Thread by @SteB777

1) After having thought about this for a very long time I'm pretty certain that I know what the basic mechanisms are. Essentially, human beings have some evolved weaknesses that powerful people learned to take advantage of to control people for their own ends.

https://twitter.com/GeorgeMonbiot/status/1366290962042019841

2) Humans evolved to live in societies very different to modern societies. Modern humans and their ancestors evolved to live in small bands of hunter-gatherers, where resources were shared equally, and no one held power.

3) Modern humans (Homo sapiens) emerged as a species 2-300,000 years ago, and our human ancestors existed for several million years prior to this. The first civilizations arose about 6-7,000 years ago, and rule by powerful rulers who held power probably emerged more recently.

4) Leaders for most of human existence were simply more able people who others in the relatively small societies of the time followed, because they had the best leadership qualities and the people in that society trusted their judgement most.

5) As the primary abilities which allowed humans to survive and have an edge over other larger and more powerful species, were cooperation and human ingenuity, the coordination of a trusted leader enhanced that cooperation.

6) These early leaders had no power over people, no army to enforce their rule. They were only leaders as long as other people in that society trusted their judgement above that of other individuals. The leaders would have lived lives similar to everyone else.

7) High status individuals, recognised by the grave goods in their burials only really emerged in the last 7000 years or so.

8) The point I'm making is that humans never evolved to deal with powerful rulers who may be taking advantage of them and manipulating them for their own ends.

9) Early leaders who people followed because of their abilities and people's trust in them had no ability to take advantage of people for their own ends. So people never evolved the ability to deal with powerful rulers who were taking advantage of them.

10) In early societies it paid for people to have unconditional loyalty and trust in their leaders, because that trust was based on the proven abilities of that leader, and people had known them all their lives.

11) There was no possibility of the modern type of leader, really ruler, who is often disingenuous and pretends to care for everyone in a way they do not.

12) Therefore, whilst people continued to have this unquestioning loyalty to their leaders, this was often not deserved, because this leader may be disingenuous, and just taking advantage of the rest of people in that society.

13) This makes people very susceptible to being manipulated by powerful rulers who do not really care that much for the other people in society, just wanting to enrich themselves and accumulate wealth and more power.

14) Humans never evolved the abilities to deal with the type of leader exploiting them and manipulating them for their own ends, because for nearly the whole of human existence, that possibility never even existed.

15) As the rule by powerful rulers developed (they simply operated like gangsters and took over our societies when they became bigger, and had armies to enforce their rule), these rulers started to accumulate great wealth.

16) This great wealth was essentially developed, by not only exploiting people in these bigger societies for their own ends, but by exploiting the natural environment.

17) Essentially the European rulers took it one step further, they started to learn to systematically exploit both people and the natural environment more effectively, and they developed a colonial outlook about 500 years ago, colonising the so called New World etc.

18) The next stage in this far more efficient exploitation of people and the natural environment, started with the industrial revolution. Where people got immensely rich through the systematic exploitation of people and the natural environment, taken to a new level.

19) To successfully exploit people, where the working classes often worked up to 16 hours a day in factories, and the natural environment started to be stripped of it's natural resources, meant manipulating people and controlling their thinking, to achieve this.

20) If you look at the 19th Century, there were relatively few people really benefiting from this systematic exploitation of people and the natural environment. The vast majority of people in society were poor and were being ruthlessly exploited.

21) Yet although this mode of society benefited relatively few, and ordinary people were actually worse off than previously, the powerful and wealthy benefiting from this, succeeded in manipulating people to go along with this.

22) They did this by exploiting people's innate loyalty to their leaders and people's innate cooperation. However, they also controlled people and their thinking with a tool hiding in plain sight, ideas.

23) We take it for granted that you understand the world through a series of ideas, but it wasn't always like that. Ideas are very useful, they enable people to develop tools and ingenious ways of hunting, which overcame the limited strength of humans and their natural weapons.

24) In early human societies, whilst ideas were used, people primarily understood the world through their direct experience of it. With every person in that society having a shared experience of the world around them.

25) All known hunter-gatherer societies revere the natural world and see the Earth as their mother. They didn't relate to the world through a series of abstract ideas, but by experience, and so were connected to the natural systems that keep us alive.

26) One of the key features of an idea, is that it detaches you from the thing your idea is about. In essence you objectify things, they become just an idea, which you can play about with and think how to use.

27) It's well known how when people objectify others, or objectify the natural world around them, that they become disconnected from them, and start to use them and exploit them.

28) There's a very simple reason for this. Humans evolved the power to use ideas to make tools, to develop hunting strategies etc. Objectifying a simple stone tool or a stick is not a problem. But it is when you start to objectify other people and the natural world.

29) Ideas were never meant for exploiting other people and the natural world. There was not much possibility of doing that in the societies people evolved to live in.

30) However, there is another serious problem with having an ideas based view of the world, and not one based on personal experience. You see, the powerful have control over these ideas, they write the law, make up the rules, and they control the media and education system.

31) When people see the world in terms of a series of ideas and not their experience of it, and a powerful few have control over these ideas, and can edit the ideas to suit themselves. They can also edit how people think and see the world.

32) As the powerful get rich by exploiting the natural world for their own ends, they can introduce ideas, that the natural world is simply there to be exploited. They can use ideas to ridicule the notion that the natural world is to be revered.

33) When I first raised concerns about how we were over-exploiting the natural world in an unsustainable way, 50 years ago, when I was just a boy, I was repeatedly told we had to have "progress and development".

34) When I asked why we had to have progress and development, and exactly what were "progress and development", no one could really explain. It was just something people had been brought up to believe, and which they parroted as if it meant something.

35) This is what I mean by how the powerful have edited our thinking and beliefs. They have inserted things like the protestant work ethic, and ideas like "you must have progress and development" into our thinking. People just take these for granted and never think about them.

36) People are very susceptible to the "reification fallacy", where an idea becomes more real to people, than the phenomenon the idea refers to. Again, this is an evolved weakness, a chink in our armour the powerful can exploit.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reificati…

37) In the small societies people evolved in, hunter-gatherer societies, there was no chance that a person would see the idea as more real, more real than what an idea referred to.

38) When people saw an animal, a plant, a natural feature like a river, their primary referent was that actual animal, that plant, that river, that mountain, not an idea about it.

39) However, in the large societies we now live in, very few people have direct experience of the natural world, and it is nearly always mediated by ideas. Not only does it disconnect us from the natural world, it means the powerful can manipulate our thinking about it.

40) Remember, the powerful have a strong vested interest in exploiting the natural environment, no matter what the consequences, because that is where all their wealth, power and status comes from.

41) Therefore, the powerful with their control over the ideas people use to think about the world, can manipulate how people see things, by editing people's ideas about the world.

42) That @GeorgeMonbiot is primarily why people "collaborate in our own destruction". It's because this destruction makes a few people very rich, and they can control people, with control over the ideas that people use to think about the world.

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