Ah, tribal life. Which will it be now? Noble savages or short, nasty and brutish?
And it’s Leviathan for the win! The notion of the noble savage in so many ways is the most absurd of civilized man’s conceits. The truth? We are better. Civilization evolves. History moves forwards, not backwards, and it never ends. There is no need to bow down at the feet of our lessers and abase ourselves at the specter of primitive atavism. The Hell of our slums and inner cities and wars does not in any way imply the end of the world. Instead, pitifully, this is instead the natural state of man!
In terms of history, civilized man instead is an aberration, a freak. Man, at his essence, is little more than a beast and the Social Darwinists are at least correct that historically, life has been little more than the law of the jungle. But the Social Darwinists are wrong when they say that our bestial nature is permanent. Humans can evolve, and in the past 200 years a new man, Homo Civlizationus, has arrived. May he never die out! May he always move forward, walking into the light! May he never take one step back ever again!
Tribal man as beast. Read it and weep. Long, at 51 pages, but very much worth at least a skim. Don’t read it while you’re eating!
