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The opportunity conveniently presented itself when I was invited to review a book set in my childhood neighborhood. As I followed the author’s account of that place, my thoughts and feelings roiled.

So here it is—last but not least—a dirge to that special corner of the Far East: although officially not a free-market economy and surely with some distinctive Chinese characteristics—its fate is still one of erasure and displacement much like the rest of the world. In this global age, the “end of history” has arrived, but fully on the other end.

AN EXCERPT:

These days, the French Concession is epitomized by trendy streets like Anfu Lu and Yuyuan Lu. These names, however, mean very different things to me: I was born and raised on Anfu Lu, our family of four squeezed into two partitioned rooms in a Xincun-style lane house. On weekends, we would visit our granduncle’s villa on Yuyuan Lu—by then already packed with a dozen more families. In those days, the city was cloistered and gray, but also slow and intimate.

Next time I returned, our home on Anfu Lu was demolished. It was later rumored that the development plan was instigated by one of Hong Kong’s wealthiest tycoons. With the state’s blessing, the seat of my childhood turned into high-end storefronts and luxury towers. Most of the old residents dispersed, relocated to faraway places they scarcely knew, living in new modern units isolated away from each other. Nowadays, as I stroll those same streets, greeted by fancy window displays and young women taking selfies, I couldn’t help but wish for something different. What if provocative art were commissioned to commemorate all those who were purged or displaced—much like the German Stolpersteine, small cobblestones inscribed with the names of Holocaust victims and installed in front of the houses of deportation. What if the old houses were not demolished for tourism and consumption, but remained as living spaces for ordinary citizens—where kids like me could play outside and neighbors chatted after work? Thanks to Fedder—those possibilities and remembrances—swept aside by the merciless march forged by power and capital—would endure on the page.

Eileen Chang, that brilliant native chronicler of Shanghai, once wrote this about modernity:

The locomotive of the Age roars forward relentlessly. We sit inside, passing perhaps just a few familiar streets, yet amidst the blazing flames of destruction, even they appear terrifying and unsettling.

Terrifying and unsettling as the motion is, words and fiction have what it takes to slow it down. The pause they effect—however slight—allows us to gaze, so that amidst the trembling ruins, florets of empathy and compassion could unfurl and blossom.

Read the whole review on Boston Review of Books.

Even since I got interested in prehistory, I have been going through books on evolutionary biology to learn more about early humans. Recently, a passage about chimpanzees left me aghast:

Males also commonly beat up on females, often in surprise attacks launched for no obvious reason. These bullying tactics can be sustained for many minutes…. The male’s aim in such attacks is to intimidate a chosen female into readily acceding to his future demands for sex…. The tactic is often successful. Over subsequent weeks, a female’s most frequent aggressor tends to be her most frequent sex partner, and eventually….he will be the most likely father of her next baby.

The Goodness Paradox, Richard Wrangham.

This description of violence is already unbearable. Worse yet, not only does the perpetrator gets his way, but his genes—carrying a proclivity for aggression—are passed on to future generations, perpetuating a world where brutality appears natural and even biologically inevitable.

If we share 99% of DNA with chimpanzees, what does that say about us?

To my relief, scientists discovered bonobos in 1954—a great ape species as closely related to humans as chimpanzees, yet are worlds apart in behavior. Bonobos embody a primate version of “make love, not war”: sex is used to diffuse tension and create ties, food is shared generously, and territorial disputes rarely occur. Separated from chimps only by a river and nearly identical in appearance, bonobos maintain a radically different political order.

The secret? Female alliance. While chimpanzees form hierarchies in which alpha males constantly use violence—including even infanticide and cannibalism— for access to sex and food, female bonobos form extensive bonds across kinship to protect each other and thwart despots. In this way, bonobo society doesn't just avoid war and conflict—it rewrites the very nature of primate social contract itself: replacing dominance with justice, and violence with mutual support.

What are the lessons for women?

Models of modern female success remain trapped in a narrow triad—romance, motherhood, and financial ascension—while failing to imagine broad alliances that counter authoritarian assault.

1. Yet we belong neither to the family nor the firm

For millennia since agriculture birthed surplus and hierarchy, women have been steered toward finding fulfillment in the roles of wives and mothers. While these pursuits can be meaningful, even beautiful, they service biological households that are the corner stones of patriarchic and hierarchic structures—systems whose very survival depends on dissolving collective solidarities into competing individual family units.

In the last decades, women are offered a new escape hatch—the supercharged career path. While this opens doors to the wider world and more diverse experiences, its bottom line is the accumulation of wealth through individual career development. Would a female Elon Musk or ranks of highly disciplined, near-burnout women professionals truly engender the mass alliances, movement infrastructure, and collective power that form the very foundations of the world we want to build?

2. Some “masculine” virtues are useful

Historically women have borne the vital work of healing, caring, and repairing - serving as counterbalance to the ruthless competition and exploitation that drive economic accumulation. Workers and capitalists alike need a loving and warm home to restore their sanity. While these nurturing roles are noble, we need more than Mother Teresa's endless altruism. To strike decisively against injustice and harm, we must reclaim the audacity, dealmaking, and negotiation skills historically attributed to warriors and generals—not to wear the crown, but to tear it down.

3. Last but not least, we need exceptional discernment

Bonobos have no trouble recognizing aggression —a bared tooth, a raised fist. But human tyrants operate through vast systems that are intelligently disguised through culture, rhetoric, and institution. As The Goodness Paradox reveals: “Hitler had an agreeable, friendly, and paternal manner… Stalin was always amazingly calm and never shouted or swore.” These men did not carry out mass murder directly, but did so by manipulating the masses and co-opting state institutions. Using the art of reshaping social realities, they were able to sell to millions of people a vision of utopia while carrying out genocide and mass executions. As a result, learning what’s being taught in schools and universities or reading law codes and newspapers in Nazi Germany and the USSR wouldn’t bring about enlightenment. In addition, many crimes like theft, brawls, rape, and homicide were minimized under those dictatorships, further concealing state terror. To see the highly deceptive web of evil requires the ability to question widely accepted “truth,” interrogate seemingly sound language and logic, and detect inconsistencies and contradictions in extensive systems and ideologies .

In sum, to become true guardians of society like female bonobos, we must transcend the confines of family and firm, wield masculine-coded strengths for justice, and sharpen our intellects to decode systemic violence.

The Call: Seeing Through the Illusion

So who are today’s alpha males? Look no farther than the billionaires and homo economicus who are hoarding wealth while the planet burns. Yet our mainstream rhetoric—being allowed to circulate precisely because it serves power—sanctifies them:

• Growth is everything.

• The rich earned their wealth “legally” (i.e., under the laws legislated by their politician friends).

• “freedom”means the right to spend billions on space joyrides while children starve.

• Oil execs who refuse to scale back productionare just “doing their job.”

• Insurance companies “have no choice” but to deny healthcare to the dying.

Facing the polycrisis, we must launch a global sex strike—not as biological females but as sworn guardians of Earth, the primal mother of all life.

With this new identity, sex is more than just personal pleasure or even individual love; it is an evolutionary statement. Every intimacy is a referendum: Whose DNA, whose values, whose world will shape tomorrow?

Until the current destructive system is transformed, we withhold both pleasure and reproduction—our most ancient leverage. Let this universal refusal be the ultimate affirmation of life itself.

Extremely wealthy yet deeply unequal, incredibly modern yet strikingly primitive, so defiant and yet so cruel—why is the United States like this, baffling, twisted and hard to pin down? The roots of its layered character were sown already when European vessels braved the vast Atlantic to the new shores. In the thirteen original colonies, a thick air of desire permeated the South, fueld by the lust for estate, cash, and social mobility. The fertile soil and sweltering climate were perfect for fast-growing, large plantations: all one needed was to rob land from the natives, supervise imported slaves, and enforce a strict racial hierarchy. When those in the North later cried out “give me liberty,” the loyalists in the South, beholden to the benefits of British trade , fought for the privilege to live under a king. Decades later, when the ethics of slavery became so contentious, many Southerners decided that they would rather die for the right to enslave than to live in a world of dignified peers. In this fabulous new world aglow with riches, why submit to equality and morality when dominion and empire yield so much profit? This question, echoing through centuries, still defines the American paradox: a nation built on ideals of freedom and justice, yet haunted by its legacy of exploitation and inequality.

The Southerners’ New England neighbors directed their gaze upward for salvation. Yet their God was a figure full of anger and wrath, to be appeased only through toil and austerity. This harsh outlook treated idleness and fun as crimes, though tempered by the comfort of close-knit communities and the belief in education. The Puritan mentality and the capitalist mindset formed two important pillars of the American identity.

The economic features of the South were not isolated, but integral to the triangular trade during the age of exploration. In the 18^th century, men in England began to harness new forms of energy, but instead of reducing work and toil, and increasing leisure and creativity, it sent peasant into the pits, bending their backs, and blackening their lungs. The subsequent surplus goods and products brought not contentment but deadly ambition. European entrepreneurs, instead of walking in the forest, visiting friends, and reading poetry, searched tirelessly around the globe for new markets, aided by cannons and guns. North America was one of those promising outlets. To pay for those manufactured goods produced by the displaced English poor, Africans were captured and put in chains, Native land was seized, indigenous forests were burned so that cotton, sugar, and tobacco could be grown to generate cash. No doubt history books will hail this era as one of “rapid technological progress and economic growth.” The resulting world, as the Puritans had hoped, provided endless toil, for God would loathe to see anyone receiving a “free lunch.”

These historical contours shaped much of what we see today: the richest nation on earth, and yet with 20 houses sitting empty for each of the 500 thousand homeless citizens. Sixteen percent of American children live in poverty, and 7.2 million of them do not have enough to eat. Surely those were the lazy ones who failed to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. The maniac rhythm of work is matched by the omnipresence of commerce. Visitoring setting foot upon the American shores marvel that ads are everywhere, and everything—from health services to education, childcare, housing, etc—is sold for maximum profit. Through the ongoing cycles of bust and boom, democracy is being dragged into periodic crises of oligarchy, depression, and lately fascism. The American dream, however, never dies. Whether it’s for the railroad barons, Wall Street wizards, or tech bros, everyone is either a “self-made” genius or a “temporarily embarrassed billionaire.”

Interestingly, there was yet another vision. In the colonial era, sandwiched between the North and the South were the middle colonies. Composed largely of Quakers and Scandinavians, those settlers disavowed arms and slavery, negotiated land from the Natives for a fair price, welcomed different religions and ethnicities, and valued consensus. The middle colonies’ heritage was soft but it stood out in the evolution of the American federation, setting the stage for condemning slavery, extending rights and opportunities, and seeing immigrants not as threats but “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

America was constantly molded by these three forces—the stern Puritan work ethic with its preference for small homogeneous communities, the capitalist drive combined with social conservatism, and finally, Quakerly compassion and cosmopolitan openness. Thus, the democratic promise had to contend with racism and exclusion, economic growth was built upon deprivation and scarcity, and bouts of reflection and reconciliation punctured violence and domination. Yet, another possibility was obscured by history: the vision of a society not as a coercive state, but a home for all; an economy not driven by accumulation, but one that makes land and people sacred. In fact, this was how the natives lived here for thousands of years. In those times, leaders acquire authority by hand out possessions generously. Belonging was fluid and voluntary but also meaningful; one was not bound to an artificial territorial unit, but treated as an essential member of a tribe, endowed with inalienable access to basic resources. There was unwavering faith that the earth provides plenty, and its children are fully capable of thriving and self-governance through sharing, collaboration, and mutual aid.

In fact, when the first Europeans arrived, they were stunned by what they saw. Millions of bison roamed the plains, rivers teemed with fish, and endless tall prairie grass rustled in the wind. Bald eagles once traced slow arcs across the blue sky—a bird so majestic it rose to sovereign symbol. Now it is seldom seen, its reign thinned by the loss of its home. Back then, food was naturally abundant so the natives didn’t have to toil and compete. But the Puritans were frightened by this idyllic picture. They knew only a civilization that compelled constant labor through scarcity, a system in which society could existed under strict discipline and control. Branding the natives as lazy and godless, the Puritans cleared forests, put fish to nets, hunted down the bison, and made it impossible to live without toil. To them, pain was salvation, work was worth, and punishment came from love.

What if things had been different? What if the Europeans had inherited this land alongside the native inhabitants, preserving its majestic, unspoiled beauty? What if we had learned that the land does not belong to us, but we belong to the land—as its stewards and caretakers, sharing its bounty with all species? What if in 2025, the newcomers arrived on those same shores, their bodies previously scarred by the voracious pillaging of nature, incessant and mindless economic enterprising, violent rivalry and oppression, to find a continent where animals, plants, and tribes flourish together, to discover humans have applied technology and wisdom to live gently and benevolently, and to witness the real “city upon hills,” shining light and love here and now, not only at the Sunday altar, but in economics, society, and human relations everywhere. What if the linear time regime of mechanical infinity, which emerged when energy use shifted from solar to stock sources, also shattered and dissipated like the end of a long dark spell? Chronology returns to its cyclical nature, where we, the children of countless generations before us, will descend into to earth in a slumber, having safeguarded this sacred planet for youngsters eager to gaze upon the sun.

This is the America that was not in year 2025—a project of what could have been, and whose time will come.

As mentioned in the last post, the violence that resulted from intensified manipulation of nature in the Bronze Age generated a wide array of counter responses across the globe.  In the Middle Kingdom, a man named Confucius stepped forward to offer moral correctives to the menacing division that tore society apart around him. Yet the great teacher did not question the underlying drive toward human-directed, acquisition-based production, which generated the surplus that invited violence, warfare, and domination.  To have the cake and eat it too, Confucius elaborated on personal virtue with an eye toward stabilizing social hierarchy. Later in the Han dynasty, Confucianism outcompeted other schools to become the official philosophy.  The receiving of state-sponsorship was earned by formulating the “Mandate of Heaven,” a concept stating that Heaven—the embodiment of natural and supernatural forces—had ordained the ruler with divine status.  Though it rested on neither proof nor logic, this proclaimation enhanced the Chinese imperial order by providing dynastic rule with a ideological foundation. In truth, if anything, all the spirits in nature would be screaming in horror, for humans were falling trees, damming and rechanneling rivers, and enslaving each other via taxation and legal codes. But the mandarins accepted this ludicrous mystification of power, carefully not to lift the veil shrouding centralized power. In this way, the students of Confucianism preached benevolence and excellence within a hierarchical, violent, and unequal system that brutally subjugated and subdued the populace.

Their object of worship, the son of heaven, the emperor or Huangdi, is of course just another mortal being like any other. But he lived in a giant palace, with thick walls cutting him off from rivers, forests, and animals, and artificially elevated divine status separating him from egalitarian human association.  The imperial household consisted of hundreds and thousands of concubines and eunuchs. Male servants were sexually mutilated and female consorts were secluded so that a male heir would ensured to continue the political mastery of vast surplus without interruption. So is it any surprise that the emperor, living in all this perversity, would least likely become the good ruler defined by benevolence and wisdom?  Yet absolute obedience to this deified human was demanded by mandarins. One Confucian saying goes, if the lord wills your death for whatever reason, then the subject must die.  Thus the fate of the mandarins was destined from the onset to be tragic and absurd.  On the one hand they were the cream of the crop, raised to recite beautiful poetry, immersed in music and art, aspired to be just and kind, on the other hand, they studied so hard to make themselves the slaves of a wanton, all-powerful, and unchecked authoritarian tyrant. 

The daily life of mandarin officials, counselors, and bureaucrats was humiliating and precarious, and it became more and more so with the growth of agri-surplus. In the Tang dynasty, the prime minister could sit in royal presence; in the Song dynasty, they stood; in the Ming dynasty, whenever they dared to speak anything displeasing to the emperor, they were beaten with heavy sticks on the buttocks by the royal guards--many “heroically” died or became handicapped. In the Qing dynasty, the last one in the long throng of Chinese empires, the mandarins were deemed too low to even qualify as imperial slaves and the screws on them were tightened to an unprecedented level.  In one famous trial, a literatus penned a poem using “qing” and “ming,” two common characters that mean “light” and “bright” in everyday speech, but these were also the appelations of the prior and current dynasties. This poem, which used the phrases “light breeze” and “bright moon,” aroused the suspicion of the emperor, so he ordered the entire family and extended clans and friends beheaded.  Thousands as a result lost their lives over 2 lines of innocent writing, marking an unthinkable milestone in the global history of censorship and suppression.  The irony or perhaps justice was that those who did the most to endorse an order built on surplus also in the end lost their dignity and honor. 

In this way, the countless personal biographies of the mandarins were filled with frustration, disillusionment, and despair. Coping mechanisms were desperately needed, and they came in the forms of Daoism and Buddhism, which in many ways were “anti-civilization.” Daoism highlighted the wisdom of “doing nothing” and just letting things be. For Buddhism, the desire for possession and control is the cause of all suffering. These two schools constantly nurtured this class, though doing little to transform actual social and political practice. Together with Confucianism, the “philosophical trio” allowed traditional Chinese intellectuals to make sense of a world that was essentially brutal and crazy. If anyone ever wonders how traditional Chinese painting can be so graceful, delicate and spiritual, it was because art was one of the main escapes from political reality.  In the imagined mountains and wilderness, the literati sought refuge in a poetic and primitive existence far from court, palace, and political intrigue. The outlook of traditional Chinese art and poetry constantly conveyed a sense of emptiness and lightness.  Only in these “emply” and “civilization-free” spaces could the minds of the literati experience freedom and dignity, as humans were born to, as the higher spirits of nature, if they could speak, intend us to.

The critical ameliorations and diversions in the premodern world were destroyed during the cultural revolution, leaving us a vivid picture of what hell might actually look with unchecked power and hellbent “development.” As the Communist Party took control of China in 1949, Chairman Mao’s personal prestige surged, particularly in the years of 1966-1976, termed as the cultural revolution.  Mao deployed sophisticated technologies of the modern state as well as the knowledge of authoritarian rule to consolidate his power. During that period, freedom of mobility was completely eliminated , as people had to be registered at local addresses and were forbidden to leave their villages and districts, much less going abroad. The great famines that killed 35-40 million lives occurred when peasants were forced to hand over harvest to the state as an artificial way to compete with the West in food production; at the same time they weren’t allowed to leave even when they were starving to death. Not only was physical mobility taken away but so was the freedom of association. Independent newspapers, civil organizations, and civil associations were destroyed or absorbed by the party. Class struggle, or more accurately Mao’s version of it, was introduced even into the family, so that couples were forced to divorce, children spied on their parents, and friends and lovers reported on each other.  Mao himself became so divine that he was compared to the sun, and ordinary citizens were executed even if they accidentally damaged Mao’s statues or portraits.  The solidarity, mutual assistance, and reciprocity that humans would develop naturally through living together was purposefully replaced by hatred and alienation. Mao’s violent politics was carried out in the name of creating a highly unified China to surpass America and England in output. Such ambition also prompted him to declare war on nature.  Large-scale deforestation and the use of chemicals and toxins scarred the landscape for years to come.  Underneath it all, the link between assaulting nature and abusing humans is quite clear.

Who could argue that all those eunuchs, concubines, beheaded poets were pure accidents to a civilization project that was essentially beneficially, and that they were just the unfortunately collateral damage to progress, so let’s not throw away the baby in the bathwater? To those who died, perished and trapped, beaten, jailed, denounced by their families, and committed suicide, they would have given up civilization in a blink for a chance to be in the woods and under the stars.

If you are reading this post, chances are you are already in the privileged top percentile in this world. However, the true measure of history is not the fortune of its survivors, but the suffering of those at the bottom: our brothers and sisters who were enslaved, humiliated, castrated, and brutally dehumanized. The quesion is also not about some innate badness of human nature, but the presence of the structural incentives that render conquest, domination, and hierarchy profitable and inevitable.  The moment humans turned away from a reciprocal, spiritual and interdependent relationship with nature and entrusted their existence purely to their own hands and cleverness, civilization was born and it began to offer handsome dividends to evil. 

People often think of language as a mark of advancement, a tool for making life better. But when viewed historically—through the context of its proliferation and role in human development—language has more often served as an instrument of training and control under regimes driven by accumulation and possession. At the same time, it has functioned also as a source of distraction and sedation, dulling the pain and suffering caused by these very systems.

The earliest evidence of the written word dates back to the Bronze Age in Southwest Asia. The Tigris and Euphrates flowed in that region , and the land between them，called Mesopotamia, literally meaning “between the rivers.” The Mesopotamians were the first to engage in intensive farming after mastering the techniques of redirecting and impounding water.  In doing so, the river, the giver of all life, became a pliable resource for satisfying the capless desire for more possession.  But hydrotechnologies such as irrigation and damming together with farming practices like deforestation and plowing left behind a disturbing trail of salinization, soil erosion and ecosystem destruction.

The damage done to nature was followed by injustice among humans.  The peasants in those societies—the very ones who toiled for increased food output—were compelled to pay tributes to the elites, so their hard-earned surplus were siphoned off. Instead of more autonomy, they had to labor constantly. By violating nature and exploiting primary producers, civilization collected its first windfall, a pattern that will repeat in subsequent episodes of economic growth. 

Yet the reservoir of new riches—a vessel of concentrated energy and material extracted first from nature and peasants—is dangerous and corruptive, much like the One Ring in The Lord of the Rings. The task of stabilizing this potent force became the inner logic for human social organization onward. 

The Mesopotamian solution, as in other riverine agri-regions such as Egypt, China and India, was to confer this One Ring to a divinely conceived king. He was bestowed with the right to claim all properties as eminent domain and to wield the power of life and death over everyone. In other words, the ruler was given ownership of all that existed in the territory under the sky, sometimes including men’s muscle power and women’s sexual availability. To prop up this figure, scribes and bureaucrats were employed to keep track and collect goods, craftsmen and merchants were hired to create status-enhancing luxury goods, and poets and artists were sponsored to legitimate and glorify the regime. A massive job program was launched, more refined and intricate objects were produced, innovation and technology advanced, much this would delight contemporary economists. In this context, the first traces of written language appeared in cuneiform documenting the exchange, collection, and distribution of material objects.  While what survived does not represent the full range of linguisitc usage—for only clay tablets that were burned in accidental fire—there is no doubt much of it revolved around transactions that were vital for the smooth operation of this new surplus political economy.

During this time, social relations underwent substantial transformation from hunting and gathering times.  Many Bronze Age societies structured themselves around biological households that retained private estates rather than associative networks rooted in egalitarianism and collaboration. Furthermore, women had been relegated to the roles of wives and daughters, confined within specific families and subject to patriarchal supervision. Life was full of competition, distrust, and precarity.

For the elites, while accumulation accelerated, social friction was bad for business and governance. Writing soon acquired a new funciton—to control behavior, as examplified by Hammurabi’s code, the world’s oldest law.  This emergence meant that individuals could no longer solve their differences through peace-making and communal reconciliation.  Instead, the words of a single man, who ruled on the basis of conquest and fiction, defined what was just, appropriate, and acceptable for all.  To his subjects, Hammurabi declared “an eye for an eye,” also “a son’s hands shall be hewn off if he strikes his father, but not “dignity, and rights, compassion,” nor “empathy, dialogue, and solidarity.”  In this system, the king legislated, the peasants obeyed, everyone adhered to their roles in order for the corporate entity to fulfil its purpose of appropriating large amount of energy and material with the result of a few overlording the many.

But something very different also came along.  To the relief of many, the early writings were more than just bookkeeping and codification.  At the edge of Mesopotamia, in the land of Judaism, a body of text culminated into what became known as the Bible. 

The Biblical writings signify the rise of the narrative by encompassing time sequence, that is, a story that has a beginning, middle, and end.  Temporality is important because according to Hannah Arendt, since the world is the culmination of actions taken by a vast multitude of human actors, the past is always entangled in trauma and the future mired in uncertainty. Based on this recognition, it follows that the desired result will always elude individuals because they cannot control the decisions of others. Consequently, disappointment, injury and fear become unavoidable. 

The writings of Judeo-Christianity provide solutions for these debilitating feelings. The Bible explains why life is fraught with misery and suffering: because of sins and disobedience. Yet inspite of the let-downs, redemption is on the horizon. In the New Testament, God sent his only son to die so his blood will not only exonerate past transgressions but also devlier future salvation.  The love of Jesus promises to heal trauma and confer miracle.

Already in the Bronze Age, humans no longer journeyed around the earth, but became bound to the toiling fields; groups no longer treated the wellbeing of each member as an irreducible minimum, but were divided into patriarchal and hierarchical households; children were born not as equals but with differentiating social status--though neither the king or the slave could find peace and security.

Each day, the sun continued to cast its brilliant rays in the morning and the moon glowed gently in the nightly sky.  Such wonderful sights still delighted the those who switched to sedentary farming, but life had already changed beyond recognition: Those thick city walls, organized warfare, taxes to be handed over, warnings of divine wrath, and year-round toil and worries for the fields and animals.  Something was eerily amiss--akin to a caged tiger pacing back and forth, knowing "this is wrong" but unable to say what it is. In the face of this inexplicable malaise, language wove a transcendental, larger-than-life narrative of love, offering sanity and solace to the madness of an economy based on accumulation. Unlike the earlier cuneiform tablets, which survived largely by chance, the survival of the holy text of later religions was ensured because individuals clung to them as their only hope in an otherwise unbearable existence

Geographically the Jews were located at the periphery of Mesopotamian heartland.  As a smaller, semi-nomadic pastoral people, they faced repeated assaults from their more militant and surplus-rich neighbors. The Old Testament recounts their enslavement by the Egyptians, capture by the Assyrians, and deportation by the Babylonians. Despite those hard defeats, the non-sedentary pastoral community never succumbed to the logic of large agricultural surplus.  In the Jewish faith, wealth was attached to a certain level of ethical and social responsibility rather than being celebrated as triumphant signs of divine favor.  Moreover, God created everyone in his image, making it difficult to justify a permanent servile class.  Most importantly, the Mesopotamian deities who forged exclusive ties with mighty kings and pharaohs were seen as false. Yet despite these key pushbacks, Judeo-Christianity did not attempt to reject “civilization,” i.e. the web of social political institutions built to facilitate surplus production. 

For Judeo-Christianity, the focus was rather on the personal ethics, with a tendency for monastical asceticism. The love from God was great, except it couldn’t be seen, felt, realized here through the material experiences that shape the human condition. When faced with a ravaging economy that felt ill and crushing, the teachings from heaven became the biggest sedative and palliative, in part resisting and modifying, but by large masking and hiding the dynamic causes. 

All at the same time, while resisting big rulers and centralized regimes, Judaism and Christianity shared similar proclivities of domination towards nature, women, and primary producers, even as they contested the ethos of surplus accumulation. 

The Greeks, whose rugged, coastline-rich geography hindered intensive farming, and whose civilization reemerged after the collapse of Bronze Age urban centers and writing, the agri-surplus trap was partially escapable.  Their elites were impoverished compared to the Persian counterparts, too poor to sustain a bureaucracy and a standing army.  Their state organization was decentralized and horizontal, with a population that moved easily via sea-routes.  In this special context, oldest surviving piece of writing from them was comprised of several lines of poetry, words that had nothing to do with economic operation or legal proscription.  The literatre of the Ancient Greeks explored desire, investigated philosophy, and presented vibrant debates.  The Greek gods were not mighty figures that conferred legitimacy on kings, but flawed beings who mingled with ordinary mortals. 

But unable to resist the allure of small farmsteads, they also kept slaves and secluded their women.  However, freed from big agriculture, the citizen body within the polis was by large egalitarian and anti-authoratarian.  Those groups of native male citizens—in the eyes of Hegel—“possess a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain.”  At the end of day, it was Hellenism and Judeo-Christianity, twin cultures displaying partial opposition to the ethos of the deep surplus economy, that nurtured some of the best instincts of human civilization.

Fast forward to the early modern era, the use of narratives via writing once again surged. Some would attribute this phenomenon to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press with good reason, but what compelled and motivated people to communicate so much? What so resonated that it merited widespread dissemination?

The age of printing, as exemplified by the novel, coincided with the capture of a new energy source—coal and gas.  But coal is the remnant stock of lush forests, trees that once stood like noble giants. To unearth this black substance buried deep in the ground, mountains have been disfigured, waters polluted, forests stripped bare, lungs blackened—and, last but not least, vast amounts of CO₂ released into the atmosphere.  If the spirits of the deceased plants could speak, those were their forms of protest for being displaced from their sacred resting place.  But the modern individual, engrossed in progress, technology, and growth, remained oblivious to the pleas of the ancient beings. 

The powerful new energy unearthed had to be matched by higher levels of production and consumption.  The Europeans, driven by dreams of raw resources, precious metals, and free land, braved the deep sea for expansion.  In their footsteps, virgin forests were cleared to make way for planting monocrops, native animals that once roamed freely were hunted down to extinction, and indigenous tribes who stewarded the land and the animals were enslaved or decimated.  With unprecedented capacity to turn earth, beings, and fellow humans into “productive inputs,” the curtain on the era of global capitalism lifted.

Fueled by coal and oil, this new phase of economic surplus ignited a wave of linguistic expression. While Charles Dickens documented the urban poor during the industrial revolution, many of his fellow novelists focused on the bourgeois female.  From Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, Flaubert’s Modam Bovary, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Jane Austen’s Elizabeth and Emma, these middle-class heroines captivated their readers with their uniquely ambivalent and contradictory status. On one hand, they enjoyed the leisure and security to contemplate, spared from being in the front line of conquest and expansion. On the other hand, their sensitive feminine souls faced the overreaching tentacles of a property society that commodified even intimate relations. Marrying into money and producing an heir to safeguard family fortune indeed overshadowed all other considerations, for the pursuit of all things beautiful like hinged upon that material foundation.

The most riveting of those figures are the women who, despite securing loyal, rich, and reasonable husbands, still feel restless and discontented.  What could possibly still be the matter—maybe the faint recollection of ancient memories flashing back on hot summer night. In the much earlier hunting and gathering eras, females made expeditions into the wild, experienced love and sex as decoupled from material security and social success, travelled wide and far to see canyons and bison, related to both genders in parity, and communed with the spirits dwelling in nature. Although such a life had long been forgotten, those literary heroines might still sense, deep in their DNA, that something is amiss despite all the comforts and conveniences of modernity.

Simultaneously, a substantial collection of Enlightenment texts arose, proclaiming that God is dead and reason will reign supreme. Yet those writings did not advocate for a union with the earth or the inviolability of all things and beings. Their rational, abstracted, and masculine principles gave rise to the modern individual---now a biological entity ruled by a highly calculative mind, adept at rational analysis in a universe devoid of temporality, place, and emotion, and under the trinity of the market, state, and scientism.

Among 18th-19th century European thinkers, Marx was exceptional in identifying alienation at a time that celebrated wealth and progress. However, he was also a proponent of large-scale production, which lends itself to a strong centralized state that was inimical to individual autonomy and civic solidarity.  Neither he nor his liberal opponents talked much about the birds, the forests, or the spirits that dwell in the rivers and valleys: an interconnected, holistic person in a sacred world was not their thing.

In this latest phase of surplus amassing, some forms of corrective had to emerge, much as they did before.  Consequently, the more progressive and compassionate side of the Enlightenment discourse championed human rights, social welfare, state regulation, and cultural endowment. Yet none of them dwelled on love—the kind that supersedes time to heal the past and uplift the future.

With the survival of humanity now hanging in the balance in the Anthropocene, we are once again desperate for narratives capable of confronting the traumas that gave rise to civilization and ensuring that its horrors are never repeated. Hopefully, this time, such narratives will serve not as instruments of control or sedation, but as tools wielded to transform the violent inner logic of human civilization

Once the unthinkable really happens, language might just become superfluous.  Time will be the series of present moments filled with joy in the soul and righteousness toward all beings.  Real wealth is the connection with and commitment to one another we try to work on and grow, right now and here, both immediately gratifying and at the same time forever valuable.  Our children will be cared for as sacred and precious beings from the outset, not as human resource or labor force, ruler and subject, superior and inferior, rich and poor.  In such a world, there will be abundant love and time, to feel the caress of the wind in the field, gaze at the twinkling stars in the sky, and treat every creature and person as divine. Children in such a world will sustain no injury, and thus will need no elaborate tales of healing and promise.  

Without fear or insecurity, the only thing left is mortality, but death in such a place is an extension of life.  For the physical body will decompose to nourish other living organisms just as noble plants and animals die to sustain us each day. The energy and time devoted to bringing joy and honor to all—the young and the old, men and women, the able and the dependent—those acts will also not fade but endure in the heart of hearts. In such a world, there is no death, and in such a world, language as we know it will be superfulous.  In such a world, when we talk about love, we may not need to say much at all.

In short, the commons are resources or things that are open to all and governed communally.   

The term originates from early feudal England, when vast tracts of hinterland surrounding the noble’s manorial estates were used by peasants for grazing, foraging, and other subsistence activities as they saw fit. These shared lands became known as "the commons," understood as resources that belonged collectively to everyone.

Within the medieval economy, which functioned on principles of subsistence and local exchange, these commons were often well-preserved. Similarly, in hunter-gatherer societies, people took only what they needed from the land, neither commodifying natural resources nor exploiting them for profit. This non-accumulative approach not only sustained humans but also maintained ecological balance, contrasting sharply with modern extractive economies.

The relative ease with which peasants fed themselves through the commons unsettled the establishment, culminating in the infamous Tragedy of the Commons essay. Driven by a neo-Malthusian fear of overpopulation—which framed the poor as greedy and multiplyng drainers of resources—the author argued for enclosing the commons and converting them into private property. By making necessaities scarce, the theory went, the impoverished would be compelled to work hard and have less babies, ostensibly curbing population growth. Fortunately, this bleak and groundless narrative was decisively refuted by Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. Through meticulous research, Ostrom demonstrated that commons throughout history have been successfully managed by communities—not as sites of inevitable tragedy, but as sustainable systems of collective governance.

Central to her work is the rejection that individuals are inherently selfish free-riders who will exploit resources to no end. Instead, Ostrom revealed when people are given a high stake in their communities, they become become capable, empathetic agents who can self-organize and govern from bottom up. Her eight core principles for managing common-pool resources provide a blueprint for achieving inclusion, ecological conservation, and equitable distribution—all without relying on either competitive privatization or top-down state control.

Now that we know what the commons is, why do we need an index for it?

Mainstream economic indicators like the GDP does not take into account important things like communal and ecological health, perpetuating a model of material growth that is putting us on a path toward irreversible environmental destruction.

In contrast, a commons-based index would track the proportion of community-governed resources and services within an economy. Unlike GDP's narrow focus, this framework recognizes that every vital system—from healthcare and housing to education, transportation, knowledge, and even finance—could be organized as commons. By implementing such an index, we create a measurable pathway toward an economy of collective abundance rather than private accumulation, where universal access replaces artificial scarcity.

How does this process work?

1.     Phasing out big Corporations.

The existence of large corporations depend on two key conditions: the private extraction of shared natural resources (as with Koch Industries and Chevron’s oil empires) and the intense exploitation of workers (as perfected by Amazon and Walmart).

The alternative? Reclaim these vital systems as commons—following Norway’s model of public oil stewardship or the collaborative resource-sharing of hunter-gatherer societies. Such a shift would dismantle the corporate stranglehold on our economy

In their place, a decentralized economy would thrive—one where cooperatives, local businesses, and community-led self-managing enterprises flourish.

The result? A society that is ecologically sustainable, politically democratic, and economically vibrant by design—not by accident. 

2.     Injecting more democracy in economic life: The commons model advances democracy in economic life by mandating inclusion, transparency, accountability, and participation—core principles that strengthen democratic governance beyond the political sphere. When organizations collectively govern shared resources, they cultivate the habits of collaboration and responsible stewardship in everyday economic decision-making. This daily practice of negotiating access, managing assets, and resolving conflicts transforms abstract democratic ideals into lived experience. By grounding democracy in material realities—from water systems to open-source platforms—the commons reinforces civic skills while redistributing power from centralized institutions to participating citizens. In this way, democracy grows stronger not just through elections or laws, but through the multitude ways people organize their economic lives together.

3.     Decoupling growth from wellbeing: Unlike GDP, which is a crude aggregator of monetary transactions, the Commons Index operates as a ratio, measuring the health of shared resources under the principles of inclusion, equality, and participatory governance. Its purpose is to redefine progress: not by the volume of goods produced or consumed, but by the equitable distribution and stewardship of what sustains us. A robust commons achieves what GDP cannot—it guarantees abundant community access to resources while preserving them indefinitely. These conditions naturally generate sustainability and replace growth compulsions with circular stewardship. Where GDP demands more, the Commons Index ensures enough for all, always.

What else do we know?

The commons movement has steadily grown in momentum, and now is the moment to accelerate its rise with a tangible framework: the Commons Index. More than just a metric, this is a transformative concept—one that could redefine our collective political identity. By embedding it in constitutional principles and eventually even national immigration policy, we institutionalize the values of shared stewardship, equitable access, and intergenerational responsibility. The Commons Index isn’t merely a tool for measurement; it’s a blueprint for a just and sustainable humanity.

With this index, we will hear conversations like:

—Oh man, I am so glad I live in a place with such a high C index. Everything feels so easy, people are relaxed, and they talk with each other all the time, I have a lot time, and I don’t need earn a lot of money to feel secure and fulfilled.

—See, once you go commons you never go back!

—Word!***

***Special thanks to Beyond Economism Berlin for this essay.

Although already expecting a large crowd due to Saito’s rising fame, I was still surprised to see the giant auditorium seething with people before the event even began.

The rock-star-style reception is entirely fitting for this young 36-year-old scholar, given that it was here in Berlin that he did his research as a PhD student. The countless hours he spent poring over Marxist texts and discussing them in reading groups back then laid the groundwork for degrowth communism in his latest book. The publication has already sold over 500,000 copies in Japan and earned him a featured profile in The New York Times.

The event was moderated by journalist Marlene Gürgen. Ms. Gürgen, who had a straightforward and no-frills style, deserves much credit for posing good questions from the onset.

She first asked about Saito’s background and how he devoted himself to exploring Marx’s critique of growth.

To this question, Saito took time to elaborate, recounting a list of events that “radicalized” him. They include the 2008 financial crisis, the Fukushima nuclear disaster, the Fridays for Future movement, and most recently, the pandemic--each one vividly exposing the failings of capitalism and deepening his desire to work on solutions.

At this point I was beaming with approval. As Marx famously said: “The philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways….. The point, however, is to change it.”

Next, the moderator addressed the elephant in the room, asking him about the centrality of economic production in traditional Marxist thought. 

This was my burning question all along.  My understanding of historical materialism posits that each generation of human society moves progressively toward a more advanced stage, ultimately culminating in communism. The driver for this process is none other than the advancement in productivity and output.  Therefore, growth for Marx was both inevitable—history would unleash more productive forces regardless of our feelings and wishes, and ideal—since this steady march could enable humans to achieve the best form of society. 

Saito’s attempt to overturn this dominant Marxist narrative was long-winded, detailed and ultimately not completely satisfactory, though for reasons beyond his book.

According to Saito, Marx was in crisis after writing chapter 1 of Das Capital, because he began to read natural science and became deeply disturbed by the metabolic rift that capitalism creates in the interaction between men and nature (Stoffwechsel).  These unsettling thoughts about the environment weighed heavily on him and were found in the all-important notebooks that didn’t publish properly.  This is, with gross simplification—the gist of Saito’s argument.

At this juncture, it all came down to how much I was amenable to this revision and its implications.

In many ways, I would endorse Saito simply for the recommendations that result from his theory. In essence, degrowth people need to turn away from individualist, depoliticalized solutions and embrace revolutionary politics. Conversely, socialists need to take economic downsizing seriously and avoid falling into production-centric approaches in their pursuit of justice and equality. 

All of this makes perfect sense intuitively, but if an extensive academic tome is needed to legitimize this alliance, so be it and all the more power to Saito.  For me, the political message is so good that it is worth repeating 100 times, especially when groups that challenge the status quo are so often splintered and fragmented. 

On the other hand, even Marx the closeted ecologist cannot save Marx the failed political strategist. The faultline is made conspicuous by Saito’s open admission that his book does not deal with power. 

The hard truth is most people these days are not keen on overthrowing capitalism, despite all the evidence linking it to the state of planetary emergency.  But unfortunately this is nothing new, for in the last several centuries the predicted uprising from an international proletarian class also didn’t materialize, not in Western nations nor in Russia or China.

Could it be that material conditions—either the oppressive factories in industrial England or the burning flame of the planet—actually do not determine our consciousness, but only a massive shift in consciousness itself does?

If so, Saito may simply have hopped on the wrong train despite doing great work to make Marx sexier than ever.  The real task would be to chart Marx—a materialist with a strong inclination toward scientism, a 19th-century European male inevitably influenced by his era of competition and imperialism—against the entirety of humanity's traditions, experiences, and wisdom in sustainability.  Given this context, is reading and reading Marx the best avenue for reshuffling human consciousness? 

I would wage an entirely different bet.  The roots of our current-day environmental crisis extend all the way back to the Neolithic Revolution, a pivotal moment that ushered in the type of complex societies that has persisted to this day, along with their permanent features of environmental degradation, hierarchy, warfare, patriarchy, and inequality.  Yet since that turn, nearly every culture and society has fought to push back, leaving behind a wealth of tools and inspirations, with Marxist thinking being just one among them.

The fight is still on and the point is still to change it all.

But let us first return to the beginning.

Before 10,000 BCE, humans by and large did not possess the technology to manipulate plant and animal life. They were forced to follow fresh food supply in a nomadic lifestyle that inhibited storage and accumulation.  In this non-possessive economy, instant usage called for sharing and redistribution, since goods would either quickly perish or be burdensome to carry.

When non-accumulating hunter-gatherers gave up mobility, a healthy lifestyle, and leisure for surplus, ownership and hoarding became possible, necessary, and lucrative.  Yet there was only so much even the largest granary or animal pen could keep.  In addition, an expiration date hangs over all organic matter, which by nature ages and degrades constantly. But with the invention of money, which stores and holds value in an abstract universe, those spatial and temporal limits got expanded.   But accumulation inevitably leads to scarcity, for the more goods and resources someone captures, the more deprived and poor others will be.  Consequently, inequality and poverty would shoot up.

In addition to storing value, money is used for accounting, for it measures worth in very accurate terms.  But such tallying is precisely what does not happen in relationships of love and trust. Would you send a bill to your children showing how much it cost in total, including the time and labor, to raise them? Would you create a total invoice of how much time and money you spent taking care of your family? In fact, the need to pay is already a clear sign that the two sides are like strangers, who can walk out of these responsibilities according to remuneration.  Precise accounting—how much do you owe me so I can pay off and never talk to you again—reflects the lack of love and trust in anonymous or fleeting relations. In enduring bonds and strong communties, there is no need to count constantly and accurately when it comes to favors and assistance because it is taken for granted that everyone is doing their best and giving what they can. When people begin to charge and pay for service and deeds via money, loyalties and ties dissolve and are replaced by fickle commercial exchange. 

Indeed, history illustrates the spread of massive impersonal exchanges enabled by coinage—the financing of bureaucracy and the army. These two institutions carried out extraction and violence for the ruler, pulling people out of their communal bonds and subjugating them to taxation and enslavement.  Wars and tribute in turn generated more fiscal income. This vicious cycle is what David Graeber calls the military-coinage-slavery complex of antiquity. In this light, the wave of monetarization contributed to inequality and penury, hollowed out local kinship, and accelerated imperial expansion.  

The generations who lived in the first millennium must have been stunned by the level of creativity and destruction they witnessed.   

In the Yellow River basin, craftsmen produced intricate oracle bones and majestic bronze musical instruments to facilitate the communication with ancestral gods. But technology and wealth did not usher in peace, rather, strife tore apart the social fabric of the Zhou dynasty, giving rise to warring states.  On the Indian subcontinent, Vedic texts paid reverence to nature and cosmic events, but the priests, the brahmins—those supposedly in close touch with godhead—presided over the subjugation of an untouchable caste.  Along the Aegean Sea, a group of men inhabiting the Attika peninsula declared themselves to be a democratic entity, yet its navy bullied other Greek city-states for tribute money, while thousands of captured slaves mined for silver at Laurion.  On the Italian peninsula, the Roman republic was created under the power of the senate and the people. But centuries later, glory, honor, and the vows against tyranny faded. With money and soldiers, the Romans brought vast Mediterranean territories under the authority of the emperor.

It was the best and the worst of times, and the most confusing of times. 

Amidst this mixing of reason and cruelty, technology and misery, some individuals did not buy into the loud victory of our second nature and started to push back.   

In the Far East, an itinerant teacher traveled from kingdom to kingdom, preaching benevolence and loyalty.

To the west, a prince meditated under a tree, declaring that what surrounded him was nothing but illusion and suffering.  Farther west, a master of dialogue wandered around the agora like a gadfly, rebuking sophistry and seeking truth through inquiry. Later in Judea, a boy was born in a stable, and he promised love and redemption from God.

Their names were Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, and Jesus.  They witnessed a world shaped by violence, scarcity, and exclusion, a world so unbearable after humans had evolved for millions of years to thrive in love, solidarity, and equity.

The subsequent religious and philosophical traditions they initiated sought a return of the sages, the state of nirvana, an intellectual journey guided by knowledge, and the divine grace of God. 

Welcome to the Axial Age.

It was the best and the worst of times, and the most confusing of times. 

In future posts, we will look closely at each of those responses that emerged in different parts of the world.  We will discover that some remedies to the Neolithic turn were offered, they were also half-starts and reversals. 

As it turns out, agricultural societies not only paid close attention to land productivity but also human reproduction. The reasons for this are quite intuitive. In earlier times, foraging bands consisting of 50-100 individuals functioned as an extended kinship group that pooled in resources for everyone’s diverse needs such as childcare, elderly support, and assistance during sickness. However, such a network of mutual aid, operating under the principle of "all for one, one for all," was no longer readily available to those Neolithic societies held together in a vertical hierarchic structure by ideology, coercion, and taxation. Without external support, each family had to rely on their next generation to care for aging members and to safeguard family possession. In this way, reproduction becomes a matter of survival and wellbeing. A woman who changes her affections or allegiances could potentially divert resources to those outside the family. Consequently, to secure the financial future of the household, strict control over women became necessary.

Indeed, in the first set of codified laws promulgated by King Ur-Nammu of Sumer, a new gender-specific crime emerged: females who dared to seek pleasure outside of marriage received the death penalty. Presumably, such behavior was deemed so detrimental and threatening to the stability of the social order that it was a matter of concern to institutions of public judiciary. Similar laws concerning adultery with disproportionately harsh penalties for women emerged consistently in early societies across China, India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt—all regions known for intensive agriculture that generated large economic surplus.

The transformation of women into subjects of control was often accompanied by their vilification in cultural narratives. In ancient Greek poetry, the first woman became a symbol of malevolence. According to Hesiod, one of the earliest known literary voices, representing a diligent farmer that tilled the land and disdained laziness, the female race was sent to bring pain and mischief upon men. In the Old Testament, a text fixated on the "promised land" with constant references to wheat, barley, and livestock, Eve was created from Adam's rib, inverting the natural order where men actually come out women's wombs. Not only is Eve portrayed as subsidiary part to her husband, but she is also blamed for humanity's fall from Eden.

Demystified Life

Once upon a time, life was shrouded in profound mystery. Plants would magically sprout from the earth, while herds of reindeer and mammoths would race through valleys from distant plains, as if descending from the heavens. In this astonishing world that was magical like a dream, human were born, yet no one could fathom their origins or destinies. Only awe and reverence were appropriate for the sacred and inviolable forces that animated life.

However, farming and herding forged the first step in unraveling the secrets of procreation. Man could now cultivate plants, breed cattle, and even make new life into the world at will. Paramount to this all was the ability to manipulate nature, tame animals, and exert control over the female.

The Rise of Patriarchal Power

With a few special exceptions, rulers in the Neolithic age were unquestionably men, thereby imbuing the apex of power with a distinct male identity in civilization even well into the 20th century. Male domination at the family level is apparent through the authoritative position of the paternal figure within the household, whose authority extended to encompass not only the wife but also the children, crops, and livestock, all of which were recognized as his private possessions by social institutions. When patriarchal notions converge with authoritarian rule, a Chinese dynasty comes into existence. Its emperor, who is ordained as the son of heaven, exercises the power of life and death over everything under the sky in his domain and is literally called Lord Father (君父). One of his most important jobs is to continue the blood lineage by producing a biological male successor so all his subjects will never suffer the “sorry” fate of not being ruled.

The Flight of Love and Passion

In unions focused on safeguarding family assets and ensuring the birth of future offspring, love and passion have no room to grow. Love thrives on mutual respect, while passion is fueled by unpredictability and spontaneity, all of which are out of place in a patriarchal household. Instead, female virtues such as modesty, chastity, and faithfulness were invented. These ideological tools—despite being introduced only with coming of the Neolithic age—were made to look so natural and inevitable. They functioned like invisible constraints, stripping women of their independent purpose, autonomous power, and self-fulfillment. A women’s worth was judged by how well she cooked, cleaned, and did childcare during the day and how well she pleased her partner and conceived babies at night. In a regrettable twist, women also served as a consolation ultimate prize for the hurt pride of the patriarchs lower on the social ladder. While they may be prostrating on the ground in the presence of the king, they can at least go home and enjoy a similar level of power over their wife and children within closed doors. So why go back to an earlier time of fierce egalitarianiam and gender equality when most men had the chance to behave like lords in their own homes?

Harari has posed the question of why women endured oppression across a wide range of societies throughout history, even in regions as culturally and politically distinct as democratic Athens and imperial China. The answer is straightforward. He focused exclusively on places that had already become delayed-return via the adoption of farming. The situation was quite different in the time of hunting and gathering, when the economy was non-possession. Recent studies reveal that women actively participated in hunting, a role previously attributed mainly to men. This discovery overturns the prevailing assumption that gender division led women to gather food while men assumed the more demanding and prestigious task of hunting animals.

In the non-possessive foraging societies in which women enjoyed much power and esteem, childbearing bore the characteristics of fewer in quantity but higher in quality. A study documenting the impact of adopting sedentary agriculture for previously hunting and gathering groups reveals a significant change: women began menstruating earlier and had three times more births on average.1 The reasons are simple. Agriculture artificially enlarged the food supply through the manipulation of nature. Yet this process was made possible by strenuous labor, that is, the increase of manpower. The new demand was being met by more frequent pregnancies, facilitated by a sedentary lifestyle that often confined women.

In contrast, foraging women, who maintained their mobility, breastfed their babies and carried them until at least the age of 2, creating incentives for fewer births. Youngsters didn't have to worry about loneliness because childcare was a collective effort within the kinship group, so there were always others around to be doting grandparents, caring aunts and uncles, and fun playmates. Growing up in this nurturing social environment encouraged sharing, reciprocation of love, and empathy for large range of personalities. This combination of smaller population, sustainable lifestyle, deep collaboration, and social emotional well being is precisely what many of us want, and it is only being partially realized 10,000 years later in a handful of socialist democratic nations with high levels of female education and gender equality.

For most of the two million years of human existence, our survival relied on hunting and gathering. It was only about 10,000 years ago, that is, in the last 0.5% of our history, that society pivoted to sedentary agriculture.

Yet such a simple technical description fails to capture the profound shift in mindset for this change, much less the sweeping social economic transformation it ignited. The degree of this seismic revolution was so profund that it could be likened to Second Creation, one that was powerful enough to mold us into an entirely new species. From that point on, our nature was no longer self-evident and simple to see, and we began to inherit a world in which human civilization and innate calling were constantly in conflict.

From Non-Possession to Owning

In the hunting and gathering world, where food preservation technology, storage facility, and permanent dwelling were absent, labor revolved around immediate and exhaustive consumption. Essentially, it was work until there is enough for now, then keep enjoying it until it is depleted. While some experts refer to this economy as "immediate return," a more precise characterization would be "non-possession" due to absence of accumulation.

In contrast, farming embodies the concept of "delayed return." It introduces a substantial time gap between planting and harvest, compelling cultivators to focus on surplus and conceive the present as a step toward future gains.

By sowing the first seeds into the soil with the expectation of deferred rewards, humanity stepped across the threshold and shattered the equilibrium that had endured for millions of years. The early agriculturalists who initiated this transition, however, endured less healthy conditions, physical ailments and deformities, extended work hours, and also the threat of hunger and disease. As a result, this agricultural revolution, which marked the advent of the Neolithic age, has been labeled as "history's grand deception" by Yuval Harari and dubbed "the gravest mistake in the annals of human history" by Jared Diamond.

How could a seemingly innocuous shift in food technology lead to so much misfortune? 

Double Violence

To comprehend the transformation that occurred, it is crucial to reevaluate the concept of agriculture. In contrast to foraging, farming represents an endeavor to secure outcome through greater control and predictability. In an immediate-return world, nature dictates when, where, what kind, and how much sustenance is provided each day. To fight this inherent uncertainty, farmers sought to manipulate their environment so they could determine the quantity and variety of resources to their wish.

However, the apparent empowerment and progress came with through the use of extra force. In the past, the relationship between humans and nature was characterized by relative equality. Humans, despite their imagination and tool-making prowess, intervened only minimally, allowing plants and animals to follow their natural rhythms and habits. In return, nature provided readily available, highly nutritious sustenance "for free," that is, without demanding the price of the year-long toil of cultivation and herding. This mutual goodwill was based on the lack of domination on either side.

For agriculture to take place, nature’s sacredness and inviolability had to be relinquished. In many instances, farming commenced with the "clearing of land," involving the burning of native vegetation, drainage of excess water, and disruption of soil makeup. Once food was planted, native plants or "weeds" were eradicated, animals and pests were repelled, and rivers and streams were diverted from their course. By treating nature more as a resource to be manipulated for human purposes, punishment ensued: men and women found themselves engaged in laborious, repetitive, and monotonous tasks such as tilling, digging, raking, threshing, and so forth—activities that didn't agree with the phsyology of their bodies. Consequently, while agriculture could yield more food, it also necessitated strenuous toil, reduced leisure, and disciplined schedules—a far cry from a "free lunch." As others have suggested, it could very well be that humans were domesticated by the food they grew, as they lost mobility, freedom and a carefree mind, contrary to their own “false consciousness” of empowerment and progress.

The Birth of Ownership

But the story doesn’t end with more work. As the economy shifted from non-possession to ownership, the social dynamic underwent a profound transformation. Previously, whatever men and women hunted or foraged was distributed throughout the group to meet the rhythmic pulse of hunger. Sharing was not only celebrated but also practical; unconsumed food would spoil quickly, and surplus possessions hindered mobility. In this way, resources easily belonged to the group as collective goods.

Farmers and herders believed they deserved more because of their hard labor. They also felt a need to accumulate as a safeguard against natural disasters—even though their own practices, like irrigation and land clearing, often contributed to those very disasters and whose impacts could easily be avoided by relocation.

The new relationship is no longer characterized by reciprocity and redistribution, for owners seek exclusive rights that are not subject to the claims, needs, or conservation efforts of others.

Thus, with a sharpened desire to produce, an increased vulnerability to calamities, and an emerging concept of private property, the foraging society's ethos of sharing was eclipsed by a new belief in self-reliance and individual entitlement.

The Paradox of Power

Shifting the balance away from nature and transitioning from non-possession to delayed-return set in motion a chain of reactions. Cultivators, for instance, required judges and courts to establish property laws—a matter of paramount importance. Yet for these rulings to hold weight, they needed effective enforcement, leading to the creation of police and security forces. A system of taxation was then needed to feed the judiciary and security personnel. Tribute collection, in turn, necessitated bureaucracy. This raised a final, crucial question: who was to manage this intricate network of judges, police, and administrators?

At this juncture, the demand for a potent ruler rose—one who possessed the authority to appoint officers and coordinate their efforts. To ensure compliance from individuals both near and far, the ruler had to establish a centralized government. This government rested on two foundations: a formidable army to suppress dissent and maintain territory, and a pervasive ideology to convince the populace that the state, personified in the ruler, was essential for peace and prosperity. Over time, a system of formal social distinctions was introduced to exalt the ruler while assigning specific roles to the rest of the population. This pattern bears a resemblance to George Orwell's portrayal in Animal Farm, where the dogs eliminate those who defy authority while the shrewd Squealer concocts falsehoods to manipulate the masses, until one day a new commandment appears on the wall proclaiming "pigs are more equal."

In rich riverine areas that supported intensive agriculture—such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China—a pyramid-shaped social hierarchy emerged during the Neolithic era. At the top was the supreme ruler, below whom were magistrates, judges, and officials. Further down were priests and scribes, who handled propaganda and administration, followed by soldiers who enforced the ruler’s will. The broad base of this social pyramid consisted of the farming population.

In this way, the change in relationship with nature, initiated by usurping power from plants and animals, fundamentally transformed human society. This twist carried a profound sense of irony, because those at the forefront of manipulating the natural environment ultimately found themselves subjugated by a small group of elites who placed them at the bottom of the food chain.

A even deeper irony comes from the fact that the exploited peasants could not do with out their oppressor. This dependence stemmed from a simple fact: the system of ownership was unsustainable without the "law and order" imposed by the ruling class. Based on this logic, when a peasant prostrates before a magistrate, it is not sheer servitude or stupidity. The downtrodden had tangible, if tragic, reasons to be grateful to the ruler, for they desperately needed the social contract forged by the Neolithic Revolution to work—a contract spurred by surplus and sustained by the hierarchy that manages it.

So once again, why didn’t people simply abandon farming and revert to the earlier hunter-gatherer life, as Harari has asked? First, scaling back on power and innovation is inherently difficult. At the same time, farmers could always pin their hope on a benevolent ruler—a notion actively cultivated by the prevailing religio-political discourse. In addition, any perceived failings of the system could be conveniently blamed on corrupt officials, malevolent spirits, evil women, or other scapegoats. In practical terms, a return was often hard to achieve; the native ecosystems that had once supported foraging were often degraded and would require generations to recover. Most profoundly, however, people had become psychologically acclimated to busy labor, hierarchy and top-down command, gradually losing the imagination and skills for rebuilding a society based on voluntary association, mutual aid, and harmony with nature.

In this way, the Neolithic Revolution initiated a radical transformation of the human condition. The reciprocal and inclusive spirit of a more leisurely and egalitarian existence yielded to systems of domination and exclusive rights, a shift accelerated by the rise of calculative thinking and technology. From that point forward, the fabric of human life was woven with the threads of hierarchy, social stratification, centralization, patriarchy, manipulative ideology, and environmental decline.

This very reality lays the foundation for Rousseau's famous declaration:

"man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains."

To be precise, while humans were inherently free, their misunderstanding about surplus led them to inadvertently forge their own chains in the name of progress

In the upcoming posts, we will explore the dynamics of human nature as complex societies emerged in the Bronze Age. Although the earliest evidence of agriculture dates back as far as 10,000 years ago, its adoption was gradual and uneven,1 making its social and political impact difficult to track. However, around 3,000 years ago, farming accelerated with the discovery of fertile soil and irrigation technology in the riverine regions of Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, and China. This led to a significant increase in economic surplus, prompting the invention of writing, which in turn provides us with a detailed picture of the shift from non-possession to owning economy.

“Those who control the present control the past, and those who control the past control the future.”

― George Orwell

The Option Outside the Farm

There is a past that lies in obscurity, buried in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, unbeknownst even to the author himself.  

In the story, a group of farm animals realize they are being abused and enslaved, and this new political consciouness prompts them to rebel. After successfully expelling the owner, they declare themselves to be an animal-only republic.  Unfortunately, the pigs, who have masterminded the revolution, morph into tyrants over time.  In the end, ordinary animals are being exploited and oppressed even more, and in addition, they are being manipulated into thinking life is better in the new regime of the pigs. 

While the warning against how power corrupts and how utopia could translate into hell is insightful, Orwell’s fable glides over an option that would eliminate tyranny forever. We should ask if the animals could liberate themselves and go on living as they wish, wouldn’t they want to just go back to where they, i.e. the wilderness?  For sure the farm was not conceived with the well-being or interest of the animals in mind; instead, it prospered at their expense.

Some might point out they will get eaten by predators in the wild. But this is like comparing the worst of nature with the best of domestication.  Although dangers and challenges abound in wilderness, it is still the ONLY place that can provide uncompromised freedom, autonomy, and dignity to animals.  While a farm can be seemingly bountiful and secure, it rests on hard labor, artificial elements, and ultimate slaughter, not to mention the incentives for abuse, as Orwell effectively illustrates.

Buck and His Calling

Furthermore, it is wrong to assume that the animals would be utterly powerless in nature.  If they have the political cognition and intelligence to stage a successful revolt as in the novel, then they would also have the wisdom to figure out how to rehabilitate themselves.  But in the narrative they are occupied by a singular purpose: the pursuit of agricultural output and productivity.

In Jack London's The Call of the Wild, the protagonist, a dog named Buck, embarks on an journey of near-death encounters and epic adventures, ultimately going back to the woods. A primal urge to embrace his rightful place in the universe stirs within him and urges him to forsake the life of control and dependency in the man-made world—no matter how luxurious, comfortable, or loving. In the end, he chooses to sleep under the open sky, watch squirrels play, and listen to the sound of the running creek.

If it is optimal for animals to live in a way that befits their nature, then what about humans?  As much as we might possess more complex features and needs, aren’t we not still a part of the biological world? If so then what is our true nature and what is most natural to us?

As Bulk discovers how he truly wants to live after sampling a myriad of existences, we too can examine our rich and diverse historical past for the same search. This becomes especially true when, after years of continuous effort to expand, develop, and advance, we have not reached the end of history but a set of interconnected crises that imperil our very survival. Is it possible that we have misunderstood our nature and the right way to be from the outset?

Keeping this perspective in mind, the blog will visit different periods of world history with a fresh outlook, seeking to find out which developments align with our nature and which ones alienate us from it.

To continue reading this post, please click on the part-2 link below.