Hi James

Been reading you for a while (have 8 books) and I think you are a great writer. It's so straight to the point that even a stupid boxer like myself can understand it. But you often say in your podcast and books that civilization is bad, but what would we have instead of it? Tribes? Pretty much every civilization goes through the same cycle it seems but doesn't tribes go up and down too?

Do you have any advice to a young male (Swedish) in his late 20's that you wished you knew when you were my age?

Kind regards

-Sven

Sven, more successful primal societies form tribes.

Some tribes form confederations and others form alliances in isolation.

Some tribal confederations form states based on agricultural surplus.

Some tribes and tribal confederations form empires based on conquering surplus-based states.

Some surplus-based states form empires and prey upon lesser states.

We are now in an era in which the surplus-based empire has been effectively captured from within by a debt-based model which is an inherent component of the surplus-based state.

In early civilizations a reduction in human stature and an increase in disease experience made of life for most a living hell. We civilized folk only identify with the top 1% of medieval and ancient people. The rest lived in abject squalor. Human ethics also suffered, as accumulation-based hierarchies replaced deed-based meritocracies.

However, once a civilization was up and running it was a gigantic biological weapon against more primitive people living in healthier conditions.

Once modern civilization permitted vaϲϲines, the accumulation-based civilizations became vice-based and devolved into celebrity-worshipping populations of drug addicts ruled through the false notion of democracy—which is one of the morality pits that await descending civilizations.

Sven, we are taught that tribalism is bad by state indoctrination camps and scriptures promoted by those very State organisms that have annihilated tribal polities and cultures. Our sports teams are actually replacement fetishes for the focus of our natural tribal impulses. Since men of the present age now look upon the world—having been mentally adjusted by these indoctrination programs—as women of past ages looked upon it, the idea of the tribe is now a daunting prospect.

I do seek, largely through the most ancient writings available to us, a means of gleaning the possibility of a potential human state that might be able to preserve the superior morality of tribal cultures alongside the improved technology of modern civilization.

As to your question about getting along in the current dystopian world, I would suggest one primary method of dealing with the world in a tribal way, as this tribal characteristic is the key to the moral superiority of barbarism over civilization.

Civilization—all known civilizations—were erected according to in-group violence, abduction, forced labor, torture, execution, overawing threats of violence from the community aimed at the individual of lower status. For instance, in America, blacks in America used to be the lowest status people and could freely be attacked without legal repercussions from the state. Now, blacks have abruptly been elevated as a class of martyr folk and it’s now the Euromerican who is no longer permitted to defend himself based on a chronological guilt complex. All civilizations and many families within these polities practice violence against their own people. These civilizations all tend to do little or nothing to defend their people from outsiders.

Conversely, all barbarian peoples other than Australasian folk, practice less in-group violence than the least volatile civilizations, with uncivilized Native and Euro-Americans demonstrating an extreme reluctance to harm or kill their own members. Also, it is to be acknowledged that barbarian cultures are practitioners of more out-group violence. This, is presented to the modern person as a greater evil than in-group violence perpetrated by The State in its prisons and by its police. I would suggest to you that this is false, that in-group violence brings violence and betrayal, where outgroup violence brings only violence, and that the greatest good is to do away with ideas of punishing, imprisoning, forcing and killing your own folk in favor of ostracism, which is the ancient way of alienation, the one terminal point of disapproval between the tribe and the individual. Alienation was essentially a death sentence that did not require the tribe to kill their own. However, in our post-tribal civilization, where none of us unconditionally belong, we not only live under threat of being treated as an outsider by our parent society but exist perpetually in that alienated state which was considered the worst fate a person could suffer, to be inwardly alone.

I suggest, Sven that you swear never to harm or force your own and make of yourself their protector and that this most ancient guiding principle will serve you well, even in the toxic medium of Civilization’s deep, dank, modern well.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival