The First to Fall

Tag: politics

  • 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.

  • Was Hobbes right? (and other holes in Wrangham’s narrative)

    Wrangham’s reading becomes “Hobbesian” only if I treat modern Homo sapiens as a transparent example of “what nature does.” But if I see most modern humans as the outcome of a runaway selection process (which I do), then what he’s describing isn’t “the natural course of things”…it’s one very peculiar path, shaped by group-enforced control, ecological shocks, and self-reinforcing dynamics.

    In Wrangham’s frame, humans reduced reactive aggression “naturally,” like bonobos, by killing off bullies. This made us more cooperative and domesticated, enabling civilization. This makes our docility some kind of moral progress…proof of “better angels.”

    But when we look at this as runaway selection, we see that humans reduced disruptive reactivity not because it was inherently maladaptive, but because control systems selected against it. Those who resisted were killed, enslaved, or excluded, while compliant individuals reproduced. It wasn’t a noble trajectory toward peace. It’s a feedback loop of domestication…each round of control flattens diversity, narrows behavior, and strengthens the system’s grip.

    I propose that modern “cooperation” isn’t evidence of a gentle human nature, but of attenuation. A domesticated phenotype optimized for predictability. And what Wrangham calls “our success” is really a fragile state of overshoot. More docile humans and larger coordinated systems make for the massive ecological extraction we see today. Instead of Hobbes’s “nasty, brutish, and short” as the baseline, the baseline was probably messier but more adaptive…with greater tolerance for autonomy, variability, and feedback from the environment.

    I think the Hobbesian story is itself a product of domesticated minds narrating their condition as “progress” (I’m in full agreement with Christopher Ryan here). What looks like the triumph of peace is really the triumph of control which, taken far enough, undermines both autonomy and ecological survival.

    I want to take a second (third? fourth? tenth?) look at Wrangham’s take on reactive aggression now. Because there’s a lot about it that doesn’t sit comfortably with me.

    Reactive aggression (the “heat of the moment,” crimes of passion) is still recognized as human. It may be tragic or destructive, but the law often interprets it as impulsive, unplanned…an overflow of feeling. That makes it mitigating. Proactive aggression (premeditated, calculated), on the other hand, is seen as more dangerous. It reflects intentional control, not eruption. Society punishes it more harshly because it reveals a deliberate strategy of harm. This suggests (to me, anyway) that people intuitively grasp that reactivity is part of being alive, whereas proactive aggression is a sort of deviation…weaponizing intelligence for domination.

    Wrangham says that humans became “civilized” by suppressing reactive aggression. But I think everyone can agree that cultural practice indicates we still see reactive aggression as understandable, even forgivable. What we really can’t tolerate is schemed violence…the kind of proactive aggression that builds empires, executes slaves, or engineers genocide. I think the very logic of law undermines Wrangham’s claim. If reactive aggression were the great evolutionary danger, why is it less punished than the thing he ways persisted unchanged?

    Which brings me back to the better explanatory model…domestication didn’t simply reduce hot tempers. It systematically removed resistance (any kind of reactivity that disrupts control). But at the same time, it rewarded (and still rewards) the forms of aggression that can operate through the system…planned, symbolically justified, and bureaucratically executed. This is why the “banality of evil” (Hannah Arendt’s term for the bureaucratic normalcy of atrocity) feels so resonant: proactive aggression is what really flourished under domestication.

    My next bone of contention with Wrangham is that most examples of reactive aggression he provides in his written work and lectures sounds a hell of a lot like bullying. Proactive bullying.

    With one hand, he defines reactive aggression as impulsive, hot-blooded, emotionally charged aggression…triggered by provocation or frustration and more or less immediate (not pre-planned). But in the same breath, he gives examples that clearly indicate planning, calculation, and strategic targeting. He cites situations where aggression is used to produce submission in the victim…not some kind of heat-of-the-moment explosion. I don’t know of any psychological taxonomies in which that behavior is a fit for reactive aggression.

    Why? Again, I think part of it has to do with his bonobo comparison. He needs “reactive aggression” as the thing bonobos and humans both suppress, to link his self-domestication theory. It certainly makes the story cleaner, too. “We eliminated bullies” sounds more like moral progress than “we empowered the strategic aggressors.” And it smells like simplification to me. By labeling bullying “reactive,” he folds it into his main category, even if the behaviors clearly involve planning.

    And by stretching his definition of reactive aggression, Wrangham masks the real driver. It wasn’t just hot tempers that got culled. It was all forms of disruptive autonomy. Including resistance, refusal, and yes, sometimes reactive outbursts. What flourishes is strategic aggression aligned with control systems (raids, executions, conquest, slavery). He’s essentially misclassifying proactive violence as the very thing his model claims was eliminated.

    The reason I’m attacking Wrangham so much is (likely) that there’s so much else I like about his hypothesis that makes the abrupt turn he takes extra upsetting. First, coalitionary enforcement absolutely matters. Once language and symbolic coordination were possible, groups could target individuals who disrupted group order. Second, domestication traits absolutely show up in humans. Smaller brains, more gracile features, extended juvenility…these parallel what happens when animals are bred for compliance. And Wrangham’s distinction between proactive and reactive aggression is useful, even he overcommits to one side.

    I get upset when he emphasizes a moral arc…we became “nicer” by suppressing reactive group members. The archaeological and historical record (slavery, bottlenecks, harems, systemic violence) points to a far darker dynamic…proactive aggression, control, and planned violence were selected for because they succeed in hierarchical systems. I don’t know how he doesn’t see this. How doesn’t he see the removal of disruptive resistance to control systems when he browses a history book through a domestication lens?

    I like Wrangham’s theories without the irrational optimism. For me, that looks like scarcity and group size growth leads to more need for control and coordination. Coalitions form, but instead of only targeting bullies, they target all disruptive reactivity (anyone who won’t conform to the group’s “world-as-it-should-be” model). Reactive individuals (autonomous resistors) are killed or excluded…predictable, compliant individuals survive and reproduce. And, as a byproduct, proactive aggression thrives…because it’s the aggression most compatible with systems of control. Paradox solved.

  • 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?”

  • Domestication and the Warping of Sexual Dimorphism

    Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: Civilization didn’t just domesticate us. It domesticated us differently, depending on whether we were born male or female.

    In our pre-domesticated state, humans showed moderate sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes in size, shape, and behavior). Men tended to be larger, stronger, and more prone to take risks, compete, and throw punches over territory or mates. Women carried broader hips for childbirth and bore the energetic costs of gestation, nursing, and food gathering. Nothing too extreme. It was a functional division…not a caste system.

    Then came the leash.

    If you want to understand what happened next, look at what domestication does to animals across the board…the males change more.

    You get smaller bodies, smaller brains, softer jaws, lower testosterone, and a whole lot more docility. You don’t need to fight other males for access anymore…you just need to behave. Domestication tamps down that volatile, high-testosterone edge and replaces it with social compliance. The women change too, but less dramatically. Domestication is hardly an equal-opportunity employer.

    What happens when this process is scaled up across hundreds of generations of humans?

    Let’s take one of my favorite little detours: the Y-chromosome bottleneck…an evolutionary funnel that occurred around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Despite the population growing, genetic evidence shows that only a tiny handful of men were passing on their genes (think roughly 5 out of every 100 men). Why? Because systems of coercion (slavery, war, patriarchy) turned reproduction into a rigged game. And those systems selected hard for one thing: control.

    Control doesn’t love testosterone. It doesn’t want unpredictability, brute force, or guys who flip tables when they lose status. It wants compliant, trainable males who can navigate symbolic ladders, defer to hierarchies, and follow rules. Over time, the male phenotype got reshaped: smaller, less aggressive, more socially performative. Instead of fighting for mates, men competed for power within abstract systems (religion, wealth, reputation).

    Women didn’t experience this reproductive bottleneck, and therefore weren’t domesticated in a biological sense, the way men were. At least nowhere near the same degree. But they were domesticated culturally. Their roles were dictated by ideological control…veils, chastity cults, arranged marriages. inheritance laws, and lineage games. Woman as symbol. Woman as vessel. Woman as territory to be defended and exchanged. Arguably, as men become more civilized, women were controlled every more tightly (as was anything men saw as a “resource”).

    And so sexual dimorphism got scrambled…intensified in the weirdest way possible. Physical differences shrank but role differences widened incredibly (differences that we still take for granted and fail to associate with domestication). Men became public actors, enforcers of systems they didn’t design. Women became private property, repositories of symbolic purity and repositories of symbolic purity and reproductive value. Both became performative shells…flattened into scripts civilization could use.

    Now forget the anthropology textbooks for a second. This process we’re talking about…what’s happening on a psychological level? What do these changes mean? How do they feel? How do people begin to experience life differently?

    Testosterone in utero shapes everything from brain lateralization to threat response. A civilizing system selecting against reactivity (for tameness) is selecting against certain kinds of minds…minds that question, that bristle, that break rules when rules break people. And so, over generations, you get men who are more verbal, more deferent, more emotionally masked. And because we live in the end product of that, we call it “progress”…as if there were a master plan to arrive at us, and…here we are! But you first need to acknowledge (at least) that there was no such plan, and that tameness was never anyone’s goal, it was simply something that the system rewarded. If you acknowledge that, we can have a conversation.

    And though women may not have been suppressed biochemically…they were certainly suppressed. Their suppression was the visible one. Mythological. Ideological. Institutional. They don’t need to be reshaped from the inside out when they can be controlled from birth to death by symbols, stories, and ceremonies.

    “Civilization made us peaceful.”

    “Civilization turned brutish men into cooperative citizens.”

    Right. These are nice Matrix-y narratives. Fairy tales. Statements that have just enough truth to squeak by as overarching explanations.

    But what did civilization do? Where was intention? What was it trying to do? (and still trying) It neutered rebellion. It privatized violence. It engineered predictable humans. Manageable ones. And because we are those humans, we call the end product “better,” and the process itself, “progress.” Against all evidence, we insist that life in civilized systems is happier, healthier, safer, and sustainable. Insanity. An insanity made possible by the changes made to us by domestication. By the civilizing process. It bred a species capable of living in complete contradiction to the signals around it.

    Docile males and constrained females. All marching toward a cliff’s edge to the beat of someone else’s drum. Marching peacefully. Unless they’re dropping nuclear bombs on each other. Or gassing each other. Or exterminating every other species. Or poisoning air, water, and food. Nice men and women.

  • 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.