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Oct 12Liked by NEVERMORE MEDIA

You remind me why I love David Graeber, and why he's been the greatest influence on my book and thinking. What a monumental work of translation, Crow! I hope this finds a very wide audience.

I'll do my little part to help that by linking it in a future episode. All his ideas deserve further discussion. I feel that even where I disagree, he pushes me to clarify my thought.

I loved your aside! I think you saw my episode on Kandiaronk: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/muskrat-love-and-anarchy, and this one talks about the DoE on gender: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/sex-and-power-battle-of-the-daves, and this one is about women, apropos of your aside: https://thirdparadigm.substack.com/p/when-mothers-ran-the-world.

I didn't see, though, where it differed significantly from the book. Some things seemed new to me, although I didn't know if I'd just forgotten them, but the important points all seemed to be there. What do you see as left out, Crow? Thanks again for all this work!

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No, that chapter is pretty much the same! I have oodles of critical things to say about The Dawn of Everything, but none of them are about Wicked Liberty.

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This is a fucking exceptional essay.

Yeah, I can well imagine something like this (rebellion following the offer one can't refuse) would've made up the minds of the savage nobles (well, they're not really noble, obviously, the monsters/globalist cabal I mean, but I wanted an excuse to be pretentiously clever with the wording). So I am right with you on your conspiracy theory about DG. Likewise, maybe I shall have to think cleverly and cunningly myself about what I say and how I say it.

But certainly, in answer to the question 'how did things get unequal' the most obvious psychological (or psychohistorical) answer is that it was 'imposed' on the mass of humanity over a period of several thousand years during the holocene by a very small minority of humanoids who are fundamentally different than (let's call it) the 99%. I'm going to argue their behaviour, and therefore their entire brain patters and functioning, is so different as to constitute a different species. They simply look like humans and parasite off them. But this entire 'conspiracy theory' analysis of history can be reduced to a simple matter of a 'group survival strategy' on the part of this 1% - if the 99% ever got wind of this demonic other then self-defence would take over and the monsters wouldn't survive. Normal human beings, as epitomised by the so-called 'noble savage' (the Americans as described in the essay) are essentially innately morally good (i.e. liberal-minded, altruistic, wary of authority, enlightened, holistic, socialist, anarchist) and all those other positive words that govern normal human behaviour simply because it's more evolutionarily beneficial to be good, and that would've been hard-wired into the brain's very structure and functioning over the course of a million years. The 1%, however, clearly went down a different path, one in which fear governed their behaviour. And that fear is why they need power and control (and money, and property rights, and statism, and so on).

Right, I'll shut up now or I'm going to write a bloody essay in a comment.

But thank you so much for this amazing article (I'm definitely going to have to restack this) - this is precisely the kind of inspiration needed.

So yeah, you're right about the conspiracy theory thing. I'm right with you on that one.

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Ok, final comment, as I've worked out what I wanted to say:

It’s not that humans went from morally good holistic egalitarian, free ‘noble savages’ to authoritarian, unequal societies. It was the monsters who created those social structures. And then imposed them on humans.

Humans, in other words, have not lost their fundamental nature.

Although they are in danger of doing so, if they continue becoming adapted to these unnatural social forms. (see neuroscience and brain evolution)

Maybe that’s the ultimate, dastardly plan of the monsters…

...and that's why maybe we need a different, separate anthropological history of the monsters (the so-called 1%/globalist cabal etc.).

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One of the things that people don't seem to understand about this debate is that altruism is usually something that increases one's chances of survival. Because our hunter-gatherer ancestors depended upon their bandmates/kinfolk/fellow tribespeople for survival, that which benefitted those kinfolk also benefitted them.

There is actually an debate in anthropology about the nature of altruism between people who believe in Richard Dawkins-style "Selfish Genes" versus those who believe in "true altruism" which in altruism in the Christian alms-giving sense.. giving with zero expectation of receiving anything in return.

Given that primitive societies are characterized by in-group reciprocity, it would be hard for me to take the "true altruism" side of the debate. If you believe in evolution, it is difficult to conceive of how nature would select for "true altruism", even in terms of sexual selection. Everyone knows that, so for as mating is concerned, nice guys finish last.

I'm no fan of Richard Dawkins, though!

I am a big fan of thinking of altruism as "enlightened self-interest". To me it's obvious that I would be better off surrounded by friends who owe me favours than I would be if I were surrounded by enemies who can't wait for their chance to put a arrow in my head.

Evil people think that kindness is a form of weakness, but they're wrong in most circumstances. However, in "every man for himself" type situations, people with lower empathy probably do have an advantage.

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I think I would agree with you about re-defining 'altruism' as 'enlightened self-interest' - taking an evolutionary point of view, with regards to the evolution of 'behaviour' this is governed by the evolution of the brain - which is, naturally, an individual's thing, not a group thing. Thus, from a certain logical point of view, being 'social' (i.e. cooperation etc.) is beneficial for the individual first with regards to 'behaviour', as governed by the brain (and the group second). I firmly believe that neuroscience has the answers here, and, from a conspiratorial point of view, it's therefore incumbent on the bad guys to 'capture' neuroscience (& psychology/anthropology) and prevent widespread dissemination of these fundamental truths about human nature. Thus we end up with the Pinkers of this world spouting projective rubbish.

Another thing to bear in mind is that 'competition' within a species would only happen in an environment with 'scarcity of resources' (musical chairs) - for the entire million years during which humans evolved to become humans, there was never such a scarcity (supply always greater than demand, in other words) - thus, no need for 'war' or 'conflict' or 'plunder' - or even stuff like 'prostitution' and 'spying' (!). Given evolution is an adaptation to an environment, this means the human brain, and therefore human behaviour, adapted to a musical chairs type situation in which there were far more chairs than people.

Notice, of course, that the globalist cabal always play musical chairs with the people (restricting the availability of money and resources, for example - the essence of neoliberalism).

I think the evolution of the human brain (neuroscience) is too much neglected in anthropology...

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I'm reading Against The Grain by James C. Scott right now and finding that it explains early state formation well... but his narrative begins with the domestication of fire, which caused humans to become an engineer species (using fire to influence our environment in ways that benefit us), which in turn caused brain growth and the long childhoods necessary for development of our giant brains. Highly recommend the book! I'm listening to the audiobook version available on Audible.

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Once I have enough (well, any, tbh) money I shall hopefully be able to resume building up a decent personal library (& upgrade to paid!), and this book, and some of the others mentioned in Lee's article are on the list. I read an article a short while ago about the increase in brain capacity in humans over the previous 5 million years or so (when the split from chimps occurred), and the graph was really enlightening (I'll have to dig it out at some point - I didn't bookmark it for some idiot reason). It's interesting because the firestarter event didn't in fact change the gradient of increase in brain capacity. This suggests (imho) it supports my hypothesis that human behaviour (in the egalitarian etc. sense - vs. bellicose chimps) is not mainly a product of 'brain capacity', but rather of the brain's structure and functioning (which evolves to be best adapted to the social environment). So, although there are some structuralist elements to early brain evolution, once we start making fire, the structuralist evolution gives way to a more epigenetic, socially-oriented evolution (alloparenting is especially important, and the long maturation time for young humans creating dependency thus 'caring for others' etc.), in which beneficial social traits are reinforced and disruptive traits 'pruned' (to use the neuroscientific term - it's interesting how immediate neuroplasticity mirrors deep time evolution).

I've also thought a real problem, with which we are still having to live, is that a lot of these 'sciences' arose during the patriarchal, racist, bellicose, unequal Victorian era, mainly by privileged white men who, naturally, would want to find a 'human story' that justifies their own cultural identity and behaviour - it wouldn't be psychologically tolerable for them to say 'oh look, anthropology shows us that humans are innately morally good, meaning we are the aberration! Actually we're downright evil!', let alone teach it in schools - now imagine theories of evolution, anthropology, psychology etc. arising in a different society, in which egalitarianism, gender harmony (proper feminism, that is), peaceful foreign relations and so on was the norm (let's call it liberal socialism, for want of a better term). In that case, I would imagine some female anthropologist like those cited in Lee's article would come up with a completely different view of the human story - it's ironic, but not surprising, it's taken this long (early 21st century) for those enlightened, more feminine voices to actually get heard and develop the human story that we all so desperately need.

Keep up the good work - these articles are not just fascinating, they're necessary! Thank you!

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Hrdy & Narvaez - those were the names I was trying to remember.

The other thing I forgot to mention was in lieu of this 'dazed survivors of a continuous 5-million year habit of lethal aggression'. One of the obvious reasons why this is such a ridiculous claim is from neuroscience - that's to say the human brain's structure and functioning is so far removed from that of a chimp such that there really is zero utility in studying chimp behaviour to infer anything whatsoever about human (social or individual) behaviour. There are many bits of the human brain which simply don't exist in the chimp brain (or at least, only in such an immature form as to be irrelevant). Also, chimps don't make fire and they don't have culture! They don't tell stories.

Anyway, it also strikes me that the demonstrable behaviour of (let's call them) the 1% is, ironically, extremely chimp-like - the rest of us don't behave like that. I liked the 400 chimps on an airplane example - very amusing. The 'Lord of the Flies' allegory is also pertinent here - the point of that story is not 'this is what happens to humans if you put them in an anarchic desert-island type situation', but 'this is what happens to a bunch of English private school boys in that situation'.

Again, even if this kind of thinking looks like 'other-ing' (i.e. bordering on racism - it's not a racial thing, I should make clear, it's a behaviour thing), I do think it's useful to 'other' the 1%, because they really don't act like the rest of us - thus, their brain structure and functioning must, logically, be different (brain scans/fMRI should be able to prove this). Thus their story is not the human story, and we shouldn't mix up the two. The human story has been blighted by the 1%/monster story, once settlements became too large for detection and ostracism to function (as it had for hundreds of thousands of years previously), but it's still a different evolutionary story.

And from a spiritual/metaphysical point of view, I would imagine the 'group-soul' of the 1% does in fact have a deep, bitter and resentful ancestral memory of continuous ostracism at the hands of humanity. Hence their hateful, vengeful behaviour towards humans, especially children.

Anyhow, just a few more thoughts - but I think this line of thinking goes a long way to explaining the last 5,000 years of human history.

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I was also going to say that bit about Turgot was intriguing. It chimes with a (conspiracy) theory (of history) I've had for a while, about the existence of the 'anti-enlightenment' movement (interesting DG mentioned the Illuminati there, but suspiciously downplays them/their importance). If 'the enlightenment' would've led to a dismantling of the power structures on which the feudalist cabal depend, then one can expect the natural reaction - they come up with fraudulent pseudo-intellectual counter-ideas, like Turgot's clearly arbitrarily invented 'stages of history' which then gets picked up on by the rest of them. (A kind of Polanyi an double-movement thing). One can also see this kind of thing as unselfconfident people whose personal identity is so invested in their cultural/social group identity/ideology (to the detriment of their own self-confident independence of mind/identity, I mean) that they have to defend it for the purposes of personal self-defence. One often sees this anxious reaction from people whose beliefs get threatened, after all - a human's identity being composed of on the one paw the group identity, and on the other, the individual role within that group. Threaten either and people get defensive.

Individuation, that's what you need. Seems those American natives got it right.

Ok. I'm going to force myself to stop writing now. It's bedtime.

See what I mean about inspirational!

Thanks again!

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You're definitely onto something here... Let's call it "Retroactive Teleology". It's a kind of post-hoc justification... After the Conquista began, all people of conscience must have been appalled (you would think at least) but the ruling class of Europe had to come up with some sort of reason why it was okay for them to rape and plunder the New World.

What they came up with was basically "hey, there's winners and losers in this game of life - don't blame me because you're a loser!"

It's basically the same logic as that of the famous Israeli settler who said "if I don't steal it, someone else will" while occupying a Palestinian home in the West Bank.

By retroactive teleology I mean the logic that because something happened, it was meant to happen.

I guess you could call it Manifest Destiny if you wanted to wax lyrical...

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Hey! I'm really happy that I've inspired you! Are you a new reader? If so I'd like to point in the direction of some of my other work that you will also likely find inspiring... Especially THOSE WHO WALK AWAY FROM CAHOKIA and WHAT IS THE SHAMANIC TRACE.

As for the rest of your comment, I plan to give it the response it deserves soon.

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Relatively new, yes. I did actually subscribe earlier this month, then for some reason I was unsubscribed (wasn't me who did it). It happened with Paul C.'s site too. If it wasn't anything bad I said that may have been misconstrued, and if it wasn't the algorithm demon, and it wasn't spooks, then it must've been a ghost in the machine. Any ideas?

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no clue! thanks for being this to my attention... tho I'm not sure what to do with this information...

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Me neither! Just that it's at times like these one can't help but get a little paranoid about spooks messing with my stuff! Mind you, I don't know why they bother, if so - it suggests small-mindedness - they should know they've got sufficient control over at least, I don't know, 95% of the population. Obviously we should keep trying to educate and help people and disabuse them of their manufactured opinions, but I don't think the spooks need to worry, let alone interfere!

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The merits or non-merits of The Dawn of Everything is, well, one thing. I found some parts of it to be great. What I don't see you addressing here is this: soapy taste in mouth (subjective) and organ failure (objective) possibly can be explained not only from poisoning but also from the bioweapon -- the transgenic gene therapy -- masquerading as a "vaccine." We know Graeber was jabbed but how many times? The data shows autoimmune diseases, cancer, return of Covid, and more all grow exponentially with each shot but also that these responses -- compared to that of the unvaccinated -- are there from the first shot. You addressed this briefly in a previous post, I can't remember what you said about it except that you were dwelling on the role his wife possibly could have played in his demise. Doing away with an intellectual for variations in his theories? That sounds like a stretch. As a poet, I can tell you that the basic stance in this phantom culture toward poets and toward intellectuals is to ignore them. Even a "bestselling" anthropologist like Graeber. From the standpoint of hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, who even knows about him or gives a fuck? Now, if we're talking about Taylor Swift being offed for a new album that disappointed whomever among her rabid fans, I could more easily get behind that

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I'm in awh. Will try to present my influence as well, shortly.

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