Acording to the ethnological/anthropological literature, our archaic ancestors would have nearly all been diagnosed with O.D.D. That’s “Oppositional Defiant Disorder.” That is, our distant relatives had serious “problems with authority” — in other words, they had problems with being told what to do.

Like this – – –

Briggs (1970:55-58) tells us in detail how religious services were conducted in iglus [igloos] and how Inuttiag (in the role of religious coordinator) tried at certain points to get his tiny congregation to stand. The community initially conformed, but then more and more people began to disregard his orders until the majority were ignoring him. At that point, he simply stopped trying to command them. –Christopher Boehm, Hierarchy in the Forest, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1999) p. 54

Egalitarianism as a Re... Murray N. Rothbard Best Price: $3.44 Buy New $8.95 (as of 07:55 UTC - Details) Is it a big deal to stand on cue during a church service? It was for our ancestors. But they were even more sensitive than that – – –

“Egalitarianism [among the !Kung of the Kalihari] is not simply the absence of a headman and other authority figures, but a positive insistence on the essential equality of all people and a refusal to bow to the authority of others …” (Lee 1979:457) quoted in (Boehm 1999:61) In fact to the !Kung, even just the arrogance of leadership amounts to a crime.

Such “oppositional” behavior was given a name in early America — Drapetomania — to explain why slaves, who lived an “idyllic existence” after all, would try to escape.

Such “problems with authority” were first diagnosed as a mental disorder in the Shrinks’ Bible, DSM III in 1980 as OD (Oppositional Disorder) and later, in 1987’s DSM III-R as full-blown O.D.D.

In fact, however, such so-called problems with authority are almost certainly reasonable, desirable — and genetic.

Because of the way we’ve been taught to think, however, this is hard for most of us to accept. Hollywood, John Wayne movies, cop shows, etc. but especially the hidden curriculum in government schools. One tell-tale result that shows up in our thinking as a result is, for example, the fallacy of the chief – – –

“There is a basic fallacy concerning Indian leadership of which nearly all are guilty. For purposes of discussion, we can refer to it as the ‘fallacy of the chief.’ Sometime in the pioneer era, we fell victim to the belief that the prevailing pattern of political organization among all American Indians was hereditary dictatorship; in other words, that a ruler from a particular lineage exercised unlimited power over a group of obedient subjects. … So ingrained is this belief that today the average tourist, when visiting an Indian reservation, is likely to ask ‘which one is the chief?’ … The North American Indians had ‘chiefs’ but often these were mere advisors and virtually never dictators. Except in emergencies, they had no power over the lives and property of their fellows.” –James E. Officer, Journal of American Indian Education, Volume 3 Number 1

And, from the “other” side – – –

“Before the white man came, we Indians had no chiefs. We had leaders, of course, men and women chosen by consensus for their wisdom and courage. The idea of a pyramidal hierarchy with a single person at the top was European. When whites first demanded to speak to a “chief,” my ancestors didn’t quite know how to respond. They pushed somebody out in front as spokesman–not necessarily the brightest or the bravest guy around, just someone willing to talk to the strangers and find out what they wanted in our country. But as far as the whites were concerned, he was our monarch, a sort of petty king, and therefore entitled to special privileges.” –Russell Means, Where White Men Fear to Tread (Los Angeles, Ca: General Publishing Group December 1996) p. 222

In fact, groups without permanent chiefs or leaders, that is without permanent established hierarchy, were first recognized in the late 19th Century by early ethnographers and anthropologists – – –

“With the help of Morgan (1877), scientific anthropology emerged in the nineteenth century as a robust but tiny discipline that faced the enormous task of explaining nonliterate cultures and their natural history to a world of urban literates.” … These small local groups [“bands” and “tribes”] had no leaders with any real authority; in contrast to the societies of their [sixteenth century] discoverers, every individual seemed to come and go just as he or she pleased. It became clear that when people live in small, locally autonomous groups, they are almost always “equalitarian.” … Strict equality was practiced with respect to political relations among adult males. Leaders were weak and merely assisted a consensus-seeking process when the group needed to make decisions (Knauft 1991)(Boehm 1999:30 & 31).”

And this strict political equality and no established hierarchy phenom wasn’t just an anomaly caused by chance observations of a few outside-the-box groups – – –

Modern anthropology therefore faced a dilemma. Politically equalized [egalitarian] bands and tribes had been found on every continent, so this anomaly could not be explained as some kind of local historical development. They were found in a bewildering array of ecological niches, so environmental influences did not seem to be a major determinant: egalitarians foraged, farmed, and herded animals. They also used many different residence and descent rules and a variety of kin terms. (Boehm 1999:30)

And further, this acephalous condition existed for several million years – – –

It is safe to say that with the advent of the Neolithic era most foragers became tribesmen. However, by no means did tribal societies always turn into chiefdoms [hierarchies -lrw]. Indeed the bulk of ethnographic descriptions on record today are of tribal societies whose egalitarianism extends back to the acquisition of domestication, and farther back into the Paleolithic era.” (Boehm 1999:90&91)

Contrast this “without much hierarchy,” “every individual seemed to come and go just as he or she pleased” situation in the “new world” with its contemporary hierarchical situation in feudal, monarchical England, culminating in The Statute of Artificers (1563) and The Act of Settlement (1662) which froze people (in the feudal version of the caste system,) to their parish (county), class, and job. [1]

So even as early as the 16th Century these acephalous (without heads) groups baffled and stunned more than just our anthropologists and ethnologists – – –

Politically, nations like the Arawaks–without monarchs, without much hierarchy–stunned Europeans. In 1516 Thomas More’s Utopia, based on an account of the Incan empire in Peru, challenged European social organization by suggesting a radically different and superior alternative. –James W. Loewen, LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, (New York, NY: Touchstone 1996), p. 67<c:\usr\wp_docs\trolley\tribes~1\wk\03_hiera.wk></c:\usr\wp_docs\trolley\tribes~1\wk\03_hiera.wk>

And with that, we can jump forward and take a look at modern civilized man (and woman, etc.) – – –

Bob Altemeyer, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Manitoba, measured the human tendency to be what he calls “authoritarian followers.” Authoritarian followers are pretty much what they sound like. They’re folks who have strong tendencies to blindly follow asserted “authorities,” especially “official” authorities and adhere strongly to conventional notions. We might fantasize that in the extreme, these folks would stand on their heads if so cued by Inuttiag.

You can check yourself out with Prof. Altmeyer’s honed test starting on page 17 of the .pdf version of his thought provoking work, The Authoritarians.

According to this measure, the higher the score, the more likely you are to find yourself standing on your head in Inuttiag’s corner if so commanded. Here’s what Prof. Altmeyer found – – –

The lowest total possible [score] would be 20, and the highest, 180, but real scores are almost never that extreme. Introductory psychology students at my Canadian university average about 75. Their parents average about 90. Both scores are below the mid-point of the scale, which is 100, so most people in these groups are not authoritarian followers in absolute terms. Neither are most Americans, it seems. Mick McWilliams and Jeremy Keil administered the RWA scale to a reasonably representative sample of 1000 Americans in 2005 for the Libertarian Party and discovered an average score of 90.3. Thus the Manitoba parent samples seem similar in overall authoritarianism to a representative American adult sample. My Manitoba students score about the same on the RWA scale as most American university students do too.

Prof. Altmeyer explains the relevance like this – – –

Since [authoritarian] followers do virtually all of the assaulting and killing in authoritarian systems–the leaders see to this most carefully–we are dealing with very serious matters here. Anyone who follows orders can become a murderer for an authoritarian regime. But authoritarian followers find it easier to bully, harass, punish, maim, torture, “eliminate,” “liquidate,” and “exterminate” their victims than most people do. –pg. 58

And a little more troubling, Stanley Milgram, a Yale psychologist and researcher, devised a rather notorious experiment. He demonstrated that a “teacher,” who was, unknowingly, the actual subject of the experiment, would essentially electrocute the fake subject — who was good at feigning electrocution — when told to do so by a white-coated scientist authority figure – – –

The details of Milgram’s experiments are fascinating; but the upshot is that six out of every ten human beings will kill you if told to do so by a person they perceive as being in authority over them. They may have a great many qualms about it, and exhibit a tremendous inner resistance to it -the traumatizing effects on the participants was the excuse given for declaring such experiments “unethical” by the psychological community- but six out of ten will still do it, and so there is really little need to “wonder” about the Nazis or the Soviets any longer. –Hank Parnell, Forbidden Fruits of the Tree of Knowledge

And like this for example, a little closer to home – – –

“For what concerns me in this inquiry is not the public image of Anglo-American idealism that was shattered by the Dresden raid, but the crime against humanity which was perpetrated. That it was decided to bomb a city of no military value simply in order to impress Stalin. That a fire storm was deliberately created in order to kill as many people as possible, and that the survivors were machine-gunned as they lay helpless in the open –all this has been established without a shadow of a doubt. What remains is to ask how decent, civilized politicians enthusiastically approved such mass murder and decent, civilized servicemen conscientiously carried it out.” –R.H.S. Crossman, Apocalpse at Dresden, Esquire, November 1963

This was followed up by nuking Hiroshima and, three days later, Nagasaki. As five-star general and U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower nailed it, “…the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing.”

And then more recently there were the battles of Fallujah and then the gratuitous torture at Guantanimo Bay, Abu Grabe and the other “black” sites run by the United States Government during the Iraq so-called “War.” And currently (2023-2024 A.D.) the U.S. Government enabled on-going Zionist UN-declared genocide/massacre of over 40,000 native Palestinian men but mostly women and children. Etc.

And then there’s this: Although it normally takes about six years of vaccine testing to prove safety and only 22% pass the first hurdle, and although early results showed a completely unprecedented level of vaccine injury and death as reported by VAERS, whole populations allowed themselves to be “locked down” and injected with the deadly, inadequately tested, new mRNA technology COVID 19 vaccine and allowed their personal lives and economy to be completely disrupted for several years , all on the say-so of elected liars, bureaucrats, and certain white-coated authority figures.

It’s these sorts of things that tend to give native American song writer, poet, speaker and vocalist John Trudell a lot of coin when he suggests – – - For a New Liberty: The... Rothbard, Murray N Best Price: $7.99 Buy New $12.00 (as of 09:31 UTC - Details)

The Great Lie is that this is civilization. It’s not civilized. It has literally been the most blood-thirsty brutalizing system ever imposed upon this planet. …Or if it does represent civilization, and that is truly what civilization is, then the Great Lie is that civilization is good for us. –John Trudell

Can we have the good without the bad?

With modern civilization sorely beset by hierarchy and authoritarian followers, the question is, what changed, morphed, and/or converted folks who wouldn’t even stand on cue for a church service into authoritarian follower lemmings who will electrocute fellow humans on demand, machine-gun civilians laying helpless in the open, torture prisoners, unnecessarily nuke entire cities, and allow themselves to be “locked down” and jabbed with an inadequately tested mRNA vaccine at the direction of elected liars, bureaucrats and white-coated authority figures?

How do YOU explain this?

In Parts II and III I’ll take a shot at a few answers and you can see if we agree.

HERE for updates, additions, comments, and corrections.

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