The map is not the territory. In 1933, Alfred Korzybski, a Polish-North American philosopher, attempted to describe the gulf between human perception and the reality in which we live in Science and Sanity. We mistake our model of the world, "the map", for the world itself, "the territory". But his referent for reality was itself a human construct. The territory is not the land, the lakes, the streams and rivers, the moors and mountains and the life providing cycles of water and carbon that permeate over and through it regardless of notional territorial boundaries. Even concepts such as self, hide our constant metabolism of elements from our environment. Without our engagement in the water cycle, absorbing and evaporating it continually, our biology breaks down in a matter of days.
Before we established boundaries in space around which we have fought increasingly sophisticated and brutal wars, we developed a shared understanding of boundaries in time. We roamed the land and coastal margins following the seasonal patterns of plant growth and animal migration. We hunted and gathered our way across the land. We collaborated within and across our emerging kinship groups, defending against much more powerful predators, sharing resources to establish peaceful coexistence. A reproductive strategy was established by females that synchronised with the lunar cycle. Not only does the size to distance ratio of the moon and sun just happen to be such that perfect solar eclipses periodically occur, but the human female menstrual cycle also perfectly matches the phases of the moon. No other primate shares this cycle or has developed a semantic language that humans acquired in a cultural explosion that set us apart from the other species, despite sharing the same vocal physiology. This emergence from limited vocal signalling into a virtual reality of symbolic culture, myth and taboo, was organised by women, who by coalition and solidarity developed the first word; no.. The self interested males were denied access to the newly reproductive females by females establishing a collective concealment ritual around the full moon when nocturnal light reflected by the moon provided the optimal conditions for hunting. Males understood this signal and joined the cycle, sharing the meat they hunted and participating in the reproduction and rearing of the group's young. How else could a mother both defend her dependent offspring and acquire the necessary resources to nourish herself and her child, in the presence of predation both within and outside the species?
By the time land grabbers started putting up fences and establishing farming as a competing strategy to the seasonal migrations of hunting and gathering, we were already fully human in the modern sense. We had developed a language that maps a semantic virtual reality onto the world. We developed mimicry of the vocal signals of our prey to improve our hunting efficiency, and whilst gathering fruits and other nutrition in our child rearing collectives we developed choral song to confuse our predators. This polyphonic vocal music is still practised by hunter gatherer groups such as the Baka in Central Africa.
Eventually, the competing strategy of the settled farmers, imposing their boundaries in space, accumulating their resource surplus over an annual cycle rather than the 13 lunar cycles in the year led to conflict with the female led society of the hunter gatherers, described by Engels as "primitive communists". A patriarchal priesthood appropriated the first human culture of language, myth and taboo and inverted it into a defended culture of bounded land to be fought for. An updated virtual reality was imposed that privileged the superior 'civilisation' of the farmers over the primitive 'tribes' of the first humans.
A species of seven billion mostly urban living humans is unlikely to move forward into free roaming communist peace loving groups, though we see many population reduction projects laid out before us, and our species has thrived in the face of existential challenge. However we still live in the first human virtual reality. Our cultural and linguistic diversity share many congruences of myth and social practice and unites us across notional boundaries in space that now serve the wealth acquisition of the Imperial military industrial complexes. We became human in a synchronised ritual of resistance. Radical Anthropologist, Chris Knight presents his theory of the female led Human Revolution that gave rise to language and culture in Blood Relations: Menstruation and the origins of Culture. He counters the orthodox view that projects our current societies’ catastrophically warring drive to dominance as the result of unexplained qualities of Man the Hunter that leave the question unanswered of why, of all the primates, Homo Sapiens emerged from the animal world, left our ancestral home in Africa and flourished for possibly 300 000 years before the Patriarchal priesthood began our descent into the major existential threats of War, Genocides and Ecological breakdown 10 000 years ago. A second Human Revolution is our only hope for averting the sixth mass extinction of the only known life in our Universe.
The current war-monging elites are whipping us into a mass psychosis of fear of the propagandised evil intentions of the illusory other. They are persuading us that diverting resources from our social reproduction into their military budget is necessary. The new head of Mi6, the Imperial West's most psychopathic and democratically detached armed force roaming freely around all the current zones of conflict, recently introduced herself to the nation by declaring "We are operating between a space of peace and war".. Yes Ms, Metreweli, grand daughter of Constantine Dobrowolski, a Nazi collaborator during World War II, known for his role as a chief informant for the Nazis in Ukraine, referred to as "The Butcher" due to his involvement in the extermination of Jews and other war crimes, that clearly is the "Space" you and your colleagues are operating in. But have you noticed your farmers are resisting? Where are you planning to have lunch in that liminal space you are creating? And when?
