Over the summer, when I spent 45 days in a row working 12 to 18 hours per day to re-stabilize my company after I withdrew us from a potentially damaging partnership, I found myself in what felt like an existential battle for financial survival, during which I wrote a group of essays about empire in modernity. I contend that modern people are the unwitting orphan children of Rome.
This is a theme that I have been studying closely for the past several years, as we've worked to see deeper and deeper into the root causes of the alienation scaffolding modernity. Our foundation observation, based on deep analysis from our mentor Darcia Narvaez, trans-disciplinary psychology researcher of renown, as well as numerous long conversations with Indigenous mentors of ours whose sovereign tribal histories stand outside of the conventionally received modern narrative about the shape of history over the past several thousand years, supports the very clear notion that about 12,000 years ago the humans that would give rise to the hegemonically-ascendant western paradigm, western civilization so-called, shifted out of nomadic (hunter gatherer) lifestyles and began to aggregate in stationary settlements. In fairly rapid succession, with the birth of settled agriculture, we saw the co-arising of surplus food, which allowed us to store food, which necessitated a system for denoting value that became increasingly abstracted (money), the arising of notional enclosure with hierarchical claim to productive arable land (notion of private property), the birth of right angles (which are found rarely in nature) to demarcate land boundaries (property surveying), the strengthening of patriarchial multi-generational land claims, which would shift us from matriarchal or balanced gender roles into masculine dominated frameworks, and then the accelerating eliding, and then fullscale amputation of feminine and earth-based modes of relating from civilizational frameworks. Said succinctly, empire is the social reification of dominance. It requires ruling elites, and a general population whose work can be extracted. It is vertical and heirarchical in orientation, and because of this literalization of value, prioritizes the above, and therefore begins to look skyword for the Divine, consolidating the Sacred into a notional upward, e.g., heaven above. It is also, as I have said elsewhere, a death cult. This has become, I hope, fairly obvious to people grappling sincerely with the unmistakeable recognition that modern civilization is rapidly degrading the only biosphere in the known universe, and seems entirely incapable of stopping this, which is something even very simple organisms refrain from doing. Goldfish in a tank stop growing. Rat populations stabilize, etc. The current manifestation of modernity has less collective intelligence, is what I am saying, than a rodent civilization. It is somewhere above a virus and below rat in terms of quality: a pretty low bar in my view.
The primary modes of relating first elided from this civilizational view because they were inconvenient ethically for dominator peoples, who needed to exit the psychic ethical torsion of knowing they were harming their relatives, human and non-human, which they knew (e.g., "We knew it was evil and we did it anyway", and did so by generating supremacy heirarchies, and then amputated fully from the civilizational view because empire abhors sovereignty in its subjects, was a view that was earth-based, cthonic, and horizontal in orientation. This mode of relating, which could be broadly termed matrilineal, and which might be formulated in the present moment, per the work of my friend and colleague Skeena Rathor, as Motherist, place the mother-infant dyad at the center of sociality, and organize society around providing the proper ecological and extra-genetic context for their mutual thriving (e.g., the evolved nest).
Such an organizing de-centers notions of verticality, heirarchy, and domination, and rather centers mutuality and reciprocity. Importantly, this view is in fact the way that all of Nature works. It is eco-systemic. Douglas Fir trees do not set out to dominate the forest ecology. If they do, they end up dying by creating systemic imbalance. Rather, eco-systems flourish through laterality and mutual aid, through reciprocal relationships horizontally between networks, such as the mycelial. The purview of the forest is the forest entire. Eco-systems optimize for life. Empires optimize the consolidation of power. We could say, therefore, that empire, like capitalism, is a self-terminating algorithm, whereas ecosystem is a self-fortifying algorithm. In empire, like capitalism, everybody loses. In the forest, everybody wins. I know which thoughtform I'd rather inhabit.
This awareness leads to the dual constructions I have articulated before: e.g., modernity as a mine: the domination and extraction paradigm, versus the ancestral as a garden. The mine is vertical and domination-based, its mode is extraction. The garden is horizontal and reciprocal, its mode is mutualistic or motherist.
The problem, or one of the problems, with this clarity, is the recognition that domination is hard-wired, as source code, into the foundational layers of the organization of modernity entire, which makes stepping outside of it a non-obvious proposition. Part of the reason I became interested in this, interested in digging out what I think of as the taproot of supremacy, was because I study patterns, and I began to see identicality in patterns of domination across very widely divergent organizations. I started seeing the same domination paradigms that I saw in corporations playing out in non-profit organizations, playing out in religions, playing out in progressive movements, playing out in marriages, etc. It turns out that we, modern people, or at least I, as someone acculturated into modernity, am pretty shitty at operating from horizontality.
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