Ten Thousand Years of Tyranny: On the Origins of Civilisation and Sin

By Richard Frost

“Ten thousand years of tyranny” is a polemic as uncompromising as Rousseau or Marx. It rejects one central idea of Darwin’s theory, ie that life evolves in an environment of scarce resources and claims that the world has always been abundant of and for life. Given this, Frost claims, life is, though violent, essentially benign. Humanity, freed from the whip of scarcity, would be free to live in harmony with itself and the wider world, without sin, were it not for the corruptions arising from differential social power.
The author, aged about 20 months, with his pregnant mother, Selina, taken in about September 1938 in North End, Essex, UK.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jun 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728352459

Richard Frost

Richard Frost is 83. He left school at 16 to become a reporter on the local newspaper in Hasting. He went to Lancaster University at 33 to study politics (awarded first class honours) and subsequently studied prehistoric archaeology at Liverpool and Durham. His book is the result of 40 years of research in the two subjects.

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2020 Richard Frost. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse      05/28/2020

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5246-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-7283-5245-9 (e)

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CONTENTS

Author’s note

Chapter 1 The Problem

Chapter 2 All power corrupts

Chapter 3 Imperialism

Bibliography

Cover%20Image.jpg

The memorial in St. Nicholas’ Garden, Whitehaven

to 76 children aged from eight to 14 who died in the

Whitehaven coalfield between 1819 and 1915.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

THIS BOOK ARISES from notes and ideas I have been working on for many years. Four years ago I had a road accident which put me in a coma for two months with a further seven months in hospital. A subsequent fall off a ladder and my impending 82nd birthday reminded me that the grim reaper was not far away and if I wanted to share my ideas I had better get on

Ten thousand years of tyranny is made up of speculations on the nature of people and society; doubts about Darwin’s theory of evolution and hopes for anarchism as a guide, a vision and an inspiration. I come from the poor but quite respectable working class via the grammar school great escape route. Leaving school at 16, I worked as a reporter on the local newspaper in Hastings. At 31 I did a residential year at Fircroft College, Birmingham, and in 1969, now 32, I went to Lancaster University and got first class honours in politics. Some years later I studied prehistoric archaeology at Liverpool and Durham.

Initially this book was going to be a primer on anarchism which led me to Darwin’s theory of evolution and quite accidentally to this new history of mankind. I had not intended to be so arrogant!

I am a bad academic since I knew roughly what wanted to prove before I started writing. My premature conclusions have not been overturned but they have evolved. Very briefly, The Problem, socially and individually, is power: all power corrupts and we have been corrupted. Contributory factors are the myth of scarcity and the associated myths of the struggle for survival and the necessity for rulers. In brief, I expose the evil that is called civilisation.

To my love and my inspiration

CHAPTER ONE

THE PROBLEM

WE LIVE STRANGE lives, so unlike any other animals’. Every morning, millions of us are up by eight o’clock and are soon crowded on trains and buses and in cars heading for a variety of destinations where we stay for the day, looking after machines, tapping at computer keyboards, and performing other curious rituals called work. Approaching nine o’clock, swarms of mothers deposit their unwilling children at schools where they are taught curious or interesting facts and ideas, like it or not.

Once there were hordes of miners clattering every day along cobbled streets and disappearing underground to hack at the earth for coal. Girls also used to clatter in their clogs to huge mills for a deafening day in the dust of looms and wheels. Their brothers and sisters are clattering to work today at hospitals, in mines, in shops, on building sites, on the railways, on farms, and on bourses throughout the world, spending their lives in ways that few would freely choose—and not a policeman or guard on duty to drive them to it.

Ten thousand years ago, none of our ancestors would have been so docile. Human beings were not born to work; they were born free and lived free for at least 300,000 years. And the living was easy. What happened?

Go back a million years, and we are a hairy primate, closely related to aggressive chimpanzees and hippie bonobos, living freely in rich environments. Over the next 700,000 years we tamed fire, learned language, cooked food—which perhaps allowed our brains to grow—and became Homo sapiens. For another 300,000 years we continued as hunter-gatherers, living the good life which, says Richard Wrangham in The Goodness Paradox, was in many ways delightful (148). He goes on:

Unlike centralised tyrannies, the leaderless bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers or villages of slash and burn farmers are genuinely pluralistic societies. Disputes are solved communally. Anyone’s voice can be heard. No one is allowed to be sad. The sense of social support is enormous and, as we have seen, the tenor of daily life is very peaceful. To add to the pleasures, the bands or camps are not subject to any polity. They are members of a larger network of groups in which everyone speaks the same dialect or language and shares the same culture. Neighbouring groups may sometimes have disputes and can even turn to violence against one another. But they all operate at the same political level without hierarchy among groups or group subjugation. (148)

But

liberty has its limits. In the absence of domineering leaders, a social cage of tradition demands claustrophobic adherence to group norms … Individuals have limited personal freedom; they live or die by their willingness to conform. (149)

Not a bad choice, and how little different from today!

There were two possible futures for hunter-gatherers: to live anarchically in a social cage of tradition which required automatic adherence to group norms or to live with scarcity, building terrible, bloody, and wonderful civilisations at the behest of tyrants. In ignorance, we let the tyrants take over. This book is an attempt to visualise the recreation of our freedom without the rule of either tyranny or blind conformity.

Homo erectus and Homo sapiens, both hunter-gatherers, lived in traditional freedom until civilisation turned them into organised societies under elite control. They lived in small groups; they were egalitarian, affluent, mostly peaceful, and good—that is to say, they were social animals and behaved in ways which supported and sustained their group, as all social species do. There is probably no species in the world in which tiny minorities rule and exploit everyone else—except Homo sapiens in the ten thousand years we have been civilised.

Before civilisation, H. sapiens were aggressive only as far as they needed to be to get food, defend territory, see off predators, and compete with rivals in the mating season. They were not cruel: they did not fight or kill just for fun; they did not torture their victims or lock them in prisons. There is no evidence for internal warfare in the areas where the Neolithic originated; until civilisation hit at around 10,000 BCE, H. sapiens did not know sin.

The great change came when we transitioned from being free hunter-gatherers to being settled farmers ruled by powerful elites who turned the people they could get under their control into slaves or as good as and used