Prior to the Agricultural Revolution, people didn’t live in houses. They roamed, following herds of animals or finding areas of more plant growth. With domestication of plants and animals, humans began living in houses (the word “domesticate” comes from the Latin for “house”).
The home, a new concept, measured a few dozen feet. It represented a separation from the rest of your band. Whereas nomads lived together, with the development of the house we became more individualistic, self-centered animals.
We also separated ourselves from the rest of nature. We cleared forests and fields, planted trees and proclaimed them “ours,” fenced off “our” land, and eliminated pesky weeds and animals. We were the masters of our individual universes, but this came with a lot of responsibility and the anxiety that attends it.
Nomadic foragers hadn’t given too much thought to what the future had in store. They were mostly focused on what they did and had in the present. There was little they could do to influence future events, so they didn’t worry about it. This saved them a lot of anxiety.
But the Agricultural Revolution required a focus on the future. There were three reasons:
Reason #1: Agriculture depends on seasonal cycles that last a year. If you’re in the harvest season and you’re not thinking ahead about the next cultivation season, you won’t have a harvest next year. What farmers do today affects what happens next year, or even years from now.
Reason #2: Agriculture is risky. Droughts, floods, and pestilence, among other calamities, could take out a farmer’s entire harvest. If farmers didn’t plan ahead, building up reserves, they starved. Consequently, farmers were always anxiously looking at the sky, trying to anticipate storms, dry periods, and floods.
Reason #3: Unlike their nomadic ancestors, farmers could actually do something today to influence events tomorrow. For example, they could sow more seeds, dig another canal, and plant more trees. The responsibility to plant the seeds that wouldn’t yield for decades kept them forever looking forward.
Peasant farmers rarely achieved the security they sought. Surplus went to more and more children, or the elites that lived off them. They always had just enough to survive, perpetually working just to have enough to eat.
Where did the elites come from? Why did they have the power to take the farmers’ surplus and keep them living at the subsistence level?
People evolved to cooperate in small groups. As their way of life changed rapidly, there was no time for Sapiens to evolve the skills of mass cooperation. As groups of people got bigger, they needed some kind of organizing structure, a way to help people work together to divide land, settle disputes, and keep the peace. Organizing so many people involved creating myths that served as the links between previously distinct bands of people. This was the foundation of cooperation.
Cooperation didn’t necessarily mean egalitarian collaboration. Cooperation was often built on oppression. Those in power exploited the farmers to maintain the system.
Fictions can foster cooperation among nations and empires. We’ll look at the Code of Hammurabi and the Declaration of Independence together to demonstrate how these seemingly dissimilar documents actually function very similarly.
Fictions can be useful. We like to think that political orders are founded on truths, but in reality, political orders are unable to function without relying on fictions.
In 1776 BC, the Babylonian Empire was the biggest in the world, with over a million subjects. King Hammurabi established a code that presented his power and legal system as mandated by the gods. The code emphasized hierarchy, breaking the population into “superior people,” commoners, and slaves. Your worth was established based on your class and gender.
The idea was that if everyone accepted this code, the empire’s million subjects could cooperate with each other. And it worked. People believed the myth that the gods dictated these laws, rights, and differing human worths, and the Code of Hammurabi is still known today.
It’s easy to think of the Code of Hammurabi as a myth. It may not be as easy to think of our own country’s foundational document as a myth.
Similar to Hammurabi’s assertion that his code came from the gods, Thomas Jefferson justifies the rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence by writing that they are “endowed by [men’s] Creator.” Both have a divine source. Also like the Code of Hammurabi, the Declaration of Independence was written as a way to unify disparate groups of people.
Unlike the Code, the Declaration is based not on hierarchy but on equality. Who’s right? Neither. The concepts of rights and equality are just as much myths as the concepts of hierarchy and of value based on class and gender. They exist only in the mind.
In order for the phrase “all Men are created equal” to be true, we’d have to find that sentiment in the physical world. But there’s no sense in which we are equal in objective reality. People have different genes, are influenced by different environments, develop different personalities, and have different chances of success and survival. The evolution of our species depends on our differences, our genetic mutations.
There’s also no objective existence of “rights.” For example, birds don’t fly because they have the right to fly. They fly because they have wings. Likewise, “liberty” is a concept humans invented. You can’t measure it and it doesn’t exist outside our minds.
None of this means that the Declaration of Independence is a lie or worthless. It has helped create a stable, cooperative society. In fact, collective myths are the only way to organize large groups effectively.
A natural order, which has its basis in physical reality, is stable. Gravity will continue to exist even if we stop believing in it. Radioactivity will still be dangerous, even if we don’t know it.
But imagined orders, systems based on myths, aren’t stable. There’s no guarantee that they’ll last. Consequently, there are two requirements for maintaining them.
Requirement #1: Coercion
The myth creators or sustainers need to continually enforce people’s belief in the fiction. This is often done with violence. Armies, courts, and police officers make sure that people comply with the imagined laws of the imagined order. For example, when many Americans decided that African slaves should enjoy the right to freedom, they had to fight a war to enforce this principle in the South.
Requirement #2: True Believers
Coercion isn’t easy—it’s actually hard to coordinate violence. Armies, courts, and police officers won’t be effective at enforcing the imagined order if they don’t believe in it, or, at least, something. Soldiers and officers must believe in the myth of God, the nation, honor, or money—it doesn’t matter what myth they choose to believe, as long as the resulting behaviors lead to enforcing the political order. So, for instance, a soldier may not believe in the imagined political order he’s supposed to defend, but if he believes in the myth of money, he may enforce the political order anyway.
How do you get people to believe in the imagined order in the first place?
First of all, you don’t tell people that it’s imagined. You maintain that the society was created by gods or nature, thereby making it part of objective reality.
Next, you constantly remind people of the imagined order’s principles, until the imagined order feels like a natural order. You can do this by inundating your citizens with these principles from childhood in the forms of fairy tales, art, traditions, propaganda, and fashions.
We live the principles of our imagined orders in daily life. It even affects our architecture. Compare how architecture differs in individualistic societies vs. collectivist societies.
In the West, we believe that we’re all individuals, unique in the world, and that only we know our true worth. When you’re a kid in school and your classmates make fun of you, your teachers tell you to just ignore them. They don’t define your worth. Only you know your worth.
Our architecture expresses this belief in individualism. Houses consist of many rooms so that each child can have his or her own space. These rooms have doors, locks, and are often decorated by the child, with posters and colors that the child feels represent her. Parents often have to ask permission to enter the child’s room. If you have your own space, you can’t help but grow up feeling like an autonomous individual, believing your worth is defined and expressed by you.
Architecture is part of the material, “real” world. But it reinforces an imagined principle.
Medieval communities, on the other hand, didn’t believe in the myth of individualism. In their imagined order, your worth was determined by those outside of you, by the gossip about you and your place in the social hierarchy. You had to defend your good name at all times, at all costs. Nothing mattered more.
Medieval architecture reflected this myth. Castles contained few, if any, private rooms. Even the children of noblemen slept in a large hall with the other children. Everyone was on display and accountable. If you never have privacy and are in constant contact with others, you can’t help but grow up believing that your worth is determined by the people around you.
Again, something in the real world (architecture) reinforced a principle of the imagined order (collectivism).
Both Romantic myths from the 19th century and consumerist myths from the 20th century influence what we desire. Even when we think we’re making our own, personal decisions by following our hearts, what our heart wants is probably influenced by these myths. Further, the whole idea that you should “follow your heart” comes from the myths of the Romantic period.
Take the tourism industry, for example. We all want to go on vacation. We think this is a natural thing to want to do. It’s not. A chimpanzee wouldn’t think of using his hard-earned status to take a trip to another chimpanzee’s territory.
Our ancestors wouldn’t have done this, either. While today, a millionaire might take his wife on a trip to Paris to help them weather a rough patch in their marriage, an ancient Egyptian might have built his wife the lavish tomb she coveted.
Traveling is not a natural, biological urge. So why do we want to go so badly?
Romanticism and Consumerism find their marriage in the tourism industry, which sells you experiences on the assumption that they will enrich your life.
It’s hard to realize that the organizing principles of your life are just imaginary when everyone else takes them for granted as well. When everyone else believes something, and it’s something embedded in your culture since you were born, it feels natural for you to believe it too.
Further, it’s hard to change the imagined order when it exists in the collective mind, not just yours. When something exists in the collective imagination of a population, it’s called inter-subjective. Something that is inter-subjective depends on a group believing in it. If one individual stops believing in it, the inter-subjective item is still there. So one person can’t change a collective imagined order on her own. You not only have to convince the people around you that it’s imaginary, but you have to replace it with another imagined order, one even more powerful, because we can’t function without them.