  • Human Self-Domestication…selection against autonomy, not hot heads.

    Richard Wrangham frames selection against reactive aggression (he uses the term “hot heads”) as the driver of human self-domestication and argues that our level of proactive aggression largely remained the same. He describes these as distinct evolutionary strategies, each with different adaptive costs and benefits.

    To be clear, reactive aggression is impulsive, emotionally-driven violence in response to provocation or frustration (e.g. bar fights, chimpanzee dominance squabbles, etc.). Proactive aggression is calculated, planned violence deployed strategically for advantage (e.g. ambushes, executions, coordinated raids).

    Wrangham’s central point is that self-domestication arises when reactive aggression is consistently punished (and culled), while proactive aggression not only persists but is sometimes institutionalized (authorities get a monopoly on violence).

    His reasoning is as follows.

    In small-scale societies, reactive aggressors were costly to group stability. They disrupted cooperation, created unpredictability, and risked alienating allies. With language and coalitionary power, groups gained the ability to collectively punish or kill these “hot heads.” Over many generations, this reduced the frequency of impulsively aggressive temperaments in the gene pool. The result is a calmer, more tolerant baseline disposition in humans compared to chimpanzees…one of the classic “domestication syndrome” traits.

    What rubs me the wrong way is how quickly Wrangham assumes, out of all the traits that make up domestication syndrome, that reactive aggression is what was being selected for. Why wouldn’t the selection pressure be for proactive aggression, for example? Wrangham admits that proactive aggression was reinforced in human evolution. We became better at planned violence (executions, warfare, conquest) than any other primate. Crucially, proactive aggression is socially sanctioned…it’s framed as justice, punishment, or defense of the group. That makes it evolutionarily advantageous, not disadvantageous. In Wrangham’s model, the ability to conspire and kill reactively aggressive individuals is itself an expression of proactive aggression, and therefore part of what made us more cooperative at scale.

    This hypothesis feels reductive to me. Domestication in other species involves selection for predictability, docility, and compliance, not just low reactivity. By centering only on reactive aggression, Wrangham treats self-domestication as a paradoxical success story…calmer humans enabled cooperation, and cooperation enabled civilization. It leaves out what civilization actually does…the flattening of error landscapes, where any form of reactivity (not just aggression) becomes maladaptive in large, controlled groups.

    I’ve been thinking seriously about whether an argument could be made, just as strong or stronger than Wrangham’s, that selection for proactive aggression was the real driver in the human domestication story.

    Large-scale violence is a consistent theme in the emergence of complex societies…from the mass graves of the Neolithic to the conquest states of Mesopotamia, Mesoamerica, and beyond. Warfare, conquest, and raiding were not incidental to civilization. They were the engines of state formation, with proactive aggression (planned and coordinated violence) clearly rewarded at both the genetic and cultural level.

    Take the Y-chromosome bottleneck (5,000-7,000 years ago). It shows that ~90-95% of male lineages were extinguished, leaving only a few dominant bloodlines. This is genetic evidence of the real pattern of civilizational “coordination”: violent conquest and reproductive monopoly by elite men. Where in civilization’s history is Wrangham’s “peaceful coalitionary suppression of “bad apples”?” I just don’t see it. “Super-ancestor” events (e.g. Genghis Khan’s lineage) show the same thing in miniature. Proactive, organized aggression yields massive reproductive skew.

    In fact, let’s turn to reproductive skew and polygyny. Even convention historical narratives tell a story of high-status males (kings, chiefs, emperors, warlords) with harems, concubines, and multiple wives. these are outcomes made possible by proactive aggression…conquest, enslavement, and the monopolization of resources. Lower-status men were excluded from reproduction, not because they were “too reactive” (though those certainly would have been excluded as well), but because they lost wars, were enslaved, or killed.

    Proactive aggression isn’t just violence. It’s long-term planning, coalition-building, deception, and symbolic justification (myths, laws, and religions sanctifying violence makes up most of the human history book). These are precisely the traits that expand during the civilizing process…organizational capacity, abstract rule-following, and symbolic reasoning, all in service of controlling large groups.

    I have a few thoughts on why Wrangham favors the other story (selection against reactive aggression). It links directly to his bonobo analogy (their lower reactivity compared to chimps). And it fits with domestication syndrome traits (softer faces and reduced baseline violence), of course. But these seem weak to me. What it comes down to, I believe, is Wrangham gravitating toward an age-old optimistic narrative…humans becoming more cooperative (from the “less hot-headed” angle), writing poems, and painting the Sistine Chapel. To me this is yet another just-so story tilted toward optimism. Real, documented human history (and the present, to a large extent) reads like selection for manipulative, proactive violence. Those who excel at strategic violence and symbolic control reproduce disproportionately. Full stop. This fits much better with what we see in the pages of history…runaway systems of control, hierarchies, and narrative manipulations that still structure our domesticated condition. These are better explained as the costs of selecting for proactive aggression than as some sort of “goodness paradox”.

    In fact, it might be a silly thought experiment, but who’s to say that if were possible to actively select for proactive aggression in other species, that domestication traits wouldn’t appear?

    To me, domestication syndrome (floppy ears, smaller brains, prolonged neoteny, pigmentation changes, altered reproductive cycles) arises because selection pressure narrows the error landscape of a species. The mechanism most often discussed is neural crest cell changes…but the reason for those changes could be any number of selection pressures. In foxes, it was tameness toward humans. In humans (Wrangham), he says it was lower reactive aggression. But it could also plausibly be selection for predictability, planning, and controlled aggression if that’s what the system demanded (and did, and does!).

    The core idea is if you reduce the payoff for being “unpredictably reactive” and increase the payoff for being “strategically compliant,” the biology shifts. The neural, hormonal, and developmental systems adapt to reward that niche. The syndrome may look similar (the smaller brains, juvenilization, etc.) because what’s really being selected for is attenuation of wild-type reactivity in general.

    Let’s move away from what I see as Wrangham’s too-narrow focus and broaden this narrative a bit.

    Let’s look at the human story from a predictive coding lens, and consider scarcity as a selector. In times of ecological stress, groups face more prediction errors (crops fail, animals migrate, rivers dry up). Some individuals resolve error by updating their model (adjusting expectations, moving). Others resolve error by updating the world…forcing it into alignment with their model. The latter is the logic of domestication…bend plants, animals, landscapes, and people into predictability.

    From here, we can see proactive aggression as control in action. On the ground, this isn’t abstract. Pull up wild plants and keep only the docile grains. Cull the fence-jumping sheep and reactive roosters…breed the calm ones. Raid nearby villages, enslave, execute dissenters, and reward compliance. This is proactive aggression. Planned, systemic, future-oriented control. It’s violence as policy.

    This makes me think of how Robert Kelly frames humanity’s cultural revolution. He proposes that symbolic thought makes it possible to imagine not just “what is,” but “what should be.” And “what should be” becomes a shared prior (model of the world) that groups can coordinate around…even if it doesn’t match reality. Once you can coordinate around a model, you can impose it, and enforce conformity within the group. To me, that’s proactive aggression (if we’re still calling it that) elevated…control not only of bodies now, but of perception and imagination.

    What disappears under a system like that? Well, for one, reactive aggression clearly becomes intolerable. It represents autonomous feedback (an individual saying “no” in the moment). In control systems, that kind of unpredictable resistance is punished most severely. You know that. Slaves who rebel are killed. Chickens that cause problems are culled. Men who resist capture are killed first. The system slowly culls “reactors” and favors the predictable (those who update their selves rather than the system).

    This is what I see as the flattening of the civilizing process…the rock tumbler effect. Proactive aggression is the abrasive force that flattens everything…landscapes, genetic diversity, behavioral variation, etc., etc. Reactive aggression is just one of the first “edges” to be ground away. A byproduct of selecting for proactive control. A footprint of the real selection pressure. And what remains is a domesticated phenotype…more compliant, less volatile, more predictable.

    Not convinced? Try this experiment.

    Write these two hypotheses out on a sheet of paper:

    1. “Coalitions punish hot-heads -> reactive aggression selected against -> cooperative, domesticated humans emerge.”
    2. “Coalitions punish (in- and out-group) resistors to group control -> resistance (often expressed as reactive aggression…rebellion, resistance to domination) -> compliant, predictable humans emerge.

    Now read as many history books as you can, testing these as you go. Take notes.

    Only one of these hypotheses explains why proactive aggression thrives where reactive aggression doesn’t. There is no paradox. Proactive aggression isn’t punished because it aligns with group objectives, and what disappears isn’t “bad tempers” but unmanaged defiance. Resistors are killed. Compliant captives are taken. Rebels are executed. Compliant laborers survive.

    This is selection against the unpredictable expression of autonomy that disrupts control.

  • “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?”

  • The Great Culling: How Civilization Engineered the Modern Male

    Somewhere between 5,000 and 3,000 BCE, something strange happened to the human genome. Specifically, the Y chromosome.

    Over a 2,000-year stretch, human genetic diversity experienced a massive contraction. At one point, only about 1 in 20 men were reproducing. That means 95% of male lineages vanished…poof…gone. Most men alive today descend from a shockingly narrow slice of the male population that lived during that window.

    So…what the hell happened?

    Civilization happened.

    Not in the TED Talk sense…with aqueducts, murals, and democracy, but in the REAL sense…with hierarchy, slavery, and reproductive monopoly.

    The dawn of social stratification. More specifically, the sorting and discarding of people under systems of control. Yet more specifically, men controlling and flattening each other, themselves, women, and their environments with castes and dynasties, priesthoods and palaces, slavery and statehood, patrilineal inheritance, and elite polygyny (harems). And a certain kind of man systematically slaughtering every other kind of man.

    This wasn’t a simple population dip (women were still passing on their genes)…it was a selection event. And it coincides with when the process we call “civilization” was going into hyperdrive. Let that sink in for a moment. The selection event, where the genetic lines of 95 out of 100 men ended….wasn’t random. It was engineered by emerging systems that rewarded a very specific type of man…and erased the rest.

    Let’s be clear about what this means.

    When only a tiny elite of men get to reproduce (thanks to war, rape, slavery, or sheer status monopoly), you get a collapse in Y-chromosome diversity. Genetic drift goes wild. Founder effects explode. Suddenly, the behavioral and physiological traits of those few “winners” echo through the generations.

    What kinds of traits? What did the 5% of men still reproducing have in common?

    Well, to survive a slave system (on either side of the equation), you need emotional suppression. To survive a caste system? You need to be obedient to the hierarchy. A priesthood? Symbolic fluency (be good with complex bullshit). To reproduce in a monarchy? Performative loyalty.

    You simply don’t need egalitarianism, independence, or sensitivity to injustice. In fact, those traits will get you killed (or at least reproductively erased). It’s naive to think that a process like this just weeded out bodies…it weeded out minds.

    Over generations, civilization reshapes the species to favor male behaviors that reinforce civilized systems (status-seeking, dominance within rules, emotional control, strategic conformity). We call this “civilized” behavior. It sounds great, because it implies that the only alternative is (and was) resource-seeking, dominance without rules, little to no emotional control, and constant rebellion. But before we even explore whether that’s true, let’s acknowledge the fact that “civilized” behavior is nothing but system-optimized behavior, filtered through thousands of years of brutal selection.

    Meanwhile, female mitochondrial DNA (passed maternally) shows no such bottleneck. This means women kept reproducing across a much broader spectrum of lineages. The narrowing came from the top down, not the bottom up. Elite males reshaped the species by erasing vast swaths of it. A bit different from the civilizing / human self-domestication story you hear, isn’t it? The nicer people in the cave cooperating to get rid of the bullies? That happened, but the majority of the domestication story isn’t there. It’s in shackles, pits of bodies, chastity belts, slave raids, human sacrifices, and all manner of horrors.

    And it changed everything.

    It disrupted ancestral balances…between empathy and assertiveness, “wildness” and restraint, autonomy and obedience. It’s not something interesting side note. It altered hormonal profiles, sexual dimorphism, and the developmental timing of traits like aggression and cooperation. Civilization didn’t just change how we live…it reprogrammed what we are.

    And it looks a fuck of a lot like animal domestication. Bottlenecks, Enclosures. Selection for traits that serve the system, not the organism.

    The domestication of plants, animals, and people has implications that, when not accounted for in just about every important conversation we have in just about every field, results in the biggest example of decontextualization I can think of. Not acknowledging the maladaptively high level of attenuation of the modern human when discussing psychology, anthropology, history, sustainability, etc….means solutions simply aren’t found. The entire thing becomes self-referential.

    We’re not aware of what we are. We’re a domesticated phenotype…biologically tamed, groomed to perform in systems of symbolic order, no matter how insane that order becomes. And we try to find solutions within those insane systems. Solutions to the systems themselves, within the rules of the systems. It’s dizzying.

    We’re still living in the domesticating system. We operate inside its psychological architecture. And we carry the genetic consequences of a civilizational edit that decided which kinds of men would carry forward, and which kinds wouldn’t.

    The modern man isn’t just a descendant of random survivors. He isn’t a product of “survival of the fittest.” He’s the product of selective obedience. He’s a creature designed (quite literally) to fit the cage.

  • Human Self-Domestication–Passive Drift or Violent Control?

    I don’t know why, but I started with a view of self-domestication as a kind of passive and benign drift that came with sedentism, agriculture, and symbolic sociality (i.e. we domesticated plants and animals but were, in turn, domesticated by them). But I’ve been reading James C. Scott recently, and he points out that early states (and much of the “civilizing process”) were neither passive nor benign. At the very least, human domestication wasn’t just self-domestication. It was also (largely, even) the domestication of other humans.

    In Against the Grain, Scott shows beyond a doubt that civilization depended on enclosure, grain taxation, raiding and enslavement to maintain labor populations, and that flight and resistance were common responses. Civilization was never attractive…it had to be enforced.

    Slavery is the foundation of civilization.

    And when this becomes clear, you see that rather than some sort of soft selection for docility, the domestication of humans is the product of millennia of deliberate constraint of movement, enforced labor routines, punishment of disobedience, and breaking of wild behavior. These are textbook domestication techniques…and, yes, they were applied to humans.

    If slaves, captives, and conquered populations were the ones who had to survive in early states, then compliance, emotional suppression, and symbolic fluency would have been necessary for survival. Over generations, these traits could be biologically and culturally selected (and feedback sensitivity selected against). This is what captivity breeding looks like.

    The “self” domestication that gets talked about (the one that doesn’t involve slavery, castration, rape, harems, etc.) probably only occurred among the elite. As the systems they built (for domesticating a labor population) gained internal momentum, rewarded behaviors that served them, and punished deviation (even in elites)…they became autonomous. And to maintain their position, the elite had to perform their role, suppress feedback, and inhabit their own abstraction. Some sort of hyper-domestication (powdered wigs?) where they weren’t just compliant, but enslaved by the structures they created to dominate others. This might explain why civilization doesn’t produce sovereign elites…it produces Donald Trumps. Actors, symbol manipulators, technocrats, surrogates. Hollow men.

  • Stability Versus “Progress”

    The romanticization of non-industrial or Indigenous cultures often assumes stability where there may be only earlier-stage (civilizational) dynamics. How do we know they weren’t just earlier on the same trajectory we find ourselves?

    I think some pre-civilizational or tribal groups may have been on a path toward scale and abstraction, had they continued to expand population, develop surplus, or centralize power. Not all small-scale societies are feedback-sensitive by virtue of size alone. Some were clearly stratifying, warring, or manipulating symbol in ways that hint at incipient feedback suppression. And, of course, some became empires later (e.g., early Mesopotamian groups, Olmecs, etc.).

    But many cultures we know of had explicit mechanisms that prevented the civilizational arc. This is where the evidence gets stronger. They deliberately resisted complexity, centralization, and symbolic authority, not because they couldn’t develop them…they chose not to.

    The !Kung (San people of the Kalahari) have rich oral traditions that ridicule arrogance, prevent hoarding, and maintain egalitarian relations through ritualized teasing and sharing.

    Pacific Northwest tribes had complex seasonal systems with embedded limits on harvesting, enforced through taboo and storytelling.

    The Inuit use humor, social cues, and distributed authority to manage conflict and maintain decentralized power, despite extreme environments.

    James C. Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed” documents upland Southeast Asian groups who fled state formation intentionally, preserving social structures that avoided hierarchy.

    Amazonian and Andean cultures often shaped their environments intelligently (terra preta, agroforestry) without triggering runaway scale or ecological collapse, suggesting long-term feedback awareness (connection).

    These are groups with institutionalized feedback preservation…culture as ecosystem maintenance, not system expansion. What’s often identified as a failure to progress (toward the trainwreck we’re on) was an active refusal.

    Some paths were clearly tried, then rejected. Archaeological evidence suggests that not all large-scale or symbol-rich societies escalated into collapse scenarios. Some collapsed gently or even walked back from the brink. The Hopewell culture in North America developed extensive trade and ritual networks, but later dispersed voluntarily, reverting to smaller, more localized systems. Catalhoyuk (in modern-day Turkey) was a large Neolithic settlement with no apparent hierarchy or centralized authority, sustained for over a millennium before dispersal. So the arc isn’t inevitable…it can plateau, regress, or reroute.

    In other places, the arc was forcibly interrupted. Many societies that appear “early-stage” were in fact stabilized systems interrupted by colonization. Their lifeways weren’t primitive…they were ecologically coherent. What ended them was an external force that did not follow the same feedback rules. Guns, germs, capital, extraction, Christian mission, symbolic domination. We have to be careful not to conflate “didn’t scale” with “was about to scale.” For some cultures, collapse wasn’t an imminent endpoint…it was something that arrived on ships.

    So, yeah, some groups were on the arc. But most actively resisted it through cultural structures that preserved feedback, suppressed hierarchy, and treated simulation as dangerous. Others collapsed gently, or dispersed consciously, not in chaos. And many were erased before their trajectory could be seen, by a system already deep in feedback severance.

    The civilizational arc is hardly a natural law…it’s a pattern. And patterns can be interrupted, redirected, or refused. But only if the culture wants to stay in contact with reality.

    But what allows some societies to stabilize? Is it internal design or external environmental limits? I think it’s both, but when stabilization succeeds, it’s the internal response to external limits that makes the difference.

    We can think of external conditions as constraints and enablers. They shape the playing field, but they don’t determine the moves.

    Environments that were abundant but not stockpiling-friendly (e.g. tropical forests, seasonal hunting zones) made it harder to hoard, centralize, or form coercive hierarchies. And without massive, storable grain surpluses (like wheat in Mesopotamia), there’s less incentive to control labor, enforce calendars, or invent gods who demand tithes. When nature feeds you just enough, but only if you listen to it…you stay in dialogue with it.

    Mountainous, jungle, or arctic environments often prevent large-scale coordination, empire-building, or rapid trade expansion. These conditions inhibit external conquest and select for small-group adaptability over centralized control.

    And where population density remained low for whatever reason (terrain, resources, cultural practices like long birth spacing), there was less pressure to intensify extraction or build coercive institutions. When there’s space to move, there’s space to stay sane.

    But none of these conditions guarantee stability. They just don’t force instability. Many societies had varying degrees of access to abundance, mobility, or knowledge, that might look familiar to us…and still chose a path of restraint. Why? How?

    Again, stability comes from institutionalizing restraint, feedback, and relational intelligence. It doesn’t come from being “primitive.”

    For example, taboos can act as a form of ecological governance. Many Indigenous societies embedded strict taboos around hunting, fishing, harvesting, or even speaking certain names or stories out of season. These aren’t “superstitions”–they’re feedback-preserving rituals, tied to real ecological signals. “Don’t fish this river in spring” framed as a spiritual belief may sound religious…until you realize that’s when the salmon spawn.

    Then we have the egalitarian social structures we see in most of these groups…something we have the hardest time wrapping our shrunken brains around. These were norms, myths, and practices that flattened power. Joking hierarchies, rotating leadership, gift economies. Leadership wasn’t rewarded with privilege but burdened with accountability. And prestige came from generosity, not control.

    And we tend to equate the myths of these groups as some childish version of our own religions. But there’s a key difference. Their rituals and stories were anchored in reality. Rather than simulate the world through myth, many oral cultures used story to maintain contact with place, kin, and feedback. Myth was a mnemonic ecology, not a symbolic escape hatch.

    Of course, the biological drive to seek advantage (assuming we accept that framing of it), is universal. This is where feedback-sensitive social sanctions come into play. Those who hoarded, abused, or disrupted balance were shamed, ridiculed, ostracized, or corrected…not pathologized, but realigned. Certainly not made president.

    What we see here is an active design of cultures that chose feedback over fantasy, limits over linear growth, and relationships over domination. They weren’t “stuck in time.” They were anchored in reality. And I think that’s the only cultural achievement worth pursuing: stabilization. Progress, the way we define it, has an unmistakable entropic flavor. In fact, in a very real sense, what we call “progress” is entropy.