19 Models of Change Across Historical Epochs

One of the most striking ramifications of the Cycles of Thesis and Antithesis is the fungibility of human nature, the astonishing extent to which human values and behaviors are liable to change from era to era.

We’ve already visited one of my favorite examples, the city of Jahazpur India, in which the evidence for “introversion” as a human tendency is limited at best. At this point— with many chapters of solve analysis behind us— I can reveal my own explanation for the split between that mode of life and our own. Simply put, as an industrializing city in the developing world, Jahazpur is still more 3o than 3c. 3o individuals are pathologically bent towards seeking out the company of others, especially by finding durable formats through which the company of others can be made consistently available to them. While the activity of such a disposition is easy to spot when it operates on an individual level within our 3c milieu— some rare people seem to have a limitless appetite for the presence of others— a look backwards along the Ladder of Sublimation reveals this tendency can be a societal trait as much as a personal one.

One should, of course, control for the effect of the relative opulence of our modern times in making such a comparison; when whole families no longer need to share a single room for eating, sleeping, and all the necessities of life, it’s possible that latent norms of privacy emerge automatically from these new material conditions. But even the wealthiest aristocrats of the dwindling feudal age seemed to feel no compulsion towards privacy. Louis XIV, the Sun King, conducted not only the affairs of state but even his personal ablutions in front of his most favored courtiers, who were expected to stand witness each morning as he rose, bathed, defecated, broke his fast, and the like. As perhaps the most powerful monarch of Europe, he certainly could have afforded privacy; as his most powerful nobles, the men watching him could certainly have objected to the indignity of watching another man’s bowel movements. But neither side seemed at all scandalized by the arrangement— for them, it was completely normal.

A more potent example of the continental drift inherent to moral progress can be found in the comparison of an ancestor of the Sun King’s, the unfortunate Louis VII, with another military leader, Pompey the Great of the Roman Republic. Both men were confronted with rebellion: Pompey, in the slave uprisings of the Servile Wars; Louis with the rebellion of Champagne. Both men took radical, violent action to suppress said rebellion: Louis locked 1500 civilians in the town church of Vitry-en-Perthois, where they were burned alive; Pompey crucified 30,000 slaves along the Appian Way. And yet, their feelings about their actions could not have diverged further. Pompey, the heathen, boasted of his deeds, having them inscribed on monuments dedicated to his name. Though his crimes were only a fraction of the size, Louis, the Christian, was haunted by nightmares for the rest of his life, the sound of screams and the smell of burning flesh. Eventually he was driven to such guilt that he was forced to take up the sword and venture away from his kingdom on Crusade, in search of absolution.

Perhaps this gulf between the two men is not so strange, spanning as it does a religion and 1100 years; but it must certainly prompt some rethinking, either of the durability of human nature underneath conditioning, or of the profound differences in character from person to person. Naturally, I am inclined to point to the former notion— in my opinion, both Pompey and Louis VII were more representative of their milieu than they were exceptional.

Of course, if such titanic swings are a regular feature of moral evolution, we should not expect the individuals experiencing them to do so entirely unwittingly. The arts furnish us with plenty of depictions of moral evolution, but one of the most striking in my estimation is The Misanthrope of Moliere. This 17th century comedy of manners concerns Alceste, a French nobleman disgusted with the foppish insincerity of his fellows at court, who longs for a return for the martial virtues of the noblesse d’épée. While Alceste’s brusque sincerity is treated as a tragicomic consequence of his own inner nature— a kind of romantic Quixotism— a Framework-informed reading of the play reveals a remarkably straightforward account of a 3o man outnumbered within an increasingly 3c milieu. It’s an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.

Communism as an Artifact of Moral Drift

What I am hoping to construct through these examples is an argument against the immutability of human nature (an argument elsewhere taken as a premise of the Framework). The end I have in mind for this argument is, straightforwardly, to counter a few arguments which have gained widespread currency both online and elsewhere. The most significant of these— that Fascism is a latent product of immutable human tendencies which can only be opposed by instantiating whatever regime the speaker has in mind— I have already dealt with at significant length.

I will here address instead a less significant notion: that Communism is unfeasible because greed is an immutable element of human nature.

Now, I am not a Communist; I have never found a political ideology which sufficiently accords with the Framework for me to describe myself as an adherent of it. However, I agree with the broad strokes of Marx’s historical narrative; the way he “chunks things up” aligns well with the Framework, and any analysis which employs culture as a bellwether of societal organization will reveal that Capitalism is on its last legs. So this specific objection to Communism, that it will always collapse under the weight of the natural human desire for wealth and status, is something of a bugbear of mine.

If you’ve read through my book thus far, my objection to the premise is probably apparent enough. To wit:

1. Capitalism is not a natural arrangement of human affairs, but an entanglement of conformity and reward which emerges out of the constraints of 3c pathologization
2. Capitalism is a process of consolidation which culminates in Fascism, and in this way is always heading somewhere. Any narrative of Capitalism which takes Neoliberalism as its endpoint is naïve to the point of denial.
3. The lust for advancement which sustains Capitalist society and which causes “Communist” societies to devolve into authoritarianism is not a lust for physical possessions, but a lust for the status which these physical possessions imparts upon their owner. This bottomless lust for status is what 3c essentially consists of.
4. All of the “Communist” societies which have existed thus far have very obviously transitioned from Feudalism to Corporatism and thereby Fascism, by way of bourgeois revolution, and in no way resemble the model of Communist revolution which Marx lays out, even superficially.

These points have largely been made sufficiently elsewhere in the book. What I’d like to do here is employ the same comparison of multiple eras which I carried out in the first section of this chapter to see if we might arrive at a defense, not of Communism itself, but of the notion that human nature is fungible enough to potentially contain Communism.

The argument which sustains the notion that Communism is contrary to human nature is a straightforward one— human beings naturally seek to be rewarded for their efforts, and will create such a system of reward through the instantiation of corruption if the government fails to manifest one. This results in a one-two punch against Communism— firstly, that people like to be rewarded for their efforts, which means that incentivization will yield greater benefits to the economy than collectivization; secondly, that this desire for incentivization is strong enough to create shadow-economies even where it is disincentivized by government veto.

These arguments are most certainly true within a 3c milieu. Reward for one’s efforts is central to the 3c psyche, and the entanglement of this pathology and industrial progress leads to enormous physical plenty. Capitalist countries nakedly outcompeted “Communist” ones by giving free rein to these social forces.

However, what remains to be seen is the extent to which the entanglement of work and reward persists in the face of growing 3n inculcation. We have a great deal of reason to expect that it will not, or that it will be thoroughly modified. After all, in the previous regime of human organization— Feudalism— it was inverted.

This is where we return to the subject of this chapter, the enormous moral drift which occurs between eras of human history. It is difficult for us, with our firm grounding in the principle that hard work should yield proportional rewards, to understand the extent to which medieval people didn’t share this worldview. Keep in mind, this was not a sense of whether hard work did yield rewards— they knew, for instance, that sowing a field meant crops would grow; this is a basic facet of reality. Where they differed from us was that they lacked the moral notion that work should yield rewards proportional to how hard it was done.

In wrapping one’s head around this, there’s really no substitute for absorbing a good deal of medieval literature; there’s only so many times you can watch the hero of a piece beat a peasant and call him a base slave because he tills a field before you develop a sense for it. But, if you’re willing to accept it for the purposes of argument, what’s important to keep in mind is that the medieval world’s conception of economic justice was a direct inversion of our own.

The modern economic agent at the top of the default business hierarchy, the capitalist, is accorded his station in life because he undertakes risk. If his investments fail to bear fruit, he loses everything he put in. If they do succeed, he takes home the surplus. It is the willingness to undertake risk, this rare quantity in a Thanatos-repressing 3c society, which renders him deserving of elevation and status. The wage-worker, by contrast, takes home his pay at no risk; he will be paid for his exertions, and if he is not paid, he will not work. Because he does not assume risk, he receives no elevated status, either in terms of societal prestige or control of the company. The higher you rise through a hierarchy of submission and domination— from janitor to Fuhrer— the more power is granted to you, and the greater the cost of failure will be^[1].

By contrast, the economic agent at the top of the default medieval business hierarchy, the nobleman, assumes no risk in the proceedings. If the peasants cultivate a bumper crop, and their coffers overflow, he is to receive his standard tithe, and the peasants pocket the remainder. If the fields are overrun with pests, and the peasants verge on starvation, he still receives his standard tithe. The higher you rose through the hierarchies of Feudalism, whether secular or ecclesiastic, the more insulated you were from your own exertions. This was the natural outcome of a system composed of 3o individuals— they crave stability which is independent of their worth, and are therefore liable to reward the greatest stability to those at the apex of society. A prudent lord, one worthy of respect, is the one who— in a world of fractious, pugnacious, 3o risk-takers, constantly starting wars and shuffling territory around— simply stands aside and allows his peasants to get on with things.

There is no question that the 3c disposition is far superior in terms of generating physical abundance than the 3o one; this is a fact which is still demonstrated daily in the remaining 3o regions of the world. Doctors in South Africa, for example, have been known to remark that their careers are barely worth the effort they put into them, because their wages are immediately taken up and distributed as patrimony among their guilt-tripping extended families.

However, the generation of physical abundance is not the self-evident end of human life. When everyone in an economy is sufficiently well spoken-for, the effects of more consumption begin to diminish. The difference between a Toyota Camry and a Mazerati is smaller than the difference between a Camry and no car at all; and where a difference does pertain, it is first and foremost in the degree to which the car confers validation from others in the form of their awe at your achievement. That this validation is not a universally motivating quantity can be seen once again in the Feudal era— where, prior to the Black Death, even the wealthiest banker genuflected to the poorest noble— and in the straightforward rejection of material wealth within the hippie movement.

I am certainly not trying, with this argument, to suggest that we should all beat our keyboards into AK-47s with which to carry out a Communist insurgency; as I’ve said before, revolution is a bourgeois phenomenon, which tends inevitably towards authoritarian Fascism. What I am saying, though, is that as generation after generation is subjected to solve and more and more people come out the other side of adolescence 3n, we shouldn’t be surprised if the moral shocks inherent to such a shift are sufficient to tear apart many things that we currently take for granted— even things that we are content to put down to human nature.

Against Moral Relativity— They’re Your Ancestors Too

There is a pronounced tendency within academia to splinter things apart. It’s unlikely that you’ll find yourself sitting face-to-face with the foremost expert on the Javanese; but to find yourself sitting next to the foremost expert on Javanese traditions of micro-beadery, and their relationship to the intergenerational instantiation of the Divine Feminine, is downright plausible.

This fragmentation results from straightforward incentives. The more facets of a subject are worthy of particularization, the more jobs can be carved out of the bloated carcass of the university. From the perspective of a line-item, four experts on the Andes is a redundancy; one expert each on Andes North, South, Central, and Widdershins feels more reasonable. In the handing out of plaudits too, fragmentation is essential; if you can’t be the foremost expert on something, at the very least you have your own take on it.

By the same token, generalizing narratives are despised with a ferocity which academics can muster for little else. Every culture is utterly unique and cannot be reduced to any formula whatsoever. Reductionism is poison which destroys jobs— and erases the essential context of the unique texture of the etc. etc. etc.

This resistance to reduction has been championed with such vehemence that it has taken on moral dimensions, and it is these moral dimensions which are the source of my discontent on the subject. My reasoning is straightforward: the tendency to separate every human culture into non-intersecting strata of benign interest is a horrendous engine of dehumanization.

Again and again, academics insist that natives should retain ownership of their culture and history. The “settler-colonialist” mindset which seeks to comprehend and above all categorize the various traditions of the world is an evil, appropriative agent of homogeneity. The negative side effect of this moral particularization is obvious— if they aren’t my ancestors, why should I give a damn about them?

To the academic who has carved out a niche in some particular field, your indifference is irrelevant at best, and helpful at worst. The desire of the 3c academic is to be the acknowledged expert on something— with all the social and material benefits such a position comprehends— without anyone giving enough of a damn about that something to check their work, or worse, compete with them. So when they tell you that the cannibalistic human sacrifice of the Congolese Rivermen is as valid as any other cultural behavior and shouldn’t be the subject of your moral ire, what they’re really saying is, straightforwardly, don’t fuck up my good thing here. The more histrionic and vehement they are in their denunciation of your projection of ChristoFascist values upon the noble savages of Darkest Africa, the more certain you can be that their tenure is a yet-undecided quantity. That these tendencies project onto native people the fear of scrutiny which is an indelible consequence of a closed mind attempting to stave-off solve is an irony of such magnitude that it would be difficult to explain to anyone involved.

As we look out at the expanse of history through a lens of moral evolution, it becomes clear that the past is as much a foreign country as any extant culture. The Romans slaughtering Gauls by the million, the Crusaders lopping off the heads of Muslims at Antioch, and the jackbooted Nazis kicking down the doors of suspected Jews all played an indelible part in the creation of the world you live in; but they are none of them your ancestors in any meaningful way, because as we have seen, the turning of an era creates such moral distance between the one and the other as to render them mutually incomprehensible. You have functionally as much in common with Pompey the Great and his mass-crucifixions as you do with the Aztec priests who dropped people down that well in Mexico City. Or, to put it another way:

They’re your ancestors too.

The expanse of our history is so vast that if anyone can claim ownership of the thoughts and deeds of one of our forebears, everyone can. What you have in common with any historical figure from a moral era outside of your own is simply this— that they were a human being, and so are you. From the early hominids stalking the Serengeti to the Soviet conscripts dying at Stalingrad, their moral evolution was your moral evolution; and that evolution is ongoing.