Human Iterations

(#8: Spatial limitation ingrains social hierarchy.)

An Anti-Primitivist Essay

What tears apart the prisons within our minds is the roaring vacuum beyond. The unexplored frontier chased down past the horizon each night by the sun.

The first step in control is the securing of borders. Otherwise the people you seek to dominate could just walk away.

It is said that, in a simple world, a single empire can only reach as far as a horse can ride. But of course the idea of empire knows no such restrictions. One border inspires another.

It is a far more important truth that, in a simple world, a refugee can only travel as far as their feet can carry them. And the final periphery beyond the locally interrelating agglomerates of tribal power is often unreachable. In Europe's dark ages the refugees lacked the capability to flee beyond all of infected Europe and so they hid between, taking to the forests, much as we always have. And thus the forests were eventually cleared. The only available free space encircled and crushed.

This happened because Priests, Kings and Bureaucrats had woodmills and horses while the peasants had none. But more specifically it all happened because the peasants were spatially limited. They were effectively fenced within authoritarianism as a result of their own limited mobility and positioning.

If we remove all the particularly non-individualized technologies that benefited Europe's centralized powers, the same reality would remain. The spatial limitation of the peasants was both relative to that of the king's men and absolute. Power need not be so dramatically centralized and hierarchical to still be as oppressive. Remove the tools of the power zombies and they would simply organize more localized authoritarianism. And the high cost of spatial redistribution of individuals (a single individual moving from point A to point B takes more time and energy) means that society's natural resistance to power is lessened.

Perhaps an example is in order. When a husband beats his wife in the apartment beside mine the situation is immediate and so is my reaction. I am able to recognize it within seconds. I can move to their door in very little time and, as a consequence, I am able to take whatever action I take much sooner. Furthermore the wife can choose to immediately relocate herself into the presence of safe, protective people. All these things are spatial matters. And remain effectively the same if we replace the aggregate of nearby apartments with more distant tree houses and give the individuals involved bicycles. (The communication of the situation is slightly different matter and will be covered in the next essay.)

If you relocate the aforementioned people into the forest without significant technological choice then interpersonal power structures can leech off the high costs of relative relocation to restrain subjects. This can happen with couple removed far from any others or an entire tribe.

Because of scarcity, hunter-gatherer tribes naturally aggregate with a good deal of separation between them. When the psychoses of power take root in a tribe they are emboldened and strengthened by such spatial limitation.

Individuals can flee for other tribes, they can, as the anarcho-capitalists might say, choose their government on the market. Choose the lives they want to live and choose the people they want to live them with. And, yes, in a relatively open market of infinite options this tends to work pretty well. Oppression just isn't that appealing. But, and here's the kicker. Because of their spatial limitation, their choices certainly do not constitute a free market. They have rather limited available options. Because by nature of the necessary hunter-gatherer distribution, the number of other individuals they can reach to associate with is very, very finite. And each relocation, each encounter costs them a whole lot more time.

Furthermore, when oppressive concepts spread further than their “discrete” embodiments, when multiple tribes (forced by famine or battered by climate change, say) adopt a regional consensus of power archetype, the effective boundary of such an aggregate of mini-empires can surpass the traveling capacity of the potential refugee. (And let's not even mention the even harsher inherent restrictions applied to families.)

Those on the outside of such a travesty could and normally would overwhelm and grind down such cancerous cultures. But a lack of individualized transport technology changes the odds. Simple geometry makes it harder to organize resistance around the edge of a periphery. Centralized power meanwhile retains the local advantage; it doesn't have to travel much of anywhere.

Given a generalized anarchy, broken only by the occasional tragic psychological misstep that inspires coercive sociological rigidity, society's most crucial healing factor lies in its ability to flee and isolate the cancer.

Our natural defense against power is free association. The ability to re-form, to route around hierarchy, bypass the malicious and fluidly create new relationships.

For this to be possible there has to be a high degree of positional interrelation. That is to say, people have to be able to relocate around one another easily.

Vacuous distance or overbearing proximity are both inconducive to such dynamicism. And tribal clusters are the worst of both worlds. The only solution is choice. Where distances between people can be overcome easily at will. Where we can rearrange ourselves with respect to the rest of humanity at a moment's notice. When we are deprived this ability, cancerous hierarchies grow.