In 1959, Dr. Dimitriy Belyaev and his colleagues of the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk, Russia, started a long-term experiment in the domestication of the silver fox (
Vulpes vulpes). From an original population of 130 farm-bred foxes, the research team progressively selected those who showed the least avoidance behaviour towards humans and separated them from the rest of the group. By allowing them to breed only amongst themselves – while avoiding interbreeding – by 1985 the researchers had managed to have 18% of the tenth generation of foxes showing extremely tame behavior. Their experiment was interrupted in that year, but other, more recent experiments have shown very similar results. Foxes, some of the least domesticable animals in nature, can be tamed as a species.
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Let’s compare the transformation of the Vulpes vulpes over the relatively short time-span of ten generations, with the evolution of humans over the vastly longer period of History, which we presume began in 3200 BC, with the first written records in Mesopotamia. That is, over 200 generations ago.
Since the beginning of Civilization, which Pierre Clastres identifies with the crystallization of the institution of power within the community and the emergence of the State, a ‘tame’ attitutude towards authority has always been strongly encouraged among humans. The vast majority of those who were – and still are – allowed to prosper within Civilization, were those who displayed and enacted a sufficient level of compliance with the requests of their authorities, whether religious or secular, familiar or military. For all the others, only two paths remained available: the narrow and exclusive one of taking power, or the broad and painful one of being ostracized. Needless to say, only a small minority of the social misfits had enough luck, ruthlessness and courage to take power, while the rest of them ended up populating the slums, prisons and mental asylums of many a Civilization through history and across the globe. Under this type of societal pressure – which we could define as morally authoritarian, if morality could ever be anything but authoritarian – generation after generation of humans were progressively pushed towards a genetic selection which let the tame ones survive, and made the wild ones succumb. It is hard not to see the similarities with the results recorded by the researchers in Novosibirsk, and to avoid imagining how this process of genetic human domestication to authority has over the centuries lead our species to assume increasingly tame characteristics. It is maybe not simply a historical coincidence that the triumph of liberal democracies and civil rights across the globe has occurred only several dozens of generations after such a process had started: only the tamest pets are allowed to walk in the park without a muzzle.
However, we should note that such a process is not to be considered as a one-sided act by the hands of some external domesticators. We cannot imagine the progressive selection of the tamest of the species as an ‘act of God’ fallen from the top of the social hierarchy and irresistibly embodied by the powerless ‘victims’. The reason for our refusal of such an interpretation – which, on the other hand, is silently present in most past and contemporary discourses about domination – lies in the very nature of political and social power and in its ultimate, paradoxical powerlessness.
Although we are used to believing that a person in a position of authority or socio/economic superiority has power over his/her ‘inferiors’, at a closer look we can easily understand how this is hardly the case. Power in itself does not produce any of the acts that are commonly associated with domination. If a master orders his/her subject to perform an action, it is not the power of the master, but the obedience of the subject that produces that action. Even when exerted with extreme force, power is never sufficient in itself to perform anything: it always requires obedience, since it is obedience alone which is capable of producing practical results. Even when the subject is forced into chains and threatened with violence, it is only his/her obedience which performs the duties imposed over them. Power is not even capable of producing obedience by itself: once again, it is obedience which produces itself. It is the obedience of their subjects which replenishes the master’s banks with money, which keeps the machines working in their factories and their offices, which works their fields and secures their homes...
If nobody obeyed, it is not said that nobody would command, but it is certain that none of their commands would produce any consequences. What use would power be, for a master without obedient subjects? Power struggles do not exist, as all that exists are the smooth tides of obedience.
So, why do we continue attributing to power a productiveness which it clearly does not have? Our delusional attribution of power to power has to do with our relationship with the reality of our obedience. Faced by the traumatic reality of our active and continuous construction of our own chains, we prefer to attribute the responsibility for our state of minority to something or somebody else. Nothing essentially different from the ancient beliefs of those who, faced by the trauma of the discovery of their own mortality, invented ‘death’ as an external entity responsible for the cessation of their lives. The attribution of productive abilities to the supposed power of our masters is the cruel spook which allows us to sleep at night, oblivious of the burdensome responsibility of our obedience.
This is how we ended up convincing ourselves that the responsibility for our subjection is of the master’s power over us, and, equally, that it is the master’s power which produces the fruits of our obedience. Most importantly, this is how we have often focused our struggle for emancipation against power, instead of against our own obedience.
In this sense, we cannot interpret the long process of domestication to authority of the human species as anything but a process of self-domestication. Against most of the radical vulgate of the last few centuries, the victimized mass of the oppressed is to be considered to have had sole responsibility for its continuous and seemingly endless state of subjection, as well as for its progressive degeneration into utter tameness. It is at this point that most radical discourses over the emancipation of the masses – to be achieved through revolution or reform, according to the gospel of different political positions – show what is probably their fundamental flaw. At their basis is the assumption of a desire for freedom and emancipation innate in every human, which is supposedly made inactive by the evil domination of some external power. Unfortunately for the believers in universal emancipation, history shows us very little, if any, proof of the existence of such a supposed ‘desire for freedom’ at a mass level, and even less of its ability to overcome the practice of human obedience. It is sad but necessary to awaken to the fact that human masses – if such things do exist – do not universally desire to put an end to their own state of subjection, let alone desiring it enough to actively seek such freedom. How else could a few monarchs and a handful of knights have subjected thousands of peasants for centuries?
Since power has no power of its own, what could stop the disobedient from disobeying? What would stand in the way of their disobedience, if so they decided? Funnily and tragically enough, the only thing that could hinder the freedom of the disobedient is the obedience of those who surround him/her. It is the obedience of the guard that keeps the prisoner’s door locked, while the keys to open it are at hand. Similarly, it was the obedience of all those who surrounded the social misfits of all generations, that created around them a situation of generalized exclusion and deprivation, thus forcing them either to live at the margins or to return to obedience. Like family curses in ancient Greek tragedies, obedience is a spell that endlessly reproduces itself. It does so to such an extent, that we could rename what we commonly understand as Society, as hardly more than a ‘net of obediences’, which are self-productive while being mutually sustaining. Your obedience encourages me to develop my obedience, and so on, ad infinitum.
Once again, such reciprocal encouragement to obey has to do with the relationship which we entertain with the difficult reality of our behavior. In looking at someone else obeying, and especially in feeling a deep and unspeakable disgust for the spectacle of someone else’s obedience, the humiliation of our own obedience starts withering away, while its explicit social acceptability helps in soothing its pain.
In this sense, conformism should no longer be understood as an odd aspect of a civilized Society, but as its fundamental and constitutive essence. Since it has been obedience, and not power, at the core of the development of Civilization, conforming one’s own life and actions to authority – that is, making oneself obedient – and encouraging others to do the same has always been the essential process of society-making within Civilization. Over thousands of years, both the structures of our society and our own bodies and minds have been engineered – or self-engineered – for obedience. As in the case of the foxes, we might even say that this has possibly become our most peculiar and ‘valuable’ characteristic.
This is particularly evident today in the realm of Work, as our world sinks deeper than ever in the whirlpool of over-production, mass impoverishment and environmental catastrophe. We all know that the system of capitalism has never been designed to focus on the production of objects and services useful to humans at large, but rather on the production and accumulation of ‘wealth’ through means of exploitation. Traditional understandings of such wealth seem to identify it with political and social power, accumulated as capital by the individual capitalists and their class, with the aim of asserting their domination over society. However, on the basis of our considerations on the powerlessness of power and the centrality of obedience within society, it might be necessary to review those traditional interpretations. First of all, by understanding that the driving force of capitalism is not exploitation by the hand of the capitalist, or conflict on the side of the workers, but rather workers’ obedience to the rule of work. Since power itself can hardly be imagined to be the object of capitalist production and accumulation – what would be the use of producing something as empty and ineffective as power? – we should understand obedience to be both the engine and the outcome of capitalist production and accumulation. Workers, through their own work, produce their own obedience. This is, and has always been, the fundamental product not only of capitalism, but of any social, economical and political paradigm that has ever been implemented on a mass scale within Civilization. The enrichment and empowerment of the capitalists and their ‘class’ is the consequence and not the reason behind capitalist production. As in the case of obedience at its basic state, as described above, its use for all not-enriched and not-empowered humans has to be found in the relief that the privileges of the few can give to the many: namely, the relief provided by the delusional and self-exculpatory argument according to which the wealth and power of the few forcibly maintains the many in a state of subjection.
But who is all this obedience supposed to be aimed toward? On a superficial level, it might seem that the obedience of the subject is directed towards and ends with his/her master: one person obeys another, thus making him/her their master. But, if one’s production of obedience was to originate from one’s subjection to another fellow human – however, rich, noble, charismatic, etc – then humans would have long ago implemented a more egalitarian distribution of the ends of obedience, obeying each other on as many simultaneous levels as possible. Paradoxically, complete anarchy would have been more efficient than a pyramidal system at maximizing the production of obedience, since everyone would have been able to address their obedience to anyone else, instead of reserving it for the minority of institutional figures of authority above them. We should rule out the possibility that an inter-human network could be the ultimate path for the production and distribution of obedience within society: it is never another powerful human we obey. It is not ourselves that we obey either, since if that was the case we would have long witnessed a societal structure based on self-determination and hedonism, and free of work or prisons – something which is clearly a million light-years away from what we have now.
Despite the common saying that, when obeying, one ‘bows his/her head’ in front of authority, it is rather upwards that our heads move upon accepting our subjection. We do not really obey our fellow humans – even our stupidity would find that insulting – but something above ourselves, something ‘bigger than ourselves’, as the idealists and humanitarians put it. Although so far we have examined it under political and economic perspectives, the category of obedience is nothing but religious. We obey The Cause, The Idea, The Future, Humanity, Honour, The Law, The Country, The Greater Good, and so on. Using our masters as go-betweens, we convey all the hard-work of producing our own obedience towards what transcends us. We can thus understand society under Civilization as a particular form of religious organisation, which is aimed at maximizing the production of human obedience towards what transcends them. Hence the quest of civilized humans to find a ‘sense’ for their lives – that is, a belonging of their life to something ‘bigger’ than themselves – without which, according to today’s common sense, our lives wouldn’t be worth living.
However, what should be the reason for humans to sacrifice their lives in the endless and active production of their own obedience, even if was for something abstract and ‘bigger’ than themselves? Clearly, we should immediately refuse any altruistic interpretations. Nobody ever does anything but for his/her own interest. Then, what advantage might there be for us, in our obedience to what transcends us?
Once again, it is a matter of delusion, and of the benefits of a state of denial. In order to explore this issue, we might want to look back at the very beginning of the process of human self-domestication, and, precisely to the third millennium BC. Upon inventing written language – that is, with the beginning of History and the rise of Civilization – humans encountered something that, while brought to life by them, was able to survive them and virtually defy death and corruption. Until that moment, humans had been surrounded exclusively by other creatures that, like them, were destined to fall into the cycle of mortality. Mortality, as such, had not yet been discovered – since no immortal life yet existed, against which they could compare their own condition. With the invention of writing and the discovery of its seemingly endless life, humans began regarding their mortal destiny no longer as a pure matter of fact, but as a cruel injustice. Something that could – and should – be avoided. Escaping mortality, even more than escaping death, became their most urgent imperative.
How could they ever achieve that? How could they escape from the biological cage of mortality, once and for all? That was too hard a challenge for humans to face on their own. As with prisoners trying to escape from jail, the help of somebody – or, more exactly, something – already outside was necessary. But what was there in the world, that was able to escape the cycle of mortality, while being present, albeit even only virtually, within that of life? The answer laid in front of their eyes, marked on paper or sculpted in stone: immortal ideas. Abstractions. Something ‘bigger’ than humans themselves.
Once gone over their initial envy towards them, humans imagined that their own immortal productions could have become the rope hanging out of the window of their cell, allowing them to escape. They held onto it, and tried squeezing their bodies through the narrow bars of mortality. They tried and tried, and most of them – of us – are still trying now. But their – our – human bodies are just too large, just too real to pass through that gap between the bars. Only the rope of abstraction is thin enough, unreal enough to pass. Becoming the rope, becoming an immortal idea was and still is the only way out. This realization lies at the core of Civilized religions, and in particular of the monotheist cults, which reduced the multiplicity of abstractions typical of polytheism to the ground zero of the One. Becoming obedient to the Idea, sacrificing one’s life to it – either slowly through work and prayer, or suddenly through martyrdom – is the only method through which a mortal human is given to participate to an immortal existence.
Thus, whenever we obey – regardless of the human disguise of our pretended masters – our aim is always of partaking in the immortality of our only, true masters: the Abstractions. All we really produce, through our economic and social systems based on obedience, is the delusion of immortality, of becoming ‘more than oneself’. In this sense, as stated before, our society has to be considered as fundamentally religious, beyond the menial distinctions between secular activities and institutional religious authorities. We live for the sky, and we pay obedience to it, in order to become part of it. This is how the distinction between work and prayer – such as in the ora et labora of the Rule of Saint Benedict's – disappears completely in the total union of the two activities: to work is to pray, and conversely, as it has become increasingly apparent with the recent shift of capitalism towards affective capitalism, to pray is to work.
As long as we will live within society as we know it – that is, a religious net of obediences – and as long as we will be the tame beings that we have become, after centuries of genetic self-engineering, this is all we are ever going to do. We might fool ourselves into thinking that we are producing something, creating something, changing something, but all we are actually doing is producing our own obedience to the high authority of Abstractions, which we trade with them in exchange for the delusion of becoming part of them.
If only such Abstractions really existed, then maybe, one day, this exchange would be reciprocated, with them maintaining their promise of allowing us to take part in their immortality. But what would happen, instead, if we realized that they are nothing more than ghosts, made of our own fear and inability to accept our mortality? What would we ever do, if we decided to change the direction of our work, and instead of looking up at the sky we looked in front of us? What would life look and feel like, if we were to base our decisions, plans and actions on the full and conscious acceptance of our mortal condition?
In other words, what would happen if we got rid of the religiousness of our life and society, moving towards a truly radical atheism?
