The Emergence Of Oppressive Societies

Introduction

This article follows on from my article The effects of overwhelming experiences. It presents some thoughts on how fully-human societies can become vulnerable to spontaneously transforming into oppressive/exploitative societies – that is, without anyone intending it*.

[*I am using ‘fully-human’, to mean societies that are not oppressive or exploitative.]

This new understanding of how oppressive societies first evolved, and why they have persisted for thousands of years, shows why the many attempts to being about non-oppressive societies have failed. It also leads to a new and more hopeful understanding of human nature and lays a foundation for new thinking about how we might bring about societies that work for everyone.

Simplified descriptions of reality

This article describes a model. All models are simplified descriptions of reality that we construct to help us as we explore the world around us and try to understand how it works. We can be more confident in a model if it repeatedly describes reality accurately under many different conditions, and if the model is logically consistent within itself.

By proposing this model, I am not saying ‘this is what happened’. I am describing some general conditions which lead to oppression and exploitation arising in situations where they had not been present before – and then persisting indefinitely – because I think this helps with understanding the situation we humans face today.

Like all models, it is tentative – that is, it is subject to change if new observations or more thorough checking of the logic show that it is faulty.

This article focuses mostly on the situation before oppressive societies became established, and the conditions that led to them arising. It does not focus so much on the situation in today’s world.

Simple mechanisms

In the first half of this article I will describe a number of simple mechanisms. I will describe them individually, but these mechanisms act all at the same time and so they interact with each other. Their interaction is an important part of the overall ‘story’.

I’ve numbered the mechanisms as it may be useful to refer to them by number; the numbering doesn’t indicate order or importance.

In the second half of the article I look at the implications of this model, lay out some new perspectives on the situation we humans face today and look at how we can move forward.

1: The effects of overwhelming experiences

Children love learning about the world around them. They take every opportunity to throw themselves into contact with reality. One way to think about this is that they are building a ‘map’ of the world in their minds, and the more direct contact they can get with reality, the more detail they can put into their map. That map in their minds helps them navigate the world with increasing confidence, sophistication and elegance.

Every child builds their own unique map. It is different to every other child’s (or adult’s) map, even though it might map the same reality.

But sometimes a child is overwhelmed by something that is too much for their young mind to handle. When a child’s mind gets overwhelmed, it seems that the learning, ‘map making’ part of their mind shuts down. Instead, it seems that everything that is in their mind during the shutdown is recorded, but with no understanding. This ‘recording’ includes every detail of the overwhelming experience that came in via their senses, as well as all the horrible feelings and panicked thoughts that were in their mind. It seems that this happened to all of us.

A wide range of experiences can overwhelm a child’s mind. Some of these are easily seen as ‘traumatic’; others are barely noticed by adults but overwhelming to very young children.

These recordings of overwhelming experiences can ‘play back’ in our minds, and when they do they can feel just as horrible as the original situation, so we often try to push them out of our minds and forget about them. But they are still there, and fragments of the recording play back, for example, the fragment fear. These fragments feel completely real and we experience them as if they apply to present reality. This is very confusing. This confusion – of past with present – turns out to have a huge impact on the human affairs.

Recordings are not learning

I think it’s important to say that these recordings of overwhelming experiences are qualitatively different to learning. I think of them as the opposite of learning: learning is like building an accurate map of the world – it helps you navigate the world increasingly well. Recordings quietly insert random bits of past situations into the present. They are like errors in the map. They make it harder to navigate the world and cause us to make mistakes, often the same mistake over and over (‘I never learn!’).

A powerful instinctive drive to recover

Children have a powerful instinctive drive to recover from the effects of these overwhelming experiences. They seek out the safety of an adult’s attention. If the adult can stay loving and attentive the child will cry, laugh, tantrum or tremble with fear about what overwhelmed them, for as long as it takes, until they are done. This process seems to allow their minds to review an overwhelming experience, understand it, and then fit it into their map of the world. Through this process, the painful and confusing recording is converted into useful experience to learn from.

Unfortunately, historically, we have not fully understood this instinctive recovery process in children and have unwittingly suppressed it. This has left almost every human adult with a large amount of recorded pain and confusion in our minds. It seems that adults can also use these recovery processes, but with greater difficulty because of the years of repression.

I want to stress here that I am not advocating for children to be protected against all possible sources of emotional overwhelm. It’s good for children to live lives full of challenge and adventure, to have bumps and scrapes, including emotional ones. We don’t learn and grow and build resilience if we are protected from reality. Being overwhelmed is not the problem, the problem is being prevented from recovering fully afterwards.

1a: Suppression of emotional recovery

The suppression of emotional recovery became part of almost all human cultures via another mechanism: It is a very painful thing for a child to have their emotional recovery suppressed. It is also overwhelming, and so this pain gets recorded and carried into adulthood. When an adult sees a child crying or tantrumming, for example, this recorded pain floods back into the their mind. It can feel unbearable. They may feel a strong pull to stop whatever seems to be causing the ‘unbearable’ feelings – that is, to stop the child crying or tantrumming in any way possible, whether that be gentle and kind or nasty and violent. And so the cycle continues.

2. All recordings logically contain certain elements

Each recording of an overwhelming experience is unique but they all contain some common elements. I want to focus on three of these elements because they play a very significant role in the world. These are:

• Feeling small
• Feeling powerless
• Feeling alone

Logically, these elements become part of every recording:

• When we were first hurt we were children, and therefore physically small. This simple truth – small – becomes part of the recording.
• If we had been powerful then our minds wouldn’t have been overwhelmed. So the recordings only happened when we were powerless. So powerless is part of every recording.
• If anyone had been able to help us – either by stopping the overwhelming thing happening or by helping us recover fully afterwards – then we wouldn’t have the recording in our minds. Therefore, every recording left in our minds is of a time when no one did help. What seems to get recorded is ‘nobody can think about me’, ‘nobody cares’, ‘I’m on my own’ – which might be summarised as alone.

So every experience of overwhelm leaves a recording – that is, a false perception in the present – of being small, powerless and alone.

I speculate that all recordings also contain something that feels ‘unbearable’: in this model, a recording only happens when part of our mind stops functioning because something was too much for our mind to handle. So recordings are always of an experience that actually was too much for our mind to bear in some way. It actually was unbearable, and whatever was present in that moment becomes part of the recording.

From what I can see, if we don’t have full access to emotional recovery, it seems that we will do almost anything to avoid feeling the recording of ‘unbearable’. That is, there seems to be no limit to the level of irrationality or inhumanity that people may engage in, in trying to avoid recordings of ‘unbearable’.

3. A vulnerability to mistreat others

When these very common recordings of small, powerless and alone play back in our minds we may sometimes be able to act with courage and compassion despite the false reality they present. That is important. But it’s also clear that we often end up reacting to the recordings as if they are real. If we do, it seems we can have two ‘opposite’ reactions:

1. The recordings playing back in our minds make us feel small and powerless and alone. Because these feelings seem like reality, we act small and powerless and alone. For example, we find it hard to stand against injustice, whether done to ourselves or to others.
2. Because the feelings also feel unbearable, we may try to avoid feeling them in any way we can. One way is to try to feel ‘big and powerful’ instead, often by trying to feel ‘bigger’ or ‘more powerful’ than someone else by dominating them or mistreating them, in big or small ways*, using whatever power we might have in any particular situation. So these recordings leave us with a vulnerability to mistreat others.
   [*Some examples of smaller acts of domination are being irritated or impatient with someone, feeling the need to win in some situations, wanting to have the last word in an argument, feeling and acting superior, and so on.]
   [Note for further work: It will be good to explore this more deeply: we could take a range of dysfunctional features of human society, past and present, smaller and larger, and show how feelings of small, powerless and alone are a major factor in their existence.]

These two reactions both play a very significant role in the spontaneous formation of oppressive societies. They are not mutually exclusive. From what I can see we all do both of them – sometimes at the same time! Which of these reactions we ‘choose’ in any particular situation seems to depend on which feels ‘safer’ (or least unbearable) in that situation. Most of the time it seems that we make this choice without awareness.

We are often completely unaware that we mistreat people because it feels like we are the victim*, not them. I think we are always feeling like a victim (awarely or unawarely) when we are dominating someone – that’s the reason why we are dominating them.

[*Feeling small and powerless and alone feels like being a victim.]

In order for someone to consider not acting out mistreatment or domination, they have to face the recorded feelings they have been trying to avoid. These recorded feelings always seem to feel ‘unbearable’, which explains why it has been hard for people to choose not to mistreat or dominate others.

In today’s world, this recorded feeling of being small, powerless and alone leaves us vulnerable to manipulation through being offered the appearance of ‘winning’ over others, or the threat of ‘losing’ to others. A large part of all political manipulation is on this basis. It also leaves us feeling insecure, and therefore vulnerable to feeling that we need more security, more money, more stuff, no matter how much we already have, and so leads to the formation of societies based on over consumption. These societies have reached the point where they are destroying the ecological basis upon which all life, including human life, depends.

4. Mistreatment becomes contagious

If there isn’t sufficient emotional recovery in a society then this vulnerability to mistreat others becomes ‘contagious’. If a child doesn’t recover from overwhelming experiences then they become vulnerable to mistreating others as they get older. If other children experience or witness* this mistreatment, it overwhelms their young minds and so, without recovery, they too become vulnerable to mistreating others. So this vulnerability passes from person to person, and down to each new generation, until everyone becomes ‘infected’. That is, everyone in the society becomes vulnerable to mistreating others.

[*It seems that caring relationships are such an important part of our nature as humans that simply witnessing one person mistreating another is enough to overwhelm a young human mind.]

5. Mistreatment leads to disconnection and separation

When one person, or group, repeatedly mistreats or dominates another, it damages their connection with each other. Eventually, it breaks their relationships and it breaks the trust between them. Individuals disconnect and separate from others, physically and emotionally. Similarly, whole groups of people disconnect and separate from whole other groups.

Thus, mistreatment causes division, which then feeds into mechanisms such as 10. Divide and be ruled, below.

6. Forming groups for safety

People come together for many good reasons: close connection with others is part of our deep human nature; working together is often much more effective than working as separate individuals; there are situations in the natural world where being part of a group is safer than being alone.

Also, in situations where widespread mistreatment and disconnection have arisen (see all of the mechanisms above), it makes sense form a group to try to find safety and connection.

In addition to these rational reasons, recordings of ‘small, powerless and alone’ from overwhelming experiences during childhood give rise to a perception of insecurity in the present, whether or not there is actual insecurity.

These groups form more easily from people who naturally spend time together* because day-to-day contact and shared understandings allow relatively more trust to develop between them. This means that groups tend to form around commonalities: man, woman, hunter, farmer… Every individual has more than one role in their society, so they have more than one commonality and so belong to more than one group.

[*For example, they do the same kind of work.]

These groups are formed of people who all feel small, powerless and alone and so, as a group, they are vulnerable to dominating and mistreating others, or feeling powerless in the face of domination and mistreatment from others. This happens in several different ways:

1. People mistreat others within their own group. I will say more about this in 7. Groups divide internally.
2. A group mistreats isolated individuals outside the group. If these individuals can conform or assimilate into the group, and if they can live with the mistreatment that happens inside the group, they may join the group. If not, they may form a separate group for their own protection. So, when one group forms it causes other groups to form in response*.
   [*This is an example of a self-reinforcing loop: something happening causes even more of that same thing to happen. Self-reinforcing loops are an important concept in understanding systems, whether natural, social or technological.]
3. Whole groups mistreat, dominate and seek advantage over other whole groups. The mistreating group feels that they are both ‘better than’ the mistreated and often, at the same time, that they are also the victims (see 3. A vulnerability to mistreat others). Each group ends up feeling separate from and that they can’t trust the other group. This then leads to everyone seeing people in their own group as ‘us’, and people in the other group as ‘them’.

7. Groups divide internally

Expanding on point a) above:

The mistreatment that happens within a group means that people within the group are often not very connected to, or trusting of, each other but the pull to separate is not enough to entirely overcome the pull to remain in the group.

This internal mistreatment causes subgroups to form within the group, by the same mechanism as in 6. Forming groups for safety. This means that, for any particular group of people who have something in common, subgroups form, usually around other commonalities that people have. So most groups are divided internally into subgroups based on their members’ other commonalities or identities.

The end result is a population divided into many intersecting groups. If you take any particular group, it is divided internally across many different lines. For example in the world today, the group working class, is divided into many subgroups, e.g. female, male and many others – and group male is divided into many subgroups, e.g. working class, middle class and many others.

As societies evolve over time, this forming of groups which are also divided internally happens at many different scales: friendship groups, families, gangs, clans, tribes, kingdoms, nations, empires, and so on. The same pattern appears at all these scales because the same mechanism is driving it at all these scales: a pull to group together for security and, at the same time, a pull to separate through internal domination and mistreatment. Much of this grouping and separation happens without awareness.

8. Self-reinforcing loops amplify small differences

Or: The spontaneous formation of inequality and hierarchy

If you feel small, powerless and alone, and your relationships are broken and you can’t trust many people, you are likely to feel very insecure. There can be a strong pull to make sure you ‘get enough’ (e.g. by grabbing material resources, for example, food) because you can’t be sure that anyone else will care about you, and it’s hard to fully care about others when you feel so scared for yourself. In this situation, if, purely by accident*, one person or group happens to grab slightly more than others, then that extra resource gives them a slight advantage in grabbing even more.

This is a self-reinforcing loop. Self-reinforcing loops tend to amplify small differences. In this case, it can lead to some people’s ownership or control of material resources growing much larger than other people’s, leading to a very unequal society.

[*Grabbing more is not always pure accident – for example, some people might start out physically stronger than others – but pre-existing advantages are not necessary: inequality can develop spontaneously through self-reinforcing loops amplifying small random events.]

As societies develop, this happens at every scale: there’s a struggle for power and resources at the level of individuals, families, gangs, tribes, kingdoms, nations, empires… At each of these scales, one individual or group ends up at the ‘top’, and others end up further down. Who actually ends up at the top is almost accidental* – they are not special. If it wasn’t those people it would be someone else.

[*I am talking here about situations when oppression and exploitation first arose. As these become more established, who comes to occupy the top positions becomes less accidental.]

Thus, inequality and hierarchy can arise spontaneously out of recordings of small, powerless and alone, without anyone intending it.

9. Clinging onto and consolidating advantage

After inequalities and hierarchies form (see above), everyone still feels small, powerless and alone, no matter how much material resource they have: this is not just about present material reality, but recordings of overwhelming experiences from childhood. They may also feel insecure because, in this kind of society, others may try to grab their wealth. So everyone tries to cling on to whatever advantage they managed to gain, using whatever power that advantage gives them. For example, the people at the top might invent property law, so that protection of their wealth is built into the rules of the society. They might also call for and fund a police force to enforce that law. People who become the police force may do so because that position gives them a way to avoid feeling so small, powerless and alone.

As each group clings onto and consolidates the advantage they gained, this advantage becomes entrenched. Over time this comes to seem ‘normal’ or ‘the natural order of things’. People in a group start to see membership of that group as ‘who they are’, and that they are different from those not in the group. So group membership becomes identity.

This may be how the predecessors of present-day oppressions got started: in a struggle for advantage, some groups came out ‘on top of’ others – they ended up with more power and resource – and then used that power to consolidate and entrench their position*. Their position of advantage then became part of the ‘shape’ of the society, for example: classism, sexism, the oppression of young people…

[*Sometimes no struggle was needed in order to gain advantage over a group, for example to gain power over very young people.]

Again, it’s not just the people who end up at the top of the hierarchy who cling on to their advantages – everyone is doing it in different ways. But if you cling on to advantages that other people don’t have then it makes it almost impossible for them to want to unite with you. So individuals and groups clinging onto and consolidating advantage leads to division, disconnection and separation at every level within a population.

Oppression is organised mistreatment

Oppression can be understood as organised mistreatment. The organisation of mistreatment first arises unintentionally as a result of many individuals and groups ending up with different advantages over others as they all desperately seek relief from unbearable feelings of small, powerless and alone left over from childhood. Later, a small part of the organisation of mistreatment becomes intentional as people with greater advantage find they can use it to further consolidate their advantage – see the next mechanism.

10. Divide and be ruled

One way to cling onto one’s advantage is to exploit divisions between the people who have less advantage – to turn them against each other so they can’t unite and use their combined power. I speculate that this may be a necessary condition: that is, it would be impossible to cling onto advantage if the disadvantaged people were not divided from each other.

However, the advantaged groups don’t do most of the actual dividing of people. It would not be possible for them to create divisions, even in a large group of people, if those people were deeply connected, trustworthy and trusting. They can only exploit or magnify divisions or vulnerabilities that are already present within the less-advantaged groups.

Division is caused by things such as fear, mistrust, resentment, superiority and clinging onto advantage, between individuals or between groups. Most of the division – or the vulnerability to being easily divided – has already happened spontaneously through people mistreating each other (see 3. A vulnerability to mistreat others, 7. Groups divide internally, 9. Clinging onto and consolidating advantage and other sections).

Today, people sometimes say ‘they are dividing us’ or ‘don’t let them divide us’. I think it’s more useful to ask ourselves ‘why are we so vulnerable to being divided?’

As with the most of the other mechanisms detailed here, this one also happens at every scale, from the interpersonal to the global.

Political manipulation

(I should mention somewhere that the recorded feeling of being small, powerless and alone leaves people vulnerable to manipulation through being offered the appearance of ‘winning’ or being ‘better than’ others, or the threat of ‘losing’ to others. In today’s world, a large part of all political manipulation is on this basis.)

11. Blaming oppressors locks oppression in place

To overcome the mechanism 10. Divide and be ruled, activists may try to organise less-advantaged sections of the population into some kind of united force. They often try to unite people by promoting feelings of anger, hatred or blame towards a group with easily-visible or supposed advantage, portraying them as the common enemy.

The problem is, in an unfair economic system almost everyone ends up having something that someone else can’t have, or benefiting in some way at someone else’s expense, whether this be a material benefit or a feeling of security or superiority.  So when any particular group is blamed for benefiting at the expense of others, almost everyone else gets scared that they might be the next target, as they too benefit in some way at the expense of others. This pulls people to deny the unfairness of the system and their part in it, or to target others in order to divert attention away from themselves – rather than joining with others to face the whole system and dismantle it together. It maintains a deep sense of insecurity, disunity and fear in the whole population and ends up locking the harmful system more firmly in place.

Attempting to unite people against a ‘common enemy’ produces a short-lived and fragile unity and eventually produces yet more division. This divisive effect is so powerful that, in today’s world, people who would fit most definitions of ‘the elites’ often promote division by running campaigns that blame ‘the elites’.

12. Collective power requires trust

(I’m not sure what this mechanism should be called!)

Many of the mechanisms listed above leave people feeling disconnected and finding it hard to trust others. (For example, 3. A vulnerability to mistreat others and 5. Mistreatment leads to disconnection and separation). From inside the disconnection, it looks like we’re alone and that few others can be trusted, and so it seems to make sense to act in our own narrow self-interest, and in doing that we all become somewhat untrustworthy, which then feeds the mistrust.

Under these conditions, it’s hard to believe a society where everyone benefits from mutual aid and cooperation would even be possible. Even if you did think in that way, without trust it seems you would be standing against the whole system alone and no one would stand with you. So it may seem like the best choice is to cling on to a position where you benefit from the exploitation of other people, even though you may be exploited yourself. You may even see this form of society as ‘good’, because it helps you maintain a position where at least you are not as oppressed as some others.

Emergence

The mechanisms I have described above are all quite simple, but they interact with each other. Many of these interactions form loops of cause and effect where, for example, A causes B and B causes A. Loops of cause and effect can often cause simple systems to generate new, complex structures and behaviours, that arise as if from nowhere. This is known as emergence.

Emergence is where complex structures or behaviours arise through the interactions of simpler components that do not have these structures or behaviours by themselves. For example: biological life arising from inanimate molecules within a cell, or complex, distinctive cloud shapes emerging from huge numbers of simple air and water molecules and a temperature difference. Emergence is very common in nature. You could say that nature is emergence.

Interactions between the simple mechanisms I describe above lead to the emergence of social structures and forces that are not present in the individual mechanisms or in individual people. These simple mechanisms, together with emergence, give rise to the complex and varied oppressive systems and societies we have seen throughout much of history and up to the present.

Lack of emotional recovery

All of the mechanisms listed above seem to depend on this one: 1: The effects of overwhelming experiences. But these effects would not be there if we had been able to recover from the overwhelming experiences (See A powerful instinctive drive to recover and 1a: Suppression of emotional recovery.)

So this analysis shows how egalitarian societies can become vulnerable to spontaneously transforming into oppressive/exploitative societies through self-reinforcing mechanisms that arise when there is not enough emotional recovery in the society.

Cultural guardrails

Some societies – maybe all – develop laws, customs, traditions or cultures, that provide some defence against these mechanisms running out of control, even though they might not fully understand the effects of overwhelming childhood experiences or the emotional recovery process. The people in these societies still carry the recordings that lead to these mechanisms, it’s just that the ‘cultural guard rails’ don’t let them get too destructive. This means the society is vulnerable to accelerating towards extreme oppression if at any time the ‘guard rails’ are not strong enough to prevent a self-reinforcing loop getting started.

We are all human

As destructive behaviour came to dominate within human society, people started to believe that this was the nature of humans, rather than the nature of humans caught up in these self-perpetuating conditions.

This analysis suggests that, if it wasn’t for the lack of emotional recovery from painful and confusing recordings from childhood and the destructive behaviour that results, humans would be thoughtful, creating, caring, fun-loving and cooperative.

Even within the ‘inhuman’ societies that have arisen, people still find ways to care for each other, work together effectively, innovate, create and find new ways to enjoy life and improve each other’s lives.

Sometimes we can hold onto our humanness in the face of false information in the recordings, but sometimes the recordings win, and once mechanisms that arise from the recordings come to dominate too much (enough for a self-reinforcing loop to get started) then they can run out of control.

Thought experiment: Stability and instability

We could conduct a thought experiment: let us imagine we have a society that is not oppressive. It is fully equal: everyone has exactly the same access to material resource, but also everyone has exactly the same recordings from childhood of small, powerless and alone.

Because of the mechanisms outlined above, this fully equal society is vulnerable to spontaneously transforming into a hierarchical society, organised around oppression and exploitation, without anyone intending it.

That is, no matter how good a society might be, if everyone has recordings of small, powerless and alone the society is not stable. There is a stable state, and that is unfair and hierarchical. Conversely, if you have a society where people don’t have these recordings, then the stable state is fair and equal.

Archaeological evidence

The book The Dawn of Everything* presents archaeological evidence that suggests that, many times in pre-history, societies have transformed from ‘fully human’ and fair, to oppressive and hierarchical. That’s not new. But it also suggests the reverse happened too: that many times in pre-history, societies transformed from oppressive and hierarchical, to ‘fully human’ and fair. This is hopeful. It could be very useful for us to know how this happened, but there are no surviving records of what allowed these transformations to happen.

[* The Dawn of Everything, Graeber and Wengrow, 2021. I found this book interesting because of the large amount of new historical and archaeological information it presents. For example, before this book, the emergence of oppressive societies was widely seen as a consequence of the invention of agriculture. This book shows that this is not true: there have been agricultural societies that were not oppressive and hunter-gather societies that were oppressive.]

We all play a part

This analysis implies that, in thinking about the oppressive societies we see today, it’s not useful or accurate to assign cause, agency or blame to any one set of people. Oppressive societies can be understood as systems that arose spontaneously out of interactions between all of the people, who all carried similar (and very ordinary) recordings of childhood overwhelm.

When we think about changing the oppressive societies we live in, we are often pulled to focus on the people who have ended up at the top of the economic system – ‘the elites’, ‘the 1%’ or the ultra rich. It is useful to notice them, but we can mislead ourselves by attributing to them a power or importance that they don’t have.

On the one hand, they are the major beneficiaries of the economic exploitation that characterises current societies – and the mechanisms outlined above lead to them becoming richer and richer. They benefit from the mutual oppression and resulting divisions between everyone else, and they promote these deliberately in order to maintain their position.

On the other hand they are just human beings. The mechanisms outlined above ensure that a small group of people will always end up at the top. If it wasn’t these particular individuals then it would be others. If these people were removed another set would take their place, as has happened many times throughout history. They are not special.

These people appear very powerful. But they, personally, have no more power than any of us. All of their power is enacted by other people. Today, this is politicians, the army, the police, lawyers, managers and many other groups with intermediate levels of advantage. In fact we all play a part in this: the only ‘security’ offered by the hierarchical system is a position where you benefit from the exploitation of other people even though you may be exploited yourself. Fear of losing what ‘little’ we have makes us feel we have to cling on to these positions of false security, and in doing so we unwittingly become agents of the overall system.

This top group also have a kind of pseudo-power that is simply the absence of our own power. That is, how thoroughly divided, scared and confused we are in the face of making big social changes – how we feel there is almost no one we can trust fully to stand with us, and how powerless each of us feels as an isolated individual. That is, we feel small, powerless and alone.

So ‘the elites’, ‘the 1%’, the owning class are not our problem.

Our problem is our failing to collectively understand and act against the effects of overwhelming experiences in childhood that make every individual vulnerable to unawarely mistreating others, and make the whole society vulnerable to the spontaneous formation of oppressive systems in which we all play a part.

It’s not enough to end individual oppressions

This analysis implies that the elimination of individual oppressions, like racism, classism and so on, are desirable outcomes but, as individual (or even combined) efforts, they don’t address the root cause of the problem.

Also, these efforts, by their nature, focus on how one particular group of humans mistreat another group of humans. This focus, without the kind of deeper and wider understanding presented here, can end up maintaining or even furthering blame and division, which then function to lock the oppressive systems more firmly in place. (See 11. Blaming oppressors locks oppression in place)

The present-day oppressions we see are symptoms of deeper underlying mechanisms. Looking back over the millennia, many forms of oppression have existed. They were all different in detail but similar in their general form. As the oppressions of one historical period were overcome or became unworkable, new forms arose to take their place, leading to a new historical period. If we don’t address the deeper underlying mechanisms, then no matter what individual oppressions we might eliminate, the society remains vulnerable to new forms of oppression and oppressive systems arising, even if no one intends it.

Everyone would have better lives in a fully human society

This model suggests that everyone, even the super rich, would have much better lives in societies that serve everyone’s real, human interests.

But it may be difficult for many people to understand this, because a) we are caught up in the recordings and mechanisms above, and so it will feel very dangerous to let go of what we believe is keeping us alive and safe, and b) most people have not thought about how much better a fully-human society would be – it’s not easy to imagine this without seeing actual examples, or understanding what would be possible if we could harness the energy and creativity of every person for the benefit of everyone, rather than turning it against each other or repressing it. Because of this, at least some of us will oppose moves towards a fully human society with every bit of power we have. This doesn’t challenge the logic of the proposition, but it is something we need to understand.

Creating conditions for change

In the sections above I’ve laid out how a widespread lack of emotional recovery sets in motion mechanisms that leave even ‘fully-human’ societies vulnerable to spontaneously transforming into oppressive/exploitative societies without anyone intending it.

These same mechanisms have locked ‘inhuman’ societies in place ever since. And, unless we stop them, these same mechanisms will lead to oppressive societies reforming in the future, no matter what changes we make at the political or economic levels. These mechanisms arise from the emotional level and they will eventually undo gains made at the political or economic level. This can be seen in the reversion to oppressive systems of the large-scale revolutions in the 20^th century, or in the social gains made in the USA and Europe since the end of WWII, and the subsequent undoing of these since the 1970s.

Our ‘inhuman’ societies have now reached the point where they are destroying the ecological basis upon which all life, including human life, depends. We must now rebuild our societies so that they support life.

How do we do that? I don’t have a detailed plan – I don’t think that would be possible. I suspect that finding ways forward will involve many different groups trying many different things, and then learning from each other about what works and what doesn’t work. However, I do have some thoughts:

Learning from past struggles

I think we can learn from past struggles – but we can’t learn everything: none of those struggles managed to break the cycles of the mechanisms I’ve laid out, such that they would not reassert themselves. I think people in those times understood some of these mechanisms, but not all of them. We will have to create some completely new ways of moving forward, not just borrow from the past.

Interrupting the mechanisms

I think we will need to interrupt the mechanisms that create and reproduce ‘inhuman’ societies.

One way to reduce the power of these mechanisms is to promote widespread understanding of them. In particular, the understanding of how not recovering from overwhelming childhood experiences has left everyone vulnerable to re-enacting both domination and powerlessness, and what this leads to. With this understanding, larger and larger numbers of people would be able to resist being manipulated, or being divided, or getting caught up in escalations of violence – at least some of the time – and so more able to hold steady on a course to a world that works for everyone.

How can we promote widespread understanding? How can we communicate to people in many different situations? When people have advocated for change before, their/our communication has often been infected by these mechanisms and so it tends to repel people. We will need to learn how to communicate with enough love, vulnerability and humanity that people feel safe with us.

We will need to find many more ways to interrupt all of the other mechanisms.

Create conditions for emotional recovery

The most fundamental mechanism is the lack of emotional recovery. I think we will have to create conditions where young children can recover quickly from overwhelming experiences. But we don’t have time to wait for a new generation to come to adulthood before anything changes – and it won’t be possible for us to create those conditions for children without at least some recovery for adults. So we will have to create conditions where adults can recover, at least partly, from the overwhelming experiences from their/our childhood.

How do we help people – how do we help each other – recover from these experiences? Our cultures have suppressed the emotional recovery processes: crying, laughing and shaking with fear, expressing indignation and more. We can try to look back at where we were overwhelmed as children and try to recover from those things. This may be useful but I think it’s too passive:

As children, and later as adults, in the absence of being able to recover we narrowed our lives – we limited ourselves to doing only those things that didn’t remind us too much of the overwhelming experiences. But if you don’t dare to look at overwhelming experiences you can’t recover from them. So full understanding and full recovery only become possible when we dare to step outside of the limits we’ve settled into. We have to dare to start imagining – and then begin building – the kind of lives, relationships, families and whole societies that we humans would have built had we not been left so hurt and confused.

How I came to write this article

In my working life I started out as a physicist and became an engineer: I like theory but I also want to make things work in the real world. I have also been teaching people to listen to each other about the emotional side of their lives for over thirty years. Eventually that led me into learning about the history of social change. As I looked at many different histories I noticed a pattern: over and over, movements towards positive change were derailed by internal division. I wanted to understand why this was happening so I could explain it to others.

I started writing down my thoughts, and then carefully checking them for logical consistency and consistency with observed reality. I found that this was a reliable way to move my thinking forward and reach a new understanding. Each time I did this I was pleased with my new understanding. But, after a year or two, I would notice inconsistencies in my understanding and so I had to go through this process again, repeatedly. Eventually this analysis started to take shape, and I found that it explained not only why progressive movements failed, but why human society was in such a mess in the first place.

Writing was very useful for me to develop my thoughts, but reading my articles didn’t seem to help people understand the ideas deeply, or to spread that understanding to others. So, in 2019 I created a three-hour workshop where people got to hear about the ideas and also experience them. My assistant and I took a strategic decision to not ‘push’ this workshop on people [not urge them to do it], but instead rely on attendees telling their friends about it. This worked very well. The workshop became very successful; attendee numbers grew exponentially during the first year. To date, we’ve run that three-hour workshop 227 times, reaching 2,600 people from 48 countries. We began by offering the workshop within the climate movement but now we’re reaching other groups.

Writing didn’t work well to spread these ideas, but it might be useful for people who want to explore these ideas in more detail, check their validity and think carefully about their implications. That is the purpose of this article.

Last updated 16/09/26 07:50