Suffering is individual
7.1 The individual
Individuals became unbalanced in different ways. The division of labor led to a number of negative effects. People became one-sidedly educated and dependent on one source of income. Daily work became increasingly repetitive, boring, and unsatisfying.
The level of education dropped drastically. Work was boring and unsatisfactory not only when floods or drought wiped out all the effort. There are scientists who see in the hunter-gatherers the most competent type of man who ever lived. His skills were so varied that even most modern people can show less in terms of number and scope of knowledge. The prehistoric and historical peasant was just the opposite.
This had fatal consequences for his descendants. The intense relationship that hunter-gatherers must have had with their children so that they could learn all the life skills, stands in stark contrast to a farmer’s child who must be “parked” while the parents work in the fields, with nothing more to learn than a few handholds.
The child lacks closeness and affirmation from the parents. It spends a lot of time alone and even when it is in nature, it hardly learns anything without an experienced teacher. Instead of developing basic trust and bonding skills through closeness with parents, he becomes insecure and anxious. Instead of gaining confidence in its own abilities, it becomes dull and disinterested.
At the same time, an increasingly complex society develops. Dumb and weak peasants are abused as worker bees by warriors, merchants, and rulers of all kinds. In history books, one reads about magnificent pharaohs, powerful kings, wise scholars, and rich merchants. The overwhelming majority of people then, as now, were tied up in a tight corset of dependencies and rarely came to cheap pleasure.
People are either in danger of getting bored or burned out. But one can hardly escape the need to feed the system. To pay the rent, feed the family, and have a few days of vacation a year, money must flow constantly.
The most overlooked impact of modern life is the separation of the child from the mother and father. While some lucky babies are fortunate enough to see their parents often in the early weeks and months, the lifelong companionship and daily interaction of our ancestors who hunted and gathered can no longer be enjoyed by any child today. The result is a lack of primal trust, bonding skills, empathy and social skills.
It is a pity that these are exactly the resilience factors that psychologists try to activate and that suffering people hope to find within themselves. Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to rebuild the foundation of a house once the first floor is in place.
A close social network and deep, honest friendships are a great help, of course. But in a working world with 10-hour days and 2-hour commutes, there is little time to build real relationships before the next move. What many people lack today is basic trust and the ability to form deep bonds based on it.
8.1 Unsocial society or the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
A group consists of individuals who submit to the group in order to achieve things together that they could never achieve alone. We use the word group here in a broader sense. The smallest group is a couple and the largest group is humanity. Groups can be organized in various forms, from informal to military.
The very earliest groups were hunter-gatherer groups that survived successfully for several hundred thousand years. These groups obviously had the right mix of hierarchy and team spirit, of giving and taking. Other groups were rarely met. Conflicts were few and far between, and it was easy to get out of each other’s way.
In today’s world, everyone belongs to a variety of groups and there are many more groups to which one does not belong.
But there are also more and more uprooted migrants like workers in China, job hoppers in the USA, political and economic refugees in the Middle East and Africa. In economically successful nations, separation is more important than team spirit. Modern societies are based on the idea that the individual is master of his fate, that the fittest survives and the winner takes all.
In this way, humanity has developed exponentially. The most recent example is the meteoric rise of China. Millions of people who were always in danger of starvation became wealthy within two generations. But the price was that people did not belong to one group they could rely on, but to many groups with many different goals and sometimes conflicting interests.
Group mechanics
Hunter-gatherer groups are conspiratorial communities that depend on each other for better or worse. They share a common interest in survival. Mutual trust is a given because people have known each other all their lives.
In modern social groups, people also pursue a common interest. But only to a very limited and temporally been extent. In golf clubs, it is playing golf. Online gamers want to play online games together. In nation-states, there is the national interest.
One belongs to many groups whose values and goals one shares only to a limited extent. But all group members must accept the rules of the group and behave accordingly. They subordinate their individual interests to the group. In this way, they hope to achieve more than they invest.
Group membership and peer pressure
Modern man also has a deep inner need to belong. He strives for the security and confirmation that a reliable community can offer. In some cases, this works out quite well, as in the church choir, in the sports club, in school. In other cases, the individual denies his own opinions and interests and subordinates himself to the group just to belong.
But group goals become a power in their own right. Leaders can force participation. They can even suppress leaving the group. Then, at the latest, there could be friction between individual and group interests. This is one negative side of groups.
The other cause is the taking of advantage by one group at the expense of the general public.
Interest groups create imbalances
Special interest groups keep the benefits for their own group and share the costs with the general public.
This is true for states that occupy other states as well as for people in power mistreating other group members. Areas of social inequality include access to voting rights, freedom of speech and assembly, the extent of property rights and access to education, health care, quality housing, traveling, transportation, vacationing and other social goods and services.
Recent Chinese prosperity has come at the cost of extreme pollution. They have caught up with what had already happened in Europe and America. They share the environmental damage with the rest of the world, but not the prosperity. While Europeans talk about the Chinese as a group and vice versa, groups usually have hierarchies. There are those everywhere who determine and own something, and those who own nothing and must comply.
The group that owns something usually includes a few percent; the majority own nothing. In recent times, wealth has accumulated at the top. Nation-states are less successful at collecting taxes as wealth accumulates. A nation-state is also a group organized according to certain rules. Groups in the form of corporations operating internationally are almost impossible for them to control. A small consolation is that many of the richest people are also the greatest philanthropists.
Ownership and possession
For 300,000 years, we humans have been a part of the global natural community. Each creature took what it needed from natural resources, and nature served everyone well.
12,000 years ago, the first farmers began to appropriate certain natural resources. At first, this was mainly arable land, but also springs and fishing grounds. Later, the same happened with mines, quarries, and other mineral resources.
Farmers were vulnerable and often became victims of robbery. Soon they had to pay for their protection. Over the centuries, lands were taken by military force and then distributed to barons and knights in return for military services. In the 18th century, new agricultural technologies brought about an agricultural revolution, just before the Industrial Revolution. When the economy was no longer based solely on agriculture, landowners sought new ways to make money. Commerce and banking grew, and cities became more important. Many farmers were forced off the land their families had farmed for generations. They hired themselves out as farm worker or moved to a city.
These were good examples of groups gaining advantages over other groups. The right of the strongest was translated into laws. Today’s property rights are based on these feudal practices. There is no doubt that legal property rights have their place in a nation-state. However, it is crucial that it is a convention based on historical developments.
The paradox is that virtually all of today’s property rights have historically arisen in ways that would be condemnable today under existing laws.
The concepts of migration and land grabbing are interesting in this context.
Human history is a history of migration. About two million years ago, man began to spread across the world, starting from Central Africa. In the process, he may have displaced other species, but he inserted himself into the natural balance of nature.
Then, in the pre-modern period, migrants increasingly met other people who already lived in the region. Therefore, migration acquired the character of an invasion.
The German term “Landnahme” is sometimes used in historiography for a migration event associated with a founding legend, e.g. the conquest of Canaan in the Hebrew Bible, the Indo-Aryan migration and expansion within India alluded to in the Rigveda, the invasion traditions in the Irish myth cycle that explains how the Gaels came to Ireland, the arrival of the Franks in Austrasia during the Migration Period, the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain, the settlement of Iceland in the Viking Age, the Slavic migrations, the conquest of Hungary, etc.
From the early Middle Ages, colonialism became the dominant form of land grabbing.
Colonialism is the seizure of foreign territories and the subjugation, expulsion, or murder of the resident population by a colonial ruler. In modern colonialism, this was linked to the colonial rulers’ belief in their cultural superiority over the so-called “primitive peoples” and, in some cases, in their own racial superiority.¹
Historian Philip Hoffman has calculated that in 1800, before the Industrial Revolution, Europeans already controlled at least 35% of the globe, and by 1914 they had gained control of 84% of the globe.
Historical developments that have led to what we now call capitalism have made this possible. A compelling and detailed history of the property can be found in Brittanica.²
One of the starting points of this development was the establishment of a stock exchange in Holland with the aim of enabling large inventions to be made in order to make large deals that required taking large risks.
In a first principles view, in capitalism, through labor and the use of course resources, a value is generated, which is then securitized, that is, in money, securities or Bitcoin. Each person basically owns his or her own human capital. Some people additionally have control over natural resources and some finally have securitized capital.
Without discussing the advantages and disadvantages of this system, we can state that this system has been an essential driver for the development of mankind until today and even more importantly, represents the system established in large parts of the world today.
After the Second World War, many states became “independent”. However, the rights of rule were usually simply transferred to local interest groups. These interest groups took ownership of natural resources and capital so that nothing changed for most citizens. There are countless sad examples of African rulers who, with a small group, greatly harmed the general public in their countries.
Also in all countries that were not victims of colonialism, most of the property relations were created by land grabbing. The property relations prevailing today are therefore conventions of the nation-states. In every jurisdiction, certain legal principles were agreed upon and the historical property relations were perpetuated. Everyone is so used to this that no one questions it.
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This article belongs to section 7 of the Section Matrix.
