How All Cultures Have Absurd Origins

Anarchic prehistory, children’s games, and the trance behind social conformity

In The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow provide anthropological and archeological evidence that in the Upper Paleolithic and the Mesolithic periods, our prehistoric ancestors experimented with a variety of social orders, including egalitarian and hierarchical arrangements as they shifted with the seasons, submitting to a leader for part of the year only to abolish leadership for the remainder.

For tens of thousands of years, people resisted the opportunity to settle for sedentary society, for the drudgery of agriculture and for the mass enslavement that supports city states and empires. As the authors say, farming and civilization came “at a terrible cost. It wasn’t just ever-increasing hours of toil that followed but, for most, poverty, disease, war, and slavery — all fuelled by endless competition and the mindless pursuit of new pleasures, new powers and new forms of wealth.”

In short, prehistoric people were anarchistic. They relished their freedom to experiment with their social interactions, and their bewildering variety of governmental customs was meant to remind them of the arbitrariness of any social order and to celebrate their autonomy as half-wild beings.

(Indeed, this was supposed to be the lesson also of the infamous Stanford prison experiment, conducted in 1971. Participants were arbitrarily assigned the role of prisoner or guard, but the temptation proved too much for some of the “guards,” as they abused their power over the simulated prisoners, and the experiment had to be terminated early. The prison guards might just as easily have been assigned the role of prisoners. Yet instead of recognizing the existential fact that all social roles are thus arbitrary in being both freely chosen and only subjectively meaningful, some of the participants identified with those roles, thereby surrendering their freedom.)

Our childlike prehistory

Graeber’s and Wengrow’s point is that prehistoric people refused to degrade themselves by submitting permanently to social conventions. But contrary to their aversion to an evolutionary explanation of this evidence, as I argue in “Were People More Childlike in Prehistory?” those authors’ account is compatible with a developmental model. We can compare prehistory to a state of childlike freedom and play, and the relative rigidity of civilization to the stagnation in an adult’s accumulated experience, memories, and background knowledge.

As I say there,

On the individual level, the adult objectifies the world and belittles the imagination more than does the child because the adult learns over more trials and errors how natural regularities work; her mental representations thus calcify, as it were, to better reflect the world.

By contrast, the child’s mind hasn’t yet rigidified; on the contrary, the child’s brain is still in flux, still growing and adjusting to its foundational experiences. Babies are born with instincts and with zero information. If they couldn’t store memories to commemorate their cumulative experience, they’d live their whole adult life mentally as naïve babies, alternating between states of overcorrecting fear and blissful ignorance.

How could it have been otherwise on the collective level, then, for humans in the Upper Paleolithic?

How, that is, could prehistoric people — who had little if any technology for faithfully transmitting their knowledge and way of life across the generations — have been other than childlike and myopic in just that respect?

Mass hallucination and our saturation in fiction

But this suggests a further connection, between the childlike aspect of prehistoric people in their conjuring of social norms with their playful imagination, and the mass hallucinatory aspect of even our obedience to our norms. As I argue in “Mass Hallucination and the Dream of Waking Life,” social norms become second nature to us only because we lower our inhibitions as we get used to them in the enculturation process.

Hypnosis, as I say, isn’t a matter of mind control or possession, but of “relaxing your inhibitions so that you can express your unconscious desire to play or to obey commands.” Thus, “the question is whether something similar happens even in our ordinary waking moments.”

And the answer is yes. When driving a car, for example, “you don’t feel the danger of hurtling down the highway with hundreds of other speeding cars, because you assume the drivers have all trained their bodies to operate the vehicles safely and unconsciously, freeing up their conscious mind to focus on other matters. We hypnotize ourselves to act as though driving a car were perfectly safe. Even knowing that car accidents are among the leading causes of death, we train our mind to ignore the risks.”

And as I argue in “Saturated in Fiction: Consensus Reality as a Web of Stories,” practically all of social life has a fictive aspect, from the concepts that act as caricatures, models, or stock characters in our personal or ideological narratives, to scientific ceteris paribus laws, to gossip, to mass entertainment, to goal-driven techniques. As I say, “We tell so many stories because that’s how we lend meaning to events that are objectively meaningless. Science tells us how things work but not what they’re for, what they should mean to us, or what we should do about them. That’s where fiction comes in.”

A humiliating hypothesis

Here, then, are the makings of an intriguing broader hypothesis: Suppose prehistoric people were childlike not in being especially silly but in preferring to indulge in anarchic experimentation with social structures, to maximize their individual freedom and to revel in playing. And suppose there’s a trance-like aspect of our obedience to social norms. Suppose further that even the life of an average modern adult is saturated in fiction. (See those other three articles of mine for more support of those assumptions.)

In that case, we can posit that all the subjective, relative, and value-laden dimensions of social discourse, from religion and politics to law and economic production to art and hobbies began as — and are still fundamentally — childlike trances or free-flowing imaginings. For perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors exulted in the kind of play that’s routine in a child’s school recess. As soon as the alarm rings, children launch themselves from their seats and rush to the exits to play their games in the yard.

What if all human cultures are fundamentally so many such games? What if they were deliberately so throughout prehistory? What if our ancestors regarded them as such, as anarchic experiments, as opposed to taking them seriously as dogmas with which to subdue each other? What if the flowering of societal norms is like the mad, impulsive rambling of an enraptured, naïvely self-assured little girl who demands first to play make-believe ponies, then to pretend to have a tea party, followed by a scavenger hunt for buried treasure?

In our civilized state, of course, we no longer view it this way. We take our ideologies and our social conventions very seriously. Not only do we live by them (or risk being imprisoned), but we identify personally and collectively with the social roles that those rules script. We submit to our culture to fit in, abhorring the lot of the social outsider.

Yet if the norms of prehistoric societies weren’t handed down from the gods but sprang from the prehistoric mind the way the most creative nonsense streams from any given child’s imagination, we can’t maintain with much credibility that our social norms are less arbitrary. Instead, what we do when we study the law or a religious creed or a college textbook, or when we go to the movies or attend a sports event or fight in a war or pass the time in our family’s routines is the equivalent of confusing children’s babble for plain truth.

What we do, perhaps, is to mistake childlike arbitrary inventions for rules worth living and dying for.

Our hypnotic attraction to social ideals

My niece, for example, likes to pretend there are unicorns in her backyard. (Admittedly, I had a hand in incepting her imagination with such a farfetched notion. But her general preoccupation with rainbow-haired unicorns was an inherent extravagance; more precisely, the toy companies’ advertisements beat me to that inception.) I amused us both by suspending my disbelief, and going along with the pretense, suggesting that maybe a unicorn lives at the top of the tall tree in her family’s yard. If only we could climb that tree, I suggested to tantalize her, we might catch a glimpse of the mythical animal.

But suppose I went insane and lost my grip on reality. Suppose I became convinced that there really are unicorns, and I managed to found institutions devoted to taking the subject of unicorns with the utmost seriousness. Suppose generations of adults went on to draw up legislation on how unicorns should be treated, campaigned politically and voted on whether unicorns are good or bad, and fought wars over the ownership of land that’s allegedly sacred to unicorns.

The hypothesis I’m suggesting is that all the social norms and ideals we take for granted are like that — not just the religious lunacies that are most obviously similar, but even the secular conventions of democracy, capitalism, consumerism, and of nature’s technoscientific domestication. Perhaps every human society originates as a childlike invention, and some societies, especially the civilized ones we inhabit, mistake those childish games, songs, doodles, and pretenses for the Word of God, the precious wisdom of Tradition or Nature, or the cold output of Reason.

When we adults watch children play, it’s hard for us to avoid condescending to them since their games seem like so much patent nonsense. Children make stuff up out of thin air, they freely change the rules to avoid the appearance of having lost in a perfectly trivial activity, and they eagerly join in as unwitting victims of these folies a deux.

A handful of children might spontaneously sing some outrageous song, and one child may gleefully start jumping up and down by way of accompaniment. Suddenly, the whole gang will follow suit, and they’ll laugh as they try to sing and to jump at the same time. And why not? They’re only having fun by living wholly in a fantasy world that issues straight from their untamed unconscious, through their untethered imagination, to end up as the din that plagues more serious-minded adults.

But perhaps a super-intelligent alien species could just as rightfully condescend to adults like us. Indeed, you need merely observe a foreign culture from an anthropological standpoint to have an inkling of how all cultures are fundamentally gratuitous. Secular culture seems bizarre to religious insiders, and the converse is just as true. Democrats seem sinister to Republicans, and again the converse is just as certain. Medieval European cultures strike us as barbaric, just as our social norms will seem monstrous to our remote descendants.

What does it mean, though, for a social ideal we take for granted to be treated too seriously in a comedically absurd fashion? Suppose a group of friends gathers around a table to be willingly mesmerized by a hypnotist. The hypnotist relaxes one of the participants and suggests that she stand on the table and bark like a dog, and she obliges, her inhibitions having been relaxed to free her to play this social role to amuse her friends. The audience members duly laugh at their hypnotized friend’s expense because the hypnotist has succeeded in provoking her to act in an extraordinary fashion.

The humiliating hypothesis at issue entails, however, that those audience members are just as hypnotized as the barking woman, even if they don’t often realize it. Ask yourself why the friends choose to meet up and to gather around that table. Presumably, they want to be entertained and they assume this magic trick would be fun.

But if you dig deep enough and ask why they want to be entertained or why they find this game so amusing, you’ll eventually exhaust their ability to supply a rational answer. Ultimately, we fall back on intuitions and routines, prejudices and leaps of faith, and the friends around that table commit to some such nonrational foundations of their behaviour only in so far as they, too, have effectively been hypnotized. We call that mass hypnosis “enculturation.”

One main difference, though, is that staged hypnosis typically involves a single magician calling attention to some bizarre behaviour, whereas the hypnotist responsible for our deference to social conventions is largely our respective desires to conform. What Freud called the “Superego” is our inner hypnotist, and when we submit to social pressure, we enter a collective trance, a state of social automation. We take for granted certain ideals and values, symbols and laws that are essentially farfetched fictions, and we submit the way a dog surrenders to what it experiences as its owner’s grandiosity.

Civilized entrapment by vainglorious drivel

Who, then, is madder, the child that gleefully indulges in nonsense and knows no better or the adult who traps herself into mistaking that nonsense for some creed, political platform, legal code, ideology, or shared fictional universe that’s supposed to be a decidedly sophisticated, grownup subject?

And how does that entrapment occur? How did we forget that even we adults can only ever be childish in our social interactions because the latter are hallucinatory acts of storytelling that call for the suspension of disbelief, for indulgence in a plethora of preposterous abstractions?

It’s a complicated question, of course, but here’s one piece of the puzzle. In our prehistory, the human population was puny. Between 40,000 and 16,000 BCE, the population of Europe was around 4,000 to 6,000 individuals, and between 16,000 and 11,000 BCE, it rose only to around 30,000. That’s across all of Europe!

What are the odds, then, that any of those mere thousands of people might have been a prophetic or artistic genius who could have invented a game that would enthrall everyone else? Remember that while some children prefer to lead while others might be inclined to follow, even the followers can happily pass the time playing by themselves — because they’re still children. What kind of magical ingenuity is needed, then, to captivate masses of childlike adults? You’d need something like Disney Land.

But if prehistoric people were spread out in relatively small numbers, the chances that they’d all come across a world-changing idea were remote. Even if some creative genius struck upon a brilliant new cultural game (such as the invention of gods, language, divination, or philosophy), what are the odds that that invention could have gone viral with prehistoric populations and technologies? How would the invention have been reliably transmitted across the continent and from one generation to the next? How could everyone have played the same game?

Only with the invention of certain technologies such as art and writing, and only when the human population rose to a certain level could we count on the mass incorporation of some individual’s creative genius. Only when hundreds of thousands or millions of people began living in close quarters, as in a city state, kingdom, or civilization could individuals have had some compelling reason to surrender their creative autonomy and to submit to some collective childlike output, as in a theocracy.

The cream would then have risen to the top — albeit not necessarily in aesthetic terms but in political ones. That is, the niche would have opened for some political genius to learn how to con the masses with intoxicating myths and rituals.

Finally, I should point out that this hypothesis is consistent with the existential principles that life is fundamentally absurd, and that the deepest truths are bound to be ironic and anticlimactic. Judging from our commonplace selfishness, cruelty, and short-sightedness, we don’t deserve a more dignified platform on which to build our cultural edifices. If our ways of life derive not from some platonic or religious paradise nor from any repository of necessary truths, but from the shameless gushing of childish folly, perhaps we could take that as part of our comeuppance.