Chapter 6: Building Pyramids

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Welcome to the Deep Dive.

We've got some really interesting material today digging into the agricultural revolution.

It's presented as this absolutely pivotal moment.

Oh definitely, a huge turning point.

Yeah and controversial too right?

Some see it as you know progress, the foundation of civilization.

While others frame it almost as a step backward toward alienation, it's a really fascinating debate.

It really is and the material highlights this incredible population shift to set the scene.

We're talking maybe five to eight million nomadic foragers around 10 ,000 BC.

Tiny numbers globally speaking.

Exactly and then fast forward to the first century

and you've got something like 250 million farmers.

A massive jump and meanwhile the number of foragers just plummets down to maybe one or two million.

It really shows you the sheer dominance of this new agricultural way of life.

It really does and it wasn't just about numbers was it?

It's the whole way of living that got turned upside down.

Foragers moving across these huge territories,

dozens, hundreds of square kilometers.

That was their world, their home, open space.

And then suddenly life shrinks down to this tiny patch of land, a field, a house, maybe just a few dozen meters across.

A very different sense of space and the sources suggest this had a real psychological impact didn't they?

They do.

This idea of attachment to my house, my land, a feeling of separation from your neighbors maybe leading to a more

self -centered outlook.

Well it ties into this move towards a much more artificial environment.

Think about it.

Foragers adapted to the natural world.

Right they lived within it.

Farmers though they started constructing their environment.

They cut down forests, dug canals, cleared fields, built permanent houses.

They literally reshaped the land.

Exactly engineering it for themselves and their specific plants and animals.

Wheat, goats, whatever it was.

Which meant you know a constant battle against anything that didn't fit.

Weeds in the fields, wild animals trying to get back in.

Even insects in the house.

It's his ongoing effort to maintain the human -made bubble against the wild.

It's funny you say bubble because one statistic that really jumped out was that even as late as 80 1400 all this farming, all these domesticated animals, only took up about 11 million square kilometers.

Which sounds like a lot but it's only about two percent of the earth's surface.

Incredible isn't it?

So much of recorded human history played out on this relatively tiny artificially managed stage.

It really makes you wonder about the vast wilderness that still existed then.

But it also raises a key question.

Why did people stick with farming?

Why not just go back to foraging if things got tough?

Yeah good question.

The material points to a couple of things.

One is that attachment we mentioned to the house, the fields, the granaries full of food.

Sense of place investment.

And also just stuff.

Even if ancient farmers seem poor by our standards they actually had way more physical possessions, tools, pots, furniture than an entire band of foragers might have carried.

Those positions become anchors don't they?

Yeah.

Harder to just pick up and leave.

Definitely and it wasn't just physical anchors.

Their whole conception of time seems to have shifted.

Ah yes the time horizon.

Foragers living much more moment to moment maybe week to week.

Right focused on the present.

But farmers they had to think seasons, years, even decades ahead.

Planting now for a harvest much later.

It's interesting the sources suggest that because foragers had trouble storing food long term they paradoxically had fewer long term anxieties.

You deal with today, tomorrow mostly takes care of itself.

Whereas farming made the future incredibly important.

Suddenly you have these long cultivation periods then short critical harvests.

And you're constantly worrying.

Will there be enough rain?

Too much rain.

A flood,

pests.

Your livelihood depends on predicting and managing this distant future.

Especially since they relied on just a few crops.

A bad year for wheat could be catastrophic.

Absolutely.

So this necessity arises to produce more than you immediately need.

You need reserves, a surplus to survive those inevitable bad years.

Imagine the constant low level stress.

Worrying about the weather, the river levels.

It must have been relentless.

But it wasn't just passive worry.

They could do things about it or try to.

Clear more land, dig another irrigation ditch, build better storage.

Which led to this

more phonetic hardworking lifestyle.

Always focused on the future outcome.

Maybe delaying gratification now for security later.

And this whole cycle.

Stress, the hard work, the surplus.

It has massive social consequences.

Okay.

How so?

Well that surplus didn't just sit there.

It became the basis for everything else.

Elites emerged who figured out how to control and extract that surplus from the farmers.

Leaving the peasants, the vast majority, with just enough to get by.

Pretty much.

And that extracted surplus is what fueled the growth of politics, wars, monumental art, philosophy.

Everything that fills our history books.

The sources mention that for most of history something like 90 % of people were peasants supporting this tiny elite.

Wow.

90%.

That really puts it in perspective.

So we have settled villages, food surpluses.

What comes next?

Bigger settlements.

Villages grow into towns.

Towns into cities.

This is enabled by the food surplus.

But also by improvements in transportation.

Moving that food around.

But just having food and boats isn't enough to create a city or an empire, is it?

Not at all.

You need cooperation.

How do you get thousands, eventually millions, of people who are mostly strangers to live together and work together?

How do you divide resources, settle arguments, build large projects?

The sources make a strong point that it wasn't usually food shortages causing the biggest conflicts.

Things like the French Revolution, Roman Civil Wars, Yugoslavia.

Exactly.

Those weren't primarily about starvation.

They were about the breakdown of the social order.

The rules of cooperation.

It really bumps up against our evolutionary history, doesn't it?

We spend millions of years in small bands.

A few thousand years of farming isn't long enough to evolve instincts for mass cooperation.

We just aren't biologically wired for it on that scale.

Forgers did cooperate sometimes in larger groups.

Maybe hundreds.

Often based on shared myths or rituals.

But it was usually temporary.

Loose.

So the massive question is, how did humans manage to scale that up?

Could mythology, could stories really be the glue to hold together millions of strangers?

And the answer, according to the material we're looking at, is a resounding yes.

These shared myths turned out to be incredibly powerful.

They provided the social links, the shared understanding necessary for cities and empires.

So while our biology changed slowly, our imagination went into overdrive.

We started creating these vast networks of cooperation based on stories,

stories about gods, motherlands, corporations.

You can see the timeline unfold in the sources.

Early villages like Jericho around 8 ,500 BC.

Then larger towns like Sadaluyuk.

Then the first real cities popping up in the 5th, 4th millennia BC.

And soon after, larger political units.

Right, like the first Egyptian kingdom around 3 ,100 BC.

Sargon's Akkadian Empire maybe 2 ,250 BC.

The scale just keeps increasing.

Leading eventually to these huge mega empires in the Middle East between 1 ,000 and 500 BC.

Then Qin China unifying in 221 BC and the Roman Empire covering the Mediterranean.

The scale is just staggering.

The Qin dynasty had maybe 40 million subjects, run by over 100 ,000 officials.

Rome, maybe up to 100 million people at its peak.

Think of the logistics, the bureaucracy, the infrastructure, roads, aqueducts, theaters, all funded by taxes drawn from that agricultural base.

It's impressive, but the sources add a crucial warning.

Don't romanticize this mass cooperation.

Absolutely, because often, maybe most often, it was based on oppression and exploitation.

That surplus came from peasants who barely had enough themselves.

And grand projects, like those Roman amphitheaters, were often built with slave labor.

Even prisons, concentration camps, those are forms of mass cooperation too, just based on coercion.

Which brings us to this really core concept,

imagined orders.

Okay, what exactly does that mean?

It means the social norms, the rules, the hierarchies that hold these large societies together aren't based on biological instinct or personal acquaintance.

They're based on a shared belief in common myths, in stories we tell ourselves.

Lots of your example of Peugeot.

It's not a physical thing, but millions cooperate around the idea of this company.

Precisely.

It exists in our collective imagination.

And the sources use two key historical examples to illustrate this.

Hammurabi's Code and the American Declaration of Independence.

Two very different documents centuries apart.

Exactly.

Hammurabi's Code, from around 1776 BC, was essentially a cooperation manual for the Babylonian Empire.

It presented Hammurabi as divinely appointed to bring justice.

And it set out specific laws, right?

If this happens, then that's the consequence.

Yes.

And crucially, those consequences depended heavily on who you were.

It enshrined a strict hierarchy.

Superior men, commoners, slaves, men and women were treated differently too.

The value of an eye or the penalty for assault, it wasn't universal.

It depended on your status and the victim's status.

Deeply unequal.

The Code explicitly states this order, this hierarchy, comes from the gods, that it's universal and eternal justice.

Even within families, children were treated like property.

The examples given is horrifying to us executing a killer's daughter if the victim was another high -status man's daughter.

But the point is, to the Babylonians, this was justice.

It was the system that ensured cooperation because everyone knew their place.

They believed in that hierarchical myth.

Now, contrast that with the Declaration of Independence, 1776 AD, also a cooperation manual for millions.

But based on a radically different myth.

Radically different.

We hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with unalienable rights, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, also claiming universal, eternal principles, also divinely inspired.

And just like Hammurabi's Code, it promised a just, prosperous society if people followed its principles.

And it's been incredibly influential.

So here's the kicker.

You have two systems, both claiming universal, divinely ordained justice.

One says inequality is fundamental, the other says equality is fundamental.

They can't both be objectively true in that sense.

Exactly.

The argument presented is that neither hierarchy nor equality are objective realities.

They are products of the human imagination.

They exist because we collectively believe they do.

They are imagined orders.

And the sources then take this biological lens to it, which is,

well, bracing.

It is.

From biology's perspective, the idea of created equal doesn't really hold.

Evolution works on difference, on variation, not sameness.

So created equal translates biologically to evolve differently.

Okay.

And endowed by their creator.

Biology sees blind evolution, no creator figure bestowing things.

So that becomes simply born.

What about unalienable rights?

Biology doesn't recognize rights.

It recognizes characteristics, organs, abilities, and these are mutable.

They can change.

Think of birds losing flight.

So unalienable rights become mutable characteristics.

And life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Well, life exists biologically,

but liberty as an inherent right is a human invention.

And happiness is tricky to define biologically beyond perhaps the drive for pleasure.

So it becomes life and the pursuit of pleasure.

So if you translate the declaration into purely biological terms.

You get something like,

we hold these truths to be self -evident, that all men evolve differently, that they're born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

It definitely loses something in the translation.

It does.

But then comes a crucial twist.

Even if equality isn't a biological fact,

believing in it as if it were true might be essential for creating a stable, prosperous society based on cooperation.

Which is exactly the definition of an imagined order.

Precisely.

And Hammurabi could have made the exact same argument for his hierarchy.

Believing in inherent inequality creates stability because everyone accepts their role.

Both are myths that function to organize society.

It does feel uncomfortable applying that to something like human rights, though.

The sources mention Voltaire.

Right.

The court about God.

There is no God, but don't tell that to my servant.

The suggestion is that maybe Hammurabi and Jefferson, deep down, understood the pragmatic utility of their respective myths, whether hierarchy or equality.

That biologically, we don't have natural rights any more than a chimpanzee does, but maybe society collapses if too many people realize that.

It's a provocative thought, and it highlights the fragility of imagined orders.

Unlike gravity, which works whether you believe in it or not,

imagined orders depend entirely on belief.

So they need constant reinforcement.

Constant strenuous effort.

And often, that involves violence and coercion.

Armies, police, courts, prisons, they exist largely to enforce the rules of the imagined order.

Like enforcing an eye for an eye in Babylon or the American Civil War being fought, in large part, over the imagined order of slavery versus equality.

Exactly.

But violence isn't enough on its own.

You need true believers.

The Talleyrand quote, you can do a lot with bayonets, but you can't sit on them comfortably.

Perfect.

Belief is more effective, more sustainable.

A priest -inspiring faith can be more powerful than soldiers' compelling obedience.

And even the soldiers, the jailers, they need to believe in something, whether it's God, honor, the nation, or just the value of their paycheck, to do their jobs.

But why would the elites bother enforcing an order if they didn't believe in it themselves?

Is it just cynical greed?

The sources argue it's usually more than that.

A true cynic who believes in nothing wouldn't see the point in building pyramids or amassing huge fortunes beyond basic comfort.

Think of Diogenes challenging Alexander the Great.

So for an imagined order to last, a large chunk of the population, especially the elites and the security forces, has to genuinely buy into the myths.

Yes.

Whether it's Christianity, democracy, capitalism, widespread,

genuine belief seems essential.

Okay.

So how do you get millions of people to genuinely believe in something that's

imagined?

Step one, never, ever admit it's imagined.

Always present it as objective reality.

Divinely ordained, like Hammurabi's hierarchy or...

Or created by God, like Jefferson's equality, or even as a law of nature, like Adam Smith's free markets.

And then you just weave it into everything.

Absolutely.

Education from day one.

It's in the fairy tales, the plays, the paintings, the songs, architecture, even fashion.

Fashion?

How does that work?

Well, think about today.

Wealthy people might wear expensive but casual jeans, reflecting an egalitarian ideal, at least superficially.

In medieval times, a nobleman wouldn't dream of wearing peasant clothes.

Fashion rigidly reinforced the class hierarchy, the imagined order of inequality.

Right.

It becomes invisible just the way things are.

The sources mention three main reasons why people don't see the imagined nature of their order.

Yes.

The first is that the imagined order gets embedded in the material world.

It starts in our minds, but it shapes the physical stuff around us.

Like houses.

Exactly.

Modern Western houses often have private rooms for kids, reinforcing individualism.

Medieval castles had few private spaces, reflecting a world where your identity was tied to your place in the group hierarchy, constantly visible to others.

The physical space reinforces the social myth.

Okay, that makes sense.

What's the second reason?

The imagined order shapes our desires.

We're born into it, and its dominant myths tell us what we should want.

Those desires then become the order's best defense.

So when we think we're following our heart, we're actually following a script written by romanticism or consumerism.

Often, yes.

Think about the desire for foreign travel.

It feels personal, but it's heavily programmed by romantic ideals of seeking diverse experiences and consumerist ideas that buying experiences brings happiness.

Like the example of the rich guy taking his wife to Paris to fix their marriage.

Right.

That solution is straight out of the romantic consumer's playbook.

An ancient Egyptian pharaoh wouldn't think of that.

His desire might be to build a huge pyramid for the afterlife.

Our deepest desires are often shaved by the prevailing myths.

So we spend our lives chasing things the imagined order tells us are valuable.

Pretty much.

Accumulating the symbols and experiences it validates, rarely questioning the myths themselves.

And the third factor.

The imagined order is intersubjective.

This is key.

It doesn't just exist in my head or your head.

It exists in the shared web of belief connecting millions of minds.

It's not objective like radioactivity or purely subjective like my imaginary friend.

Exactly.

It's things like law, money, gods, nations.

They aren't physical objects, but they have enormous power because millions of us act as if they are real.

Pujo, the US dollar, human rights, the United States itself.

These are intersubjective realities.

And you can't change them just by deciding you don't believe anymore.

No way.

To change an intersubjective reality, you need to change the beliefs of millions of other people.

It takes huge coordinated effort, usually involving complex organizations, which themselves often rely on other shared myths.

So to tear down one imagined order, you almost always need to believe in another one to replace it.

Like needing the legal system myth to challenge the corporate myth.

That's the idea.

It leads to this powerful, maybe slightly bleak conclusion.

Oh, and about the prison.

Yeah.

There is no way out of the imagined order.

When we break down our prison walls and run towards freedom, we are in fact running into the more spacious exercise yard of a bigger prison.

Wow.

That's quite a thought to end on.

It really makes you reconsider, well, everything.

It does.

We've traced this arc from foraging to farming, the rise of complex societies, and how these shared imagined orders were absolutely crucial for making that happen, for better or worse.

So perhaps the takeaway for everyone listening is to just notice.

Notice the imagined orders shaping your own world, your own desires, what you take for granted as real.

And maybe ask yourself that final question.

Are we truly free agents?

Or are we living within these vast invisible constructs of shared belief?

It certainly puts human history and our future in a different light.

And that brings this deep dive to a close.

Thanks for joining us.

I think we've thoroughly covered the material sent over.