The Tragedy of Achievement

Civilization is powered by insecurity. The key to the system's control is its manipulation not only of scarce resources, but of the very notion of scarcity itself. Our access to food, clean air and water, other people including family members, safety, physical spaces, and a dignified life in general is mediated in civilization by a system that leverages resource scarcity in order to generate a highly effective form of control based on people's desire for things that can now only be practically obtained by satisfying the system's demands, as unpalatable as they are. This is essentially the project of domestication: a brokering of once-free access to once-plentiful resources in order to master the behavior of once-wild dimensions for the sake of harnessing their power.

In addition to the physical restrictions we suffer borne out of our collective veneration of the scarce and rare, we also endure extensive psychological deprivations that begin in childhood schooling and that can persist until death. From childhood, we are taught that it is important to be the best, to stand out, to be a success. As a means to evaluate and assess children's performance and behavior, report cards and test scores supplant a child and her parents' ability to form opinions about the child's education and development independently--that is, based on their own feelings of personal contentment, interest, goals, and so on--by instead judging the child's performance according to a value system that is alien to a child's way of thinking against other children who likewise would normally take no interest in the performance of their "peers", who initially are really just strangers of the same age that just happen to be in the same room together. These classmates might become potential playmates, though, as mentioned previously, young children tend to be instinctively wary and shy of unfamiliar faces; therefore, a classroom full of new children can often stir up feelings of deep insecurity and discomfort that nevertheless, through mandatory attendance at the school, can be surmounted by enough children to make the practice somewhat feasible, though things are certainly going downhill quickly. However, the notion that the other children in a classroom, school, and eventually the country or world are to be competed against and ideally outperformed is completely foreign, has no antecedent in our ancestral forager roots toward which our biology still strongly cleaves, and must be instilled in our youth rather forcefully in order to produce the sort of competitive, self-interested personality that is our society's preferred fuel source. Children quickly realize that their own opinions about themselves based on the things they naturally value, like having fun, exploring the world, and being around family, are relatively worthless, and that even things like play or learning must be done in a certain way in order to gain the approval of adults and thus be valuable. Unable to comprehend the meaning, the logic underlying this arbitrary system of evaluating their actions and thoughts, children grow up deeply insecure about their standing in society, having to rely on external praise or criticism in order to form an identity and sense of self. Children lose the ability to see themselves as inherently good or valuable because they are explicitly taught, and treated accordingly, that goodness and value are actually pegged to their capacity to perform tasks according to a standard that can often be counter-intuitive or downright arbitrary. For example, a child's coloring outside the lines of a picture will only be tolerated up to a certain early age in school, after which point she is expected to color neatly and appropriately under penalty of a bad grade or some such demerit. Even though the child might have thoroughly enjoyed coloring the way she did, with wild colors streaking all across the page, she learns that her enjoyment means very little to the world, and that she must adapt her behavior and even her preferences to a standard that never truly existed in her own heart if she wants adults, often including her parents, to value her. What should be plentiful self-confidence based on an inborn capacity to simply enjoy coloring becomes a source of confusion, anxiety, shame, and frustration--incentives for the child to betray her own preferences for the sake of seeking approval, which now can only come from others, never herself.

Civilization celebrates and worships its rarest individuals as celebrities and heroes, exploiting the yen for external approval we acquire in childhood by reserving attention and accolade for only a fraction of the population, effectively turning self-esteem into a scarce and desired psychological resource for which we all vie, compromise, and sacrifice in a deeply misguided attempt to correct that early childhood deficiency. Even though it might have absolutely no impact on our actual daily lives, we accord great respect to the winners of Nobel and Pulitzer prizes, presidential medals of freedom, Purple Hearts, Oscars, Grammies, Tonies, Olympic medals, Tours de France, various sports cups and derbies, valedictorian ranking, down to spelling bees, science fairs, county fairs, even adult video awards and blind taste tests for vodka--virtually all aspects of civilized life is routinely turned into a competition, which means that every single dimension of life demands assessment and comparison against others before one knows where she stands with respect to the rest of the world and, to a disturbingly large degree, her own sense of worth.

The great irony and tragedy in all this is that this insecurity does not usually dissipate even after superlatives have been achieved. Often, the expectations placed on the individual who has achieved a high distinction are overwhelming, the resultant anxiety crippling, and the constant fear of falling from grace in the public eye can be intensely destructive. Chef Bernard Loiseau achieved his life goal of three Michelin stars with his restaurant, La Côte d'Or, only to fatally shoot himself in the head with a hunting rifle twelve years later when he learned that the Michelin Guide was preparing to take away one of his stars. Other top chefs choose to surrender their stars or even close their restaurants rather than endure the nerve-wracking pressure that being the best of the best entails. Nor is this kind of pressure unique to the world of haute cuisine, but can be found in the realms of corporate business ("In a cutthroat industry staffed by many of the world's sharpest minds, recruited from hypercompetitive business schools, it seems no surprise that the shame of failure is hard to take when an individual’s whole identity is built around success"), professional and non-professional sports ("Striving to please a parent, fearing a coach's wrath, chasing a college scholarship can make athletes uniquely vulnerable"), and, of course, higher education ("I just don't understand what's happening to these high-achieving kids...How did we get to this spot? The whole thing, for me, will never make any sense"), to name only a few specific categories, though civilization in any configuration, expressed in whatever variation it has been able to assume throughout history, takes it as standard operating procedure to torment all those it raises up in praise as cruelly as those who languish below its standards in ignominy. Taught to find meaning in life by striving for success, the domesticated individual comes to find that the impetus for a large majority of her life decisions arises from a nagging sense of insecurity, secret, desperate, and nihilistic to the core...

...Meanwhile, in Bolivia, among the remaining uncontacted Yuqui, one of the few remaining uncontacted tribes of hunter-gatherers on the planet, young children play, imitating the adults, while the older boys start catching small game and fish and the girls begin to learn the fine skill of gathering the food, fibers, dyes, and medicines around them. Skills are passed on to each generation virtually unchanged. These skills are inherently scaled for human beings, and everyone can learn how to do them, and do them well, even without direct teaching. The goals that the Yuqui pursue are finite, attainable, and satisfying to both attempt and achieve. They are goals that are inherently valuable independent of any external assessment--they result in full bellies, engaged intellects, healthy bodies, and harmonious lives. The families are sustained by the combined efforts of all the people, and by coordinating efforts, they increase the success of their hunts and foraging. When a boy catches a fish, or when a girl digs a root, he or she is not concerned with ranking the fish or root against the rest of the boys' or girls' efforts, because he or she does not gain or lose any status as a result of doing so. So long as the fish is good to eat, so long as the root treats the illness, it is good, and the young boy and the young girl gain confidence and in their hearts they have peace with themselves and the universe...

Response to Chris's comment from July 16th, 2014

 Note: My original response to Chris's comment wound up being too long to post as a reply, so I'm posting it as a separate entry here, starting with Chris's question.

chris July 16, 2014 at 3:06 AM

"On the other side of the drug spectrum, I've recently been going through some health problems and have relied on them to make it through in a relatively comfortable way, though if modern medicine hadn't been available I would currently be in severe pain and my quality of life would be so poor as I might even prefer death. So while realizing the underlying goals of the medicine machine, I'm at times grateful for it, and of course leaving this gap between idea and practice. What do you think personally about abandoning modern medicine?"

I've actually worked on a farm raising chickens--just a couple hundred, nowhere near the numbers on an industrial farm, but with more or less the same deformed breed of chicken that large-scale farmers raise. The chickens stayed in a barn their whole lives surrounded by other chickens that were far too numerous and therefore anonymous for any bird to form a normal social relationship with. They were too heavy to take more than a few stumbling steps before faltering. They spent so much time sitting down that their breasts were actually bare from touching the ground so much. This did make it easier to pluck them later, I confess. The environment was stressful and utterly devoid of stimulus except when I or someone else went in to catch some birds to slaughter. But here's the thing--even when their lives were so shitty (and you know chickens are smart enough to know that that life was shitty), they still panicked when I took them, and they still struggled when I cut their throats. Did they really cherish their alienated lives sitting in poop inside a crowded dirty barn that much? The birds didn't want to die. So, if you were a chicken in a chicken factory, would you be grateful for the protection that the antibiotics in your feed afforded you from the potential of infection that arises from being forcibly crowded together in a shed in the first place? It's the same power forcing you into confinement and forcing you to eat incessantly and that will eventually kill you in a potentially painful and most certainly horrifying way that gives you the antibiotics. If you take the antibiotics willingly, you are enabling your crowding, because if all the chickens refused to take the antibiotics, the crowding would not be possible. If you are grateful for the benefit of their medicine, it really is a Stockholm Syndrome situation--essentially, it's like someone breaks your legs but you only feel gratitude that they gave you a wheelchair in the end. I'm in no way trivializing pain, yours or anyone else's; all I'm trying to convey is that our gratitude for the relief that modern medicine brings becomes a weapon, a point of leverage to use against us. It's also a mistake to believe that only modern medicine can bring us actual relief from pain--I'm pretty sure the case can easily be made that the opposite is true if you consider the role of technology in general in causing suffering and disease throughout history. To believe that only modern medicine can save us from infectious disease or back pain is akin to believing that only television can alleviate boredom or only the internet can remedy isolation. I'm pretty sure that these supposed solutions are really part of the cause of the problems they claim to solve. The problem is that the connection is not immediately obvious--it's not a causal relationship that most humans will naturally grasp, not because most humans are stupid, but because the chains of cause and effect generated by technology have transcended what might constitute a human-scale reality. As I wrote before, in a techno-scale reality, all our adaptations, evolved over millions of years, begin to constantly work against us, not for us. We begin to consistently make the wrong choices without it being immediately obvious. As humans, it still feels good and right to eat lots of sugar, use disposable paper plates, drive instead of walk when it's hot outside, etc. Even littering has an evolutionary rationale. So it should be expected that everyone loves the relief that modern medicine can provide. The system exploits our human desire to not feel pain or be ill, because the novel way in which the system provides relief is difficult for a human mind conditioned to a different way of life to grasp. To most people, it's very simple: take the medicine and feel better. It's hard to comprehend that the existence of industrial medicine has only ever worsened environmental degradation and negatively impacted health in the long run. We steal from the future every time we leverage economics through technology to meet our needs in ways that ensure that the maximum number of intermediaries (=inefficiencies, waste) are involved in order to generate profit at as many junctures as possible. When the next time we look we notice that our past actions have left us poorer in the present, we are ever more motivated to steal from the future, extolling promising new technologies, digging up resources that can never be replaced. The poorer you get, the more desperate to steal you become. So, every time we rely on the system to meet our needs, whether they be medical or otherwise, we charge to a credit card that we can never pay off. Somewhere we will have to stop doing this, the question is whether we stop on our own terms and take our time, or just keep going full throttle until reality stops us for us.

The Ongoing Zombie Apocalypse, part 2

Perhaps the closest real world analog to the fictional zombie virus is rabies. Rabies is a viral disease well-known to affect mainly warm-blooded animals. Pet owners are often legally required to have their dogs and cats vaccinated against the virus, as infection can cause animals to turn vicious and usually results in the death of the infected animal. Probably the aspect of rabies that is most striking is the change in behavior of the animal that is effected through infection. A normally docile dog or cat may start acting aggressively, scratching or biting anyone who comes near it. This change in behavior is understood to be the way the virus propagates itself. Since rabies is found in high concentrations in the saliva of infected animals, the virus alters the behavior of the animal to increase the chances of it biting another host, thus spreading the infection.

What is striking here are the parallels between the mechanism of transmission of the rabies virus on the one hand and of technology on the other. When an animal is rabid, it seeks to roam and bite other hosts. It is crucial to note that the animal is unable to distinguish the motivations of the virus from its own motivations, even though from an outside perspective, behaving in an erratic, violent way does not benefit the animal in getting it food or sexual mates. The behavior, though embraced by the animal, only benefits the virus by increasing the chances of propagation. If given the chance, the virus would presumably try to infect as many hosts as possible, though the underlying motivation for this phenomenon, if there is one, is, as for all viruses, still unclear. It is a mistake to interpret the animal's new, post-infection behavior as stemming from the animal's inherent nature or personality--the disease is distinct from the diseased. Nevertheless, the animal will feel compelled to act in ways that it should otherwise understand to be self-detrimental, picking fights and risking injuries that are actually unnecessary. Likewise, technology, specifically high technology that depends on the subjugation of people, seems to only benefit itself at the expense of not only its host species but also the environment. Of course, those who are infected with the technology "virus" believe that technology, and the actions that it requires, benefits themselves--like the rabid animal, they are unable to distinguish the motivations of their infection from their own motivations, for their own motivations have been subsumed by technology, and they sacrifice and toil for technology willingly, aggressively spreading it with absolute conviction. Like rabies, once a population acquires high-technology, that population tends to spread it to surrounding populations, but it is not possible for the uninfected populations to disinfect an already-infected population. The trend is usually toward increasing infection until the virus, running out of new hosts, dies out on its own. When a population acquires technology, its behavior begins to radically change, and its priorities shift dramatically in favor of propagating technology, even at the expense of the population's own interests. Increased aggression is observable, along with a host of previously unknown symptoms like meanness, deceit, greed, and misery. When an animal becomes rabid, it is impossible to reform its aggressive behavior through any amount of incentives or punishments--the virus precludes the possibility of lucid thought, just like a zombie. A rabid animal, like a zombified neighbor, can only be put down. Leaving the animal alive out of pity risks more bites and more infections.

The question is, how accurate is this parallel between rabies and technology? If the comparison is absolute, then the prospects of ridding ourselves of the technology infection seem dire, like the third act of a zombie film. There certainly does seem to be a relentless, too-late-to-turn-back quality to the current pandemic of techno-dependence. We would just have to wait until the fire of infection runs out of kindling, annihilating most of the current biosphere. Or can we realize in time that this infection has to be quarantined as quickly as possible to protect what nature is left? Can we see the current situation for what it truly is: an ongoing zombie apocalypse, as mindless, relentless, and merciless as anything we've watched on the movie screen?

Perhaps the important thing to remember is that, just as rabies is not inevitable in an animal population, neither is technology and the negative changes in human behavior it entails destined to crop up among humans. A common argument against anarcho-primitivist ideas is that the current dominance of technological society was inevitable, predetermined by innate human curiosity--"should we somehow succeed in stamping out technology tomorrow, there will sooner or later be a group of humans somewhere that will once again pursue progress with technology". I have written previously about how diseases such as cancer are incorrectly thought of as inevitable aspects of human existence, as cancer is by no means inherent in human aging. Cancer is not inevitable, nor is rabies, and neither is technology. If a dog or cat lives its entire life without contracting rabies, it is not somehow incomplete, and it is not a lesser animal than an animal that does acquire rabies. Neither eventuality is inevitable, though either can be made more or less likely by environmental conditions. The word "inevitable" is used by the system to dispel any hopes for a way out. The word is part of the infection that is trying to overtake your mind, convince you of its rightness despite the obvious degradation happening all around us.

The Ongoing Zombie Apocalypse, part 1

Since at least George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead, which redefined the concept of the zombie mythos to what most Americans know today, the theme of a "zombie apocalypse", in which an ever-growing horde of mindless walking corpses who spread their contagion by feeding on the helpless human population inexorably overrun the neighborhood, city, country, and even world, has remained extraordinarily popular in the mainstream imagination. This sub-genre of horror film provides a particularly rich, if mostly unrecognized, commentary on mass society. For example, recent genre offerings have tended to focus on the spread of a zombie contagion in largely urban areas, where the infection spreads quickly and easily. The dwindling number of survivors increasingly have nowhere to run as the zombies seem to be everywhere. Zombie apocalypse stories continually reprise several notable themes: fear of pandemic contagion (sometimes originating in shady bio-engineering research), ineffectual governments, survivalism, breakdown in social order, and so on. However, it is the ability of the zombie movie to tap into the deep-seated but largely unconscious tension inherent in living within mass society and particularly in the ambivalent confines of the modern urban landscape that represents the genre's greatest subversive potential.

Like other primates, humans have evolved over several million years to spend virtually all their time together with their tribe or band. I think it is fairly obvious that a lone human being, no matter how fit, has little hope of surviving alone in a wild environment. Band society, characterized by cooperation and sharing, enabled humans to live, and live well, for millions of years. Simply from a pragmatic viewpoint, in-group betrayals such as murder, lying, stealing, and so on would have been intrinsically discouraged (though not inconceivable) due to the inherent lack of "hiding places" in such an intimate social environment--in other words, there would have been no wall of anonymity behind which to escape after committing a transgression in a small group of people wherein each member depends on the support of the others, not merely for survival, but company, entertainment, affection, a sense of belonging, and the psychological benefits thence derived. Additionally, I'm hard-pressed to think of very many things in a nomadic band society that could actually be stolen or lied about. In any case, the consequences of unacceptable behavior are immediate and obvious in a closed band society, even if the punishment is simply being ostracized or ignored. Strangers, by contrast, offer none of the aforementioned benefits to a group and would indeed be able to get away with just about any act of deceit or aggression as long as they were able to escape before they were caught. The consequences of harmful behavior virtually disappear once the offending stranger escapes--if the stranger escapes. However, without the presence of other members of one's band, one becomes vulnerable, and there is virtually nothing stopping a stranger from harming you.

Past a certain age, children stop acquiring language at their peak rate--apparently, nature did not deem it worthwhile to prepare us for the possibility of traveling abroad and having to acquire a new language at 25 years of age. At the genetic level, we are all ill-disposed to mass society and engaging with unfamiliar factors. Around the same age that they stop learning language efficiently, children also tend to become wary of strangers. This is not to say that children don't become braver and more willing to explore their surroundings away from the protection of adults, but this wariness of encountering strangers, especially unexpectedly, never disappears, even despite our modern liberal enthusiasm for embracing globalization and reveling in the melting pots that are supposed to be our cities. How can one tell if a stranger means us well or harm? What if the supposedly peaceful inhabitants of our cities turn out to be malevolent? They already surround us, potential threats literally occupying all the space above (skyscrapers), below (subway system), and around us. Through lack of choice, we have adapted to these novel environments, but only imperfectly, as the anxiety and alarm that the fundamental distrust we feel toward the strangers occupying our surroundings evokes must constantly be suppressed in order to function in a city. Unable to affect our own situations, like chickens in our crowded, putrid, windowless sheds, we routinely ignore the motley assortment of passengers sharing our bus or train car. We expect rudeness and perhaps even a degree of danger in some parts of our cities as a given. Some individuals seem unable to cope well enough to function in this environment, and we may term these people agoraphobic, anxious, neurotic, paranoid, or delusional. Still, even those deemed "normal" in the city seem unable to function unless they cloister themselves away from the madness that threatens to encroach from all sides, whether they lock their eyes onto the screens of their smartphones and deafen their ears with streaming music through their ear buds to get through their daily commute without having to interact with unfamiliar people or withdraw into a sudoku puzzle or the day's New York Times at a coffee shop full of obnoxious patrons who, despite your best efforts to isolate yourself, may yet succeed in destroying your solitude through various means, such as the indefensible assault on your nostrils from an obnoxious perfume or a too-loud couple conversing just above your head. Zombie films may be interpreted as a distillation of these suppressed anxieties writ large on the silver screen, like a nightmare derived from our habitually-suppressed stress about strangers in our environment that we can safely (because it's "just a movie") experience consciously but whose source from within our own psyches still remains mostly obscure to the waking mind. Nevertheless, if something of the recurring motif of zombie ascendancy did not resonate deeply with people, we would be hard-pressed to account for the genre's immense popularity.

Rational Medicine and Dehumanized Healing

Say you get sick or injured. You make your way to the emergency room or doctor's office and you get seen by a doctor who prescribes the appropriate drugs, procedure, or therapy, and in a few weeks the problem goes away. This, presumably, would be considered the ideal experience, the most that any patient could ask for--and yet, there is an aspect of degradation to the patient that is invisible and a sense of alienation that accompanies him or her even upon full recovery from illness.

The experience of getting medical help within an industrialized system completely disregards arguably the most important aspect of healing--love. By this, I mean simply an emotional investment by the caretakers in the patient as a whole person beyond just the diagnosed condition, the way a parent, sibling, or child would naturally be emotionally invested in a person and would wish for his or her total well-being and happiness. This emotional investment is decidedly not the same thing as compassion, empathy, or decent bedside manner. Those things are entirely allowed and in fact encouraged, in the face of the current epidemic of apathy on the part of overworked and overstretched medical professionals, by hospitals and medical associations. However, all medical professionals have it drilled into them in their ethics classes and, subsequently, by the threat of lawsuits, that it is unacceptable to take a personal interest in a patient's health lest judgment become compromised. Thus, medical professionals must walk a sometimes ambiguous line and negotiate the tension between being too invested and too callous. The conventional thinking seems to be that love for the patient has no place in medicine--indeed, that it is superfluous, distracting, dangerous, and altogether undesirable. This "ethic" has come to inform mainstream thought in industrialized societies such that healing from illness and injury is considered purely a physical matter, and neither disease nor convalescence has anything to do with emotion. Even psychological disorders such as depression or bipolar disorder have by now been ultimately attributed to structural or chemical flaws in the brain and nervous system. By extension, the physician's feelings about the patient are not what bring about a cure, but merely the prosaic chemical properties of the drug compound or the physical reality of the scalpel incision. The efficacy of a drug is not influenced in the slightest by the emotions of the physician or the faceless factory workers who manufacture the drug in vast, uniform quantities.

It must be emphasized that this penchant to cast disease as a purely physical and physiological phenomenon is extremely novel in evolutionary time. Prior to this, caring for the sick and injured in one's community was always a natural extension of love. Just as important as the physical components of a treatment in such a community is the healer's intention, much as it makes all the difference for a child to be comforted in sickness by her mother rather than by a stranger. In times of vulnerability, humans don't just seek a cure for their individual selves--injuries and disease, like virtually all occurrences in primitive societies, are opportunities for members of a group to foster stronger interpersonal bonds, the currency of pre-industrial life. I believe that a person in pain or distress first and foremost seeks comfort in the form of moral support from familiar faces. It's commonly enough observed in young children that a substantial amount of their crying after a supposed injury is really just an attempt to garner the attention, sympathy, and reassurance of parents and other caretakers. After the perfunctory kiss on the boo-boo (an American custom, for international readers), the child magically feels better, without any additional physical treatment (although kissing kids' injuries might turn out to provide greater and farther reaching benefits than the practice has been customarily given credit for). Contrast this scenario with one in which the crying child is rushed to an unfamiliar hospital room where, in lieu of any familiar caretakers, she has her wound expertly cleaned and bandaged by an unfamiliar nurse or, perhaps in the near future, a robot. Contrary to the first scenario, this one involves addressing only the physical, "real" aspect of the injury. I would wager that the child would find the second scenario significantly less edifying than the first. Now, the question is: are adults, at base, any different from children in their desire for attention and comfort from loved ones? The answer, I think, is no, though, for many lamentable reasons related to civilized life, adults are no longer permitted to either crave or satisfy these basic human needs, and instead are expected to act as though all an illness requires is the impersonal administration of a rational treatment by a qualified specialist whom they may or may not have ever met before. Furthermore, this treatment is provided not out of sympathy, love, or even altruism, but in exchange for payment. As with another venerable profession, money cannot buy love, only a physical sham thereof. In this sense, physicians and prostitutes are simply different and imperfect substitutes for an erstwhile common and plentiful bond that we no longer adequately satisfy, for both healing and sleeping with another person will elicit feelings of attachment in that person that, purely out of professional necessity, neither the doctor nor the whore is ultimately able to reciprocate. With his or her need for love reduced to business arrangements with impersonal surrogates, the modern seeker of true healing will increasingly find only degradation and dehumanization in the face of the advancing erosion of a human-scale existence.

The Battle for Cancer's Meaning

There is a twisted belief held by some in industrialized societies that cancer rates are growing primarily because people are living longer. It's a twisted belief because it treats cancer like a confirmation of success, instead of a warning to be heeded. The logic seems to go that, since people in industrialized societies no longer have to die at the age of 25 from bacterial infections, raiding homicidal tribes, or vicious beasts, they live longer, which is surely a victory for scientific progress, and cancer is just a side effect of our newfound longevity, one that will just as surely be understood and controlled in time, so that eventually humanity will be able to enjoy extreme longevity free of disease, essentially doing a better job than mindless nature ever could.

So goes the myth. Unfortunately, that fairy tale is on its last legs. For one thing, evidence suggests that foragers live far longer than civilization wants to admit, with the modal age of death for forager groups being seventy-two years. As study authors Gurven and Kaplan point out, this should not be surprising, since if the modal, or most common, age of death was consistently anything lower during the two million years of human forager existence, then humans would probably not have evolved the potential for a full seven decade lifespan in spite of regularly dying far before the majority of people ever got near that age. By contrast, chimpanzees that are kept do live longer than their wild counterparts--but only by about fifteen years, and at significant cost to their mental well-being. The reason why chimpanzees don't, say, live an extra forty years in captivity is because their lifespan is more or less predetermined by their evolution in the wild. Nature does not secretly inscribe the potential to live an extra four decades banking on the off chance that a chimpanzee might wind up in a zoo display. The lifespan is calibrated to the expectation of each chimpanzee living in its environment of evolutionary adaptation. Likewise, humans can naturally age to seventy-plus years not because technology and science have suddenly enabled them to, but because seventy-plus years was what humans regularly saw in the wild, hence an evolved life-cycle that anticipates a potential seven decade run, with negligible senescence between puberty and one's forties (see above link to Gurven and Kaplan study). Otherwise, as much as civilization wants to believe it, there is no way that is consistent with current understandings of evolution that technology could double or triple the natural lifespan of an animal simply by removing it from the wild for a few generations.

The second issue with the longevity myth of cancer is that there is virtually no evidence that cancer was common before civilization, and especially before industrial society, despite lifespans that would otherwise suggest the potential to develop age-related malignancies. For example, some preserved corpses from pre-contact South America and ancient Egypt exhibit signs of arteriosclerosis and arthritis associated with aging, yet, out of a sample of nearly a thousand mummies, only five instances of tumors, mostly benign, were found.

However, the most glaring problem with the longevity myth of cancer is the ongoing increase in rates of childhood cancers, which, according to the American Cancer Society, is the second leading cause of death in US children between five and fourteen. It's not even necessary to compare this with pre-industrial societies--we already know that childhood cancers were far rarer in the past and that the rate of incidence has been increasing by about 0.6% a year in the US since 1975. Across the industrialized world, these rates, along with adult cancer rates, are generally expected to continue trending upwards.

Civilization's tendency to normalize suffering and disease is truly disturbing. Cancer, once an unknown illness, is now considered a natural expression of aging, and, perversely, evidence of the necessity of technological medicine for a life free from suffering. The truth is, cancer is a toll that domestication exacts on the body. Similarly, the breakdown of social cohesion and cooperative community is a toll that domestication exacts on human interaction. The assumption of civilization is that humans by nature are inherently self-interested and, if left unchecked, will inevitably tear down society in an orgy of rancor and greed that can only be stopped by the imposition of a higher authority and that harmony can only be achieved by offsetting one individual's self-interest by leveraging another's. Such are the delusional legacies of Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith. But just as physical diseases like cancer are being demonstrated to be the product of domestication, so are civilized assumptions of a repugnant human nature. Are qualities such as greed, vanity, jealousy, egocentrism, violence, and bellicosity inherent in humans? They are, insofar as the potential for cancer is also inherent in a latent sense. The potential to develop cancer has always been present in humans, as well as the potential for individualistic self-interest and the whole gamut of negative human qualities. Placing humans in a domesticated lifestyle, like the chickens in a factory farm, guarantees the manifestation of such unnatural and undesirable side effects. But even though cancer was always biologically possible, it is only recently, with the advent of domestication, civilization, technology, and the concomitant host of radical alterations to our environment, that cancer actually manifests--obviously a warning sign. Is it really such a stretch of the imagination, then, to consider that these same radical environmental changes to virtually all aspects of human life would also have a significant, and odious, influence on human character as well, eliciting the most loathsome social diseases along with the physical, mental, and spiritual ones?

There are many passages from the Dao De Jing that, two thousand years ago, had already apprehended the tendency of technology and progress to draw out the worst in people who otherwise would enjoy peace and harmony. Chapter 3 delineates this notion:

By not exalting the talented you will cause the people to cease from rivalry and contention.
By not prizing goods hard to get, you will cause the people to cease from robbing and stealing.
By not displaying what is desirable, you will cause the people's hearts to remain undisturbed.

and even more succinctly in Chapter 12:

The five colors blind the eye.
The five tones deafen the ear.
The five flavors cloy the palate.
Racing and hunting madden the mind.
Rare goods tempt men to do wrong.

Therefore, the Sage takes care of the belly, not the eye.
He prefers what is within to what is without.

This theme is again repeated in Chapters 19 and 20:

Drop wisdom, abandon cleverness,
And the people will be benefited a hundredfold.

Drop humanity, abandon justice,
And the people will return to their natural affections.

Drop shrewdness, abandon sharpness,
And robbers and thieves will cease to be [...]

See the Simple and embrace the Primal,
Diminish the self and curb the desires! [...]

Have done with learning,
And you will have no more vexation.

However, the final words of Chapter 46 are by far the most striking, leaving us with a profound message to contemplate:

There is no calamity like not knowing what is enough.
There is no evil like covetousness.
Only he who knows what is enough will always have enough.
(all excerpts translated by John C.H. Wu)

Tyson and Perdue: Our Two-Party System

An objection raised all too often against the idea of anarchist societies is that "human nature" is such that intrinsic greed and the desire for dominance will invariably work to subvert social harmony if given the chance, and, therefore, governments naturally arise as a matter of necessity to maintain a peaceful and beneficial society. This is also the point of Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, a 1651 treatise on statecraft that proclaimed government's monopoly on violence a necessary evil to safeguard society from degenerating into a state of nature characterized by a "war of all against all" and that guaranteed lives that were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". While relatively few people outside of academia have read or are even familiar with Hobbes, it is obvious that his philosophical specter still haunts and informs mainstream views on politics, albeit at such a fundamental level as to be confounded with "common sense" by most.

In fact, Hobbes' promulgations on human nature are inherently problematic because he bases them on observations of only historical or contemporary civilized examples. While Europeans had by this time already encountered the radically different indigenous cultures of other continents, it seems that Hobbes was either unfamiliar with reports on their societal structure or otherwise chose to dismiss this information as irrelevant to his writing, opting instead to draw universal conclusions about "human nature" only from a small, highly-domesticated subset of cultures, cultures that could only exist under authority, and which would indeed collapse without it. As government systematically undermines the two million year old instincts of humans to engage in cooperative and egalitarian society in order to pursue its own goals of dominance and resource acquisition, humans respond to these unnatural stresses and the result is, predictably, a degeneration of cooperation, trust, sharing, mutual respect, and psychological and physical well-being.

For example, one could make the point that black slaves in the 19th century were considered (and largely observed to be) more pathetic, less intelligent and more brutish than whites. Slaves, it scarcely needs to be said, weren't educated to the same degree, were made to labor under grueling conditions, were made to endure atrocious and dehumanizing treatment, and had inferiority essentially instilled into them their entire lives, thus predisposing them to conform to and confirm the expectations of whites. Such was the White Man's Burden that a black slave would scarcely be able to feed, shelter, or clothe him or herself if not for the slave owner. I would venture to say that the characteristics of these slaves can give us few useful insights into the nature of sub-Saharan Africans or black people in general, and one can easily find fault and bias (and an agenda) in the white slave owners who argued otherwise. Above all, I don't think there are many who would argue that the slaves' artificial dependence on slave owners for absolutely all their basic needs and protection justified the perpetuation of slavery. One could very well compare Hobbes' view on human nature to those of American slave owners on blacks and quickly conclude how flawed and biased those views are.

However, the more accurate analogy, I think, is that of an industrial poultry factory--the kind that produces the vast majority of chicken and turkey meat destined for supermarket shelves and restaurant kitchens throughout the United States. Tens of thousands of birds are crammed together in each windowless shed on your average industrial chicken farm, with total US annual production at about eight million birds. When they arrive, they will already have had their beaks partially removed to prevent them from pecking madly at each other out of sheer frustration. It hardly needs to be explained that this practice is not done for their own safety, but rather to prevent damage to their meat. Each bird will, at maximum shed capacity, get about 130 square inches of space. Not that they would be able to enjoy it if they had more, since broiler chickens have been bred such that their bodies grow far too quickly for their heart and legs to keep up with, rendering each one essentially immobile beyond just a few struggling steps at a time. Their whole lives are arranged around consuming feed and sitting in their own choking ammonia stench. Birds are fed antibiotics to keep them alive long enough for them to reach their slaughter weight (about forty-five days), and were formerly also fed growth hormones, a practice that was banned in the 1950s. Now, if one were to try and summarize the "chicken condition" or draw conclusions about "chicken nature" solely by examining factory-farmed chickens in isolation; that is, without considering the influence of their imposed surroundings, one would have to conclude that chickens are disgusting, inherently violent, inherently sickly, unable to attain decent health and hygiene on their own, and intrinsically incapable of producing social order on their own. Their observed tendency to hurt each other justifies the removal of their beaks and ought to be viewed as perhaps a necessary evil, but perhaps even a boon, a gift of sorts, by the higher authority. Their susceptibility to infection necessitates the use of antibiotics, which is also another wondrous gift. In short, the plain inability of these animals to provide for any of their own basic needs, much less to thrive on their own, practically mandates that they be kept and cared for in industrial factory farms. After all, what else besides an industrial scale operation could keep so many birds alive, however imperfectly? The necessity of an external source of domination is crystal clear.

Such an analysis is, of course, absurd. We readily have populations of wild and feral chickens for comparison. Wild chickens are not arbitrarily violent to their flockmates, and their penchant for cleanliness is impeccable. They are highly social and are particularly doting mothers and protective fathers, and have no trouble feeding themselves or in general staying healthy, even without the advantage of troughs of feed and antibiotics. If one were to seek to understand "chicken nature", the logical way to go about it would be to study chickens in the wild, i.e., in the environment for which they are evolved and in which their adaptations work perfectly for them, not constantly against them. It would be insane to consider the factory-farmed chickens anything even close to exhibiting natural behavior. What's more, no amount of external intervention in the form of physical alterations, veterinary care, antibiotics, dietary improvements, or environmental enhancements will improve the fundamental well-being of factory chickens, because their well-being was never the point of the factory in the first place.

As civilized humans, we, too, are similarly disarmed and confined, made to be utterly dependent for our lives on the very system that causes us misery in order to exploit us. The crowding that we endure in our urban environments, face to face daily with strangers, is mentally stressful for us just as the crowding in poultry sheds is for chickens. Crowding doesn't benefit either group, but is convenient for the dominant system, and that's why it persists. The chickens' obesity and excessive consumption, much like our own, likewise does not benefit either group, only the dominant system. Nothing of civilization benefits you or the world upon which all life ultimately depends, and to argue it as otherwise, to see it as otherwise, is to endorse your own ruin.