In view of the unprecedented threat to life on Earth posed by climate chaos, species extinction and nuclear weapons, Fabian Scheidler argues that it is necessary to demystify the history of Western civilization in order to expose the destructive structures that are responsible for the global crises. These myths also include the narrative that states came into being in order to put a stop to the human predisposition to violence. In fact, history shows a rapid escalation of violence, war, exploitation and the destruction of nature with the emergence of the first states 5,000 years ago. At the root of systems of domination, whether in early Mesopotamia or modern capitalism, are the "four tyrannies": physical power, especially in the form of militarized states; structural violence, which is expressed, among other things, in unequal property relations; ideological power, which presents such orders as natural; and finally the "tyranny of linear thinking", which is based on the idea that man and nature can be controlled and dominated according to the pattern of command and obedience. However, according to Fabian Scheidler, all living systems are based on complex cyclical processes, and the idea of controlling nature is therefore a dangerous error.
Noam Chomsky, linguist and author of more than 100 books, University of Arizona
Fabian Scheidler, co-founder of Kontext TV, author of "The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization"
Moderated by Nermeen Shaikh, co-host of Democracynow
Timeline and topics:
0’14”: Nermeen Shaikh: Introduction.
Fabian Scheidler:
2’05: The crisis of life on Earth. Demystifying the history of states, “civilization” and modernity/capitalism.
3’20: Formation of states and “civilization” 5000 years ago in Mesopotamia. Surge of violence due to militarization and land privatization
5’20 The Four Tyrannies: physical power; structural violence (e.g. property relations); ideological power; “The Tyranny of Linear Thinking”.
Nermeen Shaikh: Welcome to the second in a series of interviews on Kontext TV. The series will focus on the new book “The End of the Megamachine. A Brief History of a Failing Civilization” by Fabian Scheidler. The book looks at the destructive forces that are threatening human survival. Fabian is the co-founder of Kontext TV, which has covered global justice issues for more than 10 years. And we're joined today by world renowned political dissident, linguist and author Noam Chomsky. He's a laureate professor in the department of linguistics at the university of Arizona and professor emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he taught for more than 50 years. I'll begin the conversation by asking Fabian about his book. The book is an attempt to overturn widely held assumptions about the political and economic institutions and ideologies that govern our present moment. You do so by situating these paradigms in a historical context indeed over the course of several millennia. One of the principal foundational structures of the present is of course the state. As against the argument that the state was necessary to limit or contain eruptions of violence in a Hobbesian war of all against all you in fact suggest that violence has increased with the emergence of state power. And you speak of what you term the Four Tyrannies. So talk about that first of all.
Fabian Scheidler: I’m grateful to be here with you and with Noam whose work was crucial for my own work. So thank you for joining here. The book is indeed about demystifying our history and I think this is crucial to understand the destructive forces that are by now threatening human survival and the survival of the planet, with the destruction of the natural ecosystems, with climate havoc, and with the threat of nuclear war. The mystification of our history aims at legitimizing the system we are in as the only possible system or the best system we can have, without alternatives. For such mythologies there need to be some dark ages, so we have the stone age, which is first the dark age in our past, where supposedly people were running around with clubs and beating each other to death. And so civilization 5000 years ago came by and brought humanity to a path of decent behavior. The state of course played a crucial role in this narrative. The second one – and maybe we will talk about it later – is the middle ages from which modernity and capitalism saved us. Concerning the creation of the state and indeed of what has been called civilization, the first city states were created in Mesopotamia 5 000 years ago. They were heavily militarized, and the invention of slavery as an institution also took place in this time, and the invention of writing, which was a tool of logistics and of organizing slavery as well. When we look at the standard narrative, for example by Stephen Pinker and others, they are saying, well, human nature is so violent, people are beating each other to death. This is basically the Hobbesian idea of the war of all against all, so we needed a civilization and the state to come by to save us from this. Now this is plain wrong in historical terms. We know quite a little about the Neolithic, the “stone age”, it's a long period, 200 000 years of homo sapiens. We know that there was some kind of violence, but it was not that widespread, Stephen Pinker has exaggerated the numbers extremely and has been refuted by the most eminent scholars. But what we do know is that with the emergence of the first city states and later with the empires until the Roman Empire, violence surged in an extraordinary manner. This has to do with the fact that the military was created, that has to do with the fact that inequality surged, the land privatization played a crucial role in antiquity, it concentrated wealth in the hands of an extremely small number of people, while the others were forced to serve either as soldiers, as mercenaries, or as slaves or as indented laborers, wage laborers and so on. So it was an extremely violent system that was created, indeed the first systems of domination were created at that time. I call the foundations of these systems the Four Tyrannies. The first tyranny is physical power, which of course is most obvious in the militarized state and in mafias as well in warlord systems, from which states very often emerge. The second kind of tyranny is structural violence, a term coined by Johan Galtung. Structural violence means that you cannot see the physical violence directly. One example are property relations. For example if you take Berlin, the city where I live, there are corporations that own hundreds of thousands of apartments while the poorer half of the Germans don't own anything. So you have to get a job to pay your rent. Many people tend to think that this is normal, that those who have all the apartments are very clever and the others haven't made it. But the fact is that this is a relation of violence, because if you lose your job you cannot pay your rent, and then the landlord will come and say “get out of here”, and if you don't the police will show up and take you out. In the United States there have been recently evictions of millions of people. This is a very serious example of structural violence, which turns into physical violence. But structural violence tends to be seen as normal, it tends to be seen as something that is natural. And this has to do with the third pillar: ideological power. Ideological power in a systematic way also emerged 5000 years ago. The invention of writing was very important, it was not only used for logistics but also to write down the mythologies and the religion of the upper classes, which legitimized and justified the system of exploitation and rule of their time. Ideological power tries to impose a narrative that says, well, this order is given by god, or it is natural, it cannot be changed. But the interesting thing about all these means of ideological power is that they can be turned around and used in a different way. Writing for example was used later, with the first prophets like Amos and others, to criticize power, to criticize power relations, to criticize property relations. This is of course also the case with modern media. Noam has written extensively about this, the media as a power system, but they can be used as a counter force as well. The internet is an example, it can be used as a counter force. Ideological power is a contested terrain, it's never complete, it's never certain. Now the fourth tyranny about which I talk in the book is a little harder to grasp. I call it the tyranny of linear thinking. It's the idea that man can control other human beings and nature in general in a linear way by a chain of command and obedience. I command and another person obeys, I command and nature obeys. This is an idea that can only evolve when a system of command and obedience is already established, like in the military for example. So rulers were able to think that they can control their subjects in a linear way. The idea that god controls creation is a projection of this earthly rule unto heaven. In modernity, this idea turned into the idea that man as an engineer can control nature, in the relation of command and obedience. We see that today for example in the idea that we can geo-engineer us out of the climate crisis, that we can control nature. I think it's quite an erroneous and dangerous idea because nature, all living things are based on cycles, causal cycles. Every effect is at the same time a cause for many other things, it's not linear, it's not deterministic. Living things work in a completely different way. If we try to control human beings and nature, we will end up destroying them and this is the case today.
