In 1969, the Swiss-American psychologist Elizabeth Kubler-Ross published a book called On Death and Dying. In this book, she had suggested a model with five stages of how we cope with loss, mainly the loss of a loved one, but not only any substantial traumatic life-altering loss. And she described five stages.
She did say that we can revisit some of these stages, that the order of the stages is not necessarily linear, and so she left it open as to how each and every individual implements this transition from having something to not having it anymore.
Now, this applies, of course, in interpersonal relationships after break-ups. It applies to anyone who had been cheated on in a romantic setting, but it also applies to the pandemic, because what we are losing in this pandemic is the world as we had known it, the world in which we had grown up, the familiar, the habitual, the shop around the corner. We are entering a new normal.
Every pandemic in human history, every cataclysm in human history, such as, for example, the two world wars, heralded a new period, a new era. There's nothing unusual about this. And the new normal was often very divorced from the old normal.
So there's always been a sense of all pervasive, all pervading ubiquitous loss, and people have always coped with this loss in the way described by Kugler-Ross.
So the pandemic right now is no exception. We are going through stages of grief, stages of mourning. Some of us are still stuck at the denial phase. We deny, for example, that the virus exists or that there is any pandemic at all. Some of us have progressed and now we are at the anger phase. These people are at the anger phase.
So you see disparate phenomena. For example, the entire anti-racism movement is not really about racism or any other exalted ideology. It's an expression of pent-up rage, pent-up helplessness, cumulative anger at the virus, which represents a diffuse threat, a whack-a-mole diffuse kind of life-threatening situation, and at the reaction of the authorities and other well-meaning members of the elite who are trying to shepherd us and guide us through this very precarious period, and are not doing a very good job on it.
So there's a lot of anger. Anger is an integral part of the Kugler-Ross cycle of grief and mourning.
And then there are those who have progressed even beyond anger, and they are bargaining. They're saying, well, maybe we could go out on Tuesdays, or maybe we can go to the bar or to the pub, but stay one six feet apart, or maybe we can go to the barbershop with a mask. I mean, all kinds of conditionalities, all kinds of attempts to restore the previous world we had inhabited only with caveats, with promises. I promised to be a good boy. I promised to be a good girl. I promised to put on a mask. I promised to socially distance. I promised not to violate or breach the edicts, the rules, the advice meted out by medical experts, by state authorities, by the police.
So this is the bargaining stage, where we make promises and pledges in return for our freedoms.
And then there are those who realize that bargaining won't be enough. Every time lockdowns are lifted, there's a resurgence of the virus. It's here with us to stay for many, many years. Promises of a vaccine are just this, promises, expectations, hopes, dreams, not to say fantasies.
There is no single cure or medication which can tackle this virus, because this virus has systemic effects on almost every organ and tissue in the body. It's a blood clotting virus, not a respiratory virus. Blood is everywhere.
So we are beginning to realize that the virus is with us to stay, here to stay. And that we have to adopt the virus, not the other way around. That we have to create a new normal. We have to create a new society with new institutions to cope with this.
It's not like the Spanish flu. It's not even like the Black Death. Those were self-limiting pandemics.
This particular virus will not be self-limiting. It's more like AIDS or HIV.
It must become part of daily life, dictate behaviors, dictate this very structure of our personality. We will adapt or we will die.
And this dire, horrifying realization is nightmarish, surrealistic. It's like we are trapped in a horror movie.
And so this leads to depression, which is the fourth phase, the fourth stage in the Kubler-Roz cycle.
And so many people are depressed. There's been a surge, an explosion of depression and anxiety disorders all over the world. Where we have statistics, we now know that anywhere between 30 and 40 percent of the other population have developed major depressive episodes, clinical depression and severe anxiety disorders, which they are trying to mitigate and ameliorate in a variety of totally dysfunctional ways.
And so part of the anger, part of the denial is channeled or manifested via futile attempts to make sense of the world, to pinpoint a responsible or guilty individual or group of individuals.
And these are the conspiracy theories. Conspiracy theories are proto-religions. All religions, all established religions started as conspiracy theories. Christianity started as a conspiracy theory against the temple establishment and the priesthood in Judea. Similarly, Islam started as a conspiracy theory of a persecuted minority. So that's how religions start as conspiracy theories.
And we have a proliferation of conspiracy theories because we have a religious impulse. We react to uncertainty and life threats and we try to reorganize our world. We are trying to introduce organizing principles. We're trying to make sense of the world. We're trying to imbue our world with meaning.
The virus has taken away the meaning of life, taken away the significance of society, taken away the functioning of our institutions, left us barren, left us in the realm of the unfamiliar, left us trapped in a dream state. We're trying to reintroduce the world into our disintegrating inner landscape.
And conspiracy theory is a way of doing this because it's a narrative. It's a counterfactual narrative. It's not based on facts. It's very primitive, a very primitive type of narrative. It's not for the intelligent, shall we put it gently. It has very pronounced, paranoid and grandiose features. So it's a pathologized narrative. It's a Sikh narrative for Sikh people. But it's still a narrative. It's still better than nothing.
When the virus is offering us and the authorities were trying to mitigate and abelirate the pandemic, what they're offering to us is hopelessness. And they're offering hopelessness because they can't make promises if they're responsible. And they can't make promises because we don't know enough. And we are in a state of utter uncertainty.
So there's no alternative to conspiracy theories right now. There's no official conspiracy theory. There's no official narrative because there can't be. There can't be. And we as humans, we are storytelling. We are storytelling species. It's intimately connected with language. Language is about reconstructing the world and creating consciousness via grammatical and syntactical structures. It's all about structure.
And we are living right now, we are living in a chaotic world, which is disintegrating, not reintegrating. We're trying to reintegrate the world via conspiracy theories, religious religiosity and other types of similar types of narratives, including secular ideologies and narratives.
So in some parts of the world, socialism and communism are having a resurgence in other parts of the world, authoritarianism, which is a form of narrative and a very effective narrative by the way. It's the most effective narrative in times of crisis because it combines a conspiracy theory with the vestiges or the elements or the rudiments of an institutionalized religion.
So it offers an institution plus conspiracy theory that institution plus conspiracy theory equals dictatorships, equals authoritarian states, equals ideologies, which are essentially secular religions like Nazism, like Marxism or communism, like fascism.
And so I spent a few years in Africa. By the way, maybe it's time to introduce myself. Myself, for those of you who don't know me, my name is Sam Vaknin. I'm a professor of psychology. I have a PhD in philosophy. I've been economic advisor to governments in my very long career.
And so I have the benefit of viewing the crisis from every possible point of view as a philosopher, as a psychologist, as an economist, and so on and so forth. I've authored books in all these topics.
So coming back to the video, I spent several years in Africa and once when I've been in West Africa, someone took me to see a forest. There were these amazing, beautiful trees with these overarching canopies, which still let in the sun. And the trees were very massive. You couldn't hug them. And they were very beautiful, very beautiful. They were kind of bleached. And the foliage was stunning. It was like a painting.
And my guide, the guy who took me there, he went to the nearest tree and he touched it. He just touched it. He didn't exert any pressure. He didn't do anything special. He just kind of pinged it. And the whole tree disintegrated into a pile of dust. And out of the dust came hordes, millions, I think, of termites. If you haven't seen termites, you're lucky. It's one of the most devastating, frightening things to behold. I compare it to locusts. If you haven't seen locusts, again, you're lucky.
And these are frightening insects. And the tree disintegrated. And so I got this visual that all our institutions are still standing like these trees. The family, the neighborhood, the community, cities, nation states, politics, academic institutions, the education system, courts, law enforcement. They're all standing social welfare. All these institutions are beautiful to behold. They have a raison d'être. They have a reason to exist. They're goal-oriented. They provide services. They make our lives easier. They are there for us when we need them ostensibly.
But the pandemic rendered all of them piles of dust. The pandemic hollowed out these institutions.
And not only the pandemic. The pandemic is a culmination of a process of, I would say, 60 years, the last 60 years. A process of hollowing out our institutions, of rendering them dysfunctional and irrelevant and redundant and obscure, relegating them to the trash heap of history.
Intergender relationships are gone. Families are long a memory. Communities and neighborhoods have become Facebook friends. I mean, it's all make-believe. It's all these beautiful standing trees with their canopies. It's all eaten from the inside by the termites of inexorable social change, by the rending trends, technological trends, social trends, demographic trends. These trends eroded the trees of our togetherness from the inside and rendered them Potemkin villages.
I don't know if you know the story about Potemkin. Potemkin was a minister and a lover of Catherine the Great in Russia. And one day he created thousands, thousands of instant villages. He put up just the facades. There was no depth. There was no third dimension. Just two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of houses on endlessly paved roads. And he put villages in front of these fake houses.
And so the queen passed in her carriage and these villages waved at her. And so she got the impression that Russia has many more thousands of villages than prosperous villages than it actually had.
And we live in a Potemkin world. Everything we look at is Potemkin. It's faith. It's two-dimensional. It's a facade. The villages waving at us are not even real. They're digital.
We are ensconced in our solipsistic carriages, looking through tiny windows at what is supposedly reality, but actually is virtual or augmented. It's a kaleidoscope of our inner insecurities, inner constructs.
We project within the world is us. The world is out there, but it has very little to do with us.
And so we are so terrified and so anxious of these tectonic shifts, of these colliding fault lines, of these endless endless tremors and templars and earthquakes and tsunamis and volcanic eruptions. We withdrew.
We want to be light. I mean, just look online. Who is the most popular YouTuber? Who are the most popular YouTubers? The most popular YouTubers are the ones who tell you what you want to hear. The ones who are telling you the truth are the least popular.
Yes, myself included. Who are the most loved people on earth? Populists. People who tell you that you're great, you're wonderful, you're amazing. People who cater to your grandiosity.
Who are the most hated? People who really try to do good things like vaccinate you or tell you to wear masks or educate you or expose you to the vagaries, exigencies, and vicissitudes of the world or force you to go to the dictionary and learn new words.
You don't want that. You want Potemkin. You want the trees and you want the trees to stand. You don't want to touch them. There's no touch anymore. It's only watch. Watch. Defend. It's a defensive stance. It's a protective stance. We are all avoiding the world. We have all become avoidant.
And the reason all this is happening is because after the previous cataclysms in human history, or at least in the last 700 years of human history, we have changed certain institutions. We have constructed certain institutions.
And now, before I continue, a useful distinction.
There are organic institutions and there are synthetic institutions.
Organic institutions are the unspoken, non-verbalized, unwritten, compacts, agreements, rules of conduct, mores, beliefs that underlie the way we interact with each other and how we collaborate and form the units necessary to cope with a very complex world.
And so these are essentially abstracts.
Organic institutions are essentially reified abstracts, principles.
Synthetic institutions are formalized. They are usually written down and they have rules of procedure and they have forms that you have to fill in. They are bureaucratic.
Weber was the first to analyze this new phenomenon of bureaucracy.
And so synthetic institutions are invented, consciously invented.
People sit down and say, what institution can we create to cope with this new development, with this new social trend, with this post-war, post-bellum world?
So an example of a synthetic institution is the World Health Organization, or the United Nations, or the United States Senate. These are synthetic institutions.
Organic institutions change much more rarely. The last time organic institutions changed to some extent was after the Black Death at the end of the 14th century or the middle of the 14th century. This is where when feudalism crumbled and was replaced by proto-capitalism, fewer people were left. I mean, about half the population was decimated, killed. 70% of the population of the British Isles, today's United Kingdom, were killed in two successive waves of the plague. So very few people were left and they had very high bargaining power. So this destroyed the feudal system and gave rise to the working class. And the working class is the real foundation of capitalism. But that's a subject for another video.
So there was a last time that one organic institution has changed, economic organization, economic, the regulation of the means of production, to use a Marxist term.
The last time all organic institutions changed simultaneously was about 6,000 years ago, or 5,000 years ago, what we call the agricultural revolution.
Even in the industrial revolution, there was no organic change. There was no organic change because when the industrial revolution erupted in the 18th century, we were already organized to cope with it. We had cities, we had municipal institutions, we had trade, we had international transport via oceans, we had a military, etc. So we had production lines and organized labor long before the industrial revolution because agriculture has been gradually industrialized. And we had, of course, means of transmission of produce from the rural areas to the urban areas. So we had everything in place.
So the industrial revolution did not create an organic change. Last time there was an organic change, change in organic institutions.
Comparable to what's happening now was in the agricultural revolution 5,000 years ago. So we are living through a period which happens something like each and every 5,000 years. It happens once every 5,000 years.
And of course, we are out of practice. We don't know how to cope with organic change or change in organic institutions, because none of us in living memory and even in intergenerational transfer of institutional memory, none of us has any remote recollection of how we had coped and how we had managed last time that we had revolutionized change dramatically and fundamentally and profoundly all our organic institutions.
What happened 5,000 years ago? What were the organic institutions we came up with 5,000 years ago?
Well, first of all, we came up with monogamy. If you read the Bible, no one in the Bible is monogamous. Monogamy is a new invention.
So agriculture forced people to stick together in the long bone. And so families were created.
And to keep the stability of the family and to ensure that wealth is passed on to real heirs, to people who share the same genetic material, we came up with monogamy.
Monogamy is intended to secure paternity. So we came up with monogamy and monogamy gave rise to the family at the beginning of the extended traveling. And gradually, as means of production were dispersed and became more distributed, we needed fewer and fewer members of the family and we ended up with the nuclear family.
And in the majority, in many nuclear families today, there are no children. There's just a couple, a dik.
But 5,000 years ago, we came up with monogamy in the family. We came up with the concept of hierarchy.
I mean, many of these things we take for granted. We think they reflect human nature. They don't reflect human nature. They reflect organic, the organic emergence or the emergence of organic institutions, which cater to adhere to and coped with new developments, technological developments and organizational developments.
So the family, for example, replaced the clan, the extended clan or the tribe. The family became an outsourcing resource.
So for example, children, we started to raise children in families. When previous to that, they were raised by the tribe, by the clan. It took a whole village to raise a child.
So this changed. Sex was insourced.
Rather than have promiscuous sex with anyone who is willing and ready and available, people started to have sex only with each other's monogamy, sexual exclusivity.
So these are new things, very new. Humans as a species have existed for something like a million years, depending on how we define human. So about a million years.
What is 5,000 years? It's a blink of an eye. So 5,000 years ago, we invented all these things, which today we take for granted. And we mistakenly believe that these things reflect our nature, but they don't.
We can easily conceive. And we are right now conceiving of different organic institutions, radically different, totally divorced from the previous organic institutions. And these new organic institutions, the new normal, will reflect our human nature as much as the previous now defunct, discarded institutions did.
So institutions, even organic institutions, come and go. Our human nature is fixed. Institutions cater to our human nature, sometimes reflect aspects or variants of the human nature, facets, like a kaleidoscope. But they're not there to stay. They are not immutable. They're changeable. They come and go. They vanish.
So family is something like that. Monogamy is something like that.
Already, according to the latest studies, amongst up to age 45, 68% of women and 75% of men cheat on their primary apartments. That's not monogamy. Monogamy is dead. Totally dead.
And new technology made true of that. There's not a pool of available potential mates is infinite.
So hierarchy, for example, we tend to think, and many public intellectuals tend to think, that hierarchy is inbuilt, is a hardwired feature, not only of human nature, but of nature. It's of course utter nonsense. The overwhelming vast majority of nature is not organized in hierarchies.
Hierarchy is a total human invention, an organic institution. The very concept of hierarchy, regime, elite, masses, controllers, rulers, ruled, all this law enforcement, which is necessary to monopolize aggression, to monopolize violence, so as to control the masses, so as to perpetuate the self-interest of the elites. All these are new things.
Hierarchies reflect a new spatial organization, organizational unit known as the city. Hierarchy is a byproduct, a feature and a fixture of urbanization.
If you look at a city as a spatial way of distributing humans, human beings, you will see that if a city is to function properly, it needs a center, an epicenter, a place where everyone goes to, for example, exchange information, like the Agora, or like the famous hill in Athens, in ancient Athens, or like the Forum in ancient Rome. So people needed a central location, and obviously things had to be managed. The very concept of management is an organic institution of the agricultural revolution, because only if you are a farmer, only if you're a villager, you need to manage things. You need to manage inputs. For example, you need to save seeds. You need to manage livestock. You need to manage your oxen with which you plow the land. You need to manage your technology, the plowshares and so on, and you need to manage the humans who make use of this technology.
So the very concept of management is new.
And then there's a concept of socializing. Again, many scholars, many experts, many sociologists and anthropologists and psychologists claim that socializing, working in social units, collaborating, cooperating within social units, or deriving non-collaborative, non-cooperative benefits. For example, having fun, having a good time, finding sex partners.
You know, socializing, they say, working in groups is reflective of human nature.
Humans are social animals, even if it's totalists, and Plato called us social animals. It's not true. Socializing, the very concept of society, working in extended groups, spending time together, which is not goal-oriented, not hunting for a bear or a mammoth, but just having a good time in a pub or in a bar.
Socially distancing, of course. I mean, this is new. This happened because people were forced unnaturally, unnaturally, forced to be together with a very high density per square meter in new, new, structural and organizational units called cities.
Socializing is a function of urbanization, a byproduct of urbanization. There would have been no socializing had there been no cities.
If you don't believe me, go to any rural area, rural area in third world countries where people don't socialize.
They see each other like once every two weeks, and they see each other because they have to buy something or sell something.
Socializing is a yuppie concept in a way. Young, upwardly mobile people socialize, all the others isolate, self-isolate, social distance.
Socializing socializing is an example, perfect example of an organic institution, but even more basic institutions, organic institutions, are not part of human nature.
Motherhood, childhood, these are inventions. There's no such thing as motherhood, not such thing as childhood.
We are socialized and acculturated to adopt roles. There are gender roles. You're a boy, you have to be a man, you have to grow up and be a man, and this is how to be a man.
I'm going to gender socialize you, I'm going to teach you how to act as a man, stereotypical man usually.
So this is how to be a man, gender role, this is how to be a woman, and this is how to be a mother, and this is how to be a child.
If you read the books of Charles Dickens, Charles Dickens didn't live 5,000 years ago, Charles Dickens lived 200 years ago, 150 years ago. If you read his books, there's a mention of children in his books. They are called young adults.
When Louisa May Alcott wrote a book about children, she called them little women, not little girls, little women, because kids, what today we call children, were either young men or little women. End of story. There were men and women.
Childhood is a very new concept, and so is motherhood.
Now think about this, the concept of rules. Again, many political scientists and so on were telling rules, it's part of human nature, absolutely part of human nature.
We spontaneously and automatically tend to come up with rules, regulations, procedures, edicts, and so on.
Not true.
Actually, the first known codex of rules, the first known book of rules is the Hamuabi codex, the Babylonian codex of rules. It's bloody tiny. It's tiny. It fits into a 3K file. It has a few hundred rules to regulate the entirety of society, economic activities, crime, you name it. Rules are new, a new invention. Rules are an example of an organic institution which does not reflect human nature, but reflects human circumstances.
In agricultural society, you need rules. Everything has to be structured. A has to follow B, I mean B has to follow A, cause and effect are also an organic institution, not a natural way of thinking.
If you go to animist, primitive religions, they don't have cause and effect. They have some alternating.
To this very day, in most Eastern mystical schools and so on, there's no cause and effect. There is some alternating.
So rules, cause and effect, ways of, I mean modes of behavior, dictated modes of behavior, sanctions, the very concept of punishment, the very concept of sin, which underlie most religions. They are agricultural figments. They are the outcome of human nature trying to adopt to specific, highly specific circumstances.
Don't forget that until a hundred years ago, we were all farmers and villagers. All by the turn of the century, half the population was employed in agriculture. Today, less than 3% in advanced industrialised countries.
So agriculture is vanishing as a human activity. Machines are taking over, but humans, 2-3% of the population and most of these 2-3%, they're engaged in sales, in marketing, in distribution and utterly no, they don't work the fields. They don't sweat in the fields. That's what illegal immigrants are for.
So agriculture is vanishing as agriculture vanishes all these, all these organic institutions that I mentioned, family, monogamy, sexual exclusivity, hierarchy, regime, society, socialising, motherhood, childhood, rules, edicts, regulations, all these are going to vanish. That's the new normal.
We are entering the second organic revolution in 6000 years, second time in 6000 years. No wonder we are all discombobulated, depressed, anxious and we feel that we're trapped in a nightmare.
This is not only that our synthetic institutions are under pressure and they are and they are crumbling. Our organic institutions are under pressure.
For example, why did we need to invent motherhood and childhood?
Because in the agricultural revolution, men went out to the field mostly. They were helped by women and children. You needed muscle power before technology to cover the initial phase of agriculture required muscle power.
So men did the jobs and so who would take care of the children? Who would raise the children?
Why did you need children? You needed children because they were work power. They were part of the workforce. A child was an investment. It guaranteed your old age when you were 14. Most people died in 40-45. So the child guaranteed the continued production from the fields and end your pension. Child was your pension, your retirement fund, your 401.
But who would take care of this? Who was your banker? Your banker was the mother.
So there comes motherhood. Motherhood was invented by men.
Most of the existing family-related mores and family-related myths and family-related fables and stories and rules and regulations and what is acceptable, socially acceptable, what's not socially acceptable, the sinful and the righteous. All this was invented by men.
And men invented sexual monogamy and sexual exclusivity to secure paternity. Men invented all this. It's a men's world. And they invented all this because they wanted women to take care of their children while they're in the fields.
And I'm not saying it's chauvinistic. I'm just saying it's male.
And what do women today do when they enter the workforce? They become male.
They emulate and imitate men. Why?
Because men invented the work environment. End of story. Nevermind to which radical families you listen.
You can discard all this nonsense that women are going to transform the workplace and so on. It's too late for this.
Men invented the workforce. Women adapt to it. How do they adapt to it? By becoming men.
So we end up having a unigender world.
But even all this is going to be upended, revolutionized, transformed, eradicated, undermined by the forthcoming organic revolution, which I will discuss in a few minutes.
But you see that very fundamental things you thought were fundamental, you thought were part of human nature are actually not.
You know what, I will go further. I'll give you another absolutely mind-boggling example.
The concept of time. The concept of time is not part of human nature. Actually, it's not part of nature. No species in nature has a concept of time. None, not one.
Why should we? Why should we?
The concept of time has to do with agriculture.
Because when you put a seed in the field, it's very useful if you have a concept of the future. When you put a seed, you wait, you delay gratification, you control your impulses, you don't eat the seed, you plant it, and you plan for the future. Planting a seed in the ground is a statement about the existence of time, about the predictability of the laws of nature.
So the very concept of laws of nature is also an agricultural organic institution, an invention. Cyclicality, the seasons which led later to the development of science, cyclicality, the sun, sun, astronomy, astronomy, physics, physics, you know, it's all part of the agricultural revolution.
Even behaviors are dictated by our environment, of course. For example, consider recreational sex.
In all of nature, there is recreational sex, but the vast majority of sex takes place during a season. There's a season where the female is receptive to the male sperm so that she can create newborns, she can create cubs or pups or children. So procreative sex is dominant in nature.
Of course, not all animals in nature engage in sex. Some of them have other means of reproduction, but I'm talking about high-level animals which engage in sex.
The sex in nature is procreative. It's about creating newborns, creating the next generation.
Human beings have taken recreational sex and made it dominant. People have sex for fun. People have sex because it's a pleasure, what Freud called the pleasure principle. People have sex because they love it, they like it. That's why they watch porn.
But recreational sex, sex not intended to reproduce, sex not intended to bring children to the world, is a direct outcome of cohabitation.
When you share a space, a confined space, sex is natural. Let's see what happens after the pandemic.
Sex is natural in a confined space.
And where do you find confined space? In cities. In cities where people are pressed together like sardines in boxes and cubicles and so on, density, enormous density.
Recreational sex is an outcome of urbanization which is an inevitable outcome of agricultural surplus. Farmers and villagers created more than they could consume, so they had to sell it to someone.
And then other people bought this surplus and they didn't need to work in the fields. They could do other things. One of the things they could do is recreational sex.
It's not a part of human nature. It's an organic institution. As is, by the way, the division of labor. Hunter Gathers had a division of labor. The men went out to hunt. The women went together. Gather berries, gather fruits, gather vegetables, whatever they were gathering, mostly berries. And they went together, together with the children.
So the gatherers were with the children and the hunters were hunting.
And that's a rudimentary primitive form of division of labor.
But real division of labor to its intricate sub sub units of production, that happened during the agricultural revolution and even more so during the industrial revolution. A division of labor is not part of human nature.
In nature, animals do everything. They don't divide labor. With one exception, of course, feeding.
When we come to feeding and when we come to hatching, these are the only two functions.
But all other functions, animals do everything. They are one-stop shops.
Humans divide labor. You remember the famous film, Charlie Chaplin, Modern Times, where his only function is to do this with nuts. And so by the end of the shift, he walks home and he's still doing this in the air.
This division of labor.
And of course, finally, property. The concept of property is an organic institution.
Organic institutions, they had to do with agricultural revolution because when you hunt, you eat everything you hunt. If you don't eat it, it gets poached. When you gather, you eat it. Everything is immediate, instantaneous, instant gratification, no impulse control.
But when you farm the land and when you raise livestock, you have surplus. When you sell this surplus, you get something in return. You can barter your surplus for other surplus, or you can get money, which represents, it's a store of value, represents other people's work, other people's property. But it's property.
Soagriculture gives rise to property. So property is not part of human nature. It's an artifact of the agricultural revolution.
Okay, Nafsh said about organic institutions. I hope you got the sense of what is an organic institution.
It's not the United Nations. It's not the WHO. It's not the US Senate, and it's not the parliament in Britain. It's not, it's not the European Union. These are not planned, written, schematized institutions that people create synthetically.
Synthetic institutions are created intentionally, deliberately.
Organic institutions, organic institutions, rise. They are spontaneous. They are epiphenomenalThey are emergent, and they reflect an attempt by human nature to cope with and adopt two specific, stable circumstances, like agriculture.
In Nafsh, 6,000 years later, some say 10,000 years later, because Jericho in Palestine might have been the first city, and it's 10,000 years old. So 10,000 years later, we are entering a second organic revolution.
Not synthetic. We are not about to create new synthetic institutions. We are not about to replace the WHO with the HWO. We are not about to replace the United Nations with the Nations United. We are not going to invent new synthetic institutions.
Our synthetic institutions are like the trees that I mentioned. They look very beautiful from the outside, just don't touch them, and no one will touch them. They will remain like this, ossified, fossilized, dysfunctional, useless, irrelevant, obscure, and the target of anger and rage by the populace.
I'm not talking about the rise of new synthetic institutions, talking about the rise of new organic institutions.
We're in the throes of an organic revolution, the likes of which happened last time 10,000 years ago. It's to capture its essence, we're going to transition through two phases.
The first phase is from nation-state capitalism or nation-state communism, which are 19th century inventions, from nation-state capitalism, nation-state communism, back to neo-feudalism, and from neo-feudalism back to hunter-gatherer society.
We are having a full reversal of human history. We are going back to our roots.
Some say it's not a bad thing, some are terrified by this spectre.
When Einstein was asked what weapons people will use in the Third World War, he said, I don't know what they're going to use in the Third World War, but I'll tell you what they're going to use in the Fourth World War, arrows and bows.
People are terrified by reverting to primitive forms of organization, primitive systems of meaning, values and beliefs. They're terrified of this.
Some people welcome this development, because honestly, we seem to have screwed up. We screwed up as individuals, we screwed up as societies, our cities are screwed up, our climate is screwed up, our planet is screwed up. We seem to have screwed up big time.
You don't believe me? Look outside, there's a virus out there. We made this virus, not in a laboratory. We made it possible. We created the conditions for this virus and many more viruses to come.
There have been 20 new viruses of this caliber in the last 40 years. So we are not in a good place, and sometimes when they're not in a good place, it's good to go back. It's good to regress. It's good to take a break and say, well, where have I gone wrong? There's no way to find out where we've gone wrong, unless we regress, unless we revisit all these stations.
So we started with hunter-gatherer, we progressed to feudalism, and then we progressed to capitalism and communism.
Maybe it's time to take the reverse trick, the greyhound of history, from capitalism and communism to neo-feudalism to hunter-gatherer societies.
And I will try to explain what I mean.
But before I explain what I mean, I want to introduce you to another Jew, another Jewish gentleman, Emil Dokheim, who wrote a series of books about dysfunctions of society and how individuals react dysfunctionally to dysfunctions of society. And he called societies which were less than optimal, as far as their values, beliefs, norms, normative behaviors, functioning societies which were essentially falling apart, disintegrating, or not providing the goods, not providing safety, not providing hope, not providing future.
So he called these kinds of societies anomic societies.
And here's the problem with my model of reverting to going back to the hunter-gatherer phase. The problem with my model is that each of these transitions will be accompanied by anomic. It will be anomic. Each of these transitions is going to be very, very painful.
When things disintegrate and fall apart around you, like the twin towers, there's a lot of dust. You can't breathe. It's a horrible state. It's a state of anomic where values are not upheld, beliefs are ever shifting, behaviors are antisocial, risk is enhanced dramatically, safety is long gone, institutions become cancerous and malignant, bureaucracies become passive-aggressive and take over your life. Intrusiveness is amplified via rules and authoritarian impulses.
This is anomic. It's bad.
Dokheim predicted that in anomic societies and states, suicide rates will increase dramatically, as will depression and anxiety. And he was right.
Suicide is increasing in the West dramatically, especially among the anomic.
So it's good news, perhaps, that we are going to go back to a pristine, more sustainable way of organizing human society or humans and their interactions.
But there will be a lot of suffering and a lot of blood and a lot of wounding and a lot of pain and a lot of injuries and not only narcissistic injuries, real injuries. But there'll be a hell of a price to pay for unwinding our mistakes, for going back to nature in the fullest sense of the word.
There's one solution called capitalism and another solution called communism.
In capitalism, the means of production and the surplus are individually owned and distributed and in communism they are collectively owned and distributed. These are two competing models.
And then we're going to transition from this to neo-feudalism.
There are a few videos on both my channels which deal with neo-feudalism.
So I think it's the next wave.
Neo-feudalism, we're going to have a tiny elite. We already have a tiny elite. They're going to own all the means of production and we are going to be the serfs. We are going to rent these means of production from them. We're going to give them a big part of our produce, of the things we produce, just in order to survive.
In return they're going to provide us with structures which guarantee our safety and our relative prosperity and thriving, relative as much as they will allow us to go.
So we are reverting to a state that existed in Europe before the Black Death. Before the Black Death ruined this structure from its foundations where there was a group of noblemen, a group of aristocrats. This group owned the land and they let people stay on the land, cultivate the land, work the land in return for a share of the produce.
I mean these people, the farmers, the villagers, gave these aristocrats, gave these noblemen a share of what they had produced on the land which belonged to the aristocrats and to the noblemen.
And another thing, the people who worked the lands were also recruited from time to time to serve in ad hoc armies, gathered by the aristocrats.
So this is feudalism. No feudalism is literally the same. There will be a group of 10,000 people I think, no more. They will own all the means of production, they will own all the big companies, they will own the distribution networks, they will own the transport means, they will own digital technology, they will own absolutely everything. They will give you the right to use, to have access to and to make use of their wealth and their assets in return for a share of what you generate, what you produce.
Plus from time to time you will be recruited in various campaigns. It could be a vaccination campaign, it could be a social campaign, it could be a digital campaign, but from time to time you will be mobilized.
And if you refuse to be mobilized, you'll be excommunicated. Your access to digital assets will be revoked.
You have seen this during the pandemic when various people, conspiracy theories, which I abhor, which I regard as the lowest of low life, but still they have a right to free speech. All of them have a right to free speech. As Voltaire said, I disagree with you, but I will sacrifice my life to defend your right to say what you have to say, you know.
So these people who I repeat again, I abhor, I hold in disdain utter contempt.These people who had a right undeniable inalienable right to free speech were denied access to digital platforms and assets just because they said something that contradicted and negated the narrative of the elites.
And this is neo-feudalism. Absolutely.
At its apex.
So we will move through this phase.
And then following neo-feudalism we will move to hunter-gatherer phase.
Now, what are the features? What are the core attributes and elements of hunter-gatherer societies?
Number one, separation of the sexes. In hunter-gatherer societies, the men are separated from the women. The men go hunting. The men go to watch football. The men gather in pubs and bars. The men have their own bro-networks, bromance networks or bro-networks.
I mean, there's men and there's women. The twins should not meet. They don't like each other. They're hostile to each other. They have disparate contradictory interests. It's a win-lose situation. Women win, men lose, men win, women lose. There is hostility, paranoia, suspicion, weariness, a kind of persecretary feeling, grandiosity expressed by both sides, antisocial actions intended to infringe upon the other sexes, rights, privileges and power.
So there's a fight going on. This is typical of hunter-gatherer societies. Hunters went, men went to hunt. Women stayed behind, raised their children, gathered food. The vast majority of the diet was composed of berries, fruit, berries, vegetables, which the women controlled. Women control the food and women control the children. Remember, children are assets. Children are a combination workforce and retirement plan.
So women control the financial system in the form of children and women control the food. Women were in charge. These were matriarchal societies. Men were servants and slaves. They went to bring protein back, packaged protein called animals. That's all they did. And the sexes were separated. Of course, they came together to procreate.
So the only form of sex, essentially, was procreative sex. I'm sure there was recreational sex. I'm sure there was even cheating in hunter-gatherer societies.
But the majority of sex was procreative.
First of all, because there was no opportunity for recreational sex.
A typical hunting expedition lasted for months. So women were left all alone. In poor countries in the third world, in the countries of the Balkans, in countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, it's a well-known phenomenon. Men go away to work in other countries. They are known as gust albiter. Women are left alone in villages, totally alone. There's no man around. And the only time they have sex is once a year when the men come to visit. And then they have sex for the explicit purpose of making a child, the procreative sex.
So here we have two elements of the forthcoming hunter-gatherer future. There will be a separation of sexes. It's already happening. Look at the monosphere. Men going their own way. Insales, red pillers, black pillers, radical feminism. The sexes have separated already effectively, have effectively separated. Eleven percent of people never see another human face the entire year in the West. Eleven percent. And in some countries, majority of women don't have children. And in all countries, majority of men and women are not married. Marriage is a minority arrangement.
So the separation of sexes is already happening full force. Procreative sex is returning. The incidence and prevalence of sexual activities has collapsed. I mean, it is not sex anymore. Sex had died.
I encourage you to watch my video about youth sexlessness. Sex and dating are dead in the water. They have been replaced by pornography, essentially.
Procreative sex. In hunter-gatherer societies, the mothers, the women function as single mothers. They are the only adult figure around to raise and rear the children.
And that's precisely the situation today, at least in industrialized countries. About 40 to 60 percent of all children are raised by single mothers. If you add to that children raised by gay couples, number is higher.
But single mothers in the sense that there's a woman raising children without a man around, a stable presence of a male. That's 40 percent in some countries, for example, the United States, 60 percent in others. It's a hunter-gatherer feature.
And then the next thing is that hunters hunt. And then when they return to the tribe or to the clan or to the enclave or to the village, when the hunters return, they share the hunted meat. They share the meat.
So sharing is a trickle down. It's done by trickle down.
So first, the hunters get the best parts. Then the women get the next best parts. Then at the very end, children and old people, old men and old women, get what's left, the offal and so on. So this is trickle down sharing.
Now, many of our industries are beginning to be organized around this trickle down sharing principle. It's known as a bonus system.
So for example, if you take Wall Street or if you take law firms, legal firms, they organize around this principle. They are in this massive institution. Some of them employ as many as 100,000 people, banks, the banking system.
In this massive institution, there are a few hunters. They are known as rainmakers. They are the ones who bring in the deals. They are the ones who consummate and conclude the transactions. They are the ones who bring in the money. They are the ones who make the big billions, tens of billions.
They hunt for the new deals and they consummate and conclude these deals. They are the hunters.
So they bring in the goodies. They bring in the fruits of their hunting.
And these are divided. The big share goes to the hunters, goes to the rainmakers, goes to the deal makers, goes to the management, goes to the agents of change within the organization.
But a small part is divided among everyone. It's trickle-down sharing. Everyone gets a bonus when there's a great deal.
So if I'm a hunter in Goldman Sachs or if I'm a hunter in Chase Manhattan or if I'm a hunter in a law firm and I get a deal and I make $70 billion profit, I'm going to end up with $34 billion personally.
But the rest is going to be distributed among 100,000 people. This is trickle-down sharing.
It's a hunter-gatherer principle.
People don't realize that the bonus system in Wall Street and in similar industries, this is a totally non-capitalistic thing.
Because in capitalism, you get to keep 100% of your profit. You never share your profit. Even taxation in capitalism is wrong. Taxation is an anti-capitalist socialist feature.
So sharing your profit in any way, shape, or form collectively via taxation or individually with your co-workers, that's not capitalism. That's hunter-gatherer mentality.
We already have, as you can see, features of hunter-gatherer societies returning big time, making a big comeback.
We have separation of sexes. We have procreative sex and recreational sex is vanishing. We have single mothers and we have trickle-down sharing of goods and products.
Hunter-gatherer societies were non-hierarchical. They didn't have hierarchy. They were equitable. They were egalitarian. They were organized around a network principle. Hunter-gatherer societies were networked. The sharing was networked. Of course, there was a hierarchy of wu-ge-sua. There was a kind of numerical index or numerical rule, rule of thumb on how to divide these points.
But everyone was equal to everyone. Hunters and gatherers are networked. We put in nodes. Everyone is equal to everyone.
Now, in the industrial and agricultural periods, there was a hierarchy and new technologies are rendering hierarchies obsolete. We are reverting to network equitable sharing, equitable commenting, equitable expertise, equitable everything.
Some of it is a very bad development because we reject authority. We reject knowledge. We reject expertise. We reject the intellect. We reject the fruits of the intellect. We reject any threat to our equipotence, to the fact that we are equal to everyone else.
And reality is that we are not equal to everyone else.
But as far as organizational structure and hermeneutic principle of explaining the world, we are going back from hierarchy to network. We are going back to hunter-gatherer principles of organized.
And finally, hunter-gatherers were self-sufficient. They lived in communities, of course, but the communities were clannish. It was essentially an extended family. And everyone in hunter-gatherer societies is highly individualistic because there's no integration of these tiny, tiny, tiny communities into a bigger fabric known as society.
Each of these communities produces what it needs, consumes what it needs, and creates, sometimes, surplus, which it can trade with other communities.
But that's not a prerequisite. It's not a requirement. If you produce exactly what you need and you don't have a surplus, good for you in many ways. It's not a problem.
So, self-sufficiency and communal individualism, Etzioni wrote a book about this emerging trend, communal individualism and self-sufficiency are the name of the game in hunter-gatherer societies. And they are anathema to agricultural and industrial principles of organization.
And we, with the help of technologies, are becoming self-sufficient in every possible way. Each one of us, as individuals, forget tribes and clans and families. Each one of us, as an individual, has the capacity to do absolutely everything with a small smartphone. We can publish books. We can shoot movies. We can interact with each other and communicate. We can travel, at least in our minds. We can read every book ever published, watch every movie ever made. I mean, we have access to the repositories of science, arts, culture, all over the world. We are the world. We are a self-contained universe.
And so, communal individualism makes sense to choose the one or two or three people which matter to me, who matter to me, the one or two or three significant others, meaningful in my life, and to stick to them only, and to ignore all the others.
And so, there's going to be a fragmentation, an atomization of what used to be society back into hunter-gatherer, clannish, tribal, communal groups of individuals, small groups of individuals. It's already happening. Of course, the pandemic is just accelerating all these trends. This is the new normal.
And now, we are mourning and we are grieving the world we had lost. We are mourning and we are grieving the organic institutions that rose 10,000 years ago, 6,000 years ago, 5,000 years ago, thousands of years ago. We are mourning the family. We are grieving over the loss of structure, law, and order. We no longer have a society we can belong to.
So, we feel adrift. We feel aloof. We feel detached. There'sdetached.
There's no real motherhood, childhood, monogamy, exclusivity, who can trust our partners to be only our partners. There are rules. There's no future, really, and no need for a future.
Cyclicality is useless because we don't grow anything. Sex has been rendered redundant because, you know, if you want to have recreational sex, there are safer and faster methods of obtaining it, pornography. And if you want procreative sex, which increasingly fewer people want, then, you know, you can find them, the occasional part.
And so, we look around us in the very, our very universe, our very world, everything that made our life meaningful, everything that made sense has vanished.
And not only because of the pandemic. You know what the pandemic was? The pandemic is my guide in Africa who went to the tree and touched it. The pandemic touched our trees one by one, and they all crumbled into piles of dust, and all the termites are coming out to get us.