Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 10. Against Leviathan: An Anarchist Fairytale of the Origin of Civilization

You are a peasant.

You work all day. Just enough to get by.

You are so far from where the real power is. You may not call yourself a peasant. For a long time in the so-called West. Many no longer believe themselves to be peasants. But individuals. And in the so-called West, the individual is the most important. The mighty, the powerful, the state are here to serve us. Industry and capitalism certainly propel this myth with all their advertising and messaging, emphasizing the importance of our individual preferences and pleasure.

Our once needs democracy promises this as well. It is written explicitly in the United States Constitution, a government by the people, for the people. But as democracy weakens, so does this illusion. Those living in authoritarian governments may see the truth of the matter a little bit more clearly. In those countries, the state obviously does not serve the individual.

It's the exact opposite. The individual is here to serve the state. It's expressed most clearly in monarchies. The king, the head of state, is the most important. The rest are all peasants like us. I tell you this. Not to depress you. I tell you this. So together we may see our situation more clearly and act according.

Welcome to Human Nature Odyssey, a podcast exploring the stories that help us better understand and more clearly experience the incredible, terrifying and ridiculous world we live in. I'm Alex.

Come, let's sit by the fire where some other peasants have gathered. Freddy Perlman is about to tell a story. Here he is now. He's a peasant like us. From the light of the fire. You can see his unkempt, curly, dark hair that falls just past his ears. His large, brow lined glasses with a thick top rim. He wears a button down shirt and a pullover sweater.

He's going to tell us a ghost story. It's a ghost story about peasants and kings and the destruction of the world.

So Freddy starts out by telling us that this is a tale about the destruction of the world. And from one perspective, this story could be a drama about a suicide, as the death of the biosphere is coming from within. From another view, the story is a murder mystery with humanity as the killer. But Freddy insists humanity is not a bunch of evil doers, but simply captives of something else.

He believes it is a sort of monster, a malevolent being. He calls Leviathan. Freddy tells us Leviathan is, quote, a beast whose artificial progeny would eventually swallow all human communities and by our time begin to eat the biosphere, unquote. But Leviathan is not the ghost. It's Freddy who's the ghost. It's been decades now since Freddy was living, and thinking and writing.

He speaks to us now from the pages of a book he wrote long ago, published just a couple of years before his death at the age of 50. A book he called Against History Against Leviathan. It's a strange book, riddled with grammatical errors and misspellings. It was originally published by the Detroit based black and Red quote, publishing books and pamphlets with an anti-authoritarian perspective.

Since 1968, unquote. Since black and Red dawg is now an online shopping site for cialis pills, Pearlman's book was later published online as a free PDF on the Anarchist Library. It's a book for us peasants. I say this book is a ghost story also because it is spooky. The hair on the back of your neck might stand up, but we can stay seated and relax.

It's just a story after all. A fairy tale, as Freddy would call.

As a ghost. Freddy himself can't speak, but his words on those pages flicker in the flames of our fire. Some of these words I shall read aloud. Others I will retell in my own way, as well as some respectful challenges. And as always, a few things to question. Freddy Pearlman was born in Czechoslovakia, just five years before it was invaded by the Nazis.

His family fled the impending empire, spent several years in a small town in Bolivia, and immigrated to the United States after the war. It was there Freddy lived the rest of his life and would come to believe that, in a sense, his family had fled one empire, only to arrive in another. No, that's not quite right. His ghost corrects me.

It's all one empire. Some of his words shimmer in our fire. Quote. The Nazis lost the war, but their new order didn't. Unquote. Freddy wrote his book at a time of great crisis. When the world was divided by two great powers who aimed their great weapons at each other. And if either one fired, the world would be consumed by flame, while the wealthy grew more powerful and their towers grew taller.

Famine, hunger, violence and unrest plague the globe. We too, were born into a world of crisis, of great destruction and turmoil. But Freddy tells us it was not always this way. To Perlman, viewing the world's crisis in the context of the last hundred, even 500 years is to not understand the world. No more than looking at flowers allows you to understand the whole plant.

Look towards the stems, branches and root. If our contemporary civilization, with its contemporary problems is the flowering, then Sumeria was its root. That's where Freddie's ghost story begins. In the ancient land of Mesopotamia. There's a crackle in the fire, and Freddie's ghost clears his throat.

Long ago, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. There once was a small community of people. Life was lived in natural rhythms, in keeping with the seasons, and the other creatures of the earth were known to be family. Everyone was known and was taken care of. All was shared. Decisions were made together. This was how these people lived. Freddie tells us, because that's how all people lived back then.

But here, in between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, something began to change where food was once shared. It was now carefully guarded by lock and key. The natural world became seen as something to control where there was once community. Now there were institutions. Before long, the first cities appeared. Their names were UrukEridu. Well, gosh. And Earth. And together they are known as the First Civilization.

Sumer, what had been a land of small egalitarian communities, became a land of cities and hierarchy. Perlman asks. What happened?

Hello? Who's there? Oh it's you. This is Louis H. Morgan. He's joined us by the fire. He is a ghost as well, but not one Freddie thinks too highly of. To the ghost of Louis H. Morgan. These developments in ancient Sumeria or humanity climbing the ladder out of savagery to civilization. This is his famous theory of higher states.

In his 1877 book Ancient Society, Morgan described how humanity advances like rungs on a ladder from savagery to barbarism to civilization.

If you look up Louis H. Morgan, you'll find the painting of a distinguished looking white man in a suit and bow tie. Next to this image will be the title American Anthropologist and an article from botanica.com. And if you read that article from botanica.com, you'll see that it says, quote, Morgan's ideas about the development of technology over time have come to be regarded as generally correct in their fundamental aspects, unquote.

But then goes on to say, quote, his theory that humans socialize advanced from an initial stage of promiscuity through various forms of family life that culminated in monogamy, has long been held obsolete, however, unquote, to Britannica. The idea that humanity advances from promiscuity to monogamy is ridiculous, but it's perfectly sensible that humanity advances from primitive to civilized. But we have not gathered around the fire to listen to Lewis Morgan.

We're here for Freddy. Freddy dismisses Lewis and tells us, quote, this theory of higher states can be taught to small children because it is a fairy tale, unquote. Then he smiles and adds, but there's nothing wrong with fairy tales. Fairy tales are meant to bring out a moral, something deeper than just a list of events. And that's exactly what Freddy set out to write his own sort of fairy tale.

And unlike Louis H. Morgan, who forgot his theory of higher states, was in fact a fairy tale. Freddy always remembers that his story is. So Freddy would tell us, don't think of his tale as the history of civilization. Think of it as the story of civilization. It's meant to elucidate some interesting reflections and insights, not present exact facts.

And unlike Louis H. Morgan's fairy tales of humanity's march of progress from being primitive to advance where our beginnings were an impoverished struggle. Were better for having developed out of Freddy's fairy tale. Didn't see our beginnings as primitive at all. Quote I wouldn't use the word primitive to refer to a people with a richness of life. I would use the word primitive to refer to myself and my contemporaries with our progressive poverty of life, unquote.

Now one could look at our civilization today, the supermarkets full of groceries, stores stocked to the brim with tools and appliances and every convenience one could look at these things and think, Freddy was a fool to consider this poverty, especially compared to the so-called primitive hunter gatherers who possessed far less food and fewer tools and fewer conveniences. But Pearlman was convinced he had not been taught the true richness of this other kind of life, and that this way of life was not just for exotic other cultures.

This was how Perlman's own ancestors. All of our ancestors lived one way or another, in small communities where everyone was known and was taken care of, where life was in natural rhythms of seasons and weather, where the other creatures of the earth were known to be family. When the colonizers who Freddy describes as bound by the blinding armor of civilization, encountered people who lived without this armor, the colonizers noted with disgust that these people did not seem to work when not enjoying leisure.

They danced while gathering fruit and herbs from the field, and played games while hunting. And just as there was no distinction between work and play, there was no distinction between a community and what we call a government. People weren't governed by impersonal institutions. They govern themselves. And likewise, there was no distinction between the secular and the sacred. All was wholly but not in some kind of pure, untouchable way.

Freddy admits his story is idyllic. In fact, he tells us it is, quote, deliberately idyllic. The idyllic is what the Europeans came to destroy, unquote. Now, Freddy was not just a peasant. He was an anarchist. And so were our ancestors in the timeless golden age. He'd tell us anarchy is sometimes thought of as synonymous with chaos. A society in anarchy has no order.

But under anarchism. There is still a sort of order. It might be hard for us to imagine a society where order is not commanded and obeyed, where order is decided collectively and no one person dictates the lives of the masses. An anarchist society is not leaderless, but leader full, with each person enacting individual agency over their lives and a more egalitarian power structure.

And this is how Freddie reminds us all of our ancestors lived in one way or another, in this timeless golden age. For tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years, Sumer was where that changed. Freddie imagines how this emerged. Remind me how it starts. Oh, right. The drought.

In the village of Urk 6000 years ago, a small enclave of red and mud brick homes. There is a drought. And in its aftermath, a famine. The people are hungry. Along with the gazelles, camels, elephants and the many other animal cousins that lived there back then, the old women and the old men of the village discuss what is to be done to secure water.

One brings up how their cousin, the beaver, builds dams and guides the flow of rivers. Perhaps they can do the same, but the elders backs are sore and their bones creak in the heat. The too old for such a task. They call on the youth of the village to construct a dam, to gather water from the trickling streams into a pool they can depend on.

The youth are eager to help, but it is a complicated, arduous project. The elders select one of the particularly strong youth to supervise. They choose a little God. The Sumerian word for strong men. He has a name. But one day it will not be remembered. One day he will only be remembered as Luga. The legal studies the beavers devises a plan and shares it with his peers.

Together, they construct a barricade that floods with water, and the village of Urukprospers.

Once complete, the strong man that will go is treated like everyone else. His leadership was contingent and temporary, but the following year great rains come and the dam breaks. The village is flooded. Great repairs are needed. The Council of Elders asks the googol to once again lead his peers and the build back better. Urukis rebuilt and the legal's leadership is celebrated.

Yet when the rains end, the will God returns among his fellow villagers and lives as all the rest. The following year, the rains are harsher than before, and the destruction the dam break brings is even greater. The council calls on the legal again. This time the legal requests to have a seat on the council. Despite being considerably younger than the elders.

His insistence is convincing. After all, is he not the one who most understands dam building? His guidance could help prevent further problems in the future. The elders relent and the legal joins the council. Meanwhile, in the nearby village of Earth, people take notice. They too have struggled with the famine and the rains, and they admire their neighbors. Ingenious new dams.

Their elders choose their own strong man to lead a similar project. And over in the growing settlement of a gush, the people do the same. Years pass, and Freddy tells us, one elder of Uruk and then another die of old age. They are placed on the council by newcomers, unquote. But the little girl whom the elders first chose is himself now an elder, and cares not for these new members of the council.

Why should he listen to them? What do they know of building dams and canals? His hardiness does not stop there. We're told he even dares to tell an old grandmother where not to plant her seeds. Oh, can you imagine? Well, everyone in Urukand her and Lagash, and even their neighbors in Urdu know not to try and boss a grandma around.

So legal is found dead the next day. Reportedly killed by a deity who favors grandma's. Freddy adds with a wink. But someone must look after the complex dams. A new strongman. Another legal is chosen. And to not insult him. Also given a seat on the Council of Elders, he makes sure not to ruffle as many feathers, but the grandmothers are still cautious around him.

The villages expand and more dams are needed. Generations pass. Leadership is passed from one legal to another. Over time, the Wiggles become a new kind of leader, a ruler. Many societies have leaders who inspire, organize, facilitate, teach. But a ruler is something different. And the people of the Sumer community become something different as well. Initially, farmers were asked to spend some of their time helping construct walls that benefit all from floods.

But what was done voluntarily by one generation is expected of the next and is imposed, unquote. The temporary division of labor becomes permanent and forced gifts given to the girl out of gratitude become obligatory tribute. A leader asks, but a ruler commands. And when a ruler commands, they must be obeyed.

The people of Sumer are now something else. I was calling them and us peasants. But Freddy has another name in mind. Since this new phenomenon will continue throughout the entire story of civilization. Freddy thinks it's perfectly fair to borrow a term from the far future when people will toil in Gulag prison camps in the Soviet Union during Freddy's own lifetime.

These incarcerated workers will be called Zeke's, and Freddy argues that while the Soviets may have invented this name, the Sumerians invented the position. But there are only so many people in Sumer to work for the legal. Wars are declared around foreigners from the Zagros Mountains, and Persian planes are captured and enslaved and sent to Sumer to work insects.

These wars devastate the landscape, which only strengthens the legal refugees of these wars. When nothing left to live on and their homelands migrate to Sumer as a survival necessity and volunteer to become sex. And it's in Sumer where the first trading will be invented. Inspired by fragments of what can be known from the first Sumerian writing, Freddi notes that the eventual cuneiform tablets will be, quote, mysteriously silent about the deeds of the women and elders at the time of the first two gods.

And as time goes on, the tablet scribes help people forget that Sumerian women were important, that elders once sat and counsel that there was age before the first struggle, unquote. Freddy tells us it was the birth of history. Not human history, but his story of patriarchal domination. Freddy goes on. Quote. It is not enough to say that people are constrained.

The first captured sex may do it only because they are physically constrained, but physical constraint no longer explains why the children of sex stick to their levers. It's not that constraint vanishes. The constraint is internalized, unquote. Over time, the workers and managers, quote, become increasingly like the springs and wheels they operate. Perlman pauses there. He can see us squirm by the fire.

I told you the ghost story was spooky. But this tale is not just one of comment and captivity, but of those who never stop trying to break free. Freddie's words again. Pick up in the flames. Quote. Here we reach a problem that has plagued people since the age of the first or the problem of resistance. If the blue goal is to control the sex, the legal needs help.

But how can the legal get help ruling over the sex without sharing his own power? The legal needs an intermediary between himself and the sex. The legal needs an ensi. An ensi in Sumerian came to be known as a boss, but not a boss. Always subordinate to the legal. A regional manager of sorts.

Picture a Sumerian Ensi presiding over the construction of a great ziggurat. His job is to ensure that Zek's are assembling the baked bricks properly, and to punish them if they did not. It's a hot day. The Zeke's tremble under the weight of their toil. Some collapse in exhaustion. Many faces are covered with expressions of resentment and discontent. The ensi watches all this carefully and strange thoughts come to the senses, mind unquote.

They're more than noises, he notices, and certainly many more insects than will gods. Yet the insects still follow the enemy's orders, just as the noises follow the wiggles. There are rebellions, of course, but the ensiis surprised that they're not all the time. And even more surprising, and far more perplexing, is the fact that during such rebellions, very few activities came to a complete halt, even during the interregnum between wagons, unquote.

It's as if the city has caught a will of its own, but he knows it doesn't. The only one in town with a will is the little girl. The next, when we execute the lugares will. And if the zerks have a will at all, it is a will to break out. The NCR concludes that it's pointless to think.

Thinking is the job of priests and oracles, unquote. But the NCR was on to something, even if it was just outside his grasp. Something does have a will of its own, but it's not just a city, it's Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes, the English philosopher, will use this name. He will write a book called Leviathan in 1651. Thousands of years after Sumeria is buried in sand.

Hobbes will write to quote that Great Leviathan called a Commonwealth or state, which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protection and defense it was intended, and in which the sovereignty is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body. The magistrates and other officers of Judah could share an execution.

Artificial joints. Reward and punishment are the nerds that do the same in the body. Natural. The wealth and riches of all the particular members are the strength, the people's safety, its business counselors, by whom all things needful for it is to know or suggested unto it, what are the memory, equity, and laws, and artificial reason, and will Concord health, sedition, sickness and civil war, death, unquote.

That's what Ensi was seeing. The birth of the Leviathan, an artificial creature whose parts are built out of people who are no longer free.

Hobbes will imagine that in the Leviathan there is, quote, one free and whole man, unquote, to Hobbes, that is the monarch, the ruler, the will. God. But Freddy shakes his head. Our fire burns quote. Even the lugal, the freest man on earth cannot go hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, and dancing at night as his own spirit moves him, unquote.

One of Urukagina of oh gosh, perhaps more than any other will go before him, would have learned the true limits of his power. After generations of all Gauls who ruled by the whip, UrukAgena of oh gosh, clay cuneiform tablets will tell us that he becomes, quote, the first documented reformer, unquote, and champion of what will one day call the working class.

Perhaps Urukagina recognizes the work that keeps Lagash running is that of the sex, not the elite who rule over them. For example, one such reform was not allowing elites to force Zeks to sell goods to him. If the Zeks refused, this was a real reform, and the clay tablet decreeing it survived into our time. But Ursa minor of legacies reforms do not last for long because neither does Urukagina.

You see, Urukagina  had a rival in ensifrom the nearby town named Zagizzi's. And Freddie wasn't making these names up, by the way. Zagizzi once lived as much as you and I, and Zagizzi's was sick of being in NC. He wanted to be a legal. So we devised a plan.

Zagizzi could see how Urukagina's reforms had angered the elite civil gosh. In fact, the elites were fuming. Sure, the Xqcs were happy, but who cares about them? Zagizzirealized he could potentially seize power without even using his own soldiers. He wouldn't even have to invade if he could promise to end the reforms and return power to the elites of Lagash.

They would invite him in. And that's exactly what happened. Zagizzi's recognized what  Urukagina didn't. There is more power in supporting wealth than there is in supporting justice. Yet wasn't Urukagina the ruler? And doesn't the ruler get to decide what to do? It turns out there are forces which rule even the legal. What happened to Urukagina?

Perhaps he was executed. Maybe he ended his own life to avoid capture once he saw his own elites had turned against him. All we know is that Erica. Nina was finished and that in his place, Zagizzi's became legal. As we go, the united all of the cities of the Tigris, Euphrates Valley for the first time. Sumer was a single unified kingdom.

The Leviathan and legal's legacy may think that he is now the ruler, that he is the one in control. But when Zagizzi is wiped from the face of the Earth, the Leviathan he temporarily helped grow will continue on unscathed. The Leviathan, Freddy tells us, is not run by people, but by something new to people. Institutions which are impersonal and immortal.

Perlman calls the collection of these institutions the Immortal Worm, an artificial being, yet which grows and consumes, like the living. Quote. Institutions are not a part of life, but a part of death, and death cannot die and die and die. But the labor gang lives on. Generals and soldiers die. But ers army lives on and in fact grows larger and deadlier.

Death's realm grows, but the living die. This creates problems that resisters have not so far been able to deal with, unquote.

A cold wind howls and we shiver. But the fire grows stronger. Freddie's words through the fire. Tell us, quote. Dead things have powers. Living beings lack the Leviathan quote. Neither breathes nor breeds. It is not even a living parasite. It is an excretion. Unquote. Life will be gobbled up, forests cleared, predators slain. Mountains. Mind. Life will go in one end, Leviathan, and come out the other as resources.

This excretion will be a new kind of trade. And Freddy says that outside of Leviathan, quote, trade is something people do to their enemies, unquote, not with their kin, as gifts are given and received, not exchanged. There are two ways of reading this. One is the bright side that a market economy allows enemies to live together without being kin.

Or, as Pearlman emphasizes, the nefarious side. A market economy creates a society of enemies. And as he explains, when trade encompasses all facets of society, it is no longer just trade. It is called business. A businessman, Freddy says, is, quote, a human being who thrives in and on the leviathan's material entrails, unquote. And one day business will become another force of the Leviathan.

Beyond even the supposed ruler's control.

Lugalziggi's and his trusty elites consider none of this. And how could they really? It's all so new. The incoming resources, the tribute, the power. And here they are. The rulers of the great Sumeria. They're on top of the world.

But further north, up the valley, in a land called a cod. The river. The man who may not have spoken the Sumerian language, but was fluent in the ways of Sumerian power. His name was Sargon. Born to a humble gardener who worked his way up to be cupbearer to the king. But Sargon of a card had ambition that would lead him far beyond gardens and cups.

Up until now, it was the Sumerian Leviathan who conquered much of the land around it had fallen under its sway. But for the first time, Sumer would soon be conquered itself, and it would be Sargon of a god who would do it wherever.

One by one, cities fell. First Cimarron, then along, then Mari. And the conquering continued until Sargon s army marched into Iraq and defeated lugares like easy. We're told from the cuneiform that Zagizzy was captured, and Sargon led him in a color to the gate of his Akkadian god. There's an engraved stone slab from the time that shows Agis imprisoned, being hit on the head with a mace by Sargon.

And Sargon did not stop there. He conquered Earth in Amir Lagash and Umma. He conquered out to the cedar forests of us up to the Silver Mountains of Ladakh, east out to the Gulf, and west out to the sea. A Babylonian chronicler wrote, quote, his splendor over the lands it diffused. He brought it under one authority. He set up his statues there and ferried the West's booty across on barges.

He marched to castle and turned castle into a ruined heap. So that there was not even a perch for a bird left. Unquote. Sargon of a god had destroyed the walls and cities of Sumeria, but the Leviathan was now more powerful than ever before. Like the Gizzy before him, Sargon now believed he was the head of this power.

Sargon himself boasted in cuneiform, quote, all the lands revolted against me, and they besieged me in a god. But the old lion still had teeth and claws. I went forth to battle and defeated them. I knocked them over and destroyed their vast army. Now any king who wants to call himself my equal wherever I went, let him go.

The fire spits and tumbles. The Leviathan is a cannibal. Freddy says, quote, it eats its contemporaries as well as its predecessors. Its enemy is everything outside of itself, unquote. Sargon the Conqueror thought his major achievement was in defeating Sumer and in creating the Akkadian Empire. But his true achievement is helping us see Leviathan more clearly. You see this monster, though, brought to the world by Sumer, no longer belongs to Sumer anymore.

The immortal worm has no nationality, no ethnicity. It is a beast bent on the total consumption of the world. Sargon thought he was the ruler, but Leviathan was the ruler. Sargon was Leviathan's regional manager. As Freddy says, quote, Earth is now. It is not exotic at all. It is our world. 6000 years later, there will still be little girls that they will call themselves new names, unquote.

The Leviathan still haunts us today.

Thanks for listening. Against history. Against Leviathan is an epic story spanning thousands of years. This was just its first chapter. Perhaps one day we will return and let Freddy continue his story from here. But up ahead on our odyssey, we will be traveling in time, all the way to the present to look at the beast Leviathan eventually became and the world system it created.

Until next time. I hope you won't have nightmares about spooky worms. Remember, this was just a fairy tale. And though it's one that's haunted us for thousands of years, perhaps you'll consider better stories that could come true instead. So the fire we peasants have gathered around is growing dim. It's best we let it die down. For now. But the campfire is always burning on the Human Nature Odyssey Patreon, where songs and stories are always being sung.

You can come join us around the fire. There, share your thoughts, make your suggestions, talk with your fellow peasants. Have access to bonus episodes, transcripts of episodes, and audiobook readings. Your support makes this podcast possible. Thank you to Gary and Michael for your feedback on this episode. And as always, our theme music is Celestial Soda Pop by Ray, which you can find the link in our show notes.

Talk with you soon.