“5/01/2010, 1:00pm EST”
“The first human who hurled an insult instead of a stone was the founder of civilization.”
— Sigmund Freud. (via mityelpoc) (via killthekids) Tragically, this falsehood still persists in the more or less subconscious mythology of our culture. Let’s set the record straight. “Civilization” is not a social marker but a tactical one. Linguist human social groups (and non-human ones, for that matter) existed well before the advent of civilization, which is recognized to have occurred relatively recently — sometime between 10,000 and 8,000 B.C.E. — and is marked by the moment that humans began to employ agriculture. In other words, civilization began when humans employed certain tactics: dominating the land and seizing control of food production. As happens with all otherwise unconstrained animal populations, greater abundance of food entailed greater rates of reproduction. Agriculturalist human social groups reproduced at a rapid clip, to which they responded by expanding their physical domains outward into the habitats of other humans. This is the very foundation of war as we know it, in which whole populations were destroyed, subjugated, or, at the very least, subsumed. It should come as no surprise that weapon technologies only advanced beyond “stones” when civilization appeared and invented the need for more efficient, more powerful killing methods. Far from being the beginning of what we wrongly call “civility,” civilization is the very root of war — against human animals, against non-human animals, and against the land itself.
Never leave home without it.
