1 - The Ultrasocial Origin of Our Existential Crisis

Summary

Agriculture was a major transition in human social evolution. After its adoption, the size of human communities increased from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands. Societies became organized around surplus food production with an extremely complex division of labor. Human society became ultrasocial. It began to resemble a superorganism – an autonomous, highly integrated network of technologies, institutions, and belief systems dedicated to the production of economic surplus. Agriculture and the institutions that supported it gave us two problems that now threaten our very existence as a species: destabilizing inequality and potentially catastrophic environmental degradation. With agriculture, world views arose to justify and reinforce the subjugation of most individuals to the new hierarchical socioeconomic system. In early state societies, divine right, caste systems, patriarchy, and state religions supported the exploitation of human labor and the domination of nature. Today’s beliefs include the inevitability of progress, selfish individualism, and the sanctity of the market economy.