When I’ve had conversations about the commons with right-leaning people (and sometimes cynical people on the left too), a typical response might be something along the lines of: ‘don’t waste your time trying to build a more democratic, sustainable or peaceful society. It won’t work, because humans are inherently selfish, greedy and competitive’. This Darwinian approach is echoed by mainstream economics – humans are independent, self-interested creatures, but billions of small, selfish acts actually produce the most productive economy and wealthiest society in the long-run.
I admit that I was partly convinced by that argument. I know that young children will snatch toys from each other, until they’re trained by adults to share. But I also know that humans evolved to be social animals that have to be able to collaborate for harmony within the tribe, and I’ve seen the massive responses to appeals for help after famines, tsunamis, and various other humanitarian crises. Empathy and kindness are widespread too.
Early hierarchical settlements
I could see that collaboration, lack of hierarchy and relative equality was likely in hunter-gatherer extended family bands, and this was backed up by palaeoarchaeological research, as well as observing some of the few hunter-gatherer tribal societies that are left. But I assumed that the transition from ‘Eden’ to agriculture and large settlements changed all that. I’m fascinated by ancient societies, and have read about them for many years – and this is a summary of what I believed:
As the first city-states started to form in ancient Mesopotamia, fed by a patchwork of farms across the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, grain was stored in large siloes (in case of future shortages), and a surplus was generated for the first time, that was accumulated and controlled by a warrior class drawn from Mafia-like, oligarchic families, assisted by a priesthood that kept records and legitimised their rule via a mandate from the heavens. Since then, human history has been a story of despotism, empire and colonialism, with ultimate power in the hands of a tiny minority of the population – the most ruthless and ambitious.
When farmers brought their grain to be stored, they were issued with receipts (on clay tablets – the very earliest examples of writing that we know of) that circulated as a type of currency, which soon accumulated in the hands of the powerful (rather than the grain itself), and were lent out at interest, bringing large swathes of the population into debt servitude that concentrated the wealth and power of the ruling class even more. It was control of the means of exchange, rather than the means of production, that concentrated power.
Money as power
This basic pattern was repeated in every subsequent empire, until the Greek rulers minted coins with their heads on, and paid conscripted soldiers with them. Local people were told that they had to pay their taxes in those coins, and that the way to get them was to provide whatever it was that their soldiers needed – food, weapons, clothes, armour, horses, prostitutes, alcohol etc. (or direct services to the rulers, like building their ships and castles) in return for the coins. Armies were then able to conquer more lands and send newly-captured slaved down mines to get the silver for the coins, and so on. Again, it was control of the means of exchange that was important in maintaining power.
This debt-slavery-military scam has kept power and wealth concentrated in an elite ever since, and all this was probably inevitable because of inherent human greed and ambition for power, which led Hobbes to produce his Leviathan, advocating a rigid hierarchy with a powerful monarch at the top, to stop us all killing each other, like the savages we are.
I was aware that large-ish human settlements existed before even the ancient Sumerian city-states, but I assumed that they were a smaller version / warm-up act for the coming age of empires. But new information has emerged over the last few years that seems to indicate that this story may not be true.
Even earlier non-hierarchical settlements
In The Dawn of Everything (2021), Davids Graeber and Wengrow explain (among many other things) how after the Agricultural Revolution, at least 4000 years passed before the first hierarchical urban developments. During this period, early farming communities developed technologically (e.g. metallurgy, leavened bread, basic mathematics, sailing, the potter’s wheel), but without kings, centralised control, hierarchy or bureaucracy. Archaeological evidence from what is now Kurdistan and central Turkey shows large settlements with no centre, and in which all houses were more-or-less the same size (and of high-quality), and no special burial sites containing lots of treasure.
This pattern was repeated in places as far apart as China and Peru. There were, for example, large, non-hierarchical settlements of people in Peru, 4000 years before the Incas; and in the Indus Valley and Ukraine, the very first cities show no evidence of monarchs or rulers.
The BBC repeated this message in its Ascent of Woman series. The first episode looked at Çatalhöyük, in what is now central Turkey. Inhabited by 5-8,000 people from around nine-and-a-half thousand years ago, excavations have revealed a society without gender inequality, but also without much inequality of any kind. ‘Aggressive egalitarianism’ they called it – no-one was allowed to lord it over anyone else, and all houses were of a similar size. They buried their dead underneath their houses, and incredibly, DNA testing found that bodies in ‘family’ graves were often not blood relatives. It seems that they shared their children around! Mum and dad weren’t necessarily biological parents. The ‘family’ was the entire community.
Is selfishness inherent, or hierarchy inevitable?
Maybe this 4000-year period isn’t significant – it could just have been lag time before hierarchy inevitably kicked in. But maybe it wasn’t inevitable, and human history could have taken a very different trajectory if we’d managed to prevent concentration of wealth and power. But even if it were inevitable that some of the first attempts to seize power would be successful, and would only lead to more wealth and power making it to the centre – even if that were true, it still shows that humans can live together in large settlements without hierarchy, and therefore that selfishness, greed and competitiveness are no more inherent than empathy, sufficiency and collaboration.
This has huge implications for attempts to build a commons world, including economy, governance and society. Those non-hierarchical societies must have had ways to make decisions, to produce what they needed, and to distribute it reasonably fairly – otherwise there would have been chaos. We don’t know exactly what those processes were, but today, we have plenty of ideas, plus the technology to make it happen.
Perhaps there’s a part of our nature that is hierarchical – watching a documentary about chimpanzee society recently brought that home. But we’re not chimps, we’re humans, and a couple of hundred thousand years of using co-operation to build successful extended family and tribal bands will have developed a very important collaborative part of our ancestors’ nature too. There’s no reason to allow the hierarchical part to dominate. I do think though, that although hierarchy can be maintained with absentee moneylenders, landlords, shareholders and politicians, collaborative organising requires face-to-face contact. Which is, again, where the commons comes in, growing from face-to-face contact in every town.
The main takeaway for me from all of this is that when we’re presented with arguments that humans are inherently selfish and competitive, which means that any attempt to build a commons / co-operative / mutualist society is doomed to failure, we can respond that without a shadow of doubt, that isn’t true, and selfishness and competitiveness are only dominant today because we live in a system that rewards those attributes. Humans have been and are still very resourceful and imaginative when it comes to working out how to live together in peace, democracy and abundance. I believe that commons ideas can deliver those things.
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When humans live in cultures without rulers, they maintain economies that reward sharing rather than profit – these are called gift economies.
When rulers take over, and impose law on everyone else, rulers also impose some variation of a profit economy, rewarding selfishness and greed. Societies with rulers consistently have corruption, economies based on greed and profit, racism, sexism, child abuse, and other troubles.
In societies where humans live without rulers – the normal way humans lived until recent millennia, and the way some humans still live today – they maintain a baseline of mutual respect for everybody, no exceptions. They encourage solidarity, sharing, pleasure, deep connection with the earth, and integrity. I call these “healthy cultures” because, without rulers, they also live without child abuse, racism, sexism, and all the other problems we’re used to.
Rulers impose ideologies that justify having rulers, including that people are inherently selfish. These ideologies excuse having rulers, and justify the supposed need for police and prisons to “keep us safe” from each other. In truth, when humans live without rulers, they don’t need police or prisons, as many visitors have noticed (including myself).
I recently published a book called One Disease, One Cure which describes all this in detail, giving many vivid examples of both healthy and unhealthy cultures. Humans are capable of living in profoundly beautiful cultures, even today in 2024. The book contains many concrete lessons for how humans trapped with rulers can free themselves and live in cultures of mutual respect again.
Living with a few people imposing law on everyone else is not normal. Neither is corruption, discrimination, or greed. These are pathologies that arise whenever a few people rule over everyone else, and the rest come to accept it as normal. To learn what healthy cultures are like, and what lessons people can learn to once again live in healthy cultures, you can read my free book at 1disease-1cure.com
We seem to have arrived at similar conclusions about where humanity went wrong.
My influences in this regard include Danial Quinn (“[Ishmael] There’s only one way you can force people to accept an intolerable lifestyle. [Julie] Yea. You have to lock up the food.” — The Teachings That Came Before & After Ishmael p181″) and Jared Diamond (“The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.”).
But also my formal training in ecology, which leads me to an uncharacteristic hopefulness.
In classical ecology, competition dominates in high-enegy environments, and cooperation dominates in low-energy environments.
In the tropics, with lots of year-round insolation, you have dozens of small herbivore species, competing for various plants. Trophically above them, you have over a dozen omnivores, feeding on the herbivores. And on top, you’ll have perhaps 6-8 top predators competing for the diversity of omnivores and herbivores.
In alpine and arctic biomes, you have perhaps 8-10 herbivores, feeding 4-5 omnivores, topped by the Snowy Owl and the Gyrfalcon — and they “cooperate” by dividing up the meagre pickings temporally, the Gyrfalcon hunting by day and the Snowy Owl by night.
I would submit that such behaviour has been true of hominids, as well.
In low-energy environments, humans cooperate, helping each other. This is typical in hunter-gatherer societies, where food must be found every day, with little of it able to be stored. A common indigenous tradition in Pacific Canada was the “potlach”, a feast where those who had the most were expected to give it away.
Fast forward to some 10,000 years ago, when a stable climate enabled grain agriculture which allowed humans to accumulate a trophic surplus, durable for some years or longer. This surplus brought humans into a high-energy environment, where hoarding and withholding enabled social stratification, hierarchy, money, wealth, and rulers.
Prior to grain agriculture, humans lived in tribes, clans, villages, etc. of under about 150 people. Each person in the tribe knew all the others. Expulsion from the tribe was generally a death sentence. When coal arrived in full force, the tribe devolved to the multi-generational family, with young wage-earners going off to tedious and dangerous factory work, and three or more generations lived in a tenement slum apartment. When oil arrived, the dominant social unit once again devolved to the individual, with separate social groups for work, child-rearing, entertainment, etc.
But the good news is that the climate is not so stable any more, and the high-energy resource base of fossil sunlight is soon to be in rapid decline.
“That’s the ‘good’ news?” you may ask!
But yes, we will soon be in a low-energy environment, and will again be able to access our communal roots, where only cooperation ensures survival. We will halt the inefficient and lonely focus on the individual, and will once again live in tribes, clans, and villages.
Does this mean “poverty, or a hair-shirt existence?” Possibly, in the same way that perfectly happy third-world subsistence farmers, wearing sturdy home-spun garments, and having zero income, were just fine, until “do gooder” missionaries “educated” them, and they went off to work dreadful, dangerous jobs in cities, where they lived in slums. The economists saw that they went from zero income to a thousand dollars a year, and said, “Isn’t that wonderful!” (See Schooling the World, https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/schooling-the-world-2010/)
I look forward to a time when “peasant” is once again a honoured, talented occupation!
There is a common myth that the rise of agriculture doomed humans to living in societies with hierarchy and control, but the evidence in One Disease, One Cure shows that this is not true. The Haudenosaunee have maintained a culture of mutual respect for almost nine centuries, and at the time of European arrival, they relied mostly on agriculture for food.
The Zapatistas currently rely mostly on agriculture, and they are a sovereign healthy culture in southern North America, carving space out of Mexico after their revolution in 1994.
Agriculture does not doom us to having rulers. Believing that we are helpless, and rulers are inevitable — that’s what dooms us. For anyone who wants to live in a healthy culture, my book One Disease One Cure offers many examples and case studies of people living in deeply respectful ways.
Likewise, the tradeoff is not between “poverty and a hair-shirt existence” – this represents another common misunderstanding of so-called “hunter-gatherers”. In fact, in interviews, people of these healthy societies describe the incredible abundance they commonly enjoy. The Mohawk people (of the New York State region) actually described the ecological abundance they helped create as “utopia”. In fact, living in cultures that maintain economies of sharing and a baseline of mutual respect what it means for humans to live in utopia. Utopian societies are real – that’s just what it’s like to live without rulers.
Rulers train people to think that living without rulers is impossible or miserable. The opposite is true. One Disease One Cure goes into detail in a huge range of techniques that rulers have used to trick, trap, and train people into accepting the legitimacy of their rule for millennia, and it vividly shows how people can maintain a culture of mutual respect, again with lots of stories and case studies.
Whip, Jan – great stuff.
Yes, Graeber and Wengrow show that there were large, non-hierarchical settlements well after the agricultural revolution. We can have a non-hierarchical society and agriculture.
It will be a much hotter, less biodiverse, more toxic world after collapse, with far fewer resources and far fewer people, but if we can get things in place now, future generations can rebuild civilisation in ways that avoid the mistakes we’ve been making for the last 10,000 years.
And for me, that means self-provisioning and building the commons.