DOE#1: PRESENTING (drum roll, please) BIPOLAR POLITICAL SPECTRUM THEORY!

How both the Political Left and Right were created by the Ruling Class in response to the Indigenous Critique of Western Civilization

Hey Folks!

Do I ever have a doozy for you today!

Buckle yourselves in. This is the culmination of what I’ve been working on for quite some time.

I promised a granular, chapter-by-chapter analysis of The Dawn of Everything, and today I’m getting started on Chapter One.

Before I get into my own thoughts, though, I want to say that I will be drawing heavily on a series of YouTube videos produced by Dr. Scrotes of the What is Politics? YouTube channel.

Often, he expresses things so well that I’d rather repeat his words than come up with my own formulation.

Because I’m a big believer in giving credit where credit is due, and because I want to direct people towards his YouTube channel, I will be quoting quite extensively from Dr. Scrotes throughout my explorations of The Dawn of Everything.

I’ll quickly mention that, for clarity’s sake, I had to take some liberties in quoting him, though I believe I have in all cases preserved his original meaning.

If you’d like to get the most out of your research experience, I highly recommend watching these videos:

Before we get into it, some housekeeping info.

The first chapter of The Dawn of Everything is entitled Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood, which is also the title of a 2015 essay of the same name, which was published by the Royal Anthropological Institute.

I mention this because I plan to compare the content of The Dawn of Everything with the preview chapters that were published before Graeber’s death.

Because Graeber died mysteriously a year before the book was released, I am skeptical about its authenticity, so I will be comparing his posthumously-released writing with that which he published while he was still alive.

For those of you interested in my methodology as I conduct my analysis, I refer you to this piece, in which I list the different essays and preview chapters that were published prior to Graeber’s death.

With that out of the way, let’s get started.

What’s the deal with this chapter, Dr. Scrotes?

In this chapter Graeber points out that many of they key insights and concepts associated with the European enlightenment – ideas of individual liberty and equality, and the rejection of religious dogma and established social hierarchy based on ascribed status – were heavily influenced by Europeans’ encounters with Native Americans. 

This influence came both from observing the American way of life - which flew in the face of the social order which europeans had been taught to believe was natural and ordained by god for hundreds of years – and the influence also came from specific critiques of European society, religion, economy and values made by the Americans.  

Merchants, Jesuit missionaries, soldiers, military men and various kinds of settlers, went across the Atlantic Ocean to the new world taking for granted a whole array of rigid social dominance hierarchies, between rich and poor, kings and subjects, lords and serfs, masters and servants, men and women, massive wealth inequalities, and property relationships that kept some people in servile and dependant relationships to others.  

But North America truly was a new world in more ways than one.  The European immigrants and colonists were shocked to discover that the so-called savages they encountered lived in societies where these hierarchies either didn’t exist at all, or else they existed in relatively mild forms compared to what they had taken for granted all of their lives.  

And it was a further shock in their encounters to hear the Americans excoriating and making fun of those hierarchies, ridiculing the Europeans’ mistreatment of each other, their shameful rules of private property and money exchange, and calling them slaves.  

This is what Graeber and Wengrow call “the indigenous critique”, which is a term I will be using throughout this series.

Whenever I use it, by the fall, please be aware that it is shorthand for “the indigenous critique of Western Civilization”.

Specifically, it includes critiques of Christianity, feudalism, private property, patriarchy, taxation, bureaucracy, European legal systems, and, most of all - money.

Dr. Scrotes continue:

For some people the encounters contributed to the growing Enlightenment ideas about how much of the hierarchy that Europeans were subject to were not necessary and not just, and that they should be overthrown. 

But to other people, the Native American ways of life were perceived as a threat to the social order that needed to be crushed.  

I suppose this would be a good time to make my thesis statement. I believe that European reactions to the indigenous critique lead to the creation of both the Political Right and the Political Left, two poles which work in conjunction to set the limits of political discourse. I will call this Bipolar Political Spectrum Theory.

Dr. Scrotes continues:

Graeber and Wengrow quote some of the reactions of Jesuit missionaries to the people they encountered which are worth repeating. Graeber points out that the Jesuits saw liberty as a low, animal quality.  

First there’s Pere Lejeune who did his missionary work among the Montagnais Naskapi people in what’s now Quebec who were an extremely egalitarian hunting and gathering people:

“They imagine that they ought by right of birth, to enjoy the liberty of wild ass colts, rendering no homage to any one whomsoever, except when they like. They have reproached me a hundred times because we fear our Captains, while they laugh at and make sport of theirs. All the authority of their chief is in his tongue’s end; for he is powerful in so far as he is eloquent; and, even if he kills himself talking and haranguing, he will not be obeyed unless he pleases the Savages… Our Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests - I mean ambition and avarice.  They have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him… Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.”

LeJeune goes on to talk disapprovingly about how they have sexual freedom, how women don’t obey men, and how the Indians love to laugh and make fun of him.

And here’s another quote from Pere Lallemant who missioned among the Wendat people, from 1644: 

“I could hardly believe that there is any place in the world more difficult to subject to the Laws of JESUS CHRIST. Not only because they have no knowledge of letters, no Historical monuments, and no idea of a Divinity who has created the world and who governs it; but, above all, because I do not believe that there is any people on earth freer than they, and less able to allow the subjection of their wills to any power whatever, so much so that Fathers here have no control over their children, or Captains over their subjects, or the Laws of the country over any of them, except in so far as each is pleased to submit to them.” […]

Now, these quotes come from the various volumes of the Jesuit Relations books, which were accounts by Jesuit missionaries which were extremely popular in Europe at the time – like imagine if people from earth landed on another planet and we got reports from how the people from those planets lived, how popular those reports would be!

And then Graeber and Wengrow continue about the native reaction to the Europeans.

“In the view of the Montagnais-Neskapi, by contrast, the French were little better than slaves, living in constant fear of getting into trouble with their superiors.  Such criticisms appeared regularly in the Jesuit accounts, not only from those who lived in nomadic hunter gatherer bands, but also from settled town dwellers like the Wendat.”

In addition to these Jesuit books, eager European readers were also gobbling up other books about the New World, like Baron Lahontan’s collection, New Voyages to North America, 1666-1716.  Of particular interest was a section called Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Traveled which was first published in serial form in 1703.  

In these dialogues, Lanontan reports debates between himself and Adario, a fictionalized version of the real Chief Kondiaronk – a Native American of the Wendat nation of great renown who Lanhontan had made friends with and who had engaged in many debates and discussions with them in Montreal. […]

And in these debates, Adario made many detailed critiques of European society – religion, patriarchy, social castes, wealth inequality, ownership of private property, the existence of a punitive legal system – much of which Kondiaronk had likely expressed to Lahontan, but some of which were also likely Lahontan’s own opinions, as he was himself a forward-thinking critic of European feudalism.  And these same arguments were soon echoed and sometimes wholesale adopted by enlightenment philosophers in their debates and treatises, in particular the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  

So let’s look at some of Kondiaronk’s critiques as recorded by Lahontan in his book where the author debates with Adario (i.e. Kondiaronk), as cited by Graeber and Wengrow:

“I find it hard to see how you Europeans could be much more miserable than you already are. What kind of human being, what kind of creature must Europeans be to be forced to do good and refrain from evil only for fear of punishment? […]

You have noted that we lack judges. What is the reason for this?  It’s because we never bring charges against each other. And why do we never sue each other? Because we have made a decision not to accept or use money. Why?  Because we are determined not to have laws.  Since the world was a world, our ancestors were able to live happily without them.”

Kandaronk then goes on eviscerate the French legal system point by point, focusing particularly on judicial persecution, perjury, torture, accusations of witchcraft, and differential justice for rich and poor.

And in the end, he returns to his original observation: the whole punitive apparatus of trying to force people to behave properly would be useless if France did not also maintain contrary institutions that incentivized people to behave badly. These institutions consisted of money, property rights, and the resulting pursuit of material self-interest.

Kandiaronk continues: 

“I’ve spent six years thinking about the state of European society and I still can’t think of a single one of your ways that isn’t inhumane, and I sincerely believe that it can only be because you stick to your distinctions of ‘mine’ and ‘yours’. I affirm that what you call money is the devil of devils; the tyrant of the French, the source of all evil; the scourge of souls and the slaughterhouse of the living. To imagine that one can live in the land of money and preserve one’s soul is like imagining that one can preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.

Money is the father of luxury, lasciviousness, intrigue, deceit, lies, betrayal, insincerity, all the worst behaviors in the world.

Fathers sell their children, husbands their wives, wives betray their husbands, brothers kill each other, friends are false, and all for money. In light of all this, tell me that we Wendat are not right to refuse to touch or even look at money?”

Lahontan then tries to counter-argue that without money, Europe would collapse.  

“Without it, nobles, priests, merchants and many others who do not have the strength to work the soil, would simply starve. Our kings would not be kings; what soldiers would we have? Who would work for the kings, or for anyone else? This would plunge Europe into chaos and create the darkest confusion.” […]

So Adario (aka Kandiaronk) replies: 

“Do you really think you will influence me by catering to the needs of nobles, merchants and priests? Yes, such distinctions between men would dissolve; a leveling equality would then take its place among you as it does now among the Wendat.”

And he goes on to say that all the useless parasites who live off of others’ labour will die off, but their children will know how to work and the world would be a much better place.

Adario/Kandiaronk: “I’ve enumerated many times the qualities which define humanity: wisdom, reason, justice, etc.  And I’ve shown that people having opposed material interests turns all of these things on their heads.  A man motivated by interests can never be a man of reason.”

So you have this critique coming from Native Americans, but also from Europeans like Lahontan who clearly agrees with Kandiaronk, and this stuff is tearing across Europe, challenging the social order like heavy metal and rap records in the 1980s. 

And ultimately, Graeber and Wengrow argue, it was in order to fend off these types of critiques from Native Americans, and the Europeans influenced by them, that European thinkers developed the theory of stages of human progress.

This is something which I have written about before. It turns out that Marx and Engels got their ideas about history not only from Hegel, as is commonly taught, but also from Lewis Henry Morgan, the anthropologist who came up with the classificatory system of different stages of human development, each of which related to different means of subsistence (from foraging to pastoralism to agriculture, etc).

But I’m getting ahead of myself here, because that all came later. Let’s get back to Dr. Scrotes’s narrative:

So, the originator of this idea was not a conservative traditionalist, but a bourgeois liberal free market economist, Turgot, who later became Louis XIV’s economic adviser, who famously opposed the reduction of bread prices during a famine. He was against the medieval hierarchies of the three social orders and the rule of the church, but was for economic hierarchies, and also for a monarchical absolutist government.  

In Turgot’s formulation, people start as hunter-gatherers, and then move up and advance to being pastoralist animal herders, then they advance to being farmers, and then finally they advance to commercial market civilization, with each stage being better and happier for everyone than the previous one.  

And in this schema, the liberty and equality that the Native Americans enjoyed were ultimately signs of economic and cultural backwardness, something that’s incompatible with advanced civilization.

At the end of the day, hierarchy and submission to authority were the price that people had to pay for all the benefits of civilization and markets.  

Quoting from Graber:

“Yes, we all like the idea of liberty and equality, Turgot writes, that is, in principle. But one must take into account the larger context. In reality, the freedom and equality of savages is not a sign of their superiority, but proof of their inferiority, since such equality is only possible in a society where each household is largely self-sufficient, and thus where all are equally poor. As societies evolve, and technology advances, the natural differences in talents and abilities between individuals become more and more important, and eventually they form the basis for an ever more complex division of labor… and where the poverty and dispossession of some, however lamentable, is the necessary condition for the prosperity of society as a whole. There is no way to avoid this. The only alternative, according to Turgot, would be massive state intervention to create a uniformity of social conditions, an imposed equality that could only have the effect of crushing all initiative and thus be an economic and social catastrophe.”

And these are the same arguments we have heard over and over ever since, but which reached a particular crescendo during the Cold War when these arguments became the heart of the pro capitalism argument, with the Soviet and Chinese communist dictatorships as the ultimate examples of Turgot’s thesis. […]

Graeber and Wengrow expand on their theory in Chapter 2 of The Dawn of Everything, explaining how Turgot directly influence Adam Smith, the Scottish theorist often seen as the Father of Capitalism.

A few years later, Turgot would elaborate these same ideas in a series of lectures on world history. He had already been arguing – for some years – for the primacy of technological progress as a driver for overall social improvement. In these lectures, he developed this argument into an explicit theory of stages of economic development: social evolution, he reasoned, always begins with hunters, then moves on to a stage of pastoralism, then farming, and only then finally passes to the contemporary stage of urban commercial civilization. Those who still remain hunters, shepherds or simple farmers are best understood as vestiges of our own previous stages of social development. In this way, theories of social evolution – now so familiar that we rarely dwell on their origins – first came to be articulated in Europe: as a direct response to the power of indigenous critique.

Within a few years, Turgot’s breakdown of all societies into four stages was appearing in the lectures of his friend and intellectual ally Adam Smith in Glasgow, and was worked into a general theory of human history by Smith’s colleagues: men like Lord Kames, Adam Ferguson and John Millar.

The new paradigm soon began to have a profound effect on how indigenous people were imagined by European thinkers, and by the European public more generally. Observers who had previously considered the modes of subsistence and division of labour in North American societies to be trivial matters, or of at best secondary importance, now began assuming that they were the only thing that really mattered. Everyone was to be sorted along the same grand evolutionary ladder, depending on their primary mode of acquiring food.

‘Egalitarian’ societies were banished to the bottom of this ladder, where at best they could provide some insight on how our distant ancestors might have lived; but certainly could no longer be imagined as equal parties to a dialogue about how the inhabitants of wealthy and powerful societies should conduct themselves in the present.

Okay, let’s recap. We now have three intellectual tendencies.

1. The indigenous critique

2. The radical European critique of feudalism, which was inspired by the indigenous critique but which drew on other influences as well. These radicals would go to overthrow the monarchy during the French Revolution.

3. The reactionary response to the indigenous critique, which argued that dominance hierarchies were a necessary consequence of material progress. This intellectual tendency, which began with Turgot and continued with Thomas Hobbes, Adam Smith, and others, created the Myth of Progress as a counter-argument to the indigenous critique. This became the Political Right.

Okay, so that explains the emergence of the Right. What about the Left?

Graeber and Wengrow continue:

Let’s pause for a moment to take stock. In the years between 1703 and 1751, as we’ve seen, the indigenous American critique of European society had an enormous impact on European thought. What began as widespread expressions of outrage and distaste by Americans (when first exposed to European mores) eventually evolved, through a thousand conversations, conducted in dozens of languages from Portuguese to Russian, into an argument about the nature of authority, decency, social responsibility and, above all, freedom. As it became clear to French observers that most indigenous Americans saw individual autonomy and freedom of action as consummate values – organizing their own lives in such a way as to minimize any possibility of one human being becoming subordinated to the will of another, and hence viewing French society as essentially one of fractious slaves – they reacted in a variety of different ways.

Some, like the Jesuits, condemned the principle of freedom outright. Others – settlers, intellectuals and members of the reading public back home – came to see it as a provocative and appealing social proposition…

In fact, the indigenous critique of European institutions was seen as so powerful that anyone objecting to existing intellectual and social arrangements would tend to deploy it as a weapon of choice: a game, as we’ve seen, played by pretty much every one of the great Enlightenment philosophers.

In the process… an argument about freedom also became, increasingly, an argument about equality. Above all, though, all these appeals to the wisdom of ‘savages’ were still ways of challenging the arrogance of received authority: that medieval certainty which maintained that the judgments of the Church and the establishment it upheld, having embraced the correct version of Christianity, were necessarily superior to those of anyone else on earth.

Turgot’s case reveals just how much those particular notions of civilization, evolution and progress – which we’ve come to think of as the very core of Enlightenment thought – are, in fact, relative latecomers to that critical tradition.

Most importantly, it shows how the development of these notions came in direct response to the power of the indigenous critique.

Indeed, it was to take an enormous effort to salvage that very sense of European superiority which Enlightenment thinkers had aimed to upend, unsettle and de-centre.

Dr. Scrotes:

So you had the Native American and European critique of European hierarchy, and then you had Turgot’s and others’ defense of European hierarchies, particularly of wealth and power.  

And then, you have Jean Jacque Rousseau. According to Graeber and Wengrow, what Rousseau does with his Discourse of Inequality is synthesize the two opposing views into a masterful declaration of impotence. 

He issues a scathing and shocking critique of European hierarchy and economic inequality, but according to Graeber and Wengrow his critique ultimately implies that we have no alternative, and thus his critique ends up serving as a justification of the status quo, or at least of a society with unjust dominance hierarchies.   

Wow! Did the Left come into being as part of a deliberate effort to create a limited-hangout-style counter-narrative to the Myth of Progress? This is exactly what David Graeber, the greatest anthropologist of the 21st century, is proposing.

If that is true, no wonder he got killed! He basically reveals the trick that makes the whole political system function. The ruling class has divided all political possibility into two narratives, both of which are unsatisfactory. The result is that the status quo wins the debate by default. Is this by design? According to David Graeber, the answer to that question is an unequivocal Yes.

Such a conclusion would necessitate nothing less than a total revision of the intellectual history of the past five hundred years. Keep in mind that we’re talking about a man who was recognized, up until his premature death, as one of the greatest scholars in the world. It might be easy to write someone like me off as a conspiracy theorist, but we’re talking about David Graeber here.

His theory deserves to be taken seriously, especially given the mysterious circumstances of his death. If this is what got him killed, I think we owe it to David Graeber to make sure that this doesn’t doesn’t get swept under the rug.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. Let’s park that thought.

A PROPOSAL FOR A METHODOLOGY OF COMPARATIVE FORENSIC ANALYSIS OF WRITING PUBLISHED BEFORE AND AFTER DAVID GRAEBER’S DEATH

Three books have been published since David Graeber’s death, which has presumably padded his widow’s finances significantly. Their marriage seems to have increased her net worth quite handsomely, but that’s probably just a coincidence.

Like Bob Dylan once sang: “I can’t help it if I’m lucky.”

David Graeber apparently left a large amount of unpublished writing behind, meaning that more posthumous books will presumably continue to enrich the woman who likely murdered him. Unfortunately, they will probably be heavily censored and stripped of genuinely revolutionary content.

If we presume that David Graeber was killed for exposing the basic scam of the Bipolar Political Spectrum, which has for centuries been leading revolutionaries into dead ends through the clever use of false logic, we would do well to compare writing that was published before and after his death.

Chapter 1 of The Dawn of Everything provides us with the perfect opportunity to do so.

As I mentioned, it is entitled Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood, which is nearly identical to the title of a 2015 essay, Farewell to the “Childhood of Man”, which can be found here.

More relevant to my present concern, however, is how Chapter 1 differs from Graeber’s earlier presentation of his argument that the Left was created as a response to the Myth of Progress, which was in turn created as a justification for European feudalism in response to the indigenous critique.

Simply put, the argument that Graeber makes in his 2019 essay The Wisdom of Kandiaronk is much stronger. The book omits certain details contained in the essay, which leads me to believe that the version contained in the book is basically a watered-down version of his true thesis.

I would highly suggest reading The Wisdom of Kandiaronk and Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood together. Certain omissions are extremely telling, and support my thesis that The Dawn of Everything is a watered-down version of the book that Graeber was working on prior to his untimely death.

The Wisdom of Kandiaronk was originally published in French in the anthropological journal Le Journal de Mauss.

I recently translated it into English from French, which I am fluent in. I encourage people to read it. It differs from Farewell to Humanity’s Childhood in some very telling ways.

For those of you who want a more detailed forensic analysis of Graeber’s writing, I refer you to this essay:

Okay. You ready? Let’s start comparing and contrasting. Chapter 1 of The Dawn of Everything begins:

Most of human history is irreparably lost to us. Our species, Homo sapiens, has existed for at least 200,000 years, but for most of that time we have next to no idea what was happening. In northern Spain, for instance, at the cave of Altamira, paintings and engravings were created over a period of at least 10,000 years, between around 25,000 and 15,000 BC. Presumably, a lot of dramatic events occurred during this period. We have no way of knowing what most of them were. This is of little consequence to most people, since most people rarely think about the broad sweep of human history anyway. They don’t have much reason to. Insofar as the question comes up at all, it’s usually when reflecting on why the world seems to be in such a mess and why human beings so often treat each other badly – the reasons for war, greed, exploitation, systematic indifference to others’ suffering. Were we always like that, or did something, at some point, go terribly wrong?

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. ‘Good’ and ‘evil’ are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

Nonetheless, on those occasions when people do reflect on the lessons of prehistory, they almost invariably come back to questions of this kind.

We are all familiar with the Christian answer: people once lived in a state of innocence, yet were tainted by original sin. We desired to be godlike and have been punished for it; now we live in a fallen state while hoping for future redemption. Today, the popular version of this story is typically some updated variation on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin and the Foundation of Inequality Among Mankind, which he wrote in 1754.

Once upon a time, the story goes, we were hunter-gatherers, living in a prolonged state of childlike innocence, in tiny bands. These bands were egalitarian; they could be for the very reason that they were so small.

It was only after the ‘Agricultural Revolution’, and then still more the rise of cities, that this happy condition came to an end, ushering in ‘civilization’ and ‘the state’ – which also meant the appearance of written literature, science and philosophy, but at the same time, almost everything bad in human life: patriarchy, standing armies, mass executions and annoying bureaucrats demanding that we spend much of our lives filling in forms.

Of course, this is a very crude simplification, but it really does seem to be the foundational story that rises to the surface whenever anyone, from industrial psychologists to revolutionary theorists, says something like ‘but of course human beings spent most of their evolutionary history living in groups of ten or twenty people,’ or ‘agriculture was perhaps humanity’s worst mistake.’

And as we’ll see, many popular writers make the argument quite explicitly. The problem is that anyone seeking an alternative to this rather depressing view of history will quickly find that the only one on offer is actually even worse: if not Rousseau, then Thomas Hobbes.”

Um… what? The only alternative to Rousseau is Hobbes? Excuse me? Has David Graeber ever heard of anarchism? Have there been zero breakthroughs in political theory since the 1750s? How could anyone make such an absurd statement?

This is an example of the kind of nonsensical non-sequiturs littered throughout The Dawn of Everything. If you aren’t paying close attention, your mind might gloss over them. But I ask you, dear reader, to take a second to think about how absolutely ridiculous it is to propose that the only two possible interpretations of reality were formulated by two European writers who died centuries ago.

Really, I’m going to drive this point home, because I think it supports my argument that David Graeber could not have possibly written The Dawn of Everything. How could any scholar, let alone an anarchist one, make such a ludicrous claim?

Graeber was a great admirer of Marcel Mauss and Pierre Clastres, for instance. And are we to suppose that Graeber had never read Peter Lamborn Wilson, Ronald Wright, or Fredy Perlman? What about Kropotkin and the classical anarchists? To say that the only alternative to Rousseau is Hobbes is beyond silly - it’s absurd.

The claim is so ridiculous that it’s not enough to simply point out its absurdity. If you ask me, such a claim requires an explanation. No one could plausibly accuse David Graeber of being ignorant of political theory. We’re talking about the author of Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value here. The most reasonable conclusion, therefore, is that he either didn’t write those words or was not expressing his true views.

So why would the authors of The Dawn of Everything make such an absurd claim? Well, there are a limited number of reasons why people make false statements. Generally, there are five reasons:

1. Because they believe what they are saying to be true

2. Because they are lying

3. Because they in denial about something they know or suspect to be true

4. Because they are joking

5. Due to a number of complex psychological factors including defence mechanisms, delusions, shadow-projections, etc.

I ask you, dear reader, to take a moment to think about these possibilities. To my mind, the likeliest explanation is that the authors of The Dawn of Everything are simply attempting to deceive their readers. If anyone has any alternative theories, I’m all ears.

If we can dismiss the other four possibilities, then we must move on to asking ourselves: If the authors are deliberately trying to deceive us, what are their motives for doing so?

Well, why do people lie? As far as I can tell, there are five main reasons:

1. Personal Gain (such as financial gain)

2. To cover up illegal, unethical, or shameful behaviour

3. To avoid punishment or adverse consequences (such as damage to one’s reputation)

4. To impress people

5. Force of Habit (in the case of pathological liars)

If we are to accept that David Graeber and David Wengrow are being deliberately deceptive in The Dawn of Everything, which of these five motives best explain their actions?

WHAT IS THE DOUBLE BIND?

I have studied psychology extensively and have worked in sales, which is a real-world laboratory for techniques of persuasion.

One of the most critical things a salesman needs to understand is that people appraise the value of different products by means of comparison. One effective technique is to offer a higher-priced option first, because whatever price you quote next will seem lower. The art of sales is largely a matter of controlling the frame of reference of your customer.

What I would aim for, as a salesman, was to pace and lead my customer towards “the Magnetic Middle.” Let’s say I’m selling chocolate bars. If it were up to me, I would want to have three tiers of pricing.

For illustration, let’s say I’ve got three different types of chocolate bars. Let’s say the prices are:

Option A: $10

Option B: $5

Option C: $2.50

Now, $10 is a lot for a chocolate bar, but maybe there’s something really special about it. More likely, it’s strategically overpriced to make Option B seem like a better deal.

After mentioning Option B, I would then go to strategically undersell Option C. Whilst superficially praising it, I might use body language to signal my opinion that it is an inferior product. I might also say that my other customers have tended to be more satisfied with Option B.

What I want and expect in this situation is for the customer to choose Option B. If some customers choose to buy the more expensive or less expensive option, that’s fine by me, but my goal will be to lead people towards the Magnetic Middle.

These ideas, by the way, are supported by behavioural psychology. I would refer people specifically to the work of Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, one of the best books on applied psychology ever written.

I learned the concept of the Magnetic Middle from a book called Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive, which I highly recommend.

I say all this to make the point that controlling perception is a matter of controlling the frames of reference of those you wish to influence.

Imagine your goal is to quell and contain resistance to an economic system in which people are tax-farmed, conscripted into military service, and forced to send their children to government indoctrination centres.

How would you do it?

Well, obviously, you have to make it seem as if such an arrangement is preferable to the alternatives. You have to control what people are comparing your Product to.

Do you understand where I’m going with this? In order to make the current political Reality palatable, you have to make it seem like the best option.

No one would choose Trudeau’s Canada if they were comparing it to, say, the Canada of ten, twenty, or thirty years ago. But if are were comparing it to Chinese-style technocratic totalitarianism, they might ultimately decide that things could be a lot worse.

In every situation, it is always true that things could be worse, which makes this a very flexible, one-size-fits-all excuse for tyranny.

The basic version of this persuasion technique is to make one option more appealing by comparing it to a less desirable option, but the more advanced version situates the Product between two poles and compares it to both.

Two alternatives are offered to the Product you are selling, but both are undesirable in some way. The goal is to have people choose the Magnetic Middle, which in this case is the status quo - a social order controlled by a cartel of international criminal organizations called banks.

WHAT IS BIPOLAR POLITICAL SPECTRUM THEORY?

This is what American-style electoral politics are really all about. It’s about controlling the perception of the masses by controlling the poles of the debate.

Think about it. The two-party system works by forcing the public to accept something undesirable by presenting it as the best of the available options, or, if you prefer, the lesser of two evils.

It also serves to pit people against each other, which helps preserve state power by keeping commoners from realizing their basis for unity and making common cause with one another.

WHAT IS THE DOUBLE BIND?

In addition to the Magnetic Middle, another key concept to understanding politics is the Double Bind.

This website explains:

Have you ever been in a double bind? This is a situation in which – no matter what you do – you seem bound to lose.

A child used as a pawn between rowing parents, for example, will feel they cannot win. Here is the worst case scenario in a divorce.

The mother says to the child:

“If you love me more than your father, come to me.”  

The father says:

“If you love me more than your mother, come to me.” 

Now, this definition refers to a double bind as a predicament - a situation in which one is forced to make a decision between two undesirable options. That’s just life.

When I use the term Double Bind to refer to a propaganda technique, however, I am referring to situations in which people are offered a choice by someone who is offering it in order to make something undesirable seem more desirable by comparing it to something even more undesirable.

When salesmen offers you a choice between two products, they want you to subconsciously accept that you are making a choice between two options. In reality, you have a third option, which is to buy neither product. The salesman isn’t likely to remind you of that, though. He wants you to choose between the options he is presenting, because in either case he has made a sale. The important point here is that the salesman doesn’t care which of the two options you choose.

You might call this “an illusion of choice” or even a “false choice”, and this is the principle that electoral democracy is based upon. It is about making people feel like they have a choice because if people have agreed to something, they are more likely to see it as just. This is why our rulers want us to perform the ritual of voting. It is a way of legitimizing state power. If people can be said to have consented to their enslavement, they aren’t truly slaves. The Devil always gives you a choice.

Because I want to make this crystal clear, I want to give you some examples of Double Binds, which parents and salespeople use all the time.

Here are two examples of common uses of the Double Bind:

1. Would you prefer to have your bath before or after dinner?

2. Would you like to pay by cash or credit card?

In both cases, the choice that is offered contains a presupposition. That the child is having a bath is not up for debate, and it is presumed that the customer will buy the product. If someone is thinking about a choice between how they will pay for a product, it means they are not thinking about whether or not they will make a purchase.

The successful use of the Double Bind involves getting the other party to subconsciously accept a hidden presupposition.

The important thing to understand is that the salesman does not care which option you choose. So long as you have chosen between the two choices he offered you, he has won.

It has long been apparent to me that electoral politics is based on the Double Bind.

The best example of this is the U.S. two-party system, and I will probably expand upon this idea at some point.

My purpose here is to expand upon my theory that The Dawn of Everything was written in order to justify the status quo, much in the way that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan did in the 17th century.

I am now able to expand my theory. I believe that the purpose of The Dawn of Everything was to frame all political theory as existing between two poles, which are represented by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Graeber explains:

One reason why the intellectual debates of the 1740s or 1750s seem so strange to us today is that later left-right divisions had not yet crystallized. In fact, the terms 'left' and 'right' did not yet exist at the time of the American Revolution; they were a product of the decade immediately after it, and referred to the positions of the aristocratic and popular groups in the French National Assembly in 1789.

I encourage those of you who wish to pull on this thread to watch the following video, which provides a good historic analysis of the terms “Left” and “Right” as they apply to politics.

If you’re really feel that I’m on to something and want to expand your knowledge, I would also recommend watching these videos:

(Note that I do not share this YouTuber’s opinion that we should go back to the “correct” meanings of the terms Left and Right. Because the terms are used by the ruling class to pit people against each other, I believe we would do better to abandon both terms altogether.)

DID THE LEFT-RIGHT POLITICAL PARADIGM EMERGE ORGANICALLY, OR WAS IT DEVELOPED AS A TECHNIQUE TO CREATE A MAGNETIC MIDDLE?

Many people are so used to thinking of politics in terms of the Left-Right political divide that they cannot even imagine a world in which such distinctions did not exist.

The argument that I want to make is that both Left and Right emerged in response to the indigenous critique of Western Civilization.

The Right emerged first. The first pole, epitomized by Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 work Leviathan, was developed as a justification for monarchism because contact with indigenous societies had caused Europeans to become much more skeptical than they had been previously about the “divine right of kings” to rule over them.

The solution proposed by Hobbes was that authoritarianism was the best option for humanity because human beings are naturally selfish, brutish creatures and that the “state of nature” is characterized by a “war of all against war”.

About a century later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau invented the Left as an intellectual project, though the term itself emerged only later. He took a different approach, arguing that although human nature might not be nearly so nasty as Hobbes suggested, people ultimately were responsible for their oppression because their ancestors had in some way consented to it.

In The Wisdom of Kandiaronk, the last major essay that he published before his untimely death, Graeber proposes an incredibly sophisticated and convincing theory that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality should be considered the founding document of the Left.

He claims:

[I]t could be argued that by bringing together the indigenous critique and the doctrine of progress originally developed to counter it, he, in effect, wrote the document which founded the left as an intellectual project.

And this is where things get supremely cray-cray. Are you ready for this?

THE MYTH OF THE NOBLE SAVAGE MYTH

Right after crediting Rousseau with inventing the Left, Graeber goes on to share some extremely mind-blowing information, which requires the intellectual honest person to question to what extent mainstream history has been edited to downplay the importance of the indigenous critique on European thought.

When encountering the idea of the indigenous critique for the first time, one might reasonably ask “Why have I never heard of this before?”

This was the reaction of the historian David A. Bell, who is an Enlightenment scholar.

A Flawed History of Humanity

If Bell had read The Wisdom of Kandiaronk, which was published before Graeber’s death, he would have a very good answer to that question - there was a deliberate effort to rewrite history through the creative use of a novel propaganda trope - The Myth of the Noble Savage.

Before sharing the relevant passage, which basically proves that HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS, I will note that this information was not included in The Dawn of Everything.

It is very puzzling why this is so, given that this information significantly strengthens Graeber’s thesis that Kandiaronk and Lahontan inspired the Enlightenment.

Because I cannot think of any reason why this information would be left out of The Dawn of Everything, which contains many lengthy excursions into questions of dubious relevance (such as hobbits, dwarves, giants, and schizophrenic prophets), I cite its omission in support of my thesis that the posthumously-published book is counterfeit, and that David Graeber’s true views have been suppressed.

Are you ready to have your mind blown?

This is from The Wisdom of Kandiaronk:

[R]ight-wing thought has always been wary not only of ideas of progress, but also of the entire tradition which sprung forth in response to the indigenous critique.

We tend to assume that it is mainly left-wing politicians who talk about the 'Myth of the Noble Savage' and that any ancient European narrative that idealizes distant people, or even attributes convincing opinions to them, is in reality nothing more than a romantic projection of European fantasies onto people the authors could never truly understand. […]

Ter Ellingson, the anthropologist who has done the most comprehensive review of the literature, concluded that there never was a 'Myth of the Noble Savage' - in the sense of a stereotype of simple societies living in an era of happy primordial innocence - at all.

The accounts of real travelers tend to provide us with a much more ambivalent picture, describing foreign societies as a complex, sometimes incomprehensible mixture of virtues and vices.

Instead, what needs to be examined might better be called the Myth of the Noble Savage Myth.

Why did some Europeans begin to accuse other Europeans of having such a naive and romantic view, to the point where anyone who suggests that an aspect of indigenous life has something to teach us is immediately accused of romanticism?

The answer is not pretty. The phrase 'noble savage' was actually popularized as a term of ridicule and abuse used by a clique of die-hard racists who took control of the British Ethnological Society in 1859, and called for the total extermination of inferior peoples.

The original proponents of the idea blamed Rousseau for the Myth of the Noble Savage, but soon afterward, students of literary history were scouring the archives for traces of this noble savage everywhere. Almost all of the texts discussed during this chapter have come under scrutiny and been dismissed as dangerous, romantic fantasies. But at first, these rejections came almost entirely from the political right.

Ellingson gives the example of Gilbert Chinard, whose 1913 volume America and the Exotic Dream in French literature of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries was primarily responsible for establishing the Myth of the Noble Savage as a Western literary trope in American academia, with Chinard perhaps the least coy about his political agenda. He too recognized Lahontan as the key figure and explained in detail that Rousseau had borrowed specific arguments from him.

Wow! Someone please correct me if I’m wrong, but it looks like David Graeber has offered hard proof that Kandiaronk and Lahontan have been written out of the history books. Apparently, an anthropologist named Ter Ellingson has conducted a comprehensive review of the literature and formally called shenanigans.

I second this call. Shenanigans has officially been called.

This is pretty mind-blowing stuff, and the implications are massive.

Was Rousseau controlled opposition? Was the Left invented for the purposes of ideological subversion?

Is the true purpose of the Left-Right political divide to present a Double Bind in which all political possibilities are reduced to two unappealing options?

Is the true purpose of this false choice, in which the poles represented by Hobbes and Rousseau are framed as the only realistic alternatives to the status quo, based on the logic of the Magnetic Middle? Is the true purpose of the Bipolar Political Spectrum to subliminally force acceptance of the status quo as the best of all possible worlds?

Think about it. Could this be the reason that Leftists so often propose ludicrously stupid solutions to political problems?

I think so, and if I can prove it, I will. After grappling with the befuddling contradictions of The Dawn of Everything for over a year, I finally have a working theory. I’m pretty sure that I’ve cracked the code at this point, and I ain’t about to quit now.

In the coming days and weeks, I plan to continue my investigation, which will involve reading original sources, including Hobbes and Rousseau.

I feel like a bloodhound who’s been sniffing and sniffing and sniffing… and who just got a powerful nostril-filling whiff of the scent I was searching for. It’s pretty elating, to be honest. I knew I was onto something, but had no idea where it would lead.

By now, I have a better idea, although I’m well aware my work is far from over.

For now, dear reader, I will leave you with this thought:

If you happen to wish to assist with this research project, by the way, I would really appreciate it.

Feel free to volunteer your services in the comments, or by writing me an email at thecrowisamessenger@riseup.net.

Thank you for reading, and if you aren’t already subscribed, now’s your chance!