Because for most ordinary people the early states meant taxes, forced labour, conscription, slavery and epidemics, and life outside them was often freer. Some peoples kept states at arm’s length by staying scattered, mobile and egalitarian and growing crops that were hard to find and tax, and the political scientist James C. Scott thinks that many hill peoples of South-East Asia were refugees from the valley states; in Therapeutic Shamanism the state is a late arrival, born with the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer around 4,000 BC.
How new is the state? #
Very new, on the scale of human history. A state, in the sense used here, is government by a ruling group with the power to tax, conscript and command the people it rules. Modern humans have been around for something like two hundred thousand years, and for all but the last six thousand or so there were no states anywhere. What we call ‘civilisation’ is usually dated from the first city-states, around 4,000 BC, and everything before it lumped together as ‘prehistory’.1 So for most of human history the question was not how to avoid the state, but how to live well without one, and hunter-gatherers answered it. The deeper puzzle is why some peoples ever accepted rulers at all. See What is the Fall?
How did people live without rulers? #
By governing themselves. Hunter-gatherer bands had no leader who imposed decisions on the rest; the cooperation and order their lives depended on came from respectful discussion and consensus, with people taking the initiative, or being given authority, only for a time and for the task in hand. That is anarchism in its proper sense, order without top-down government, and the belief that hierarchy is the only way to organise a society is a wonky thought that most people raised in Taker culture find it hard to see past.2 Anyone who tried to set themselves above the others met a rising ladder of sanctions; see What is a reverse dominance hierarchy?
Mobility mattered too. A band that felt threatened could usually move on.3 The anthropologist David Graeber and the archaeologist David Wengrow describe three basic freedoms that held power in check in many early societies: “(1) the freedom to move away or relocate from one’s surroundings; (2) the freedom to ignore or disobey commands issued by others; and (3) the freedom to shape entirely new social realities”. Whilst people could walk away or simply ignore orders, the only kings there could be were, in their words, “play kings”.4
Why would anyone run away from a state? #
Because of what states took. In The Art of Not Being Governed (2009), Scott studies the great upland region of mainland South-East Asia he calls Zomia, and says that its hill peoples are not people left behind by progress but, over two thousand years, largely “runaway, fugitive, maroon communities” fleeing the slavery, conscription, taxes, forced labour, epidemics and warfare of the rice-growing valley states. Most of them are shifting cultivators who also forage. Almost everything about how they live, he writes, “can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length”: living scattered in rugged hills, moving often, keeping their societies egalitarian and their identities fluid, and growing root crops that ripen at different times and stay hidden underground instead of grain that can be seen, measured and seized.5
Scott also suggests that foraging, herding and shifting cultivation are often a ‘secondary adaptation’, taken up by people getting away from a state, so that some peoples who live by foraging today may be the descendants of farmers who left. He sees the same pattern beyond Asia, amongst Cossacks, Roma, sea nomads and others.5 The early states were fragile and spent much of their effort capturing people and holding them; see What did James C. Scott show about early states and grain?
Did some peoples stop states from forming at all? #
So it has been argued. The French anthropologist Pierre Clastres described societies of the South American forests, mostly farming peoples, whose chiefs had prestige but no power to command, and which worked to stop power ever separating from the people; see Who was Pierre Clastres, and what is “society against the state”? Graeber and Wengrow build on the same idea, arguing that people in the past were often more capable than we are of imagining other ways of living together, and that some societies set up authority for one season and took it down the next.6
Therapeutic Shamanism sees the same refusal in hunter-gatherer bands, at an earlier and deeper level. They did not need to resist the state, because the levelling that kept any one person from dominating the band also kept the conditions for a state from arising, and because they could move on.
Why did states arise at all? #
In Therapeutic Shamanism, through farming and the Fall. Farming produced surpluses worth defending and populations too large to return to hunting and gathering. When climate change brought crop failures around 4,000 BC, people went to war for land and food on a scale never seen before, organised into armies and, for the first time, handed power to ruthless psychopaths to lead them.7 The first city-states followed quickly, then empires with huge inequality, patriarchy, slavery and armies, and the sky religionsSky-religion. The vertical, hierarchical reordering of the sacred that the Fall installed, governed by the spell ‘up is good, down is bad’: transcend the body, escape matter, purify upward. The conditioning Therapeutic Shamanism works to undo. More about this grew up to justify and organise it all.8
Those in power then needed a story to keep it. If violence and selfishness are innate, people must hand power to strong leaders to protect them, and any memory that for most of human history people lived more peacefully without rulers has to be forgotten or derided.9 Seen this way, the peoples who avoided the state were keeping hold of something the rest of humanity had lost. See Were hunter-gatherers peaceful? and Why have shamans been persecuted, and what happened to shamanism under states and world religions?
Is Scott’s account of the hill peoples disputed? #
Yes. The historian Victor Lieberman, a specialist in Burma, argues, as the philosopher Daniel Little summarises him, that Scott made little use of Burmese-language sources and so got some facts wrong, that the written record of people fleeing from the lowlands into the hills is limited, and that Scott gives too little weight to the ecology and cultures of the hills themselves. He points to the highlands of Borneo, where swidden farmers show many of the same features, such as shifting cultivation and a great many local languages, without any predatory lowland state to flee from.10
On the other side, Scott wrote his book knowing it would be contested: “There’s no denying that I make bold claims about the hill peoples of mainland Southeast Asia”, he wrote, adding that he thought them broadly correct, even if he might be mistaken in some particulars, and that his work drew together the findings of many others.11 And the wider idea, that people have often chosen to live beyond the reach of rulers, does not rest on Zomia alone; Clastres’s forest peoples and Graeber and Wengrow’s seasonal societies are separate cases of the same refusal.
