Human history is also the history of how monkeys will overcome the alpha-male hierarchy after leaving the wild. For 2 hundred thousand years, we responded to such hierarchy with instinct, it was something we couldn’t avoid, escape from or question. But something much bigger than normal evolution happened around 10 thousand years ago and changed everything: we created cities - not just nomad wooden settlements, but stone built sedentary cities. And those cities changed the role of our instinctive hierarchies forever.
First, the cities diversified the hierarchy's divisions. From collectors and hunters, we jumped into something much more complex, with several different interdependent activities organized in a completely new set of importance inside the enlarged group. The alpha leader, his females and friends will never leave the top of the hierarchy so far, but the rest of the group will be divided over and over through time, interfering not only in our most basic social instincts, but also messing with our brains and the way we think.
The availability of food also changed in such a profound way, we needed new methods to allow coordinated production and distribution among the population, new ways to control the population during scarcity times and the population growth during prosperity. Finding the balance between production and population became the major challenge to mankind, since we left the tribal stage. All those changes messed deeply with our brains. The cities forced us to get smarter and smarter. An idle mind can trully perform miracles and so did mankind's collective consciousness. It expanded and invented "knowledge" as a concept. The hominid who knows he knows, now knows what it takes to perpetuate knowledge and how important it is to do so.
Since the birth of the cities, the human being is putting up a fight against the human beast. Consciousness and instincts are constantly fighting each other, so as culture and nature. As the anima beasts were kept away from the people, mankind becamenits own enemy. All the free time and safety the cities provided would eventually rot the basis of our most primitive mechanisms of survival. Many of those mechanisms would lose their meaning without the night beasts to eat our children and the daytime scarcity to make us walk away from where we were born. The entire set of instincts we developed as hunter-gathers became useless after we built walls to protect us from others like us. It took us 10 thousand years to begin to realize what is the real job that has to be done here. It took us one hundred centuries to understand what the frack we are meant to do with our lives. Until recently, mankind simply followed the stream, using instincts as social control mechanisms, instead of as tools to evolution.
The alpha male's bunch, always more fed, more educated and with a lot of free time to think and learn, took advantage of the changes created by the urban life and used that knowledge to deepen their power and privileges. It took us, the rest of the monkeys, at least 70 centuries to start questioning what was going on after all. We can comfortably place the begining of the shift around 3 thousand years ago, when consciousness began to spread among the beasts... That was the beginning of the end to the alpha-male empire and the birth of a new kind of humanity.
Greek, Chinese and Hindi populations simultaneously jumped into something no one back there could imagine the consequences. Mankind, in a certain moment, decided it wasn't enough just to build walls, once the biggest threat to its safety had ceased to be the lion and the bear to become the human beast itself. Civilize the human beast was now the most imperative need of civilized people. If today we can picture an utopian anarchy as the future of society, it is because of those ancient thinkers who never understood well how deep the alpha-male empire was placed into our genes. And thank Nature they didn't.
Once civilization began to spread, like the gods, the instincts' power started to shrink. Even when they appear to grow here or there, on the overall, they are always shrinking. Evolution is unstoppable. Even during the most dark moment of the worse dark age mankind ever saw, spreading and perpetuating knowledge was imperative. It didn't matter, if the Pope ordered to poison the books pages, people would figure out ways to pass that knowledge along. And it all began about 3 thousand years ago. And today we have the internet, the largest collective conscience we ever had. I'm sorry, alpha-male, but your empire is doomed to die and thentime is not far away. Repent, before your time comes to an end...
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