The Nomadic Alternative – Page 52

arbitrary consideration of symmetry. "Hold yourself apart", a

Pharaoh counselled his son. "No man has adherents in his day of distress." The ancient Egyptian "Great House" pronounced. The White House announces.

One Pyramid text describes metaphorically a Pharaoh's cannibal bloodlust. He eats men, strangles them, draws out their entrails, swallows his enemies for breakfast, smashes their backbones for the spinal marrow, and sinks his royal fangs into their lungs and palpitating hearts. In America too the Aztecs constructed Pyramids of hewn stone that mirrored the petrifaction of the social hierarchy.

Here were scenes of senseless carnage - the glinting of obsidian daggers, iridescent plumage, quivering hearts severed from the bodies of sacrificial victims and blood running into the interstices of turquoise mosaics.

To the civilized, civilization is a matter for self-congratulation, the victory of reason over superstition, of cleanliness over filth, of order imposed over chaos. But civilization means nothing more than 'living in cities', and the city militates against the biological needs of man. The City, as such, first surfaced from the fertile alluvium of Southern Mesopotamia, probably as the result of warrior herdsmen imposing their will over settled farmers, and applying the techniques of animal coercion to human beings. The city thus combined the restlessness of the adventurer with the advantages of permanent settlement. Civilization was schizoid from the start.

Order and Compulsion were the two gods on which the first cities were founded. The manipulation of labour is the key to technical progress. The problem is to trick or force the maximum number of 'human cattle' into believing their welfare to be indissociable from the richness or vertical progress of the state. The harder the workers work, the more material compensations for their bondage can be distributed down the social pyramid. "Without Compulsion", reads a Sumerian text, "no settlement could be founded. Workers would have no controller, no supervisor. The rivers would not bring the overflow."

In return for obedience and servile conscription into the machine,