The First to Fall

Tag: religion

  • WILL

    I’m considering whether concepts like free will and God’s will function like a civilizational equation for neutralizing the “error signal” of inequality.

    Every society, at every time and place, faces inequality. And inequality doesn’t feel right…does it? And not feeling right, in neuroscientific terms, means error.

    Some people are born poor, sick, or generally shit out of luck. Others aren’t. They’re born fine and seem to do fine. And without any sort of explanation as to why that is…it looks arbitrary and unjust. It’s destabilizing because human nervous systems are sensitive to fairness. (I believe that because it seems to hold true for most people once I get to know them.)

    Civilization flattens errors for its members. That’s what it does. And here we have an error, don’t we? Unfairness. Inequality. But civilization has a two-part story to keep inequality from being experiences as an error by its members.

    The first part of that story is free will. That part tells us inequality is the individual’s fault. You could’ve chosen differently. Your poverty is the logical result of laziness. Your suffering comes from bad decisions.

    But that doesn’t account for all inequality, does it? Some inequality fall through the cracks of that argument.

    That’s where God’s will comes in. Inequality is the cosmic order. God chose your station…or suffering purifies you…or justice comes later for you (in heaven, or via karma).

    Add these two stories together, and you get a closed loop. If you’re disadvantaged, either you chose badly (your free will) or God chose it for you (divine will). In both cases, whatever system you live in is absolved. It’s on you or God. Case closed.

    What’s really happening here? In the brain?

    Inequality is a prediction error. You expect fairness, but you see unfairness. Taken together, free will and God’s will reframe that error as expected, meaningful, or “deserved.” It’s a story that neutralizes surprise for you. It lets you accept conditions that would otherwise feel intolerably incoherent.

    In medieval Europe, you’re a serf because of God’s plan…but also because you don’t have the virtue to “rise.” In Calvinism, your wealth shows God’s favor…but your hard work (free will) proves it. In American capitalism, anyone can succeed (free will), but if you don’t, maybe God didn’t bless you. In communism, even, a secularized version appears. History’s laws are inevitable (God’s will), but you have to freely devote yourself to the case (free will).

    This is yet another example of civilization flattening the error landscape. Otherwise, inequality would feel like raw incoherence. We need to make it explainable…”just,” even. We wrap it in narratives of freedom and divine order.

    These stories are post-hoc rationalizations, of course. They do nothing to solve inequality. They’re explanatory patches applied after the fact.

    Historically, the pattern is clear. The inequality comes first (land hoarding, hierarchy, wealth gaps). People register it as an error signal…it’s unfair. And civilization comes to the rescue…not by reducing the inequality, but by retrofitting a story. Free will (you could have done otherwise!) or God’s will (it’s meant to be this way!). These stories reframe perception so you can tolerate inequality.

  • “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.