The fall of humanity and 6,000 years of insanity

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A book review of The Fall: The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and The Dawning of a New Era

the fall

Approximately 6000 years ago, something went horribly wrong for much of the world’s population of hunter-gatherer bands and tribal peoples; an event that Steve Taylor calls “The Fall“.  What had been a land of plenty and a mostly peaceful existence, turned to scarcity and fear.  The lush grasslands and forests of the Middle East and Central Asia dried up, disappeared and turned to desert.

The peoples of that region spread out and conquered much of Asia, Europe and North Africa.  It was a conquest with dire psychological consequences that has endured to the present.

According to author Steve Taylor, in his book, The Fall:  The Insanity of the Ego in Human History and The Dawning of a New Era, 4000 BCE marks the point at which humanity went from being a culture that was relatively peaceful and egalitarian, and fallen to one that was wanton with constant violence and subjugation.

According to Taylor, before 4000 BCE, Saharasia (the Middle East and Central Asia) easily supported the people that inhabited the area.  The hunter-gatherers and horticultural societies that lived in Saharasia spent only a small portion of their time actually working, and were a leisurely people who did not oppress and brutalize their neighbors.  There were no slaves.  Children and women were not abused, and conflicts were resolved by committee, with both men and women participating in the governance of the tribe, or band.

Beginning with the desertification of the region, resources grew scarce, and humanity’s psyche suffered a devastating blow.  Peace as the normal homeostasis of the world’s cultures was replaced by endless warring, suppression (especially of women and children), and dogmatic religion.  The strong empathic bonds that pre-Fall people felt for other people and nature were severed, and we have been paying the price ever since.

Confronted with having to make great efforts to survive, the ego was born.  Though the egoic component of the human psyche has brought us many good things, like scientific break-throughs and helpful technologies that make life easier and safer, it has also been the cause of much human suffering.

Taylor points out that the desertification of Saharasia resulted in an “ego explosion.”  The “ego explosion” is responsible for the social chaos humanity experiences in the form of war, patriarchy, and inequality of different cultures, sexes and children, according to Taylor.

With the ego came, for the first time in the history of humanity, a sense of separation and aloneness from one another and nature.  Our minds became consumed and overran with incessant thinking, which Taylor calls “ego chattering.”

We suffer from what Taylor calls a “perceptual sleep.”  “To unfallen peoples the world is a fantastically real place,” writes Taylor.  “To them all things are alive…But for us fallen peoples the world is a more dreary place–so dreary, in fact, that we hardly pay attention to it, but spend almost all of our time focused on tasks or distractions, or else on the thought chatter in our heads.”

According to archeological studies cited by Taylor, a neurotic fear of death and an underlying unhappiness with existence did not evolve in the human psyche before the advent of the ego, as well.

Separation, aloneness, “ego chattering,” “perceptual sleep,” fear of death, and general unhappiness has been our shared legacy, and psychosis, and the underlying cause of social chaos for much of recorded history.

It is no accident that the world’s most theistic, and dogmatic religions–Judaism, Christianity and Islam–developed in the dust of the epicenter of the Fall.  Before there were “gods” and “God,” there was a strong sense that the world was permeated with spirit, and that all things, animate and inanimate, were made up of one primordial spirit that was alive, ran through and connected all things.

“The religions of unfallen peoples are not theistic–that is, not based around the worship of gods,” Taylor says.  Primitive peoples did develop mythologies about a creator-God, but, “After creating the world, this God steps aside and has very little to do with it.”

A world ablaze with spirit was eventually replaced by a domineering, paternalistic, vengeful God, essentially separate from this world, who sanctioned much of the social chaos and psychological discord endemic to the fallen psyche, controlled wholly by the ego.

Worst of all, the ego explosion is directly responsible for the destruction of the environment; a problem, Taylor points out, that we are running out of time to fix.  A psyche that sees itself as separate from, and hostile to the external world has little regard for the environment, and only sees it as a means to an end; that end being lucre and survival.

There is hope.  As Taylor says, “after 6,000 years of psychosis, we may finally be regaining our sanity.”  Taylor is optimistic that humanity might be finally showing signs that it is moving out of the long, dark era of the Fall, away from the pathologies of ego, like materialism, war and careless destruction of the environment, “even if it is a minority movement,” he says.

What is developing is a new psychological disposition that has never existed before, and not a regression to the purely magical world of ancient peoples.  Taylor believes that over the last 150 years a less egocentric and more empathic center of gravity is taking shape in our collective consciousness.  As an example, he points out how shocked a modern day human would be to see how horribly people treated each other a mere three hundred years ago in England, where only a few–all wealthy men–had any rights.  He also points out the great strides in civil rights that have emerged in the last 150 years, from the abolishment of slavery, to women being granted full rights of citizenship on equal par with men.

“…[W]e aren’t truly going back, but forward to a whole new state of being.  Transcending ego-separation doesn’t necessarily mean sacrificing the positive effects of the Fall…The real problem is not the sharpness of our sense of ego but its separateness, and the fact that its thought chatter has become too wild and chaotic…Instead [the ego] needs to be tamed, and its walls of separateness need to be melted away.  It needs to become an integrated part of our psyche, performing an important function when it’s required to, instead of monopolising our psychic energy and attention.”

Hopefully some psycho-cultural, “trans-Fall” emergence will take place on a grand scale, before it is too late.  Hopefully, future generations will sit around laughing and shaking their heads in disbelief at how crazy and stupid we are.

the fall

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Collin Hinds

Senior Writer and editor.
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12 years ago

We are still primitive in many ways, even though we are loaded with the gifts of technology these days.

Egos are certainly a problem, when you meet a person who is genuinely humble, they are so different from the crowd, if this ego-less culture is to emerge and dominate society it will take aeons.

jenny40
12 years ago

Crazy and stupid we are for sure, as well as mean and nasty, and sometimes kind and compassionate. Big sigh inserted here Mr. Collin Hinds.

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