You know me: I’ll go after almost any aspect of modernity, including technology, agriculture, or even written language. Let’s now take a big swipe at “The Law.” But first, we’ll need to get a few common reactions out of the way.
When I suggest that a rigid, codified legal system is an abomination that humans are better off not suffering, strong objections instantly arise on the basis that a lawless modernity would be a chaotic nightmare for all sorts of reasons.
I totally agree: modernity absolutely needs a legal system in place. So, sure: anarchy is no way to run modernity, but here’s the catch: modernity is no way to run humanity, or life on Earth more generally. Modernity, it appears, initiates a sixth mass extinction, and is thus effectively synonymous, just as unsustainable is synonymous with failure. Modernity has no deep-time ecological vetting, and is a transient offshoot that has—in a relative eye-blink—caused tremendous disruption to the prospects for a happy life for countless members of the Community of Life, including, of course, future humans.
So, ask not what modernity needs, because doing so is basically asking what the sixth mass extinction needs. As far as anyone knows, and certainly as the actual evidence reveals, the two are inseparably part of the same phenomenon. So, let’s get over prioritizing what modernity needs. Laws are among those “necessities” of the sixth mass extinction—a.k.a. modernity.
Hackles
Let’s get back to reactions to the proposal of life without laws. Most people in our culture believe that without laws, humans would behave like savages. But they only believe so because—as products of modernity—this is the only mythology they have ever heard.
Are such beliefs based on any personal, direct experience with hunter-gatherer lifeways somehow spared from modernity’s influence? Of course not. How hard have most people worked to absorb anthropological research—while simultaneously attempting to peer past cultural biases that seep into those practices as well? It should be clear that narratives in such fields change over time, leaving the truth that much more elusive, which is its own important lesson. Almost nobody actually knows what life feels like outside agricultural modernity, although the math says it doesn’t feel very dangerous. We need to recognize our staggering lack of authority on this point. Christopher Ryan’s Civilized to Death is a great entry point.
Our culture hammers it into us that “uncivilized” equates to barbaric, savage, violent, or whatever. But without more intimate—and uncorrupted/authentic—familiarity, these can’t be anything other than stories, or at best decontextualized inferences.
By this I mean that most interaction between modernity and ecological lifeways has been in extreme contexts. Humans living authentically can indeed be ferocious when protecting their livelihoods. When outsiders—especially those whose habits and technologies are unrecognizably different—intrude, one can expect savage ferocity as an appropriate defense. Reach your hand into a beehive sometime and you may come to the same conclusion about the savage ferocity of bees. But among each other, the bees are perfectly docile and cooperative. Context matters a lot.
Norms, not Laws
People living as ecological members of the Community of Life might not have laws as we have come know (fabricate) them, but they do take norms very seriously. Other social animal groups are similar. Transgressions are met with prompt, corrective actions—or even hostility if need be. Certain general behaviors are discouraged, but less in a rigid way than in a case-by-case assessment. The one-size-fits-all letter of the law suffered by modernity stamps out the nuances that dominate “natural” law, to everyone’s detriment.
One might worry that in the absence of formalized law, tribes were left with mob rule. But that’s just our modern ignorance spouting off again, “informed” by the anonymous collectives we inhabit. Tribal people are deeply connected and anything but anonymous. Every member is important, and punishing any one member hurts the whole tribe: not only in terms of lost capability but also on the emotional front. It must be excruciating to decide to banish or—if it must be done—kill one of your treasured flock, intimately known since birth. These (rare) episodes are taken very seriously. I say rare, because growing up in a supporting and familiar community of mutual cooperation and dependence does not promote the phenomenon of “crime” as modernity knows it. Narcissists (jerks) are not as common in a culture of mutual support compared to cultures that emphasize competition, individual success, control, acquisition of materials and power, etc. Given modernity’s twisted priorities, is it any wonder that we’ve bred a culture of A-holes that make and require laws in a nearly-futile attempt to tame the resultant chaos?
Wait: Am I an Anarchist?
I’ve basically always been a “good kid” and a good citizen. As long as I am embedded in modernity, I default to following rules—rules serve a purpose in the context of modernity to protect myself and others from myself and others. I actually drive the speed limit: it’s safer for me, other drivers, other animals, while being more energy efficient. I would go even slower if that didn’t create its own safety hazard or make me a major irritant for the impatient majority. While I tend to follow rules, I’m not 100% compliant—sometimes assessing situations on a case-by-case basis. I try to respect the spirit of the law most of the time, deviating only in cases where either I assume complete personal responsibility or I believe I understand the nuanced/contextual situation more thoroughly than the codified version could have encompassed (which I don’t assume as a default: mine is just one more meat-brain having limited perspective).
Being a conscientious “good” citizen, the concept of anarchy has always been an uncomfortable one for me. I don’t trust myself to always fully understand a complex scenario and act in an optimal way. If everyone trusted their own judgment more than that of the collective, everybody would do their own thing without regard to rules—which strikes me as a recipe for disaster. As I said before, anarchy is no way to run civilization.
But again, civilization is no way to comport ourselves on this planet, since that road leads to a sixth mass extinction. For millions of years humans lived in satisfying political arrangements as free agents in egalitarian bands enjoying great autonomy and freedom from coercion—rooted in distributed competence and resource access. They were anarchists, and the outcome was in many respects the opposite of chaos, as validated by stability over tens-of-thousands of generations. So, maybe anarchy deserves a closer look. Maybe it’s possible to still be a good citizen of the Community of Life and be an anarchist. Maybe, in fact, like basically every other creature on this planet, I’m fundamentally an anarchist. But the teachings of modernity make it hard to shoulder the baggage the term invites.
When I confront the fact that I may in truth be an anarchist, I can’t stop the punk song from the Sex Pistols (Anarchy in the U.K.) from charging into awareness: “I am an Antichrist-a, and I am an Anarchist!” Great: now anarchist is tied in my brain to what is possibly the most reviled term in Western culture: Satan-adjacent. Like I said: baggage.
The Core Flaw
It has always bugged me that laws pretend to have the capacity to dial it all in: get it right. Yet, the system constantly gets more cumbersome, intricate, self-contradictory, and uninterpretable. Courts wouldn’t even be necessary if it were possible to draft a perfect legal code, but it’s a futile pipe dream. Nonetheless, we continue to pretend and try.
What’s happening in the U.S. right now is a fascinating example that “exposes the lie” of legal validity. It’s impossible to play a game when one team basically says the rules are stupid and refuses to grant them authority. This leaves the other side blowing the whistle, saying “you can’t do that.” The response is, quite accurately: “But we just did.” The “game” only works if both teams agree to the fabricated rules, or that there even are rules. At present, the political left is still pretending that the game is on and can get back to normal. Judges issue pronouncements that are simply ignored. Whatever “side” you prefer, it’s at least becoming clear that the whole construct is a fiction (sham) that requires common buy-in (pretending) on all sides in order to work. The “game” of modernity is pretty fragile: not written in the stars, rocks, or deep-time ecology but is instead a novel, temporary, flimsy arrangement that won’t stand up to the trials ahead.
The legal system offers yet another stark example of how our cognitive limits are simply not up to the task of creating an artificial (non-ecological) framework as a basis for reality. As a classic example of left-hemisphere fetishization, legal proceedings aim to determine fault in a binary guilty/innocent scheme pretending that 100% of the responsibility lands on some individual (or group of individuals). The brain-exploding truth is that responsibility is threaded into the entire history of the universe. The forces applying to an “individual” are intractably dependent on a boundless chain of cause-and-effect that reaches essentially everywhere. Of course, such recognitions dredge up the dreaded topics of free will and determinism, which our modernity-addled narcissist/supremacist brains have tremendous difficulty accepting.
Because the universe is not interested in stark delineations, it quickly becomes clear that legal systems struggle to accommodate nuances of the complete world. The response has been to double down and double down and double down by elaborating written law until it’s a rat’s nest of misguided complexity. The enterprise is simply trying to accomplish the impossible, in a doomed effort to assign blame. It’s incredible—and more than a little sad—how many people are invested in the ever-elusive fantasy that the failing fabrication can be made more perfectly functional.
Humans are much better adapted to common-sense, case-by-case judgment among intimately familiar “citizens” based on norms that evolve with the group according to longstanding context and what works well for them in that place. Only when hierarchies, possessions, and writing emerged did law come into being: mostly motivated to protect the elites—and their acquired power—from the masses. If laws were to be boiled down to a single word, that word would probably be: MINE! The aggrandizers couldn’t have done civilization without it! Once laws were in place, the sixth mass extinction could charge forward! By vesting power in written words and securing mass acceptance in their fictional authority, the way was paved for a disastrous end to the vastly-older and successful legacy of ecological anarchy.
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Welcome to the rabbit hole!
Welcome to the band! I'd probably pigeon hole myself into the anarcho primitive category if forced. Of course, that's just where my beliefs lie, it's impossible to enact within modernity, so I also – generally – obey the rules.
The law is just another abstraction. A middle man that at the same time tells me to behave responsibly, whilst removing my ability to be responsible. The paradox is that the purpose of any specific law should be its own destruction. What is the purpose of drug enforcement other than to eradicate drug use, and make itself obsolete? What's the purpose of money other than to get to the point where it isn't required? Does economic growth climax when all is provided? No, of course not, because all of these things are there to centralise power and control.
Huge fan of the path you're going down, Tom. I walked this road a few years back and it's really been a blast to read your thinking about these same ideas. For me, it's helpful to think about the old Dungeons & Dragons alignment concept. Law and Goodness are on entirely different axes. Being lawful has zero to do with goodness. Being "chaotic," which would be the D&D term for anarchistic, doesn't make you evil. That's why I'm always Chaotic Good, even IRL.
Making up the rules is one of the key features of modernity and of course laws are the master rules. Thanks for tackling this little topic.
You may have previously articulated this but I'm wondering, do you consider modernity and civilisation to be synonymous?
For some it's hard to see that subject-object is at the heart of the language we use … and thus the worldview to which we're conditioned. The idea that past and future might just be stories that we can only tell in the present moment … is not easy to assimilate, and then live by. "Tom Murphy for President" may be a phrase nobody has ever voiced ….
"Man-made Law"
From Techqua Ikachi, a newsletter of the traditionalist faction of the Hopi Tribe (1975-1986):
"The Hopi were established long before the White Race came to this continent.
Their leadership is deeply rooted in their culture and traditions, and most important, in the Creator's law, which is everlasting. Every race in the world began this way including the Bahannas… But Bahanna has now obligated himself to a man-made law. If by this he neglects his original vow, it will mean not only his downfall, but damage to the earth as well."
Techqua Ikachi Vol. I
"…Everyday their propaganda machine is grinding away to belittle
our tradition and indoctrinate our children into Bahanna's material laws while erasing the spiritual laws of the Hopi. This is a fact we must face everyday."
Techqua Ikachi Vol. II
"…We think it is undesirable, it will be our greatest mistake to support that will be harmful and will hinder our ways of life. We have our own laws to go by that are far richer than manmade laws, by which we have
survived thus far."
Techqua Ikachi Vol. III
—–
Japanese natural farmer, Masanobu Fukuoka:
"As laws proliferate, they appear to move toward perfection, but they only become more imperfect and preposterously complex, breaking man and the land apart…
Laws that do not arise and are not consummated naturally do not remain in force very long… When people can do without a law it is best not to have that law. Only the barest minimum of laws is needed – to create a world that can get along without laws. Were it necessary to have a single law, then it should be: "One shall build one's house at least sixty feet from one's neighbor." If people were to scatter out and build a small house on a quarter-acre wherever they pleased, then the food problem would take care of itself, water and sewage lines would not be needed, and the problem of pollution would be licked. That is not all; this would also be the quickest path to making our lands a paradise on earth."
The Natural Way of Farming, pg. 264-266
A lot of changes have to occur before ecological anarchist communities would be able to defend themselves from governments and the corporations that control them.
For sure. And for clarity, my tendency is to look well beyond the horizon of my own life. I keep forgetting that many assume that any suggestion I might make is intended to apply to them in their lifetimes—whether it be that humans should number in the millions, live as hunter-gatherers, or practice anarchy. Maybe this is inevitable in a culture built around self-centeredness. What I hope to achieve is a supportive attitude toward the ultimate goals, making them more palatable so that it becomes acceptable to begin transitioning in that direction. For the moment, perhaps my advocacy is best described as gesturing.
Thank you for this clarification, Tom. It is most salient to me. ME! Sorry, couldn't resist that dig at myself. However, even after admitting that I am embedded in self-centred modernity culture there is one notion that I obtained from your textbook that keeps recurring in my mind making me think that, yes, my lifetime – the next few decades – is indeed the relevant timescale.
It is in the chapter on exponential growth. Nothing happens, nothing happens, nothing happens, then everything happens. All the change happens suddenly at the 'end'. If one can detect any change at all then that means massive change is about to happen. Am I missing mathematical nuance here?
Therefore, hadn't I start as soon as possible learning to live like a hunter-gatherer and/or coming to terms with mortality?
Good to bring this up. Every mathematical model fails, because it is inevitably disconnected from heaps of context that ultimately become relevant. The bacteria in a jar likely would not in truth maintain their exponential trajectory as toxins (their waste products) built up. We won't continue the exponential energy trajectory that consumes the sun and then the galaxy in a few millennia. These "models" are used to illustrate that growth simply can't persist forever: something must break. But the nature of the breaking is far outside the simple model's purview.
It appears that we are already peeling back from the exponential trajectory, heading for a turnover whose plateau could last a while. My best guess is that elements of HG life re-enter over the coming centuries as people live off diminishing scraps for generations. Maybe in 1,000 years we'd describe human lifeways as once-again HG (will require 1000× reduction in human population, which probably takes a while). Nobody knows. Then again, it won't be monolithic: some live HG lives today and will continue (I hope). Being highly localized, different patterns and transition speeds will likely obtain all around the globe.
It's an interesting point, Scott. At what point does a government lose its legitimacy? I suspect that could happen very quickly, given the precarious nature of modernity. It isn't beyond the realms of possibility that the just in time food supply fails at some point in the coming decade or so. I could see a path to the requirement for a type of localism where anarchism could thrive, and it doesn't take a huge amount of imagination! I suspect that it won't be government that is the issue in those circumstances, but a traumatised population that may wish to reinstate the same hierarchy based systems as before.
North Sentinel Island, located in India's Andaman and Nicobar archipelago, is most fiercely protected and restricted island. It is home to the Sentinelese, an uncontacted Indigenous tribe that has lived in total isolation for thousands of years and aggressively resists any outside contact. Actually attacks intruders fiercely. Indian government has prohibited any outsider approach to the island within a specific nautical radius of its shores.
I hope they survive after the demise of modernity.
And along with law came organised religion to give that law Authority. It's helpful to just have one God too, as different gods might have different rulebooks and that would never do.
Great post. I fully agree with your verdict on modernity and all its laws etc. But the excercising of judgement requires… Oh, forget it.
"The 'game' of modernity is pretty fragile: not written in the stars, rocks, or deep-time ecology but is instead a novel, temporary, flimsy arrangement that won’t stand up to the trials ahead."
I really like this framing. The more technologically "sophisticated" we become in an effort to exert control over what is ultimately uncontrollable, the more than fragility becomes apparent.
So glad to have discovered you Tom through the Crazy Town podcast a few months ago. I've ordered copies of your physics book for myself and several other people since.
If anyone is worried they might be an anarchist, or maybe they are just anarchist-curious, then I recommend Dr David Bramwell's two part series in his Adventures In Nutopia podcast. It's rather wonderful as he goes around the UK trying to get to the bottom of what it's all about by talking to people doing it and living it. It's in all the places so just search for the above. Here's a pocketcasts link: https://pca.st/episode/a37863ac-73dd-4b60-a896-37bf0b3f08ec
You just re-discovered the concept of social construct. I really do not see the utility in your current line of reasoning.
Whether you call yourself communist, capitalist, anarchist, agrarian, nomadic, hunter gather, modernist, or any other social organization, people will find ways to organize themselves, and then, importantly, treat that organization as a physically real entity to be preserved, regardless of the presence of written word. You can call them spiritual beliefs, laws, norms, culture, animist practices, be my guest. But at the end of the day a group of humans will find a way to organize themselves and find a way to preserve that organization.
This blog is increasingly propagating the fallacy of "interpolated blame", that is claiming that because individual humans have some limited degrees of freedom in terms of choices of action, therefore as a statistical whole the human race has control over it's actions. This extrapolation is in direct contradiction to the Laws of Thermodynamics and the Laws of Large Numbers, both of which most assuredly have the last say at anything approaching a planetary scale.
This is not to excuse humans of culpability, but rather to recognize we have much less control over our individual lives than we are comfortable admitting, let alone control over planetary scale dynamics. Forestalling anthropic destruction of the planet would require a degree of coordination that frankly defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is simply physically impossible.
Imagine yourself a very long lived, or immortal, astronomer on an alien planet watching the spectrums of Earth. You would note that over millions of years the planet separated it's Oxygen from it's Carbon and Hydrogen. You would have seen this work of battery storing chemical potential and rationally concluded that the build up was not statistically sustainable. You would be able to say that eventually that potential would be discharged, without being able to predict exactly when. To the astronomer half of that stored potential just disappeared in a couple hundred orbits of Earth. The planet literally stored chemical potential by physically putting Oxygen, and Carbon and Hydrogen, in different places.
An excellent comment. Context is everything. And few have it.
eg "… to recognize we have much less control over our individual lives than we are comfortable admitting, let alone control over planetary scale dynamics. Forestalling anthropic destruction of the planet would require a degree of coordination that frankly defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is simply physically impossible."
The more complex systems become complex (and then incongruous) the simplification arrives. TINA. How and when that unravels no one knows; but Tom offers some great ideas of how to approach individually and in small groups.
As do the Hopi, Six nations Haudenosaunee, Australian native Aboriginals et al … no need to reinvent the wheel.
But do avoid like the plague the 250- year old system founded on the Declaration of Faux Independence and the US Constitution and all that flows from it.
Aaron,
Interesting point:
"But at the end of the day a group of humans will find a way to organize themselves and find a way to preserve that organization."
So what's the difference between humans and the wider animal world in that regard? Anarchism, or primitive anarchism, seems to me to be just a description of the default state. Without organisation. With acceptance that there is no "system" that humans can create that works better than that which all the other animals conform to. That as soon as you intervene with abstractions such as hierarchy, bureaucracy, and so on, or the thought processes that either precede or follow that system construction, you are setting a course to collapse.
I guess the question is whether that default state exists for humans or not, or if that too is just an after the event social construct?
Rico.
You've painted every possible modality as basically the same: to-may-to, to-mah-to. My point is that a glaring asymmetry exists, producing stark differences in temporal stability and in ecological sustainability. We can play the game of calling them all the same in our heads, but the record speaks differently.
I'm with you on the agency thing: I don't believe in free will. The atoms that comprise us are along for the ride. The point is that observation can at least reveal that some modalities work well and others are disastrous in ecological terms (game over). Whether that stimulus is significant enough to trigger a response is anybody's guess. Pointing out the long stability of anarchy seems at least worth doing.
My point is that in hindsight two things are true:
1. The apparent ecological stability you keep citing was actually predicted on an unstable charging of the Earth-Space battery in the form of organic bonds that separated Oxygen from Carbon and Hydrogen. Thank you photosynthesis!
2. Given that hidden instability, the more the battery charged the more likely a trigger would dramatically discharge it. Something was bound to come along and discharge that battery. It just happened to be humans. It could have been racoons who discovered fire.
In this view humans are quite literally little more than complex enzymes that open novel pathways to discharge the Earth space battery. What comes after the Earth Space battery is depleted to the point that industrial civilization is no longer possible is anyone's guess. One thing is certain, there will be a lot less humans around and the ecology much simpler.
Yes this is a bleak view of our place in the Universe. But is it any less bleak than accepting that the Earth will be consumed when the Sun goes red giant?
I find your comment very similar to Suzuki rhetoric trick of "the warrior and the sword" (an attempt to use Zen Buddhism to justify WW2 mass killing), quote:
"It is really not he (the killer) but the sword itself that does the killing. He had no desire to do harm to anybody, but the enemy appears and makes himself a victim. It is as though the sword performs automatically, his function of justice, which is the function of mercy"
A mix of rhetoric (hunter-gatherer and industrial capitalism are all the same) orthodox determinism (I'm just an enzyme here) plus the final nail excuse: because in billions of years the sun will kill us all, better set everything on fire now!.
ps: but hey, not because we want…we just stumbled upon a giant match.
Most people are anarchists:
https://davidgraeber.org/articles/are-you-an-anarchist-the-answer-maysurprise-you/
I also read "Civilised to Death", thanks to it being recommended here in fact. I think it's one of the books that has had the greatest impact on me. I followed it up with "Don't sleep there are snakes" which I highly recommend as a book providing insight into pre-agricultural living.
People in our street has been having trouble with a particular neighbour and many of us have wasted an enormous amount of time trying to deal with it through the apparatus of state: the police, social services, mental health. It has all become incredibly technical and ultimately futile. Plus it's taken years. After reading Snakes it occurred to me that our issue is one that simply wouldn't arise in a small anarchist community, or if it did it would be resolved in days not years. I now have the same mental model of the police in a modern state as I do of modern IT support: they take away the power of people to solve their own problems giving in return a promise that they'll handle it, which they don't.
Where do I sign up to join an anarchist community?
maybe an update on this article topic https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2021/05/why-worry-about-collapse/ could be in order? With a focus or framing around these observations and ideas:
Industrial civilization is locked into growth by political ideology, corporate power, infrastructural path dependency, and thermodynamic constraints, making transformative climate mitigation structurally infeasible rather than merely politically delayed. The processes driving climate change and the breaching of other Earth system boundaries cannot be stopped or meaningfully redirected by current structures. Individuals and even organized groups have minimal power to impact global systemic change, as their behaviours, actions, and constraints are largely determined by the roles they are assigned within the system itself.
Consequently, collapse is essentially unstoppable. Our primary agency lies not in prevention, but in preparing for the aftermath. The meaningful role we can embrace is not that of planetary savior, but of curator and carrier. Our efforts are best focused on saving knowledge, ideals, and cooperative practices for pockets of human wisdom to emerge post-collapse. Therefore, while we could feel deep sorrow and grief about the suffering that collapse will bring, we should direct that concern into building small-scale, resilient, and egalitarian communities. These scattered groups, adhering to anarchic principles of cooperation, represent the only viable unit of survival, as survival at any meaningful scale cannot be successfully systemized or engineered from the top down.
[See next comment, intended to replace this one.]
[Moderator note: What follows was meant to replace the other post, but I think both have value in saying something similar by different means, so I disregarded the request to replace one with the other and show both.]
What if the system we're all running on was never designed to stop—and the only real choice left is what we carry forward when it finally breaks?
Therefore, while we could feel sorrow and grief about the suffering that collapse will bring, we should direct that awareness into building small-scale, resilient, and egalitarian communities.
Worry disables. It's a holding pattern. Grief-informed action acknowledges loss while still choosing what to tend.
I used to think collapse was something to prevent. Now I think it's something to prepare for—not by stockpiling, but by sharing wisdom with people who'll carry it forward when the fire finally comes.
Small scale resilient egalitarian communities would be great but they can't be modern, since modernity is unsustainable. Sounds like hunter-gatherer tribes. They can be sustainable.