What I will write, will seem like an attack on the sun-worshipers. And it is. I do not like them, I truly don’t. I curse the name of Gilgamesh, I hate all fascists. But here one also needs to love the fascist, to dance with the devil. After all, this series is about saying “yes”, as much as possible. The legacy of the first city-states might be one of chains, but look at what they built. The awesome ziggurats lining the skyline. Fields of grain as far as the eye can see. The writing of the first epic. The first code of law. My god, the genius of it, the effort it must have taken to coordinate all that. The image of a God-King with the sun behind him is archetypal for a reason. There is joy in mastery, and the God-King is one of the highest degrees of mastery possible. All that terrible power, right at your fingertips.
“Wait, I thought this series is about liberty? Wasn’t all this accomplished by slavery?”
There is a scene in Ender’s Game, where the titular character has been training to fight against an alien race. When they were destroyed, the obliteration of an entire race of sentient beings, was when he knew them the best. In that moment, he loved them. There is a strategic component here, yes, but also it immunizes you against turning into Robespierre, or worse, reddit atheists.
“What if my enemies are completely unlovable, valueless scum, beneath contempt?”
Then choose better enemies.
With that out of the way, we can begin to examine how in the holy hell does someone convince someone else to build temples. Ask yourself — would you like to toil towards someone else’s grand project, day after day, seeing only sustenance pay as your reward, being treated as less than human. That notion seems absolutely absurd!
Towards answering this question, we need to meet two archetypal figures — the priest and the shaman. They fulfill very similar roles in a community, but towards slightly different ends. They both are associated with healing — both placebo effect (they are always unusually charismatic), but also knowledge of medicinal plants. But most importantly, they are a cultural infection vector. They are there to meme people into cohesion within the society they lived in. Propagandists (this term is used in the original, value neutral context), professional charlatans. They conduct important societal rituals, such as funerals, weddings, appeals to deities but also remembering and recording the past.
The median shaman is an outcast, is respected, despised and feared all at the same time, deeply charismatic, employs parlor tricks and utilizes various methods to invoke abnormal subjectivities. This could be anything from ingesting narcotic substances, controlled dreaming, still contemplation, or extended repeated activity, such as ritualized dancing. These are utilized as a break from normal experience, to deepen the connection to the other side, to cross the threshold, if one wanted to evoke Campbell. All change is traumatic by nature, and trauma helps lessons stick. The bigger the trauma, the bigger the possible change. One can imagine scuffing up a cast iron pan before seasoning, so oil can flow into the resulting pores and form a polymer coat. The rituals they conduct and the knowledge they impart are local in nature, and specific in character. They are tied to the local landscape — both in geography and in their ideas. They conjure forth a layer between people and the world, they overcode our experience. For example, they invent methods to overcome harmful bias — when out hunting large game in tundra, animals often move in ways designed to trick any trackers. Here, a brilliant ritualistic invention is made — one makes a bone charm which is supposed to show the direction of the animal, but functions as a randomness generator, to counteract the deliberate obfuscation. Of course, the hunter does not see it this way, for him, it is pure sorcery. This does increase the odds of a successful hunt, and it is important to understand that it would not function without the “useless magic” part. If you know that the result is simply random, you will find it far more difficult to follow the advice. While I characterized them earlier as charlatans (which they are to a fairly large degree, as demonstrated in the previous couple sentences), each shaman still fears other shamans and their power. An Inuit shaman remarked privately to an anthropologist that while he does not believe in the things he preaches to the villagers, he still thinks there is an underlying force that is embodied in nature.
The (always sun-!)priest, while sharing many of the above characteristics, is most importantly backed by a bunch of men who are very good at putting sharp sticks through people. If a village of people didn’t like their shaman, and decided they had enough of him, they could just go and either drive him out, or kill him outright. This is especially if they thought the shaman no longer had any perceived power left, since the main defense against the mob was that of curses. Any advice the shaman gave damn better lead to good outcomes, or he gets the axe. The priest has far more leeway, and if things go wrong, it can be more safely blamed on other factors, like sinful citizens. This means that the priest does not need to maximize the wellbeing of the community, but merely assure that the men with pointy sticks keep backing him. Hence, it is of the utmost importance that the men with pointy sticks get paid, which means you need to make sure that the people you converted stay converted. Flourishing becomes merely an instrumental goal. This is heightened by the fact that it’s hard to get people to live in cities, work on some damn ziggurat 14 hours a day, and probably get human sacrificed at some point in the near future.
Here, one of the priest’s main tools, which has been used time and time again, is the duality of Cooked-Uncooked. Civilized-Uncivilized. Citizen-Barbarian. This distinction can be largely boiled down to those who pay taxes, and those who don’t. Early states were almost always limited primarily by manpower. This is not to overstate the power of these early memes — they were primitive and simply not strong enough to bind people. Nor did the state provide enough benefits for most of its workforce, so almost all labor was coerced. This meant that people exited from state rule all the time — they simply went to places that were less legible to states. The easiest example is the terrain and territory that they inhabit. People near states that are not under state control live in places that are difficult to control and navigate. This could include hills, but also swamps and tundra. In a swamp, one needs to know precisely what ways are navigable, and what are not, otherwise one ends up drowning. Note here that these lands have low property value — that is because they tend to be difficult to operate in for states, since marching in an army with pointy sticks and maintaining supply lines is a logistical nightmare. We should also conceptualize the culture of these barbarians as illegible territory. They tend to be egalitarian, and not use things like honorifics. A lack of strict hierarchy makes each individual agent more robust. Nobody bows to no-one else. Some barbarians also reject writing, for example. A single road could have many different names, depending on where you are. The road running through two villages could be called “Lähtse road” in Kiili, and “Kiili road” in Lähtse. This is a problem for the early state, when every landmark and road has a dizzying amount of names it is difficult to keep records. Hence, the barbarian needs to be condemned, his way of life deemed as uncivilized. However, they are deeply interconnected, as often the relationships are symbiotic. Happy People, a documentary about Siberian peoples demonstrates this symbiosis excellently, although even they have been fairly civilized by historic standards. These methods of barbarian (nomadic!) resistance are always local, they are specific to the land, time and place.
“So, Rousseau is right about everything?”
No. To those uninitiated, Rousseau was an enlightenment writer who claimed that human is most happy in these shaman-barbarian societies. Not quite brute, not quite civilized man. He was more or less right on this account. But where he is completely and devastatingly wrong is that man is born free. Nothing could be further from the truth. We are flesh and blood, and require food and other biochemical necessities. We have psychological needs, most of us require companionship and love. And we are chained to our phenomenological experience — our subjectivity. Our experience is also rooted in time, we can not think outside of time. These are limiting the possible experiences we could have.
“Okay, but how can these barbarians help us live better lives?”
The first, and most important lesson is that of knowing both your swamp, and your priests. The state always needs to simplify, condense, legibilize. Use this to your advantage, and take the lesson from trickster-gods. “Do not throw me into the briar patch”, yells Br’er Rabbit, “Anything but that.” Any priest-conjured sun-god cult is bound to have cracks in which you can operate. Pay lip service, if you have to, but head for the briar patch if needed. Oftentimes, you have valuable things to offer as someone who is nominally outside the system and is not beholden to their taboos (jews and moneylending) or your territory might have unique resources to exploit (anything from slaves as manpower to providing mink fur).
The second is that not all chains are bad, not even all artificial chains. The shaman does in a very real way improve the lives of people around them. Here, one must be in close contact with oneself, to recognize what bolsters, and what suppresses oneself. Pick and choose, reject what is bad for you, but always keep trying new things and experimenting. Remember what all governments are in their heart, still those sun-god worshipers, with many layers of paint. This isn’t to say that things haven’t gotten better, or that they can not be useful at times, but one ought to be extra careful when dealing with them.
Where have all the shamans gone? While you can’t get away from priests these days (“Have you gone to therapy?” “Oh, that statement is problematic” “n race is the Glorious Race” ect.), most shamans seem to have disappeared. What seems to be their namesake, is turned into TV schlock (and it is easy to see that they stop being accountable to improved lives once they are on TV) in the form of ghost hunting shows, or even America’s Psychic Challenge. My grandparents have tales of local wise women, who procured cures for things that doctors could not. Here, we have the disintegration of local structures that afford shamans. Remember, that they are local, hidden, tucked away. We are increasingly disconnected and alienated from our surroundings, hence any shamans that would pop up are illegible to us. These are replaced with “alternative” medicines, which while providing a similar service, are usually far more exploitative towards their communities. Of course, all this is combined with increased legibility for the state — individuals have numbers that identify them, each birth is strictly tracked, we leave both digital and legal tracks everywhere. There is tremendous need for good shamans and barbarian territory these days, so go out, start a cult. What’s the worst that could happen.
Any questions, comments, accusations of cuckoldry and racial slurs can be directed @Childermass4 on twitter.
