Originally published in Man’s World Edition 3 and reprinted with kind permission of the editor. You can read it, along with dozens of incredible articles here A core principle of Western liberal politics, at least from the French Revolution, is the insistence that everyone is equal when our social roles are stripped away. The inherently horizontal nature of humanity is now the hegemonic view across most of the world and it’s hard for someone born and raised in modernity to think anything else. However, this was not always the dominant view and it demands closer scrutiny in light of our increased knowledge of prehistory and genetics. There are lurking questions across the fields of hunter-gatherer and early farming studies - how did social stratification occur and when? How was it maintained and developed, and what do these inequalities mean for us today?
fascinating post! would you be able to point me in the right direction of some more info on this:
"Sometimes women are violently initiated into the group, thus forcing her to guard the secret knowledge, but also trapping her somewhere between a biological female and a spiritual male"
i am writing a work of fiction that has such an incident, and i'd love to read more...
excellent post! I must admit, I do not love the idea that humanity was ruled by slavish dysgenic shaman cults for a hundred thousand years, with a few bronze age warriors breaking in only as a brief interlude. Surely some vitalist and noble tribes must have existed in the deep past?
Not sure I fully agree with your moral characterisations here. Warrior societies have clearly done awful things through history and the midwinter dog sacrifice sounds like it belongs more in the other family anyway.
Where would you place the 'enlightenment' societies and groups that contributed so much to human progress in the last 300 years? These were composed largely of young men and seem hierarchical to me but we're also not obviously warrior dominated, hereditary or characterised by biological fitness.
fascinating post! would you be able to point me in the right direction of some more info on this:
"Sometimes women are violently initiated into the group, thus forcing her to guard the secret knowledge, but also trapping her somewhere between a biological female and a spiritual male"
i am writing a work of fiction that has such an incident, and i'd love to read more...
Thank you!
Best substack poast I've read. Great work! What's the source of that Campbell quote? I'd like to read more.
Thanks for that.
There is some overlap with the spiteful mutant literature. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321955381_The_Mutant_Says_in_His_Heart_There_Is_No_God_the_Rejection_of_Collective_Religiosity_Centred_Around_the_Worship_of_Moral_Gods_Is_Associated_with_High_Mutational_Load
excellent post! I must admit, I do not love the idea that humanity was ruled by slavish dysgenic shaman cults for a hundred thousand years, with a few bronze age warriors breaking in only as a brief interlude. Surely some vitalist and noble tribes must have existed in the deep past?
Not sure I fully agree with your moral characterisations here. Warrior societies have clearly done awful things through history and the midwinter dog sacrifice sounds like it belongs more in the other family anyway.
Where would you place the 'enlightenment' societies and groups that contributed so much to human progress in the last 300 years? These were composed largely of young men and seem hierarchical to me but we're also not obviously warrior dominated, hereditary or characterised by biological fitness.