Having prefaced this series on dualism with a clarifying exaltation and a grounding in animism, we’re ready to roll up our sleeves and trace the origins of dualism.

Animist tendencies have to be stamped out of children in our culture, who display a natural proclivity to treat the entire world around them as alive and full of potential friends. They soon learn from acculturated adults the sin of anthropomorphism. “Stop talking to that stool and inviting it for tea! Don’t dare project human greatness onto mere ‘things’—or even animals. No, not even Boots, the family pet. Yes, technically humans are animals, but that’s just a quirky fact, not how we should act.” Indeed, we do a number on our kids, molding them into fine little human supremacists.

Viewing rocks and weather and rivers as part of a single, unified co-dependent Web of Life, animists are somewhat allergic to both supremacy and hierarchy. Humility is the watchword. We don’t and can’t understand enough to call ourselves superior, voiding any case for ranking. Many cultures recognized humans’ newbie status and explicitly looked for wisdom in our elder relatives: the plants and animals, who knew how to live in “right relationship” with each other and with the planet—tested over eons.

This aversion to hierarchy went hand-in-hand with “fiercely egalitarian” social practices—wherein everyone had essentially equal access to food and its means of procurement. Various “leveling mechanisms” were employed deliberately and explicitly to prevent the emergence of instability resulting from power concentration. Demand-sharing and jocular meat-shaming were common practices in this vein, all the way to banishment or death for dangerous aggrandizers (see also earlier, related work from Hayden). As Christopher Ryan phrases it in Civilized to Death, “There’s plenty of ferocity in the ‘fierce egalitarianism’ of foragers.”

So, what happened to upset this long-standing social order?

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