A New Story of Humanity

A sort of year in review of how to change the world

What if we could actually save the world in our lifetime? What if we could solve just about every single problem that ails our now-global society so that our kids or grandkids can live in an indubitably better world? What if I told you that we can do that all for the low low price of …. Well… free! As in actually *being* free. Embracing the freedom we all want.

Too good to be true? Impossible?

What if I told you that this is not utopian? This is not about building some ‘perfect’ world… just a better one. Our descendants will still have their own problems to deal with… but at least they won’t have to deal with problems we gave to them, that we inherited from our forebears.  

To be even more realistic, at the very least, we can give them a super clear understanding of what those problems are and the wisdom of how to deal with them.

Would you be open, then? Either way, hear me out.

Theoretically… how would we build that world?

I think it starts with first realizing that we *can* build it. We have to show that these problems are not insurmountable or inevitable or intractable.

Then we have to identify all of the major problems we face today and their ‘first principles’... the underlying causes of those problems. After we identify those roots, we can trace them back to understand how those problems came to be, and thus see what weeds we need to uproot to fundamentally solve those issues.

Finally, we can visualize what a world would look like with these problems solved, because we need hope if we ever want to actually commit to taking on such a herculean task!

So let's do that!

TLDR:

Here’s my entire premise in one word: Hierarchies.

Here it is in a sentence: Hierarchies are the source of pretty much all of our problems due to the enforcement of (decision-making) power imbalances, therefore the solution is to systematically dismantle them and create structures that encourage freedom and equality, i.e. egalitarianism.

In a paragraph:

The development of human intelligence seems to relate very closely with the development of prosocial behaviors and egalitarianism. However, as the environment changed and it became easier to develop sedentary societies, so too did it become easier to hoard resources. The hoarding of resources created incentives to skew the balance of (decision-making) power towards some people (dominant males) at the expense of all others. This unbalanced playing field created the conditions for hierarchies to exist, which naturally seeks to justify its own existence by propagandizing the world as belonging to a ‘natural order’ where certain people naturally deserve to be above others. This authoritarian ideology is fundamentally against freedom and equality. If we want to build a better future, we need to dismantle these hierarchical structures, rebalance the playing field to favor egalitarianism, and decolonize our minds to stop thinking hierarchies of power are natural or a ‘necessary evil’. 

In other words: 

​​The central reason why the world is so fucked up is because of power structures. 

Because we stabilize a system where people who have advantages in bargaining power can dominate those who have less bargaining power.

This leads to pretty much every major problem we have today and have had over the last few millennia: sexism, poverty, racism/xenophobia, classism, war, homophobia, unchecked greed, even pollution, and so on.

Hierarchy is an inherent power imbalance. So long as we think it's necessary or natural, we will justify various ways to encourage that imbalance… and thus various types of inequality and limits to freedom.

Therefore, the solution is to work to dismantle hierarchies and strengthen equality.

The more we remove these power imbalances, the better the society we can create. 

1. This starts with decolonizing our minds to realize that the ‘master’ is not necessary in any way shape or form. 

2. Furthermore, we need to create better stories and fiction that helps us see alternatives and thus be comfortable critiquing the current system. 

3. Most importantly, we need to build tools that decentralize power, practice reverse dominance to encourage humility, and foster environments that make it easier to develop egalitarian societies.

Now I’m going to spend the rest of this newsletter (probably over 10K words) describing why this is, how I got here, and exploring the details. Buckle up!

I know not everyone has the same love I have for long form content though, so feel free to skip around. I tried my best to make each section roughly 300 - 500 words, so its somewhat scannable as well. 

Furthermore, I plan on turning these into videos in the future!

And FIY, I use the term ‘hierarchy’, but I could probably use terms like ‘dominance’ and/or ‘coercive power’ instead. But hierarchy to me seems more clear and encompasses those other terms as well. 

My Story and Credentials - Why I think I can (help) Change the World

For as long as I remember, I’ve been dreaming about massively changing the world for the better. Here is another article I wrote a few years ago specifically about my Ambition. And here’s an autobiography about my (early) life. But anyways, one of my biggest problems when I was younger seemed to be lack of reliable transportation and being stuck in traffic (we often lived across town from school, so I always experienced lots of traffic). And so flying cars was one of my first ideas on how to solve that… 

As I began trying to invent the future, I began discovering all the other problems associated with vehicles: pollution, fuel, expense, repairability, traffic, jobs, and so on… 

Subsequently, I began trying to solve those problems too by not just trying to invent hovercars, but ones that ran on renewable energy, was affordable, was versatile as a space for creative expression, and created more opportunities than it destroyed through tech and exploration.

Then I realized that things like poverty and hunger were bigger problems… so I began trying to tackle that through ideating super cities that could grow anything from food to devices to entire housing! Coupled with incredibly creative bioengineering and biomimicry (BEAN trees), it would also reverse climate change and save extinct or endangered species. I was on a roll!

But then I realized there was an even deeper problem… inequality. Namely, inequality of opportunity. I saw that even if people had virtual ‘access’ to wealth by being in even the ‘wealthiest nations’ of the world… they still for some reason were not able to take advantage of that wealth. They did not seem to have real access.

In addition, I noticed that there was a significant problem of mental health issues: loneliness, depression, anxiety, and so on. Even among people who had wealth, many were miserable! 

I was confused… I thought technology and progress and ‘wealth’ would solve everything. Why then did people who have so many resources, still suffer so much? Perhaps I was just naive… perhaps that’s just how the world works…. ‘Life isnt fair’ … ‘that’s just human nature’… ‘humans never change’...

So they claim.

But why? Why is it that so many people in the ‘richest’ countries are so miserable? Are they really all just a bunch of entitled, whiny babies? But what about the very real things we still dealt with in places like the US? People getting murdered by cops; high rates of homelessness (not just with adults, but with kids who didn't even have the chance to ‘mess their life up’); or how about the rising suicide rates? Lack of healthcare? Prison industrial complex? Loneliness? Depression?

I’ve thought about committing suicide before, many times... it takes a lot to actually go through with that… how much pain are these people suffering to actually go through it? How miserable must they feel? Would someone who is just ‘entitled’ really go through with something as final as suicide? 

Its these types of questions that lead me down the rabbit hole to figure out why and how we created a society in which even amidst so much ‘progress’ people felt so miserable.

I started to look deeper. Were people just always like this? Is depression and loneliness really an inevitable result of higher intelligence? Is human anguish the cost for prosperity? Is this really prosperity at all?

How come you have to pay property taxes even after completely buying your home? Why are so many black people poor? Are we really just inferior? Are we truly more violent and deserving of this pervasive third-rate citizen treatment? Are white people really all racist? Are men just smarter and more ‘logical’ than their ‘female’ counterparts? Are wealthy people just better people? Are they smarter and truly provide more value? Why is Africa so poor? Why is America the ‘protector’ of the world? Do we really need to be spending such a ridiculous amount of money on the military when we still have so many people suffering and going without basic necessities? Is overwhelming force and threat of Nuclear Winter really what ‘world peace’ looks like? Is this justice? Is this freedom?

For years I’ve been asking these sorts of questions… Diving in all sorts of rabbit holes across the internet and with people. 

Perhaps I was just naive… perhaps I should just get with the program… What’s the point of asking these questions? I need to just focus on getting into school, getting a job, moving out of my parents house… This is a waste of time. This is just how the world is. Capitalism is the best thing we can do. Vote for the politician that is the lesser of two evils. Be grateful for this great country. Enjoy the small things in life. Look at all this amazing technology. Become rich. If I really want to solve anything, becoming the richest person in the world, then you can talk. Then people will listen. Play the game.

However… slowly but surely, I began answering those questions. And so much more. I began to see the patterns and the narratives, the ideas and the reasonings. I was wrong many times, but then I realized why I was wrong and what a more correct answer looked like and why it was (more) correct. I began piecing together stories in my mind. I began sharing them, and going through the process of grappling with these ideas in the public space of my private mind. 

I still don’t know everything… I likely never will. I still may be wrong... But I will be less wrong than ever before and be open to useful counterpoints explaining how and why I am wrong so that I can self correct.

I still don’t even know how to adequately frame or explain the full scope of the problems we are facing. How do I present these ideas in such a way that people understand how I got here and why I think these are correct? At the same time, how do I encourage discourse to catch the inevitable mistakes? How do I do so in a way that encourages *real* meaningful discourse and not just a bunch of people who want to bash me for questioning their perception of the world or folks who think they have answers but aren’t self-aware or humble enough to admit when they are wrong?

How do I portray my confidence and show that it does not come from some superiority complex in thinking that I am just so much smarter (I’m not), but instead comes from just years and years of self-assessment alongside research and thinking and assessments of the world?

Why should I even bother? I don’t have much of a voice… even if I am right… who will see this? Who will care? What’s the point?

And what if I’m wrong? What if I just deluded myself into thinking that I could even deign to understand the bigger picture? 

I don’t know.

But I guess I have to try…. I want to try. 

I just can’t imagine myself being okay with living in a world in which I don’t do everything in my power to help change it for the better… to help solve the problems I see and experience.

So let me try… 

Disclaimer

Over the past few months, I have been procrastinating terribly on this newsletter… Whole weeks went by where I didn’t even touch this document even though I was thinking and talking about this topic everywhere else. I kept scaring myself because I felt like I was missing key details or didn’t have a full enough story. I was worried that I couldn’t do this… who was I to make such a broad yet detailed ‘theory’ about why the world is so fucked up and how we can fix it? Why would anyone listen? Who cares WTF I think?

But I had to remember why I’m even doing this newsletter… to figure it the fuck out.

Because I care. Because this is how I do my part to help fix the world. I don't have all the answers. Though I do think I have some. I don’t have the full story, but no one does. I probably will make mistakes, big and small, but that’s all part of the learning process.

Part of me wanted to make this a well cited research paper, but that’s not what this newsletter is about. Its simply about me *learning out loud*... figuring out how to change the world, and what role, big or small, I can play in that. 

More than anything else in this world, I want to figure out how to change it for the better. 

I simply can’t sit back and accept our doom or expect someone else to fix it. I see so many things that are left unsaid or unheard that really should be said and heard more. I see so many solutions that don’t even recognize the true scope of the problem. I see way too many people completely lost and depressed, jaded and cynical, or even hateful and gleeful for the apocalypse. I refuse to be any of those people. I was those people. No more.

The point of this is to do what I can to show why we must do better, and how we can do better. And by golly I will… :P

I’m going to do better myself to be more consistent with these releases, for no other reason than it helps me feel better about putting my knowledge to use and airing on the side of practicality rather than pure theory. I want to be action-oriented about this rather than keeping everything in my head. I want to produce just as much as I consume (if not a bit more). 

I hope you will too.

Please be patient with me if this sort of thing intrigues you. I’m sure I make mistakes here, repeat myself too many times, go on for far too long, and/or miss some important perspectives, but this is just one of many attempts, (although it ended up being one of my more ambitious ones) to figure out the story of humanity. I had a lot of research in mind, but didn’t want spend yet more time tracking everything down, vetting it, and so on. Nor did I write this all in any real order. I kind of just put down a number of thoughts I’ve had throughout my learnings over the past few years; often reordering, expanding, or cutting things out.

If you have thoughts, please feel free to share them in the comments as you go. Or keep them to yourself until the end. I’m open to the possibility of being wrong and welcome the dialectic. 

Thanks for taking the time to read this at all. Without further ado. Let’s begin.

Why we *can* change - Debunking Human Nature

The first of the biggest problems today is a prefiguration of all (or most) the other problems… that of human nature. Specifically the *assumption* of what human nature even is.

Before we can even get into identifying the many problems in our society today, we must first show that these problems are not some ‘inevitable’ or ‘necessary’ result of some perceived ‘flaws’ or ‘sins’ of humanity.

Sin is not a universal constant.

Many people, primarily religious people, but even secular folks with a religious mindset, love to assume that people are just inherently evil, greedy, selfish, or some other synonym of ‘sinful’ in nature. 

This is wrong. This is misanthropic. This only serves to justify hate for humanity in your heart. 

I will explain why this is wrong, but first recognize that I do not and cannot change you if you truly believe this. I only seek to supply an alternative view of the world. Hopefully you can use this alternative view to walk yourself out of such a dark home like I once did. 

Anyways, the view that people are inherently bad in some way is a very long standing philosophical concept. One that has almost always been used to justify some collection (and abuse) of power.

The different manifestations of this are such things like:

• Humans are inherently competitive and therefore we need systems like capitalism

• Humans are inherently violent and therefore we need laws and police to protect us

• People are greedy so we need taxes and tax write-offs to give people a reason to share

• People are selfish so we need to incentivize cooperation through national identity

• People are lazy so we need to incentivize them to work through wage labor

• Etc

As you can see, the very idea that humans are not ‘good’ immediately is (and must) be followed by a justification for some restrictive or coercive action, usually one in which somebody places themselves or someone else in a position of power to enforce those restrictions and coercions.

By viewing humans in such a way, its similar to viewing a dog as if it’s really a rabid wolf barely restrained by a metal chain affixed to a big pole in the backyard. Instead of realizing how vastly different (and domesticated) a dog is… you assume that thousands of years of evolution has virtually no bearing and that you must dominate it through physical, mental, or emotional abuse in order to ‘tame’ it. And even then, you must keep vigilance or its rabid nature will be unleashed.

Whenever a dog does something bad (which people often mistakenly conflate as both general undesirable behavior which is subjective, and truly violent behavior), instead of seeing that as a result of a bad environment or training or some other causal factor, you instead assume that such is its natural state coming out. While if it does something good, you attribute that to your ever so skilled use of domination tactics. It’s an inherently narcissistic and deluded mindset.

In reality, dogs are and have been domesticated for thousands of years. A dog is no more a wolf than we are an ape or chimp. There are very few similar traits. And furthermore, viewing evolution as going from ‘bad’ to ‘good’ or ‘dumber’ to ‘smarter’ or even ‘weaker’ to ‘stronger’ or ‘more animalistic (ie savage)’ to ‘less animalistic (ie ‘civilized)’ is such a childish and inherently flawed perception. Evolution is simply adapting to one's environment over time. A chicken is more ‘evolved’ than its ancestor, the T-Rex… and we’ve domesticated the chicken to the point that it cannot survive on its own.

Many people assume that apes and wolves and other ‘wild animals’ are just ‘violent’ creatures barely restrained from their impulses by necessity or human involvement.

Many folks either assume that evolution has made us ‘better’ than every other animal… or that evolution is not real and that some higher power designed us to be the Masters of the Earth.

Both of these are deeply problematic perceptions, because once again, it justifies the domination of those other animals and even each other ‘for our safety’ or ‘to be civilized’ or because ‘God said so’. Furthermore, the extent to which we dominate is seen as necessary … even when we ourselves admit that the violence, abuse, manipulation, and other tactics are undesirable mechanics of that domination. 

So you see, viewing human nature as ‘evil’ or inherently bad in some way, necessitates a, quite frankly, evil/bad approach to dealing with other humans and the world. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy of negativity. I argue not *quite* the opposite… but certainly something more hopeful and realistic.

Human nature is simply social. Because being social is one of the prime ways we have adapted to our environments to gain intelligence and sapience. If you care about the science of evolution, even a brief search will show you that the vast majority of theories on how humans evolved intelligence revolves mostly around our use of social skills. 

Everything else: competition, tool use, and even ‘raw’ intelligence (in terms of being able to compute) are things found in other animals… sometimes to an even higher degree than in humans. The one thing we have that almost no other animal has, is social skills. Particularly the ability to get what we want by cooperating with others through those social skills.

How that social adaptation manifests depends on a huge amount of variables. 

Why we *can* change - The Environment

The greater reality, as far as we can tell, is that we are all just animals, that all of life simply exists through sheer chance… compounding on the stuff that works and discarding the stuff that is a detriment. Of course, that is not something many want to hear, and I too think there are some spiritual meanings and perhaps even designs… but I’ll get back to that later. Because even if there is some higher power in charge of this, it would still be wrong to view the world as something we are in charge of. 

A more useful perception is to realize that everything is behaving in response to the environment. Animals, plants, photons, bacteria, the human psyche, etc. Everything exists in an environment… multiple environments, and the way something interacts with the environment, or the way the environment interacts with things, dictates how things respond in turn.

Yes, this gets into my systems-based determinism theory. Which you can read about in my last newsletter, but even if you are gung-ho about living with the light pollution of free-will, it is still incredibly useful to realize the impact of the environment on everything.

Ignoring the environment is like trying to ignore the weather when you go outside. You might like to believe you are always warm and dry, but if you walk out into the rain unprotected, you will no longer be so. You may then *say* that you chose to become cold and wet… but obviously that would be silly, because you do not control the weather. You simply chose how you responded to the weather (and even that was most likely strongly influenced by your mental environment in terms of culture, knowledge, self-awareness, and so on).

Likewise, we do not necessarily choose our environments, but we do and can respond accordingly to try and make the most of or even change the environments we find ourselves in.

However, environment does not mean just the ‘natural world’; that's what we typically call the ‘natural environment’ (better described as a geographic ecosystem). The environment is any conditions and surroundings in which something lives. 

It is the environment which determines how things evolve. The geographic area, the food available, the temperature, the atmosphere, even the other lifeforms become a part of the environment relative to any one creature. Additionally, genetic mutations and stellar radiation are part of that environment. The knowledge passed down to offspring is an environment, thus culture and society are mental/social environments.

A brief aside about language

It is not that the ape or the wolf is some ‘violent’ ‘untamed’ creature… it is simply a creature. It responds in certain ways depending on the conditions, its available tools, its ‘culture’ and so on. We may see the way it rips apart another animal as ‘violent’... and we may see that ‘violence’ as a bad thing… but that is our own interpretation and subjective opinion. We use language to try and understand the world, but that does not mean our language is always an accurate description or even always a useful one.

Furthermore, even if our definition of something like ‘violence’ is useful in describing what we perceive, the accompanying moralistic values we place upon that word and perception is yet another layer of opinion. Viewing all kinds of violence as a bad thing is like viewing all kinds of liquids as a ‘good’ thing… yes, there are some ‘good’ liquid for us (water, blood, etc) but many liquids are poisonous or dangerous to us (including blood and many types of water!) 

Likewise, ‘violence’ is only a useful concept if its in reference to us directly, and in certain contexts.

Our language is very useful. But what we do with that language can be very counterproductive and even dangerous if used in the wrong context.

There is no inherent ‘evil’ or otherwise sinful natures in the world. And viewing the world that way encourages you to ignore the role the environment plays on how things behave. It also leads you to justify really bad behavior in the name of ‘righteousness’. 

When we say ‘human nature’ we have to be clear about what we mean. We usually mean what humans do … naturally. How do we behave in our ‘natural habitat’? Turns out, that depends on the habitat!

Human Nature is However We Adapt to an Environment

Realizing that we, just like every other animal and lifeform, respond to our environment, inherently helps you see that we can, in fact, change. Simply because, if and when the environment changes, so must we. 

In other words, as our ‘natural habitat’ changes, we change along with it.

Once again, its important to realize that the ‘environment’ is not just the physical surroundings and conditions, but also the incorporeal (yet still very real) social, mental, emotional, and other ones too.

Every lifeform can change its environment, though to what extent depends. It seems that the more ‘intelligent’ a creature is, the more it can perceive non-physical environments, such as simulations of future environments, or the creation of social environments through the interactions of other beings. That intelligence allows it to use that ability to change its environment more consciously.

The unique thing about humans is that we can create these non-physical environments more than any other creature, and then respond to them. 

Our ability to think is the very process of creating and/or responding to nonphysical environments. 

We perceive the world, then we compare our perceptions with past perceptions to simulate future possibilities. Future environments. We then respond accordingly to maximize our benefits. We can even change the current environment quite drastically to more closely match our simulated environments in which we think we would respond (i.e. live) more desirably.

Even if you disagree with the deterministic bias I am so obviously using, you should still be able to see the massive benefits of recognizing the impact of the environments we perceive (physically and non-physically) on our lives.

To bring it back once again, we do not have some inherent ‘human nature’... we simply are responding/living in accordance with whatever environments we perceive for ourselves.

(Or, perhaps human nature is inherently social, and anything beyond that is an application of that social behavior within various environments.)

If we want to change, we have to recognize that not only *can* we change, but we are always changing. We are always responding to many different environments. But it is easy to assume that we are not changing and can’t do so because we are constantly manipulating the environment to encourage the same type of behaviors we happen to value at the moment.

There’s a huge catch to this overpowered ability to mold the balance in our favor though… we don’t actually know what is best for us… at least not always. Oftentimes, we either lose sight of our own intuition of what is good for us, and/or we buy into what somebody else thinks is a good environment for us, regardless of our own needs and desires. Combined, we can all too easily create for ourselves environments that aren’t actually to our individual or even collective advantage… at least not in the long term. We can fool ourselves into *thinking* we have mastered the environment, when really we just put something in motion that will come back to Thanos Snap us into oblivion. 

An Artificial Local Maxima

Somewhere along the way of evolution in our pre-sapien past, we gained the ability to perceive ourselves… with that came the ability to also see how we could better manipulate the environment to benefit the future versions of ourselves. But that also creates the conditions in which certain behaviors are rarely ever given the option to change, since we pre-configured (i.e. rigged) the environment to cater to those behaviors. 

This creates a sort of ‘local maxima’ where we reach an evolutionary ‘dead-end’ that seems like the best way to adapt, but is actually worse than other possible adaptations. 

In fact, it was likely the stabilization of the natural environment itself that led us down this path of ‘stabilizing’ our own societies at the cost of our adaptability.

There is a lot of evidence showing that during the pre-holocene era (i.e. before 11-9,000 years ago), the climate swung wildly every few centuries. On average, it was quite a bit colder than in the holocene era, but temperatures swung between ice cold and kinda cold (simplifying here).

If you recall, we humans have existed for roughly 300,000 years! And I mean human humans. The homo-sapiens that evolved in Africa 300K years ago had a very much similar type of brain and body as us today. Humans that migrated out of Africa roughly 60K and 30K years ago ended up pro-creating with (and out-competing) the other hominids, some of which were ‘smarter’, stronger, and more ‘violent’ than us in many ways, such as the Neanderthals. 

It’s theorized that the Neanderthals were strong enough to single-handedly take down a mammoth!! Meanwhile, humans would hunt down the mammoth with large war parties until it collapsed from exhaustion and a ton of our spears. Furthermore, whereas the Neanderthals likely subsisted solely on ‘big game’ (ie all the giant mammals that used to exist during the ice ages), humans primarily subsisted on foraging various smaller animals and plants. So when the glaciers melted and the giant animals died off from lack of food or over-hunting, the neanderthals died with them, and we thrived.

That’s the thing with evolution, it’s an ongoing process, because the environment is always changing. A lifeform may have adapted really well to a particular environment, but then something changes and its strength becomes its greatest weakness. The dinosaurs roamed this Earth for millions of years and were able to grow to incredible sizes… but then that comet struck and the only dinosaurs that could survive were the small ones that eventually became birds.

Its survival of the fittest, which has very little to do with ‘strength’ or some objectively ‘better’ form, but simply being a better fit *for the environment it is in*.

Our Delusions of Human Nature

Unfortunately, we have deluded ourselves into thinking that humans are ‘more evolved’ than other creatures or ‘more fit’ by narrowly defining what ‘fitness’ is and sabotaging others from competing.

This seems like a powerful thing… but it comes with the risk of viewing ourselves as some static being that never has to change (and even as one that can’t change). This puts us in direct opposition to the natural environment, which is constantly changing. So if we deem ourselves ‘incapable of change’ or having reached some ‘superior’ form where no further change is necessary, then when that inevitable big environmental change comes, we will not be able to adapt.

In addition to all of that, we, particularly in the present-day, have deluded ourselves (or been deluded) to believe that we are completely self-contained from the environment. We somehow got it in our somewhat collective consciousness the idea that the environment is just something we happen to inhabit, but has little to no sway on our behaviors. 

In some ways, it's deeply arrogant… in others, it's deeply insecure.

It's arrogant because it's like going outside in the rain and thinking that we have suddenly chosen to make ourselves cold and wet, or that we simply have to be better citizens (be productive, be disciplined, be wealthy, etc) in order to stop being cold and wet.

Rather than realizing that we never had any direct control of whether or not we felt cold and wet.

It’s also insecure because it's like going outside in the rain and thinking that being cold and wet is just the natural state of our being, and we have exposed this sorry part of ourselves by leaving the comfort of our caves homes. When of course, in reality, being cold and wet is a natural state we find ourselves in as a result of certain environmental conditions.

Instead, we must realize that first of all, we are beings living in a world. And that world has an impact on us no matter how smart we are. Our feelings/emotions, our logic/rationality, our behaviors/traits are all strongly impacted by the various environments we find ourselves in. 

Our power does not lie in deluding ourselves into thinking the weather responds to our thoughts (or that there is no weather), but instead in recognizing the weather as a pattern, understanding its impact on us and the environment, and responding accordingly; whether that be to build our own environments to protect ourselves, or even one day to change the environment so much that we can control the weather (and deal with whatever responsibilities such powers demand).

So…. the world is full of problems. And many of those problems are of our own creation. These problems are not simply the result of human nature, but instead the result of misunderstanding the impact nature has on humans, and the nature of human impact. 

The evolution of human sentience - how we got here

Understanding evolution is a key tool to understanding human nature.

As humans evolved from chimps into hominids, we gained the ability to create social relationships. There are countless theories and books that all agree at the very least how being social was and is humanity’s biggest advancement. The ability to socialize with each other is pretty much the only thing we do better than every other animal on this earth. And being social is pretty much the reason why we were able to create technologies through the sharing of information.

One of my favorite theories about our evolution is the Female Cosmetic Coalitions (FCC) theory. 

Highly recommend reading the above article, but a real quick recap is as follows: 

• Our early, pre-hominid ancestors were able to establish trust through eye-contact in other members of the species (primarily other females) to watch their kids.

• This freed up mothers to forage for more food, thus allowing their kids to get more nutrition, leading to larger brain sizes.

• These relationships created the first matri-local coalitions of hominids working together for a common goal: to raise their children safely

• This also protected them from dominant males who previously utilized coercive strategies to form harems or other forceful methods of reproduction

• Since males now could not simply take what they want, they had to learn to communicate with these coalitions of females to be able to reproduce

• Thus marks the beginning of language and first use of symbolism for the purpose of showing males what foods to bring in order to be allowed access to the fertile woman of the month.

• This also became a great strategy for non-dominant males who couldn't compete with ‘alpha’ males, they could simply join a coalition and be guaranteed reproductive opportunities.

• Hominid species that utilized these matri-local coalitions more effectively than others were therefore able to out-reproduce the other hominids, thus explaining why homosapiens were able to beat out neanderthals, despite the latter being far stronger and more independent. 

• This also explains why/how the earliest rituals were in regards to half animal, half human creatures using red paint, because it both scared dominant males and intrigued them; communicating to them the type of animal meat the women wanted, as well as communicating the state of the menstruating women, indicating this was the best time to reproduce, and they wouldn’t have access without their consent.

I’m probably still missing some key elements, but its an ambitious theory, yet also a falsifiable one. They’ve already won some points by predicting the earliest possible uses of art and symbolism (red ochre on the outside of caves to symbolize menstruation, hybrid animal/humans symbolizing the desired animal to hunt, and even female figurines with a large male appendage to symbolize consent to reproduce). 

As you can see. This explains a LOT about why we gained the ability to communicate, why we rail against patriarchy despite it supposedly being ‘natural’ (it is with other primate species, but not with us), and possibly even why males in our species are only about 15% bigger than the females (in other male dominated mammals, males are 50 to 150% bigger)!

This theory, and many others, also shows why ‘fairness’, ‘equality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘consent’ are so important. If patriarchy was ‘natural’ and hierarchy the norm throughout our evolution, then we would never have come up with these concepts in the way that we do. Furthermore, if our evolution was chiefly driven by ‘competition’ than our type of intelligence would never have occurred! Predators who can get their way by just hunting and dominating others don’t need to speak. Their superior brawn and hunting acumen would be sufficient to get their way.

You only need social intelligence if you are physically weaker and have to communicate with others to ban together against the dominant ones.

Hence the wonderful and much needed corrections about the history of human civilization that has been circling around recently. The bulk of human history has actually been egalitarian, not hierarchical. These societies were far more affluent on average (as in the vast majority of people in these societies enjoyed all the same privileges), were more conscious about how they made decisions (thanks to consensus and cooperative gamification), and were usually longer lived as a society than the neighboring empires (they lasted for thousands of years while most empires collapsed after a few hundred).

You may have heard about the recent book David Wengrow and David Graeber published on this very same topic: The Dawn of Everything.

Here’s a great interview with Wengrow about it.

However, it's important to note where the book falls short, and the following video shows how, where, and why it falls short.

10.1 David Graeber & David Wengrow’s "The Dawn of Everything": What is an "Egalitarian Society"?

In fact, I HIGHLY suggest you watch all the videos on the ‘What Is Politics’ channel! He does a great job in explaining all of these problems and is a large resource for this entire newsletter article. 

Throughout that series, he shows how, historically, the left was largely about freedom and equality, while the right was about authority and power. He explains how conservatism vs liberalism, big vs small government, and so on are sort of cherry-picking these ideas throughout the ages. And how equality vs freedom is a nonsensical dichotomy. You need equality to have freedom, and vice versa. 

Thus why anyone who cares about freedom, is technically on the ‘left’ and those who care more about authority, are on the ‘right’. I’m sure people will have much to say about that, but please watch those videos to see what this means.

Also, recognize that how ‘left’ and ‘right’ is used today are not actually practical or clear manifestations of these ideas. But this newsletter is not about that. Let’s continue.

What needs to change - The Problems

Now that I’ve given that context, we can finally get into identifying all of the problems and then organizing them to show how and why these issues are a result of various ways we perceive (or misperceive) our environments. 

Here is a list of problems (in no particular order) that most people would probably agree are big ticket items. I can probably source this stuff, but it's fairly obvious.

Inequality

• Gender Inequality/Misogyny

• (Systemic) Racism

• Poverty/Classism

• Homophobia/Sexual discrimination

Health

• Child Abuse

• Disease/physical fitness

• Mental Health (Depression, Suicide, Anxiety, Loneliness, etc)

• Climate Change/pollution/ecological cataclysm

Societal Collapse

• Misinformation & Mistrust

• Extremism/Isolationism

• Authoritarianism (dictatorship, central government, egotistic leaders)

• Corporatism/Capitalism (Monopolies, lobbyists, resource hoarding, consumerism, etc)

• Supply chains and industrialization (waste, exploitation, unsustainability)

• War (especially religious, political, & economic)

What people might typically do at this point, is to try and go through each one of these and propose solutions or maybe even link a few of these up. But instead, I’d like to show you how every single one of these problems (and probably any other problem you can think of) are all either created or gravely exasperated by hierarchical power structures.

This is systems thinking at its finest… I think… maybe… idk, but its fun and effective to do! :P

As stated in my overview, the problem with hierarchy is that 

1) some people can gain advantages in bargaining power (i.e. the ability to get what they want), and 

2) those people will often... eventually... inevitably use that power to get what they want, usually by exploiting or excluding other groups

Power corrupts. Specifically, power over others is inherently corrosive.

How Hierarchy is at the Source of our Biggest Problems

Once again, I can simplify all this before I go into depth about how I got to this conclusion.

Inequality:

This should be the most obvious as an imbalance in power, but unfortunately many people are woefully misinformed. 

Gender inequality is NOT due to some inherent ‘flaw’ in women… in fact, I’ve shown above with the FCC (and many other social theories of evolution) that it was largely thanks to biological females working together that we ever gained sentience.

Inequality of all sorts, but especially between genders, comes down to us creating and then reinforcing an environment where certain people have more resources and/or decision making power over others.

The people who gain power over others want to keep that power, and the best way to do so is to justify having that power, or even ignoring the existence of that power.

Humans have an inherent bias towards tribalism. We create social groups over literally anything. But, just like with sports or other games, tribalism is quite fun and harmless by default. It only becomes dangerous when one group gains power over others. 

Once again by power, I mean the ability to limit another person’s freedoms. 

If we want to stop gender, racial, income, age, or any other inequality… we have to first realize that such inequality is upheld through the justifications we give as reasons for why one type of person can limit the freedom of another person, directly or indirectly.

Then we have to take down any power structure which allows some group of people to enforce their will on other people.

All the while, we have to recognize how our environment makes it harder or easier to form inequalities in the first place. More on this later.

Health:

It seems the vast majority of our health issues today are either preventable, mental health conditions caused by childhood/ societal trauma, or otherwise a result of pollution of some sort. Of course, we have plenty of other diseases from random stuff like genetic mutations, infections, etc… But certainly there has been a rise of health issues directly associated with preventable diseases, autoimmune disorders due to pollution, and mental health issues.

Yes, some of these issues are indirectly due to or even independent of the power structures we find ourselves in, but we know for a fact that poverty and abuse are some of the leading causes of mental disorders.

I’m sure most of us don’t have to be reminded of the healthcare problem in America… but even beyond that, the fact that we do not have strong communities anymore is a huge factor in our negative health outcomes.

It has been shown in multiple studies that loneliness is one of the leading causes of death. 

Again. We are social creatures. We are not meant to be alone. So when 20-30% of people say they feel alone and don’t have even a handful of friends (much less a whole community they feel comfortable depending upon), is it any wonder that we still suffer so much despite all of our scientific knowledge and advanced medical technology?

Furthermore, the air pollution, microplastics, and chemical pesticides in our food has all been linked to some serious health issues as well.

Climate change and pollution is a direct result of people thinking themselves above the environment itself. Pretty much every egalitarian society in history considered themselves an integral *part* of nature… just one piece in a giant cycle, not as some master or even caretaker of the natural world. They considered themselves a part of the natural world. 

There was no distinction between themselves and the rest of nature. Hence why they never took more than could be replenished or even thought to own any land. Owning land they happened to use was as ridiculous to them as is the idea of owning the particular air molecules we use to breathe is to us.

Pollution occurs when you don’t care about the environment in which you live. Or worse, when some random people can shit all over the land, water, or air where someone else is living.

The fact that some people have the power to both pollute the environment and then to get away with it too is proof positive of the corrosive properties of power.

Political Collapse:

Literally all of this is just direct effects of corruption. Not merely ‘corrupted officials’ doing shady stuff, but more broadly the corruption of our social fabric. The fact that the very thing that allowed us to spread across the world has been steadily atrophied into sociopathic behaviors and incentives is the corruption I am referring to.

One of the biggest problems with hierarchy is the unequivocal way that it atrophies one's social skills. Recall what I mentioned earlier about how dominant members of a species don’t have to communicate as much. They can get what they want just by swinging their mass or even psychopathic cunning. 

Well think about that for a second. If the more dominant you are, the less you need to use social skills… that means you don’t really need as much negotiation, communication, empathy, or consensus as other, less dominant members. 

Is it any wonder why leadership positions tend to be a beacon for psychopathic and narcissistic people? Sure leaders still need those skills, but that’s merely because they aren’t *completely* dominant. Throughout history, even the most powerful emperors were not too far from being deposed by other nobility, or just a crowd of discontent citizens. So you used these social skills, but only for the purpose of appeasing people just enough to get what you want, without ever truly having to care about their needs. 

If any leaders did care, they’d quickly get attacked by their more heartless peers, so the selection pressures would lean more and more towards narcissism. 

Furthermore, this also means the people who are being ruled, also use less social skills, because they don’t have to think about important aspects of how their society is run. They just follow the leaders and utilize little to no critical thinking skills about why the leader is doing what they’re doing. So long as they *feel* like they are being listened to, they steadily lose the ability to actually determine the effectiveness of their leader(s)’ actions. 

So on one side, you have a deterioration and weaponization of social skills towards more manipulative use cases. And on the other, you have an outsourcing, and thus atrophy of social skills towards more vapid or easily fooled uses. 

Does that not sound familiar?

This is why specialization of skills is actually not always good. It can be very, very bad! Though I haven't researched this particular aspect, I hypothesize that wherever you find skill specialization in a society, you will find the creation and/or widening of class stratification. 

When you specialize skills such as decision-making, then you forfeit the most important power to a specific class of people! This group can and will play deadly games with that power, while the other class(es) are stuck picking up the scraps. 

When you study egalitarian cultures, you see that they all spend a lot of time discussing various matters of their community with the entire community. This may sound like a bad thing to those of us who have been indoctrinated to believe that ‘politics’ are just for people who want to play power games and for ‘bureaucracy’... that’s because it is! That is the environment we live in! But that’s not what politics *have* to be.

The etymology of the word is evidence enough. ‘Politics’ simply means ‘affairs of the city,’ referring to the Greeks’ tendency to come together and communicate how their cities should be run with their general assembly. Though the Greeks weren’t the most egalitarian peoples, this idea traces much further back and much wider to every egalitarian culture who took the time on a daily basis to determine the affairs of their community with the entire community.

The bulk of stories around ancient campfires likely had to do with everyone sharing their knowledge, talking about this or that logistical thing, or even simple gossip that acted as a way of bonding with your community. 

Politicking was and should be an everyday part of life for every person in a community, not some dirty thing ‘people in power’ do!! 

Most importantly, egalitarian cultures had a number of methods designed specifically to weed-out egotistical people when it came to take on any necessary leadership positions.

Some of these include:

• Would-be leaders volunteering to be beaten!

• Leaders having the last pick of meat or other resources.

• Leadership positions being temporary and limited to a specific event or time.

• Police positions rotating in and out every season. 

• Randomly selected counsel representatives.

• And many other reverse dominance tactics

Without these safeguards against egotistical leaders, we get what we have now.

Inequality starts at home. 

The ability to build a cohesive, supportive community where mothers are supported, fathers have humility, and kids have options is the keystone in building a better humanity.

If your society justifies the domination (i.e. abuse) of women and children at the most basic of levels (the family), then it's no wonder that we can and do justify it everywhere else!

Equality and freedom is not about forcing everyone to look the same, act the same, and think the same… quite the contrary. Equality is the ability to empower everyone, no matter their abilities, intellect, or appearance, to have a meaningful say in their own life.

A community is a gathering of individuals that chose to come together and enjoy each other’s company. If you force somebody to be in your community, or make it hard for them to leave when they want to leave, it is not a community, it's a cult.

If you can justify treating your own child like a slave, (claiming you ‘own’ them just because you birthed or raised them, demanding respect rather than earning it, forcing them to do what you say without question, etc) then of course you would justify treating your employees, or poor people, or people from other cultures as sub-human and/or not equal to you.

The very idea that you should treat your children as humans that are in the process of maturing, is basically blasphemy to many people. Folks are so ready to jump on the idea that you have to ‘force’ your child to do as you say or follow the rules or show respect ‘for their own good’ that they won’t even consider the thought that there are other ways of teaching kids how to survive (and thrive) in society without coercion. It also is exactly what propels the atrophying of social skills across generations. It’s an attempt to make each generation more compliant than the last.

In egalitarian cultures, children are raised by the entire community. The parents don’t need to think twice about the safety and wellbeing of their child anywhere in the community, because they know everyone in the community cares about that child. The elderly will share their stories, the adults will share their skills, the other children will share their company. 

Kids are empowered to be both altruistic and independent from a young age. They choose which teet to suck milk, who they allow to hold them, and are praised for sharing. Games are inherently collaborative rather than purely competitive. They are even allowed to deal with ‘dangerous’ objects and ideas, learning to cook their own food and craft/use their own weapons  as soon as they can manipulate the tools. Thus kids are more self-reliant at an earlier age, able to supply most of their own nutrition needs before age 10. While at the same time, recognizing that their independence is an interdependent affair.

This is why child liberation is one of the most overlooked yet fundamental causes for wide-scale change.

We like to think of poverty as one of the biggest problems in our society. Its a huge talking point and the focus of many great organizations. But, as I hope made obvious by now… its really just a terrible symptom of the underlying issue of hierarchy.

In a world where everything is owned by some other person or group of people, then people by default are at a disadvantage to those people. That means as soon as you are born in any nation, you have to be subservient (ie follow their unsaid rules and play their unspoken games) if you wish to earn even the most basic of necessities for all life on earth: a home. 

And because we have made it nearly impossible to simply live in the wild, (since even ‘nature’ is owned by some nation or other), then you literally cannot legally build your own home from scratch in the middle of the woods, even if you wanted to. 

This is great for hierarchies! They can say they are providing your home for you! Or that they give you the opportunity to live a luxurious life… but of course, all they’ve done is claimed everything for themselves and try to sell it back to you as a ‘privilege’ of living on ‘their’ lands.

That’s just the fundamentals. In terms of our everyday lives, due to how our economy works, you cannot buy a home, without participating in the massive Ponzi scheme we call real estate. Every time someone buys or rents a home, banks or land-owners are creating money out of thin air. Because they can now spend the money that you *will* pay them as you off that loan. 

Thus is the power of debt. Since the first banks and governments decided to turn promissory notes into money, we’ve been duped. Money gets created everyday not based on how much people give to banks or even how much hard money is printed, but based on how much debt is being credited. 

People are homeless not because they are lazy, or even because they are in a ‘third-world country’ but because they can’t or don't participate in this circle-jerk of debt. This is how the rich get richer as the poor get poorer. Because everyone is coerced to go into debt in order to buy anything of worth, but only the rich can use that debt as credit, then spend that credit to make bets on what debt gets paid or what stocks go up/down, thereby compounding their money.

That’s how you make your money make money… by exploiting everyone else who don’t have the means, heart, or knowledge to exploit you.

The Importance of Being Prosocial

Getting back to our evolution, It’s important to note how we got here in the first place. By realizing our origins, we can more clearly see that this was not some positive ‘progress’ … but an adaptation that lead us down the path of a parasitic mentality, as opposed to a sympathetic/mutually beneficial one.

Our local maxima is very similar to that of a parasite or a male dominated chimpanzee species, as opposed to the ‘high-minded’ consciousness-driven ‘civilized’ society that we think ourselves within.

What is Politics and Saint Andrew have some great videos that show how egalitarianism declined in the shift from matri-local to patri-local societies.

Basically, matri-local (not matriarchial) societies are ones where mothers/wives stay with their side of the family. While in patri-local ones, the wife goes to live with the husband’s family. This seems like a fairly innocuous thing today, but think about that in terms of ancient times. 

In a world where no one has a monopoly on violence, you need incentives against violence to ensure it doesnt become a good strategy. You need reverse dominance tactics to dissuade people from getting their way through violence. In a matri-local society, physically weaker women had little to no fear of being struck or taken by aggressive men. Furthermore, children would be raised by the entire community. This environment was inherently easier to establish and maintain equality and freedom. 

But in a patri-local society, the first needs to be a reason why women would even want to leave the protection of their family to live with the husband. Whereas males regularly would leave their families to go find ready women. Therefore, the practice of selling women for cattle or other resources only took root in groups that were already geared towards hierarchy rather than equality. 

Further, when the wife goes to live with the husband’s family, she is now suddenly surrounded by people who don’t know her. If her husband ever abuses her, she has to hope they punish (or stop) him… most don’t. In fact, many men (who were usually brothers, uncles, and fathers) in these types of communities realize they can force the women to do what they want, with little to no consequences. This is the seeds of patriarchy.

In these communities, they can have harems, force their women to continuously have more children, and thus grow their community faster than an egalitarian group where women could choose for themselves when or how often they’d reproduce. Its classic natural selection. Evolution doesn’t are about ethics, consent, or even consciousness. Patri-local societies breed patriarchy, and patriarchy breeds faster. So of course, we’d have more patriarchal societies today. Even though the quality of said births were no where near as healthy as matri-local ones, they still could outnumber them.

And of course, because they are more violent, they could usually innovate on weaponry or resource hoarding techniques more than anyone else.

You can clearly see the shift away from equality and freedom, towards domination tactics. And if FCC theory is correct, this also explains why our very ability to communicate has steadily declined. 

Because if people can just get what they want through domination tactics, why bother with clear, concise, inclusive language? 

You can just bash people on the head with wealth, authority, political power, celebrity influence, or even using language itself (like memes, comedy, and meaningless debates) as a weapon instead of a tool for communication. 

Even if FCC is wrong (thought it will be important to see WHY it's wrong and in what ways), it is almost certain that being social played *some* critical role in our evolution. Therefore, any environments we create for ourselves that reinforce antisocial behaviors inherently run counter to our strengths as a species. 

Creating societies in which reinforce antisocial behaviors evolves us in a direction that we probably will not enjoy as historically social creatures. Some may call this a ‘devolution’ but either way, it's bad news.

If you look up ‘antisocial behavior’ or ‘antisocial personality disorder’ you will see that it is characterized by a disregard for the rights of others. Antisocial actions are those that “harm or lack consideration for the well-being of others.” as defined in the well-cited Wikipedia page.

Of course, disorders and such are usually relative to the society you are in. But I’d like to point out how much of our entire modern-day society normalizes antisocial behaviors, especially compared to egalitarian societies that were extremely prosocial.

Furthermore, it's a well-known fact that things like narcissism have become the norm today. Renowned clinical psychologist, Dr. Ramani, points out how if you wanted to create a breeding ground for narcissism, you couldn’t do a better job than modern-day western society. 

There are probably far more mental health problems that arise from an increasingly anti-social society, but again, that is a discussion for another day.

The Environment of Freedom

What I want to point out here is that many of the problems of our society are not due to ‘human nature’ or some other mysterious, inevitable thing… it’s due to our society consistently creating or reinforcing an environment where certain people can violate the rights of others.

I don’t like to use the word ‘rights’ because that implies the need for some legal framework to ‘allow’ or enforce or even ‘protect’ rights. Nonetheless, the whole point behind the term ‘inalienable rights’ is that these are self-evident, but what we mean to say is what we’ve always said: freedom.

We claim (especially in America) that we want and value freedom, yet we continuously justify the violation of other people’s and even our own freedom at the drop of a hat.

We claim that security or equality must come at the cost of freedom (or vice versa)... this is a false equivalency.

Freedom requires equality. It is only when everyone has the same amount of leverage or power that power no longer matters. It is only when everyone has the same amount of power, that everyone also has the most amount of personal freedom that does not tread on the freedoms of someone else.

Only in an unequal world is there people with less freedom than others. Its quite simple.

Furthermore, in a world where everyone has ultimate personal freedom and equality, everyone is incentivized to protect each other’s freedoms. You have incentive to maximize the security of everyone else because you know if any one person or group gains more power, they will use that against you sooner or later.

People love to point to crimes as an example of why we need some sort of hierarchy… some laws and government and police to protect us from bad people… 

But we must remember that people do crime for a reason. Those reasons are fairly simple:

• Mental illness

• Desperation

• Bad Laws

• Accidents

• Power imbalance

For each of those reasons (and probably any other you can think of), understanding why the crime happened and solving that underlying problem is more important than merely punishing people.

Sure vindication feels good, but laws or even consequences don’t stop people from doing crimes. 

Furthermore, actually addressing the underlying causes of crime is the most effective way of stopping crime before it happens.

Mental Illness & Desperation:

If people are mentally ill or desperate, its much better to figure that out and put programs in place to help them or otherwise mitigate the risks of their mental anguish. This includes people who steal or kill ‘just for the heck of it’... because these people are mentally ill, we know this. We call it kleptomania, psychopathy, sociopathy, malignant narcissism, etc. 

It would therefore be FAR more effective to figure out what causes these illnesses, and/or identifying their existence, then directly addressing the people in the context of those illnesses. 

Bad Laws: 

Many laws are themselves unfair and put in place to target certain people. Such laws are not a net good for society. These are the things we look back on (if we matured at all) and realize was really bad and stupid (Jim Crow laws, Suffrage limitations, Slavery). Even things like protecting property is often misused, abused, or just useless and causes more problems than it solves. IP and private property for instance are one of the worst offenders of this that most people still think is useful even though it's not. I’ll address this later though.

Accidents:

Accidents happen, it's far better to manage these on a case-by-case basis and figure out why the accident was made and reduce the chances it will happen again. We sort of do this, but often over-correct or under-correct due to whatever is more popular at the time according to public opinion, precedent, or private interests.

Power Imbalances:

Power imbalance is the biggest problem. It's the self-feeding system that precipitates corruption and tyranny and such. The only way to stop this is not to make laws against abuse of power (because those inevitably get overturned, ignored, or abused anyways by those with more power) but destabilizing power structures in the first place. Don’t even allow people to gain the power they will inevitably abuse in the first place (or rigorously work to take down those who do).

This is why the ultimate freedom is to have equal decision-making power with no hierarchies (at least not permanently). 

Laws are a codification of what a community is already doing. They serve best as a sort of guideline based on historical precedent, but they should not be held as some sort of "commandment"... That defeats the purpose and just puts the power into the hands of those that wish to enforce or interpret the laws in their favor.

Similarly with cultural traditions. They are useful only in-so-far that they show us how things were done, but that should not limit us from doing things differently as times change. 

Furthermore, if only some people actually have the power to put laws in place, than it's no longer a record of what the whole community agrees to do. It's just what some people want everyone to do regardless of if others disagree. Therefore it's once again an abuse of power.

There is just NO reason to ever have permanent hierarchies that is not born out of an inherent ability to violate someone else’s freedom.

Even if you are the bestest person ever and use your power responsibly … you will necessarily violate other people’s freedom. You might say perhaps that person deserved it, or you doing this for their own good, or the greater good of all… But who is to say? How do you know such use of power is ever warranted? What happens if history shows that you were wrong? The damage will already be done. You will inevitably become the sole or main component as to whether or not other people ‘deserve’ to have their freedoms violated. Even if you have a wise counsel, its highly unlikely and historically demonstrable that your predecessors will NOT all be the same level of fair and perfect.

This is why limiting people’s freedom should always, always be the very last resort.. Rather than the default first.

Any system in which a few people have more decision-making power than everyone else… is a system in which they are the inevitable single point of failure.

We can beat this topic all day going through all sorts of examples and cases and ‘what-ifs’ and I’d actually like to do that one day… but it all comes down to that simple fact: Power over others is inherently antisocial and anathema to a free and equal society.

Science & Technology

Many people love to point to scientific and technological progress as justification for all the abuse of power that got us to this point. As if we couldn’t have gotten here without being tyrants (or, excuse me, ‘capitalists’). But here’s the thing… science and technology is not a result of capitalism or any other form of power structure. 

In fact, I’d like to make the argument that science/technology actually has been *handicapped* by capitalism and other hierarchical power structures.

Science and technology largely progresses either as a *byproduct* or *despite* the people in power trying to monopolize the power that comes from said areas. 

Science experienced its jump in progress only when the previous hierarchies of religious and royal power structures were in turmoil. 

Furthermore, it's thanks to various public, open source, or otherwise ‘safe spaces’ within companies or governments over the last century that was the prime driver for the most advancements in those fields.

The game industry is a great example of this, because it is one of the least regulated fields today. In the last two decades, as game companies became more profitable than ever, innovation in the game industry has slowed down drastically. 

Anybody who plays games regularly will tell you that there is less creativity in mainstream games than ever before. Indie games are where most of the new stuff comes from, precisely because they are led by people who are allowed to express their creativity without some boss telling them what to focus on instead. They are driven by passion, not profit.

You see this in everything from MMORPGs (especially) to shooters, racing, and single player games. Even VR does not have as much innovative games as one would expect an entirely new medium of gaming to allow, due to the fear of ‘not being profitable’ (and the monopolization of hardware).

The more our science and technology is dependent upon the need for profit, the less innovations we get in science and technology. You see this in the decrease in R&D spending, the decrease in patents (even though IP is stupid), the decrease in disruptive innovations (despite the buzz word), the increase in monopolies, and so on. 

Most scientific progress is not done in companies, but in universities, and even those done in companies are only done in ‘innovation labs’ where profitability is not considered until after something is developed. 

But as soon as profit comes into question, all innovation and progress grinds to a halt as methods of monetization are configured. If it's not profitable, it won’t be released to the public until it can become profitable. This includes the push for unprofitable growth. Because the whole point of scalability and operating at a loss, is to one day recoup the loss (likely in a monopoly). Thus is the ‘nature’ of business.

Capitalism creates more power imbalance, not less

Folks often say or assume that capitalism creates more opportunity. But in reality it simply creates more opportunity for people to gain power over others. Anything beyond that is a happy (but more often than not, tragic) accident.

A huge reason why capitalism is fundamentally flawed is due to the fact that it is essentially a giant pyramid scheme. It’s built on a zero-sum mentality where there are winners and losers. With there being far more losers… and those losers have far less resources.

Thus why the idea that the ‘market will correct itself’ or whatever is terribly silly, since only those who can participate in the market matter. And those who can spend more in the market have a louder voice than those that have less. If you can (and will) spend 100 bucks whereas I and all my 50 friends (as if I have that many) can only spend 1… our combined voice is barely heard in the marketplace. Sure there will be a market for those that have less money, but that market will never be more powerful than the one where wealthy people can throw around millions or even billions of dollars every second. 

And I think most of us know how utterly stupid trickle-down economics is, right?

Of course, I’m no economist, and I’m sure they’d say something different. My point here is that the speculative ‘market’ is a distraction from the fact that most people just want to live a decent life and not worry about bills. But such a thing is impossible in a system where everything can and will be commoditized and where inflation is a sign of growth, and growth is essentially the only important indicator of progress (rather than, say human health, fulfillment, or environmental sustainability).

Furthermore, the very definition of capitalism is the “private ownership of the means of production”... that means some groups of people (or even just individuals) can own anything that can produce things (ie people, land, and other resources). 

This is a really important point here. Because people love to point out the sins of communism and other economic/political systems but refuse to admit the original (and current) sins of capitalism.

Capitalism was not started by a bunch of free spirited folks who wanted to progress humanity. It was a progression of rich people who wanted the same power as the nobility. You can see this very clearly throughout the French Revolution and similar where the merchants, some of which were indeed peasants beforehand or other lower positions, would criticize the aristocrats (nobility) for not playing by the same rules as everyone else. The nobility could take out loans without paying them back for instance, or own land without paying taxes and so on.

The merchants wanted that power as well and were able to gain it through the buying of land, building of businesses, and so on. The only reason why they cared about private property was to have the same power as the nobility. They turned around and rejected the peasant’s right to own property afterwards! Because they didn't want to let them take their power or ask for more payment like they did with the nobility.

In fact, the very idea of private property is yet another one of those recent things that people mistake for some long-held belief. Most people didn’t care about private property. Only nobles could even ‘own’ land in most every empire. The average person used the commons for their daily needs. 

But anyways, slavery was very much commoditized and scaled up as a result of capitalist ideologies. (Once again, owning the means of production). 

Yes, there were slaves long before this time, but as always, profit-minded innovation has a way of exploiting any system to gain more profit from it. Despite the US constitution being founded on ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ and ‘opportunity’ or whatever… slavery was much too profitable to be abolished. Even the civil war was more about stopping the South from expanding slavery due to the added power they would have from it, rather than actually stopping slavery. Many of the workers unions and even the quakers slowly but surely went away from the abolition of slavery because they were more concerned about the ‘white slave’ in factories.

Check out this passage from the book, Black Reconstruction, by W E B Du Bois. One of the best historian essays on the period leading up to, during, and after the American Civil War.

While the Evans brothers, who came as labor agitators in 1825, had among their twelve demands "the abolition of chattel slavery," nevertheless, George was soon convinced that freedom without land was of no importance.

He wrote to Gerrit Smith, who was giving land to Negroes, and said: "I was formerly, like yourself, sir, a very warm advocate of the abolition of slavery. This was before I saw that there was white slavery. Since I saw this, I have materially changed my views as to the means of abolishing Negro slavery. I now see, clearly, I think, that to give the landless black the privilege of changing masters now possessed by the landless white would hardly be a benefit to him in exchange for his surety of support in sickness and old age, although he is in a favorable climate. If the Southern form of slavery existed at the North, I should say the black would be a great loser by such a change."

At the convention of the New England anti-slavery society in 1845, Robert Owen, the great champion of cooperation, said he was opposed to Negro slavery, but that he had seen worse slavery in England than among the Negroes.

Horace Greeley said the same year: "If I am less troubled concerning the slavery prevalent in Charleston or New Orleans, it is because I see so much slavery in New York which appears to claim my first efforts."

Thus despite all influences, reform and social uplift veered away from the Negro. Brisbane, Channing, Owen and other leaders called a National Reform Association to meet in New York in May, 1845. In October, Owen's "World Conference" met. But they hardly mentioned slavery.

The Abolitionists did join a National Industrial Congress which met around 1845- 1846. Other labor leaders were openly hostile toward the abolitionist movement, while the movement for free land increased. Thus two movements—Labor-Free Soil, and Abolition, exhibited fundamental divergence instead of becoming one great party of free labor and free land.

Same thing goes for the Native Americans. Despite the fact that the colonies did not own Native land, they routinely sold it to citizens and killed or ran off the Natives who were already there.

Hundreds of millions of people were killed or otherwise died in the early years of capitalism. A death toll that has yet to be reckoned. Even in modern times, capitalism has been directly responsible for the genocide or enslavement of entire peoples from land that is deemed a ‘resource’ (i.e. for wood, rare earth metals, cloth, rubber, medicines, chocolate, oil, fish, or just human labor). Than of course there is a running toll of people who die every year from poverty directly due to capitalism. That’s not even including all the animals and plants that are now endangered or extinct due to mass deforestation, pollution, fracking, overfishing, overhunting, or of course climate change…

This is what happens when ‘wealth’ is vaunted as some achievement… This is the cost of that wealth.  

Here are some great answers to the ‘Who killed more? Capitalism or Communism?’ question. Many answers have some great points and nuances!

Progress isn't even Worth It

We are still not ‘advanced’ enough to stop any cataclysmic events, those things that caused mass extinctions throughout Earth’s history: meteors, volcanoes, super storms, solar flares, climate change, etc… Can and will still kill us too.

So in the grand scheme of things, we are not necessarily more advanced than our foraging ancestors, who were able to adapt through multiple cataclysmic events: the Younger Dryas period, the climate change from the last ice age to the holocene-era due the poles shifting in which caused massive desertification across Africa and the middle east, the huge climate shifts every few decades/centuries during the pre-holocene ice age. They were hardy, adaptable peoples!... Well some of them. The hunter-gatherers adapted, while most other empire-builders were wiped out.

We are probably *more fragile* as a species than ever before... because unlike those times, most of us cannot fend for ourselves if our society collapses. Even those that know how to hunt, most likely do not know how to forage and utilize all the plants and animals in an ecosystem in a sustainable way. Western society has driven nearly all the remaining millennia-old hunter gatherer cultures (nearly) extinct! Plus many ecosystems are downright destroyed as well. So even if we were to learn how to forage, it is unclear if we have enough remaining functional ecosystems to support us (even a fraction of humans).

Additionally, by creating a nigh-global empire of westernization, we have created a single point of failure… we have exposed ourselves to the threat of global pandemics thanks to this largely mono-cultural environment where disease can easily spread from any corner of the world to every other. Globalization has also severely decreased the frequency and cohesion of local communities, making many places around the world look and feel virtually the same. 

Worst of all, it has driven many rich cultures extinct, or to the brink as capitalists seek to commoditize everything and nationalists seek to erase any history of unique differences within their ‘borders’.

Diversity is crucial because of this risk of sudden change. Not merely in how we look, but in genetics, societal organization, culture, ideas, and so on. But Westernization/Globalization has steadily been colonizing every corner of the Earth and turning us into a mono-cultural species that can no longer adapt very readily to change.

Instead, we are almost being dragged by the march of technology that innovates on growth more than anything else. Instead of us deciding how to change, we are being changed in ways we have no idea how to handle or even recognize.

Our ‘progress’ has come at the cost of our social cohesion, adaptiveness, trust, mental health, environmental health, and likely our future…. Is it all worth it?

That is not to say that we haven’t gained from technology, or even hierarchy. Things like the internet, life-saving medicines and medical operations, mass transportation, air-conditioning, construction techniques, and so much more are all amazing things to have!

But many of those technologies are thanks to the public, open, or otherwise democratization of knowledge rather than capitalism.

We have not gained nearly as much as the capitalist propaganda suggests. The whole story that ‘capitalism has brought the most people out of poverty’ grossly ignores the fact that the origins of capitalism (i.e. colonization and imperialism) *created* the exact poverty it is ‘saving’ people from. And it currently maintains that poverty as we control their lands through loans or direct imperialism.

We all know that one of the biggest tools in a capitalist toolset is to create the problem it sells the solution to.

What Life was Actually Like (ie not necessarily ‘short, hard, and miserable’)

The idea that people were just ‘impoverished’ before imperialists/capitalists came along, is a direct evolution of the idea that non-Europeans were ‘savages’ or ‘primitive’ or ‘stupid’ because they didn’t live in a hierarchical society.

There is a wealth of anthropological data today that shows that people were actually living pretty good lives throughout most of human history. In fact, immediate-return foragers (hunter-gatherers) who had egalitarian societies were often far healthier in mind, body, and spirit than their agricultural or non-egalitarian forager counterparts. AND they still made remarkable technological advancements for their time.

Many egalitarian communities were and are able to get much more out of their farming and foraging techniques from ‘wastelands’ that hierarchical societies thought inhospitable or not worth the effort. Even to this day, we don’t know exactly how certain cultures are able to consistently get all the nutrients they need from environments in which our ‘more advanced’ technologies can’t work with.

The idea that people lived short, miserable, violent lives is demonstrably false. The biggest cause of death for immediate-return egalitarian foragers was in early childhood due to disease or infanticide (the early version of abortion). If you survived past the age of 9 or so, you would likely live into old-age (i.e. around 70 years) very similar to today. Obviously, there were many deaths from infected injuries throughout adulthood too, but if you didn’t die from a serious injury, you would still live quite a long time. 

Of course, if a lot of people die young then that would statistically move the ‘average life expectancy’ down. A life expectancy of 25-30 years does not mean people just died at that age, like a dog or cat… it means there were more people who died very young.

Obviously, its good that we have less early child-hood death and can come back from injuries… but now we also have more people dying of preventable disease, or from pollution, or accidents and mass death from our own technology, or self harm. Furthermore, people are far less physically fit, so old-age is far more miserable (and lonely) than it was throughout human history.

Imagine how much life would be better if we had the healthier lifestyles of our ancestors, along with the safety and medical technologies of today!

In many egalitarian societies, elders (and disabled people) were an integral part of the community and may have even been more fit, on average than our elders of today. They were able to help in production of tools even if they couldn't go out and forage. The first cut of meat even went to the elderly or disabled who crafted the bows/arrows, but couldn't go hunt. Furthermore, there have been very interesting discoveries featuring the remains of clearly disabled people (such as with no limbs, or no teeth, or other ailments) that managed to live long lives, implying that they had to have been taken care of and highly respected to have been buried so ceremoniously at such an advanced age.

Many of the cases of cannibalism, maltreatment, and other evidence of miserable lives actually came from hierarchical hunter/gatherers (not all of them cared about equality) or agricultural societies. It was these non-egalitarian peoples who often took slaves, or forced even pregnant women and small children to do the hardest labor.

Across many western societies today, people cast away the elderly to live in isolated nursing homes. Old and disabled or even just differently abled people are far more likely to live miserable lives simply because they can’t participate as readily in the ‘marketplace’...

It is only in hierarchical societies do you begin to see a trend where certain people would become ‘devalued’ and had less bargaining power if they could not keep up with the hunters. (Though there were many different types of hierarchies such as gerontocracies and matriarchies where power was centralized via other means).

Warfare was not even common until agricultural or other delayed-return, hierarchical societies began realizing that it was a good strategy to raid other people for their resources instead of gathering them all yourself. 

Immediate-return foragers did not have ‘hunting territories’, and thus saw no need to ‘protect’ said territories from others. They saw the land much like we see the air (for now), open and free. Anybody can use it and it doesn't even cross our minds usually to think about privatizing our air (unless its some sort of dystopian vision). 

In a society where everyone has the same level of bargaining power, the only way to ‘get what you want’ is to communicate with others to figure out a mutually beneficial solution where you all get what you want. This environment inherently makes it easier to manage desires in the first place. If you live in a community where you know that somebody else’s happiness will almost certainly come with more generosity, and that you in turn will be happier when you can help others too, the range of your desires become biased towards altruism or mutual aid rather than greed. The very idea of having everything for yourself becomes (or rather naturally is) foreign, impractical, and disturbing.

Only in a hierarchical structure, where people regularly have the ability to gain power and wealth over other people, will people want things that are mutually exclusive to what somebody else wants. Only in an environment where you can allocate resources that are privatized, and the size or ‘value’ of those resources can give you more advantages over your brethren, will you then begin to see the ‘logic’ of greed and selfishness.

The environment molds our desires just as much as it does our behaviors.

Hierarchy is a sickness

Hierarchy is like a disease of the mind… of society. It infects the body of our consciousness and works to trick the ‘cells’ that are our ideas into feeding the hierarchies and allowing it to grow unchecked.

If not identified, it can turn our own immune system against us. 

This is why it’s so hard to solve homelessness, racism, sexism, and so on… Its not because we are fighting against ‘human nature’ or that these are otherwise intractable problems.

It's because these are just symptoms of the disease. And though it is important to alleviate these symptoms whenever possible, you will never cure a disease by just treating the symptoms.

Furthermore, the very environment we have today is strongly biased towards hierarchies… towards centralizing bargaining power to fewer individuals at the cost of everyone else.

Nearly all these isms and issues are a direct result of taking power away from many people to give it to fewer people.

Therefore, claiming that the only way to solve these problems is by creating more hierarchies through economic, political, or technological means is just making everything worse… feeding the disease.

But we’re not dead… we can still fight it. And some of us have been fighting it. Despite the fact that imperialist nations have been assassinating, sabotaging, or otherwise destroying nearly every attempt to decentralize power structures, there still exists quite a few strong antibodies against hierarchies.

Even beyond the various socialist or anarchist initiatives, our very technology has quite a few tools against centralization of power as well. 

Though many technologies are not neutral and do bias the reinforcement of hierarchies, tools like the internet make it easier than ever to decentralize and distribute power.

Unfortunately, the monopolization of the internet has been steadily co-opting that power. Making the internet dependent upon a few ‘big tech companies’ (or even governments) just limits the power of individuals to live free and equal lives such that only a few of those individuals have greater access to the internet or to the power of the internet than many others.

But before I get into the solutions and such, let me spend more time really breaking this down for the people in the back. (but of course, at any point, if you haven't already, you can just skip to the end!)

Technology is not neutral

Many technologies biased a certain group or type of person. 

Here’s a few examples:

• The plow was a top-heavy device that made it harder for women to farm and thus required more male labor, which lead to the idea that women couldn’t do hard labor, even though women typically did most of the ‘hard labor’ for many of these agricultural societies prior to that. 

• Books were too expensive for the average person to own, much less access, so when knowledge began to get stored more in written form, as opposed to oral, then there began a schism between those who could afford books and those who could not. Thus why a lot of older books sound completely arcane, because they were written for other scholars, not the average person.

• Cars were, and still are, quite expensive, hard to maintain, and required a lot of rethinking in urban planning. So if you did not have the money to buy one, much less a car-friendly suburban house and car-centric roads, you couldn't participate in the burgeoning ‘future of transportation’. And as cities became more car-dependent, walkable neighborhoods were demolished and paved over to make way for highways, suburbia, and parking lots. This destroyed the tax-base of so many cities (because car-dependent areas are less dense and people can work/pay taxes in an area that they don’t live in) that almost every car-dependent city today is facing bankruptcy. 

The luddites were right. They weren’t a bunch of non-technical people… they were the mechanics and experts who know how the industrial age factory machines worked better than nearly anyone else. They understood that the existence of these amazing technologies would herald a devaluing of human labor. They knew that humans would be increasingly compared and in competition with the machines meant to make their lives easier. 

They saw, way back in the 1800s, that these machines would commoditize craftsmanship, destroy personality, and reduce humans to undesirable expenses.

They knew that the very art of production would be severely destroyed such that most consumers won’t even think about the sheer amount of work and effort put into every single thing that is produced. In a world where the means of production could be privatized without privatizing the humans themselves, the power balance would inevitably favor those that could capitalize on the owning of these machines.

Just like we see today with data… the sanctity of privacy and attention, of user behavior and custom, refined knowledge, is being commoditized. Capitalists claim it’s just automated data crunching, that there is no value in that data without their algorithms, but what is really happening is a retardation of our ability to personalize, curate, and process information. AI is the 21st century version of those factory machines, sucking up tons of raw materials exploited from the environment (i.e. our minds and behaviors), and crunching it up to churn out products. 

It doesn’t even matter about the quality or ‘innovation’ of these products… the fact of the matter is that they inherently strongly bias the few individuals who have the money, connections, luck, or sometimes skill to capitalize on this technology to gain more power at the expense of everyone else.

People love to claim that without capitalism, we wouldn’t have innovation. But we’ve had innovation for thousands of years without it. And furthermore, we have to ask ourselves if we actually want ‘innovation’ in general, or actual quality-of-life improvements where it matters.

The intrinsic problem with automation, whether it be as simple as traffic lights, as factories, or as abstract machine learning algorithms; is the outsourcing of human intelligence to machines, which often is indeed more convenient… But comes at the cost of our ability to exercise said intelligence. Sometimes this is an acceptable trade-off, but oftentimes we actually lose very important skills without even realizing it. Such as spatial reasoning, memory, attention spans, and much more. As we’ve seen over the last few decades, automation does not even necessarily grant us more space/time for leisure and reaching human potential! 

Many of the best technologies we value today were not done for the purpose of profit or other capitalist means, but due to open-source communities who wanted to create something cool or solve a problem or even fight back against privatization! (Some of the big names include Arpanet, Linux, Android, Firefox, Chromium, Blender, OBS, and more)

Innovation is society agnostic. We can have plenty of innovation and technological advances without also exploiting resources to hell and biasing all the power towards a few individuals or corporations.

It’s clear that even the project of doing good science is handicapped by a capitalistic, hierarchical mindset. The very concept of peer-review is an egalitarian ideal, but the current landscape locks up access to scientific research and journals to the point that only people who have the privilege of going to high-end institutions can ‘do’ science. 

All that to say, the technologies and modern-day conveniences you enjoy most today are either here *despite* capitalism/hierarchy, or are only possible due to the gross exploitation of less fortunate peoples.

A Thought Experiment on Societal Collapse

Also consider this: if our society collapses today, if we truly do face some existential apocalypse.. It is highly likely that all evidence of our ‘technological progress’ will be ground to dust in a mere few thousand years… perhaps 5 or 10, but even if it takes 100,000 years for all evidence of our existence to be wiped away, it still is nothing in the grand scheme of things. 

Once again, we homo sapiens seem to have existed for 300,000 years… beings with a very similar level of intelligence. Even before then, other hominids have existed for over a million years. That is an unimaginably long time for us to truly internalize in our minds that can barely grasp the length of a few decades. 

It is possible, I’m not sure how likely, but it is certainly at least probable that other technologically advanced societies have risen and fallen in this time. Most people won’t even entertain such an idea… and that is exactly my point.

If you can’t even imagine the idea that advanced societies have risen and fallen throughout human history, or geological history, and if you can’t imagine humans (or other creatures) ever amounted to anything ‘remarkable’ in all this time due to the lack of evidence…. Then what happens when our society inevitably collapses (if this current trajectory holds true)? 

What ‘value’ should technological advancement hold if it comes at the cost of our present-day freedoms, equality, and potential? 

What does it matter that we have ‘capitalism’ to thank for our current level of ‘wealth’ if none of that wealth means a hot-shit in the time it takes for a mountain to move? 

What does it matter that we have xeta-bytes of data churning out trillions of dollars, if all of that can be gone with the rising of the tides or the impact of an asteroid or the eruption of volcanoes?

What does all this tech and wealth matter if it comes at the cost of our conscience? What is the value of this wealth that is based on taking out unpayable loans from our own futures?

Even if you don’t believe in evolution…. You probably won’t be reading up to here, but even so, one must admit that there is probably no place in heaven, or any other afterlife for those that justify the exploitation of other life, right? Can you truly imagine a heaven in which those who sat by and allowed or otherwise were even complicit in the domination of other people are not punished for such depravity?

I am not a primitivist, but I do admire the fact that low-tech civilizations have been able to exist for far longer than many of us today can ever imagine our businesses and capitalist empires flourishing. The Mbuti have maintained their way of life for at least a thousand years, even through genocides, slave trades, deforestation and more. Same for the Khoi-San, the Blackfoot, the aboriginal Australians and so on.

Regardless of how you feel about ‘progress’, there is something to be said for sustainability and stability… for peoples who can somehow maintain or adapt their society to outlast the rise and fall of hundreds of empires and cataclysms

Hierarchies are a disease upon the human consciousness. Any forms they take: capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, organized religion, nuclear families, state socialism, majority democracy, etc are all just manifestations of this same problem. Variants of the same deadly virus. One that consumes the virility of our minds and bodies, infects the social bonds that were our evolutionary advantage, and corrupts the imagination that was the tip of that evolutionary spear. 

If ever we are to create technology that truly allows us to get to the stars, it won’t be built off the back exploitation. It’s just not sustainable. 

Our quickly changing climate, extinction of life since the last great mass extinction event, and destruction of the human spirit is the result of our technological progress. Is that all we can do?

I believe technology can be far, far better. Whether it's slower or faster, our technological development can and should be geared more towards unlocking human potential, of ALL humans, instead of empowering a few at the cost of the many.

Because here’s the thing… even the billionaires among us, even the inventors and engineers and designers who can express their potential through our current level of technology, even they are kneecapping their own potential by taking out loans on the rest of us. 

Hierarchies always collapse

Here’s the kicker. I mentioned before that capitalism is fundamentally unsustainable and cancerous. But remember, it’s just a manifestation of hierarchies of power. These hierarchies are always going to collapse. Because once again, the only thing we can count on in life… is change. Something happens that inevitably shakes the environment, causing everything to come tumbling down and life to have to adjust. 

Throughout human history, societies built on hierarchical power inevitably collapsed, usually quite violently. The Babylonians, Sumerians, Incan, Aztecs, Egyptians, Zimbabweans, Romans, Greeks, Chinese, Indian, British, French, and soon the Americans. (And probably every other hierarchical society you can think of). 

Because people who are being oppressed inevitably rise up to overthrow that oppression, and the people who want (more) power inevitably overthrow those who already have that power.

If that sounds too simple… its not. Life is fairly simple. What’s complex are the ways in which this plays out. Complexity emerges from very simple rules (i.e. patterns) interacting together.

Hierarchy brings with it a number of very simple problems that weave together to form what *feels* like some impossibly complex web of intractable issues. But viewing it that way just serves the propaganda of such a system… believing said system is too big to fight, or inherent in the human condition, or a necessary part of progress is what makes hierarchies so powerful.

All of that propaganda is bullshit. 

And realizing this grants us the power to take some of that power back, and to begin the work of (re)creating a better society for all.

Let me spell it out for you. A hierarchy of power is built upon and encourages the following simple issues:

• Selfishness - Egalitarian societies require selflessness, or at least self-interest aligned with the entire group. Altruism is a great strategy in a cooperative group, because it will always come back as people remember your generosity. But the more power you gain, the more you are incentivized to keep it to yourself, or otherwise use ‘generosity’ for your own gain even at the expense of others.

• Greed - Only a hierarchical society creates the space for greed to take root, and the means to act upon it. Hoarding resources feels like a good idea, and a hierarchy where altruism is not a good strategy encourages greed instead.

• Competition - Specifically the worst type of competition, that of a finite, zero-sum game. Where there are winners and losers, and the winners deserve to rule over the losers. Hierarchies ratchet up the stakes of even a friendly competition and make kindness a weakness instead of a strength.

• Corruption - Bad (selfish, unempathetic) people inevitably rise to power, and even good (altruistic, wise) people can easily misuse power if they think ‘its for the good of all’. Hierarchy encourages ego… it makes even the best of people think that their ideas are better than everyone else’s. It makes us forget that the wisdom of the (educated and participatory) crowd and will always be wiser in the long run.

• Infighting - The coup-de-grace. People without power want it (back), people with power want it more. Thus they fall due to internal pressures that merely compound with any external ones.

A Brief Tangent on Africa

It's this last one I want to touch on real quick in regards to Africa, the birthplace to humanity. Because Africa is an absolutely perfect example of the problem with hierarchies. 

Many people regard Africa today as a ‘backwater shit country’ … obvious ignorance aside, this perfectly illustrates my point. 

Most people around the world, including many Africans, don’t even know about the history of Africa. They just assume it has always been poor and miserable. That there is some intrinsic failure of the people that make it so. Once again, *even many Africans believe this*. 

Obviously (to anyone who knows African history) this is not true.

Africa, even during colonialism, had hundreds of kingdoms, empires, and otherwise thriving societies. Here are a few you can look up yourself: 

• The Mali Empire (birthplace of Mansa Musa, the richest man in history) and the home of Timbuktu, the largest scholar city/library in Africa, and the world, for hundreds of years.

• The Edo Empire/Benin Kingdom who used fractal math to organize their city (a fact the Spaniards could not grasp and thought was ‘chaotic’, also was the cleanest city they ever visited, including London or their own cities),

• Zimbabwe which literally means ‘great stone city’ due to their massive walls and structures built with huge stones that fit masterfully together with no mortar. They erected trade routes throughout much of Africa and even with China via trade with coastal cities.

• Swahili, which seemed to have used Persian architecture before the Persians, and built their entire city from coral! They had massive sea-based trade networks and regularly traded with India and China. 

• Kumite, Nubia, Somalia, Aksumite, etc …. 

Furthermore, the Greeks and Romans regularly sent their best to learn amongst the African scholars (thus the close integration with Egypt) who were more than just Egyptians, but folks from all throughout Africa and the Middle East (since its a prime central place to meet). 

But during Colonialism, as Europeans began to invade Africa, the biggest reason all of these Empires fell was actually *not* purely due to the Europeans, because many of them were able to fight them off for quite a while, even despite guns, ships, and disease. What killed these huge African powers was their own infighting. The same thing that took down the Greeks, Romans, Ottomans, Aztecs, Japanese, and every other great empire… 

People were vying for power within said empires, many of which thought they could use the European (slave) trade routes or weaponry to gain that power, and stabbed their own kin in the back. They thought they would be able to take advantage of the changing times to make a bid for power… some were successful, but most weren’t. Even those who were successful only lasted a few more decades before infighting + external pressure caused them to fold.

These African empires fell due to their own hands first, then the outsiders burned everything to the ground and claimed the land for themselves. Now most of us don’t even remember that there ever was anything happening in Africa at all… we just assume its always been this way.

Look at America now… or wherever you live. Look at the infighting. Look at how even with an existential crisis knocking at the door (e.g. climate change, pandemics, and possibly even the singularity), most of the people in power are just trying to grasp at more power rather than address these problems.

Our entire society is about to be colonized by nature itself. The elements will claim the land we thought we owned. All traces of our civilization will be ground to dust with even more prejudice than the Europeans did to Africa. 

So tell me, what ‘value’ is our ‘progress’? Our wealth? Our democracy? Our civilization if it all can and will go up and smoke under the weight of its own corruption?

Hierarchy is ‘natural’... just like cancer

If you’re one of those people that say ‘good riddance’ to humanity, than fuck you. Sorry not sorry. Because what makes all of this worse is that if such a thing happens,.. If humans go extinct or otherwise collapse, all of these lessons will be lost to the sands of time.

When the next species (whether it be another hominid or some other animal) gains sentience and builds things, they too will inevitably fall prey to this cancer. Because hierarchy is logical… it is a natural adaptation in certain environments. We see this in other animals, not just in humans. 

Whenever a lifeform (plant, animal, bacteria, etc) escapes its natural habitat, and gets into an ecosystem where it has no natural limiters, it can become cancerous, we call this an ‘invasive species’. What we’ve done with imperialism, colonization, and now capitalism is exactly what any other lifeform would do in this situation. The only difference is that we are (supposedly) aware of what we’re doing. 

So if we go extinct, the same thing will happen again. The beauty of sentience is being able to actually learn and pass that knowledge to future generations. What makes humans so different from any other creature, is our ability to pass on more knowledge in a variety of ways and subjects, thanks to generational social skills. For millennia, we have been struggling with war, inequality, cycles of societal collapse, and so much more.

Every single empire throughout history has collapsed, while many egalitarian societies that managed to survive the atrocities of these empires, have been alive for thousands of years. 

Many empires, maybe even every empire, have died due to a combination of internal and external strife. Due to the poor/slave class rebelling while the ruling class vie for power, and foreign powers swooping in for their own purposes. Most of their accomplishments have been lost, destroyed, or corrupted with barely anything surviving today. 

Meanwhile, egalitarian societies both pre-date and outlast these empires. The Mbuti, Khoe-san, Hausa, Blackfoot, and more than most of us realize, have somehow existed continuously for thousands of years despite these overpowering empires who have tried to colonize and genocide them. They are resilient.

But no other animal can learn from these lessons… especially not if we go extinct.

This is why I spent so much time outlining the origins. Because history shows that this is not some curse of humanity or intelligence or a necessary aspect of civilization… it’s a cancer. It is a good idea, run amok. It is a runaway problem that will continue until there is nothing left.

Just like cancer, it is extremely powerful. And just like cancer, just because it has power, does not mean we should hold it up as better than the alternative just because it is more destructive and aggressive.

When we see cancer, we know that it is fatal and must be treated as soon as possible. 

How to cure the cancer of Hierarchy

Now here’s the transition to the solutions, if you haven’t felt this coming already. 

Current/past treatments of this problem are very much like how we treat cancer up to this point: nuke everything and hope the cancerous cells die before the healthy ones.

Now obviously this is not ideal, but its the best we could do for quite a while. People ate the rich, had violent uprisings and hoped to destroy power structures before the society itself collapsed.

But just like with cancer, that puts you in a position where you have to delicately balance the violent energy, or risk it getting out of hand and causing even more problems. Furthermore, even if it succeeds, you don’t actually know if you pulled up the cancerous cells at the stem. You hope it's in remission and never comes back, but it often does.

Just like cancer, hierarchy can turn even good things into bad. The specifics as to why or how this corruption happens is still not clear… but we know that environmental conditions, genetic mutations, and even epi-genetic mutations due to pollution or disease can cause cancer.  

Similarly, a hierarchy could start from something benign and helpful: a good leader, a protection force from danger, a way to distribute limited resources, etc... but the environmental conditions (patri-local/anti-social societies and resource hoarding), mutation of the culture it inherited (irrelevant traditions and toxic cultures), or epigenetic mutations of the culture in the present (new technologies or ideas that lead to more pollution/inequality rather than sustainability) can naturally turn that hierarchy into something terrible.

Before we know it, we are being boiled alive in the soup of egomania: collecting more and more power, warring with other peoples, destroying the environment, and generally becoming a parasitic life form, rather than a symbiotic one.

Maybe the specifics change, but the general shape of this cycle will and has repeated with any other lifeform that escapes its natural habitat. Humans, for hundreds of thousands of years, were able to combat or avoid the carcinogen that is hierarchical power and unchecked growth by limiting our own growth through natural means. 

• They had voluntary abortions, not to control population numbers, but to dedicate more time to actually raising every child as best as they could. The children were not raised (or ‘belonged to’) the parents alone, but by the entire community. Their aunts and uncles and grandparents and elders and neighbors and even peers would all play a role in the upbringing of the children. Such that kids were naturally both independent and social.

• They lived in adaptive communities that were small and mobile during some times of the year, but also came together in other times of the year. 

• They knew the power of coalitions and reverse dominance tactics to create and maintain true freedom (i.e. the freedom to decide how you want to live your life) of each individual rather than biasing the freedoms of a few over others. These communities utilized smart immune systems that looked out for any egomaniacs and then isolated, disincentivized, or ostracized that sort of behavior. The very creation of communities was as a natural defense against dominant, alpha-males; where a coalition of females and ‘beta-males’ could more easily and fairly get their share of resources by banding together to defend from dominant aggressive types.

• They view themselves as a part of nature holistically such that any consumption was inherently sustainable. They knew that you couldn’t keep taking from an environment forever, you had to move on eventually or try new things in order for the old things to replenish themselves. Thus, technologies were not created to extract more at the cost of the environment, but instead to cause less suffering (either on the part of the animal/plant you were killing, or the human who did the work), and less waste.

• Even spiritual beliefs were more sustainable. The gods and spirits were rarely ever ‘all-powerful’ beings that you had to prostrate and/or kill for in order to get their blessing. Instead, the gods and spirits were each powerful in their own domain. The deer god was more powerful in one domain while the lion god in another (for instance). The trickster god was a wily fellow, but you could outwit them if you were clever too. Any and everybody could partake in rituals, they were not controlled or restricted to only the ‘holiest’ people. Thus there was never any need or thought to go to war for conflicting ‘messages from the gods’ or because ‘god told me to take this land’. Spirituality was a truly tolerant and open-minded, shared experience of trying to appreciate and understand the mysteries of the universe.

There are so many ways in which people actively and passively fought against the ego-centricity that is endemic to hierarchies. They weren’t naively doing these things listed above. Many societies witnessed first-hand the evils of hierarchy, and thereafter did their best to spread the knowledge or otherwise take down any future hierarchies. 

So… if you got this far… let’s finally look into how we can use those wisdoms of indigenous peoples, as well as learning from our own mistakes, to build a better, more sustainable future.

Starting from Scratch Now

I think the first important point is to note that we are not, and cannot, start from ‘scratch’. This is not some ‘blue sky’, ‘green field’ daydream about what if we just started over.

We can never start over. Even if we go to a new planet, we’ll still be bringing all of our history and assumptions and values and so on with us. In fact, you can very clearly see this in the language of space sci-fi and current-day burgeoning space industry. We say we are ‘colonizing another planet’ or even space itself! This is already starting off on the wrong foot.

Furthermore, even if we do ‘start over’... how will you do so? What will you have learned? I can tell you right now, most people just assume they could do better if they were in charge, or if folks just did it *this* way instead of *that* way… This is wrong. This is inherently ego-centric.

The truth is that we have very little idea what would work and what wouldn’t work in any new environment. All we know is what has not worked in past environments (and we barely even know that). If we try to build a better society from the top down, we are already missing the point. The most resilient and adaptive societies are those in which everyone has the most personal freedoms. They’re built bottom up.

If we try to build a system (whether it's from scratch or as an incremental change from the current ones) that tells people what they can and can’t do, we have already built the carcinogenic seeds of a hierarchical power structure. 

Instead, we have to figure out how to empower every individual to have the most say in their own lives, with as little coercive power on other people’s lives (directly or indirectly) as possible.

Next, we have to realize that we are a part of nature. We are not above it, separate from it, or anything else.. We are another creature on this Earth, in this universe. We are therefore beholden to the same conditions and laws (as far as we understand them) and so on. Yes, we have the ability to change those conditions and bend or at least learn those laws, but we are not above them. Being blind to the conditions which influence our behaviors does not make us immune to those conditions. It just makes us ignorant of their influence.

Further, we have to erect a very strong immune system to ego. We have to actively and passively disincentivize any collection or abuse of power. We have to realize that no good leader or talented individual or even technological progress is worth the cost of our very existence. Any ‘reason’ we might come up with to justify the extended use of hierarchical power is inevitably a carcinogen that will corrupt that power into something awful sooner than later.

Let’s try to keep the empire-building of the future to fiction. 

Sure, there are benefits to building empires, or at least to creating permanent hierarchies, but those benefits (probably) always come at the cost of sustainable growth later on. It may be faster at first to have someone in charge instead of a consensus-based system to get things done, but there is a very short half-life to having specific people who are always in charge. Regardless of if the people in charge are voted in, earn it by merit, or are ‘divined by the gods’... it inevitably is just not able to adapt to changing environments and conditions over an extended period of time. And those positions quickly become sought after for their power rather than their responsibilities.

The problem with democracy

Having specialized roles specifically for ‘politics’ or other decision-making is inherently hierarchical and myopic. Without the voluntary participation of the people, it steadily collapses into a system of class-based power games. Because if most decisions are chiefly made by those positions of power, even if they are voted in and ‘representative’, they don’t require most people to pay attention to what is happening. It is an outsourcing of decision-making skills, thereby becoming a natural drift in power away from the people and into the hands of the few ‘politicians’.

A consensus-based system requires everyone to participate, and if they don’t participate, their abstention is noted so future complaints are more easily managed and recognized. With consensus, it becomes very obvious when a decision is wrong because you’ll hear about it from everyone. But this feedback loop is very much atrophied or even non-existent in any other system, even democratic ones, where most people can only really voice their complaints or thoughts come voting time. 

People like to say ‘dont complain if you didn’t vote’... but voting literally does not matter much in a democracy or republic, because your voice is reduced to a ballot … and usually not even a ranked-choice one. So regardless of if you vote or not, your voice only somewhat matters if the politicians or subject happens to be exactly what you want. People claim this is a ‘necessary’ trade-off because you can’t have a democracy with millions of people, much less a consensus model… and that is exactly the point! You can’t have meaningful conversations with millions of people about the things that matter to them. Everybody has different things they care about at different times in their life.

Thus, the importance of this next section: Community.

Ban Countries and Borders. Build Intimate Communities

Scale is a major flaw in democracy. 

We try to bandage this wound by having a separation of powers, and by having federal, state, and local governing systems. But that too is the same problem, just at different levels.

The simple truth of the matter, which unfortunately a lot of people refuse to completely recognize, is that nations themselves are the problems. A nation is just a giant hierarchical empire. A nation is not too different from a feudal system, where you have the royalty at the top and the serfs or peasants at the bottom. And the royalty own everything and everyone in their realm. The only difference is that in a democracy/republic (especially under capitalism) the rich and powerful own the rest through money and political power. 

Further, the key issue with even a place as ‘democratic’ as America, is that people are automatically enrolled in the fiefdom.

We like to think of ‘automatic’ US citizenry (this goes for any other nation in the world too though) as a good thing. We claim that this gives everyone the same privileges. Access to the same resources and opportunities.

But what we are really saying is that some people colonized a huge amount of land and resources, and everyone now born in these territories belong to this empire. You automatically must follow these rules, pay these taxes, and be grateful for the privilege. 

Its pretty fucking disgusting.

And many folks just assume this to be natural or good. Even me critiquing this will be seen as ‘unamerican’ or ‘communist’ or whatever… I’m just calling out the bullshit.

We have to stop caring about borders and countries. Nations and patriotism. Even heritage should be more about the people than the land. Freedom means actually having viable options to make informed decisions… being able to consciously choose which rules you’ll follow, which communities you are a part of, and what values matter to you. 

If you are forced to associate (i.e. automatically ‘gain citizenship’) with a group of people and follow a set of laws, and be indoctrinated with a curriculum, then you literally do not have much freedom. 

What better looks like

A better society would be one in which each person can decide for themselves if they want to associate with a certain group of people. If they want to follow these rules or have those values or participate in this society.

Many indigenous societies raised their children such that even though they spent a huge amount of resources raising them, the children were not beholden to stay there. They could easily leave. 

We claim that people can easily leave today, but you can’t, because the entire world has been sliced up between different fiefdoms and empires. You have to either choose which empire you will belong to, or try to eek out a life in the lands no empire wants at the moment. 

This is why the whole ‘if you don't like it, then leave’ argument doesn’t work, because the world is riddled with parasites that we call nations. We have to rid ourselves of these parasites if we actually want to live in a better world, where people have real options.

On top of all that, people have to jump through hoops to leave, and unlearn things their country indoctrinated them to believe was the whole truth and only truth about the rest of the world.

How can we claim ‘freedom’ when our very lives are automatically beholden to the empire we happened to be born in? When our minds are molded and hardened by the ‘education’ of our empire’s schools and media?  

How can we claim ‘freedom’ when your freedom can be taken away at any time if you do something that your current empire has claimed to be ‘illegal’ without ever consulting you, or even informing you of all the rules in place? 

How can we claim ‘freedom’ when your livelihood is dependent upon how well you work for someone else or get someone else to work for you? 

How can we claim ‘freedom’ when our hard-earned money is being taken with little to no say on how it is spent,... and people with far more money can afford to figure out loopholes, thereby putting even more pressure on you?

How can we be free?

If we want to experience true freedom, we need to rid ourselves of this idea that the only way to live a ‘civilized’ life is to trade most of our freedoms for the ‘conveniences’ of one empire or another. As the saying goes, ‘those that give up their freedom for safety deserve neither’... the author of said quote knew quite a bit about criticizing the status quo and being unafraid to rebel from tyranny.

The funny thing is that these conveniences and safeties are not even supplied by the empire itself… the nations and democracies and economies that we benefit from are just emergent behaviors from the people that actually are doing the things. It's individual people that do this stuff… not some abstract ‘nation’ or ‘government’. It's easy to forget that simple truth.

What that means is that if we want to have a life where we can get the food, services, and other resources we want, then we need to realize that we don’t need some nebulous, immaterial ‘nation’ or ‘government’ to do so. We can create the lifestyle we want by establishing and maintaining self-sustainable, intimate communities.

An ‘intimate community’ is simply one where you personally know the people who are producing said conveniences, where you in turn feel empowered to participate, and where every single person has the ability to decide their life for themselves alongside everyone else. No one individual or group gets more say on what rules and such get applied to others.

Getting more specific, we need communities that do the following:

• Utilize primarily locally-sourced products (food, raw materials, recycled materials, processed materials, etc)

• Share local resources for free within the community (the food grown locally is given right back to the people who helped grow it, free of charge)

• Trade only based on what is needed and not needed or via gift-giving ceremonies, not what can be resold ‘at a profit’ to one’s own community or others

• Ensure all knowledge/information/education is easily accessible by any and everyone; as well as applicable to real-life projects

• Prioritize walkability in urban planning, as well as a diverse and somewhat dense population

• Utilize generative & sustainable technologies that enhance & empower nature rather than exploit and pollute (this includes humanity, as sentient forms of nature)

• Provide all housing and other infrastructures for the community, free of cost, or in exchange for participating in their construction/planning.

• Cooperate with other communities to create larger infrastructure, such as high-speed rail, VTOL networks, and satellite uplink or fiber optic (or even bio-engineered) internet.

• And any other solarpunk lifestyle projects!!

The job argument

But what about the jobs that no one wants to do?

This has already been talked about a lot in other places.

But let's quickly go over this. 

I think there’s three things to keep in mind whenever this ‘argument’ comes up.

Number 0 - Who the fuck are you to coerce people into doing jobs they dont want to do? If you actually recognize that there are jobs people do that they don't want to but *have* to, because they’re poor and/or feel the need to work at jobs they hate just to maintain a desirable lifestyle… then you have already justified coercion and exploitation.

Number 1 - Who says we need these jobs? A huge amount of the products/services we have are not necessarily things we need or want. They are part of the gallery of products sold to us, made (or funded) by people who want to just make more money. If the only things that get made are things that people actually want to make themselves or be a part of, then we will likely have far less things that have no actual purpose, have more real-world value (as opposed to speculative), and are just better made (longer lasting, better craftsmanship, made more safely, etc).

Number 2 - Who says we need so much? Another huge portion of the products out there are thrown away even before it is ever used or sold. As much as 30-40% of foods, products, materials, and more is just waste due to overproduction! Cutting out the industrialization of production will vastly decrease the workload as well.

Number 3 - Who says x or y super important thing that we really need but is really hard or dangerous or nasty to do… won't get done? The nail in the coffin for this whole argument is that humans have always figured out consensual ways to do things together that no one individual wants to do or can do. In your own (healthy) household, you probably come together with your housemates to clean up! You probably even make a game out of it to see who can clean the toilet or the stove or whatever part of the house better. Or just do it while singing and dancing. Or simply rotate who does it every now and then.

Many egalitarian communities did something very similar. They split the ‘hardest’ or most ‘undesirable’ work between the whole community, so no one person had to do it all the time. This also made it so that everyone didn’t have a problem volunteering to pitch in. And of course, there was a lot of downtime for art, inventions, thinking, socializing, and so on. 

The technology argument

In regards to complex technology, we have to recognize that our most advanced tech won’t just disappear. The people working on these things… will still be able to do so! Without hierarchies, they simply won’t have to worry about having to corrupt their inventions just to be profitable. Furthermore, you will have more collaboration without the threat of IP litigation, patent trolls, profiteering, or ego insisting things be done sub optimally just because some HiPPO (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion) in the room thinks their uninformed ideas are good.

The reward for inventing or innovating something new/better will be immutable credit thanks to tech like blockchain, which itself can be focused more on its ability to act as a decentralized source of truth rather than just another way to scam money out of people.

Further, because you can easily see who created what, you can send (and receive) gifts as thanks! And of course actually see your creations being used to make a better world for everybody, rather than exclusive to only those that can afford it.

Also, the idea that most people don’t create things without a profit incentive is one of the most heinous and vapid ideas economists love to shout. The truth is that only sociopaths and narcissists require rewards to enjoy the act of creating. Most people like to be creative because being creative is fun, and helping others is reward enough. The need for external validation and accolades is neither a healthy human desire, nor a common one for well-adjusted people.

So long as they can enjoy a good life where their needs are met, and credit of their creation is not stolen, most people really don’t care about the rewards. Compensation only matters to people who have nothing or crave more power.

In terms of costs, the only real cost you need to worry about is the environmental impact. Is it sustainable? At what rate of production? What is the plan for recycling or waste disposal? These questions would be the only, and unignorable, cost questions. Money should not be a measure of these important factors, because money can, will, and has quickly overshadowed these considerations.

The entire reason agriculture, and thus society, got so far out of hand is because people started ignoring the environmental costs. They figured they could just claim land and farm, mine, or otherwise use it as much as they wanted without thinking about what happens when the land is tapped out or polluted. We have to balance our technological growth with the finite resources of Earth. 

That does not mean privatizing and monetizing everything. The idea that capitalism works because it determines who gets what limited resources is demonstrably, egregiously false. Capitalism doesn’t give a flying fuck about limited resources outside of how much the perception of scarcity can drive prices/profits up. Clearly, capitalism cares more about wringing out every drop of ‘value’ by exploiting resources to hell, rather than actually paying attention to ecological balance.

In a post-hierarchical world, you only ‘own’ the land you are actively using. No one can force you off of land you are using and no one can coerce you to give up your land or work for currency that you can’t use for anything else except buying more things.

Instead, when you produce, invent, innovate, or create anything, you will use the resources available to you, therefore directly seeing how much it costs in real world materials to make that thing. You can’t make more than what your resources allow you to make, so you naturally stop production until those resources replenish. 

This is why and how foraging societies were (and are) so sustainable for such a long time. They recognized that you couldn’t simply eat everything in the area, because there would be no more for the next day or season. You had to let those resources replenish if you wanted to continue your way of life. This feedback loop is imperative if we want to have sustainable technological growth rather than reckless viral growth. We aren’t locusts.

Again, we are not starting over. Yes, due to our reckless growth, we were able to quickly gain a ton of technologies, but as we can very clearly see, this cannot continue. Nonetheless, we can still use what we have gotten so far, but simply be more responsible with its use from now on.

The beauty of not starting from scratch is that we can use the good and the bad parts of society to forge something better than we've ever imagined in either.

A quick vision of the future

Why do we need money to live? Like for the most basic of needs? Money, as it has become today, is the enabler of our cancerous lifestyle. It is rarely ever an actual measure of ‘value’ or ‘scarcity’ … only of power. Money is now just a tool for people to exploit others or the environment without facing the consequences (or even recognizing the exploitation) of their actions.

So let’s imagine a future where money, and every other tool of hierarchy, is no longer a staple.

I’m not much of a storyteller, despite how much I read and write, but I hope you get the gist of what I am trying to communicate.

We can use a combination of technological advancements, and ancient permaculture practices to provide enough resources for every single human on this planet. Without driving every other animal (and thus ourselves) to extinction. 

You may not be able to get any and every food or product at every day of the year. But you can 

enjoy a steady, diverse, and more enriching supply of foods and products year round.

Furthermore, because being rooted in one spot for too long is not really a great strategy for long-term survival, and because borders would be abolished and private land no longer a thing. People can and will be able to travel more regularly. More people will thus be able to appreciate different cultures, and different products or foods those cultures and climates create.

The idea that we should make the world come to us is extremely arrogant and unsustainable. As much as I love them, we are not trees. We are built to move. And those that can’t move as much can now use all kinds of vehicles to move, or enjoy the feeling via virtual reality.

Speaking of, I haven't even touched on the metaverse this entire newsletter, that is for another day… but it's important to recognize what I said in my LinkedIn posts.

The metaverse does not have to be an escape from reality, it can enhance our reality. It can allow us to collaborate more, to make more informed decisions on how different technologies would impact the world through simulations, to let people play out their power fantasies in a virtual environment where they aren’t actually ruining real lives or resources, and where we can further explore our history, our present, and our futures more immersively.

Anyways, each and every community should be one of consensus and voluntary association. They might get quite large, reaching thousands and possibly even hundreds of thousands of people, but people can and will naturally splinter off as they come across problems they can’t come to a consensus on. And that’s okay!

In fact, that is preferable. That right there is freedom. Being able to leave a group that you don’t agree with, rather than having to ‘tough it out’ and deal with decisions you absolutely hate, is what it means to be free. 

The minute we put the needs of the ‘community’ above the needs of the individual… we’ve gone too far. Because the ‘community’ is just a bunch of people. Therefore it’s ‘needs’ are really the needs of the individuals. The minute you begin to justify certain needs over others, what you’re actually doing is elevating certain people’s needs over others, and thus it requires (threat of) violence to force those people to act against their interests and values.

In a society without hierarchy, there is no incentive or reason for war. Egalitarian societies only ever go to ‘war’ to free people who have been enslaved by non-egalitarian society. Pretty much all of the evidence for the earliest wars point to hierarchical societies raiding other societies for their resources. Battles due to large-scale disagreements about things like vengeance or wrongdoings or some other non-resource driven purpose are extremely rare in the archeological record. And they are just that, single-time battles, not prolonged engagements involving entire societies over many years.

Violence won’t just go away, this is not some utopian pipe dream, but it certainly won’t be monopolized by people in power to keep everyone else from taking that power back… and it won’t be industrialized to feed the imperialist or religious fervor of narcissists who want to impose their view of the world on others.

There are countless stories I can tell about what this ideal world could look like. And how it is both practical and necessary to build. But this has gone on long enough, and I’m working on creating an anthology of sorts in the vein of solarpunk.

In fact, looking up solarpunk ideas is a great place to start if you want to see more practical examples, stories, and activism centered on creating a better world.

Recap

Everywhere we see hierarchy… we also see inequality, we see stolen or other lack of freedoms. The very existence of hierarchies in various institutions necessarily creates inequality and a limitation of freedom. You cannot have freedom and equality so long as you have people incentivized to limit or otherwise take the freedoms and equality of others. 

This is the fundamental problem of our society. And has been for thousands of years. But as I’ve pointed out, I hope, many times over… this is not inevitable. Nor is it irreconcilable. Nor is it necessary for progress. 

I’d like to end with a riff on the following quote:

“If you want to understand any problem in America, you need to look at who profits from that problem, not at who suffers from that problem.” ~ Dr. Amos Wilson

Well I’d like to go a step beyond that.

If you want to know why there is such a desire for profit, look at the environmental conditions and incentives that reinforce that profit-seeking behavior… 

Or to put it another way:

If you want to understand the motives for profit in the world, look at the environment that incentives the profit, not (just) the organizations profiting.

So don’t just follow the money… survey the environment that makes that money matter in the first place.

It's not (just) the people that's the source of the problem; it's the environment that strongly influences what people do, which people are able to gain power over others, and the systems these people build to reinforce that environment.

In order to build a better world, we have to 

1. Recognize the environments at play and how they create the current world we live in

2. Adapt to or even change those environments to better favor good behavior

3. Maintain these environments by being more conscious about the changes or adaptations we think will move us forward

Not all progress is good. We can have leaders without permanent hierarchies. And human nature is social first, all else second. 

Don’t be afraid to be revolutionary. We can, have, and must change drastically if we wish to survive and thrive for thousands, or even millions, of years to come.

Sources and Inspiration

Here are many of the things that inspired this essay/article/blog thing. It’s not quite exhaustive, as I couldn’t easily save the podcasts I listened to during the last few months, forgot to save other stuff, and I still haven’t bothered organizing my Pocket list or Notion repository… but I hope it helps find more info on most everything I discussed here:

Most important archeological discoveries in 2021 -  https://news.artnet.com/art-world/best-archaeology-discoveries-2021-2046144

Indigenous republic in the Americas before Columbus -

Capitalism stole Christmas -

Capitalism stealing the Metaverse -

BSA critique with actionable solutions -

Black Socialists in America @BlackSocialists

Every dig at the problem without a proposed solution is a blow to morale and hope.

What The Dawn of Everything gets wrong -

Youth Liberation -

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in terms of revolutionary society -

Pain relief drugs induces risky behavior - https://www.sciencealert.com/the-most-common-pain-relief-drug-in-the-world-induces-risky-behavior-study-finds

Changing false beliefs via science - https://www.psypost.org/2021/11/psychologists-have-found-that-triggering-large-prediction-errors-helps-to-change-false-beliefs-62110

Pyschologically healthy people - https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ulterior-motives/202111/personality-profile-psychologically-healthy-people

Neurological differences not linked to behavior in women and men - https://www.psypost.org/2021/11/neuroscience-research-finds-brain-structure-differences-in-men-and-women-are-not-strongly-linked-to-behavioral-differences-62042

Overfishing -

Was life better in ancient times? - https://www.cold-takes.com/was-life-better-in-hunter-gatherer-times/#hunger

Dawn of Everything review - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/oct/23/the-dawn-of-everything-by-david-graeber-and-david-wengrow-review-inequality-is-not-the-price-of-civilisation

Doing the work of Activism -

Greenwashing -

US Imperialism caused climate change -

What is an egalitarian society? -

Build friendships, not just communities - https://raddle.me/wiki/friendship

Ending Climate imperialism -

The collective mind - https://neurosciencenews.com/collective-intelligence-19512/

Beyond greed and scarcity - https://philoma.org/wp-content/uploads/docs/2009/09_10_24_-_Interview_-_Yes_-_B._Lietaer.pdf

BSA, Exhaustive list of political terms - https://blacksocialists.us/mumbo-jumbo

YouTube propaganda -

Materialism vs Idealism -

The materialism of Sexism -

When communism works -

Inequality more tolerated with individuals than groups - https://www.pnas.org/content/118/43/e2100430118

Rising population density linked to lower fertility - https://www.psypost.org/2021/10/new-study-helps-explain-why-increasing-population-densities-are-linked-to-decreasing-fertility-rates-61970

How tech companies manipulate media -

Japan’s town with no waste -

Mystery of the disappearance of giant animals -

The suburban wasteland, part 1 -

The suburban wasteland, part 2 -

Can individuals fix climate change? (no) -

National Liberation and Anarchism -

A Solarpunk Manifesto - https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-solarpunk-community-a-solarpunk-manifesto

Neoliberal Anxiety -

Solarpunk Solutions -

The hope of Solarpunk -

Malatesta aint no snitch -

4 Types of Narcissism -

Narcissistic Parents -

Low-grade Narcissism -

Highly Sensitive People -

Demonopolizing the internet - https://onezero.medium.com/demonopolizing-the-internet-with-interoperability-b9be6b851238

Podcast ep about Upgrade Squatters - https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/squatters-lower-east-side/

Upgrade Squatting article - https://www1.nyc.gov/site/hpd/services-and-information/hdfc.page

Catalan Integral Cooperative - https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/what-on-earth-is-the-catalan-integral-cooperative/2018/09/19?__cf_chl_managed_tk__=pmd_SBeG1JfsUHQHa2manpBfkS3UGM3uSFUUWNR0g2wqNDs-1633628820-0-gqNtZGzNAzujcnBszRP9

Graeber and Wengrow Myth of the Stupid Savage -

The Wisdom of Kandiaronk -

http://www.journaldumauss.net/?La-sagesse-de-Kandiaronk-la-critique-indigene-le-mythe-du-progres-et-la

America’s SUV mania -

Inequality is always dangerous -

Poverty-free futures - http://www.metafuture.org/poverty-free-futures/

How political definitions shape reality -

Bo Burnham vs Jeff Bezos!! -

Fear of Learning - https://www.fastcompany.com/919215/we-have-nothing-fear-fear-learning

People with high socioeconomic status have lower EQ - https://www.psypost.org/2021/10/people-with-higher-socioeconomic-status-have-lower-emotional-intelligence-especially-at-high-levels-of-inequality-61942

Anarchy is ecology -

Applying Copyleft to non-software information - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/nonsoftware-copyleft.en.html

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs -

Can small-scale farming feed the world? -

Mastering Complexity -

Kpaxs @Kpaxs

How to master complexity and problem solving in science and engineering? Build insight and understanding first, so that you do not drown in complexity. Approximations foster understanding. A thread on Mastering Complexity: amzn.to/3oon52p

History of Capital and Debt -

Cory Doctorow MOSTLY AFK @doctorow

It's been just over a year since the death of activist, writer and anthropologist @davidgraeber - a brilliant speaker, writer and thinker who helped give us #Occupy, "we are the 99%" and #BullshitJobs. 1/

Escaping the Alt-Right -

The Tyranny of the Clock -

Climate movement is broken -

180+ Cognitive Biases - https://www.teachthought.com/critical-thinking/the-cognitive-bias-codex-a-visual-of-180-cognitive-biases/

Want to change the world? Start with self-trust -

Goodharts Law rules the modern world - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-26/goodhart-s-law-rules-the-modern-world-here-are-nine-examples

Biological computing - https://bernardmarr.com/what-is-biological-computing-and-how-it-will-change-our-world/

Systems thinking -

Majority of soldiers refused to kill -

Vacation policies in the US are a joke -