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Civilized to Death: The Price of Progress

Christopher Ryan (Goodreads Author)

4.15 · Rating details · 1,907 ratings · 220 reviews

The New York Times bestselling coauthor of Sex at Dawn explores the ways in which “progress” has perverted the way we live—how we eat, learn, feel, mate, parent, communicate, work, and die—in this “engaging, extensively documented, well-organized, and thought-provoking” (Booklist) book.

Most of us have instinctive evidence the world is ending—balmy December days, face-to-fa ...more

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Paperback, 304 pages

Published August 11th 2020 by Avid Reader Press / Simon Schuster (first published January 1st 2018)

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Dec 12, 2019 Trevor rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: evolution, history, economics

There are a couple of things that separate me from your average loony, left-wing atheist. One is my distaste for both Pinker and Dawkins who are more generally held to be the heroes and even linchpins of modern-day rationalism. The reason why they both bother me so much is that I can’t help feeling that their genetic determinism smells a little too much like eugenics. This book criticises them on much the same terms I do. That said, if I was to offer one piece of advice about how to read books, There are a couple of things that separate me from your average loony, left-wing atheist. One is my distaste for both Pinker and Dawkins who are more generally held to be the heroes and even linchpins of modern-day rationalism. The reason why they both bother me so much is that I can’t help feeling that their genetic determinism smells a little too much like eugenics. This book criticises them on much the same terms I do. That said, if I was to offer one piece of advice about how to read books, it would be to pause when what you read confirms your prejudices. It won’t actually help, of course – despite the modern belief that the scientific method clears the path of dogma, the truth is much more complicated. Your prejudices will almost certainly win out in the end, even if you pause and acknowledge them. But even so, there is no harm in pausing all the same.

Dr Pangloss, Voltaire’s inspired character from Candide, knows that we live in the best of all possible worlds – which is not unlike the opinions of Professor Pinker who has recently written a couple of book seeking to prove much the same thing. Pangloss even goes on to provide optimistic explanations for what might not otherwise appear material from the best of all possible worlds opinion – you know, like his being hanged for heresy by the inquisition.

This book shows that most of us are a bit like Dr Pangloss on steroids. This is because we not only believe that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but even that the world is getting increasingly better. That is, it is better to live now than it was to live yesterday, and it will be better to live tomorrow than it is today. Progress, young man, progress.

There are two views of the prehistory of humans that have defined much of post-enlightenment thinking on the subject. The first is that of Rousseau, although, interestingly enough, it seems he never actually ever used the phrase he has become most associated with – that is, the noble savage. The noble savage is only noble, however, when he is alone and fully engaged in selfish, boy behaviours. As soon as he stops being alone and has to negotiate with other people, things go from bad to worse. Once I watched the very start of a film called Being Human. It had Robin Williams and some woman as sort of Adam and Eve – which was all good, until sort of Vikings arrived and took away Eve. The implication being that early humans were essentially sort of orangutans, living alone and only coming together to mate.

The other vision of early humanity that has dominated western thought is that of Thomas Hobbes. Interestingly enough, he also thought early humans lived isolated lives – but he is mainly remembered for the quote that early humans lead lives that were solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. And since one person could never trust another person to not do them wrong, they had to do onto others before the others did onto them. It was only with the birth of a state – where people gave up much of their freedom and agreed to be ruled over – that life became even part-way tolerable.

This book is a spirited defence of pre-civilised humanity. By pre-civilised, I mean that literally, that is, human life prior to the agricultural revolution of the fertile crescent and elsewhere that lead to us living in cities. In this the author attacks the foundations of many of our current beliefs about the notion of progress. Much of this attack is full-frontal. So that, we might argue that civilisation has given us wonderful cancer treatments, or medicines to treat diabetes, or heart disease, or provided us with great dental care – while the author points out that most of these illnesses are products of and caused by our living in civilisation. So, saying you have a partial cure for something that you, in fact, caused, doesn’t quite sound as impressive as we might have first assumed.

Just about every book I’ve ever read on this theme quotes Benjamin Franklin that if you bring a native American child up in a city and show them all of the benefits of life that modern society can bestow, and then they spend a week back with among native Americans, they won’t want to return to ‘civilisation’. But the reverse doesn’t hold. Non-native American children brought up by native Americans need to be physically restrained from escaping back to their tribe when they are finally ‘saved’ by their ‘civilised’ own kind.

Rather than such lives being brutish and nasty - they are caring, healthy, and, given our species evolved into such lives, it is a bit hard to argue that they are opposed to how we are meant to live.

He provides quotes from people from PNG who could not get over how much more we work than seemed reasonable to them, or why we spent so much time away from those we loved for so little return. Given hunter-gatherers generally only work about 20 hours a week, they can hardly be blamed for looking at us askance. They also struggled to understand why the majority of the people allowed a tiny minority to dominate so much of the wealth of society – given that sharing is so fundamental to hunter-gatherer society. They couldn't quite understand why those who selfishly hoarded wealth weren't killed by those without.

He also dispels a number of myths along the way here – not least the ‘short’ part of Hobbes’s quote above. In fact, if you lived beyond childhood in a hunter-gatherer society (something he admits wasn’t exactly guaranteed) then you were likely to live until you were 70, and this has remained fairly constant for much of human history. As he points out at one point, we now live slightly longer than this on average, but mostly this ‘gain’ has been bought by turning a relatively quick death into a protracted and slow (and often agonising) death. In fact, I felt this part of the book to be the most interesting of the whole thing. His discussion of how we have become obsessed with postponing death at any cost does make me wonder at the sanity of our society. People I have spoken to who have lost family members to cancer, say, have wondered if their family member might have been better off not ‘fighting’ cancer, and therefore suffering the agony of surgery and of chemo and of other medications and so on, or if it might have been better to have just let the disease run its course and rather spent their time trying to achieve some form of acceptance. The major truth of our existence is that it has an end – the notion that a delayed end is always better is pretty hard to justify.

Look, I don’t know what to make of this book in some ways. There is no going back, and there are far too many of us now on the planet to do much else than what we are currently doing, I suspect. But we do seem to be destroying the basis upon which our lives on this planet can be sustained, and if that is as good as civilisation gets, you do get to see why ‘primitive’ peoples might look at us 'civilised' people as if we were insane when we tell them how much more ‘advanced’ we are compared to them. You know, civilisation has had a bit over 200 years in Australia, while Aboriginal society was here for something like 60,000 years – and man, have the civilised stuffed this place up! We have the fastest extinction rates in this country of anywhere else on the planet. We currently have bushfires burning along the length of the New South Wales coast and summer has only just started. Last year a million fish died in our inland river systems due to an extended drought, but all of the seats along the river (where this Biblical scale pestilence visited) voted for climate change deniers. As uncomfortable as I feel when I get told that progress is either an illusion or a marketing ploy – looking at climate change does make me think we really are stupider than we look.

This is a quick read but a very interesting read too.
...more

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Oct 06, 2019 Nina rated it liked it · review of another edition

I’m conflicted about this one. It was a fun read and the “Narrative of Perpetual Progress” definitely deserves the type of debunking the author is attempting. The lives of our hunter/gatherer forbears were not as nasty, brutish, or short as the proponents of the myth of progress would have us all believe. However, their lifestyles were not as idyllic, peaceful, and sustainable as the author would have us believe either. He rightly takes scientists like Steven Pinker to task for cherrypicking dat ...more

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Oct 16, 2019 Ietrio rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: junk

An intellectually dubious argument for taking life like a buffet: Ryan would take some of the 21st century, and some from the 20th century plate and mostly from a fairy tale that exists only in his mind.

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Apr 08, 2020 David Meyer rated it it was ok

Most of my reviews are short and sweet, but this book made me want to take notes as I went. The author is clearly passionate about the subject which I respect, but the arguments made throughout the book felt so poorly made that they rubbed me completely the wrong way. The funny thing is, there is plenty that the author said that I agree with, but often even these things were annoying. Some of these complaints will flow poorly as they were taken from various chapters and moments in the book, whil ...more

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Oct 06, 2019 Bremer rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

“An era can be considered over when its basic illusions have been exhausted.”

— Arthur Miller

Modern civilization is seen as necessary for “progress.” With every breakthrough in technology, science, medicine, and so on, with every new comfort and convenience, advancement and novelty, what is the cost?

People often assume that progress is steadily increasing, and at a linear pace, believing that the livelihoods of the hunter-gatherers were primitive, dangerous, and simple, despite their survival for ...more

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Dec 28, 2019 David Zaidain rated it it was ok · review of another edition

This book is basically a rant. It would have been better as a short New Yorker article. Maybe.

I fundamentally believe in the central premise- our advancing progress and industrialization has not produced healthier or happier people. But this book rants about the symptoms without really getting into a “why are we like this”....these systems were created by humans as a reaction to something. That something is not explored and seems to be because we are just selfish dicks, i guess. Industrializatio ...more

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Oct 01, 2019 Timo rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Author Christopher Ryan has provided a clear and compelling argument against what he calls the Narrative of Perpetual Progress, or NPP.

In 2016, I dropped away from traditional life, leaving Seattle, WA to wander Mexico and Central America. It was due to many of the ailments listed in this book that I found life in Seattle so intolerable; but I wasn't ready to face the idea that Modern Life wasn't great. It took awhile for that realization to set in.

I was raised in a fundamentalist religion. I re ...more

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Oct 17, 2019 Adam Bell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I’m a long time listener of Dr Ryan’s podcast Tangentially Speaking so the arguments presented to me in this short and sweet treatise on why progression isn’t inherently positive, aren’t new. I’d however recommend this book to anyone that has contemplated the necessity to participate in the “rat race”, why we aren’t necessarily better off now than our ancestors and how to re-imagine a better life for yourself. I listened to this on Audible and it was read by the author which I’d highly recommend ...more

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Mar 28, 2020 Andrea McDowell rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: social-and-cultural, groundhog-day, 2020

There were some parts of this book that were ok.

Unfortunately, this was constantly undercut by the many parts of this book that are ableist, sexist garbage, verging on eco-fascism.

To wit:

High infant and child mortality in prehistoric cultures isn't as bad as it sounds because they were just killing disabled children, and those kids don't count: (p. 118) "While a significantly greater percentage of infants died in prehistory than today, even that point isn't as unambiguous as it seems. First, man ...more

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Nov 29, 2019 Ailith Twinning rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019

I rather enjoyed this read, and find the ideas rather compelling.
Except one. The "sharing" economy is bad, a scam, throwing all the risk of the employer onto individuals while some tech startup rakes almost everything, and doesn't even make a profit doing it because it's dumping so much into expansion and stock buybacks to drive finance capital to just keep the damn ponzi scheme rolling. Uber, Air BNB, "Uber for dogwalkers", Task Rabbit and all the rest are vile - and Ryan bought the advertising ...more

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Jan 23, 2020 Robert Kenny rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Are you interested in hearing arguments based on how an author “feels” about the world, with nothing but personal biases and anecdotes supporting them? If so, this might be the book for you. But, if you’re like me, and prefer books that support a thesis with statistics and research, you probably won’t enjoy it. The closest thing to factual support Christopher Ryan offers for any of his arguments is one or two counter-examples for a generalized belief. For instance, when arguing against the opini ...more

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Oct 02, 2019 Judith rated it did not like it · review of another edition

I read about 10% of the book. I agree with Ryan that if we started as a “wolf pack” then we are mostly poodles and pigs, and we need to look at and provide for our psychological needs in light of our origins as foragers. But I won’t get my desire for confirmation fulfilled by this book. He seems to not understand natural selection, and he lacks precision and science when considering human evolution and the human condition. There are many better popular science books out there. Start with De Waal ...more

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Oct 30, 2019 Igor Pershin rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I've always felt that our way of life doesn't feel natural and that it is simply because it isn't, but it has always been hard to put my finger on exactly what was at fault. This scathing critique of everything our society holds to be important yet what we know fails to meet our fundamental needs is both fascinating and entertaining.

Chris takes us on a journey through how we got to this point of mutually assured destruction we call development, prosperity and 'progress'. The more 'developed' we ...more

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Oct 01, 2019 Philip rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Just finished my advance readers copy. Waited a long time for this one to finally be released. The wait was worth it. I also recommend The New Human Rights Movement by Peter Joseph and The Spell of The Sensuous by David Abram if you enjoyed this book. I love books that turn my conventional ways of thinking upside down in ways that make sense

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Dec 09, 2019 Joseph L. rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

Watch a detailed review along with my favorite ideas and takeaways at:
https://youtu.be/LtCUeGzXpxs ...more

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Nov 26, 2019 Katy Koivastik rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: non-fiction

This is one of those books easily read annually to remind one of what is important in life.

I jotted down at least 10 of Christopher Ryan’s most salient points. Here are three:

“Our desperate peregrinations are in search of a place much like the home we left when we left The Garden and started to farm”.

“We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter and leisure”.

“We are trapped in an economy that is killing us. Human This is one of those books easily read annually to remind one of what is important in life.

I jotted down at least 10 of Christopher Ryan’s most salient points. Here are three:

“Our desperate peregrinations are in search of a place much like the home we left when we left The Garden and started to farm”.

“We live in a world created by and for institutions that thrive on commerce, not human beings that thrive on community, laughter and leisure”.

“We are trapped in an economy that is killing us. Humans are starving for what our ancestors had, a sense of community”.

Strangely coincidentally, I had been reading Daniel Quinn’s “Ishmael”, a book that had been sitting un-read on a bookshelf for many years, when the subject audiobook became available. When I had plucked “Ismael” off the shelf I expected it to be about Herman Melville and/or Moby Dick and not a novel with the subtitle “An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit”. I quickly became aware of the similarities between the two books. Indeed, late in “Civilized” Christopher Ryan describes “Ishmael” as a “cult classic” (who knew?) that “distinguished the leavers from the takers”, i.e. those who make the world a better place and those who cannot see beyond their own greed.

From “Ishmael”, page 80: “....Man’s destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he’s done—almost. He hasn’t quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we’ve attained, we don’t have enough mastery to stop devastating the world—or to repair the devastation we’ve already wrought. We’ve poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit—and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out—and we go on gobbling them up. It is hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody’s really doing anything about it. It’s a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.” Sobering. ...more

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May 17, 2020 Kai Inkinen rated it liked it

Authors don’t make good readers (of audio books). There’s probably exceptions, but this isn’t one of them. The author takes the habit of ”acting out” the opposing views, often in a voice that exaggerates and ridicules the other party. Feels petty and childish.
As much as I’d like to give it 4 stars, I cannot due to the deficiencies. The book is full of interesting facts about ”primitive” life, and really takes a fresh view in looking at the individual and psychology, rather than at the bigger nar ...more

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Jul 05, 2019 Elizabeth The Wicked rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I've been waiting for this since 2014 when I first read Sex at Dawn. Chris has been talking about this book on the podcast since then. If you're a fan of the podcast, much of the material here will be familiar. many of the same references, stories and points are repeated.
Chris isn't saying anything new here, so much as saying it in an entertaining way that is still well researched. If you have read the works of Marshall Sahlins, Jared Diamond and Frans De Waal there is nothing new to learn here, ...more

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Oct 07, 2019 Robin Hood rated it really liked it · review of another edition

I like the authenticity of the author.I listen to his podcast (Tangentially speaking) more often than not and share the same concerns and similar critiques. The point of divergence is the nihilistic undertone and that of impending doom in the form of large scale climate crisis that the author tends to take for granted. The future may pan out this way and we might be completely helpless but firmly believing it to be the case wont help us in whatever efforts we may be capable of mustering collecti ...more

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Apr 18, 2020 Peym added it

Shelves: in-english

Devil bill would despise this book with rough stand
each day turns to the magic mirror in the hand,
asks:" who is the fairest of the land?"
replies back:" we are with the vigor of progress,
but some verities must be banned"
So he and the masters of the woods and sand
Mobilize huntsmen, err-visioned, dreadful band
Pinker, ridley and et al, hunting the minds to the depth
Echoing their preach in ears of us bland:
"the best of all possible worlds", you live grand"

______________________________
I'm not in ...more

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Nov 15, 2019 Steven added it · review of another edition

The key takeaway for me: Civilization is not our natural environment. We act and live poorly within its confines.

"What fueled the Spaniards cruelties wasn't human nature. IT WAS CIVILIZATION." p 57

"Modern diseases...are largely, not total, due to misalignment between the world we've created and the one our bodies were EXPECTING TO INHABIT." p 110

Can we go back to the garden? No, but we can adopt as many foraging traits as we can, such as barefoot running shoes, spending time in nature, and expl ...more

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Oct 28, 2019 Enrique Incle rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Sobering and realistic

This was a great way to help us reconnect with our ancient roots, our true nature. The author used many vivid examples and sources that brought lucidity and clarity to describe the current identity crisis we are all experiencing as a species. The author and his dead helped me shaped and be able to turn a lot of this concerns and my angst into a more tangible concept. Now I have better understanding of what I been missing.

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Nov 01, 2019 David Moynihan rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: did-not-finish

Ugh! I gave up after two chapters of the audiobook. The author narrates the book and his sanctimonious drone killed whatever pleasure might be found in the book.

Save hours of your life for better purposes. Here is the gist of it:

People living ‘civilized lives’ are less happy than hunter-gatherers, generally speaking.
Change is inevitable; progress is not.

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Oct 02, 2019 mat lee rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Eye opening

Love tangentially speaking, sex at dawn and now civilized to death. Great read, very eye opening to a lot of the issues humans face today.

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Dec 17, 2020 Randall Wallace rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

For well over 95% of our history, we humans existed in “small bands of 150 or fewer people” in a system of egalitarianism, mobility, and gratitude. Sebastian Junger explained why hoarding and selfishness were not tolerated: “Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny.” Jared Diamond called the transition to agriculture (civilization) the “wo For well over 95% of our history, we humans existed in “small bands of 150 or fewer people” in a system of egalitarianism, mobility, and gratitude. Sebastian Junger explained why hoarding and selfishness were not tolerated: “Subsistence-level hunters aren’t necessarily more moral than other people; they just can’t get away with selfish behavior because they live in small groups where almost everything is open to scrutiny.” Jared Diamond called the transition to agriculture (civilization) the “worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Historian Yuval Noah Harari called the agricultural revolution “history’s biggest fraud”. Using monotheistic religion to lock in a less nutritious diet that demands a lifestyle with less leisure? That doesn’t seem smart, or fun.

Before the advent of agriculture, the human population doubled roughly every 250,000 years. After the birth of agriculture, babies could be weaned earlier with animal milk. Women became lesser in status. Generosity and equality were abandoned. To Christopher, “our species went from living in the world, into living in a zoo of our own making.” He insightfully added that we became as domesticated as our chosen plants and animals. “Civilization convinced Columbus and his men that gold was more valuable that the lives of the people they destroyed to get it.” Any child over fourteen caught begging for the third time in England, after the Poor Laws were enacted, was executed. Early explorers discovered people who “ate more nutritious food, worked less, slept more, and suffered less disease.” Those who love to point out how chimps can be so aggressive won’t also mention that bonobos who have an “utter absence of lethal aggression among them. No war.” Doug Fry writes in “War, Peace, and Human Nature” that the “worldwide archaeological record is ‘clear and unambiguous’ in showing that ‘war developed, despots arose, violence proliferated, slavery flourished, and the social position of women deteriorated’ after our species” began after agriculture. As Christopher bluntly states, “Civilization is the source of most human violence.” “The infectious diseases most deadly to human beings didn’t exist in prehistory. They are by-products of civilization itself.” A dentist travelling the world realized, “if people were still eating their traditional diet, their teeth were perfect.” Today, one in nine people worldwide are undernourished. Those saying that we are better fed than foragers today, must ignore close to a billion people from their calculations. Strange, but caloric restriction is considered “the only proven technique for extending life.”

Foundling hospitals began when so many people were dumping babies by the side of the road. “In the early 1800’s, roughly a third of the babies born in Paris were left at the foundling hospital.” So much for Parisienne romance.

Civilization is the destruction of what is free, so that humans can be sold an inferior overpriced copy of what was free. Civilization is “Ignore friends and family to get rich so someone will love you”. I like Chris’s bit on civilization selling us, “prepackaged dollops of transitory satisfaction that evaporate on the tongue.” Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park study showed that happy rats did not get addicted to drugged water. Addiction is having more to do with the addict’s earlier trauma than with the drug itself. Nike made lots of money by making running shoes for a style of running humans shouldn’t be doing, namely landing on their heels. They created a product, then the market out of vapor, and the resultant running injury epidemic was free of charge. Before 1972, people ran in thin soles shoes and had far fewer knee injuries. Tribal infants are picked up when crying and feel loved and welcome. Civilized infants are left to cry and feel “confused and alone” thinking there must be something wrong with me.

Between 1997 and 2003, the number of children who liked to hike, garden, engage with nature fell by 50%. One explanation is that between 2000 and 2003, children’s prescriptions for psychotropic drugs increased 49%. U.S. toddlers were recently found to be active 20 minutes a day. Let’s look at the number of children killed by family members per year: that figure (20,000) is 4x the number of U.S. soldiers dying both in Iraq and Afghanistan. UNICIEF found children’s health to be the lowest in Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, and the United States. In 1998, 30% of teachers thought that kindergarteners should read. By 2010, the figure became 80%. Kids must first hang and play to learn social cues. Let’s face it: play teaches kids to learn to live together. Hunter-gathers shunned “power assertive methods to control behavior”, they knew that each person should learn to understand/control their own needs. They did/do have a sense of toil. When the hunter-gatherer child became adult, play became work, “but it does not cease being play. That productive quality helps the whole band and is valued by all.” For hunter-gatherers much of life is play while for the civilized much of play strangely becomes work. “Excuse me, I’m still working on my salad.” Grandpa exercised, while we work out. I’m working on myself in therapy. I’m working on being more playful. I’m working on not working. Why is the U.S. called a prosperous nation when forty-million people are clearly below the poverty line?

The closer you look at it, the more civilization looks like a pyramid scheme. Villages and towns meant hierarchy, and hierarchy of wealth. Happiness once came from being in the community. In the 1920’s 5% of the U.S. lived alone. Now that number is 25%. Keep them alone and fragmented, and those people are easy to control. Calling all rich winners is as smart as calling every soldier a hero. Reinforcing false narratives is easy when few factcheck or dare to read. “Power diminishes all varieties of empathy.” Diminished empathy is self-destructive and leads to isolation. Selfishness leads to death, first social, then physical.

“We pay doctors very well for deploying technology and very poorly for spending time with patients.” Attempts to make humans live longer appear to have just made suffering slow-motion. Victor Frankl saw it was meaning in life that was far more important than happiness. Happiness is best seen as “an incidental gift”. The Journal of Affective Disorders in 2012 wrote, “The economic and marketing forces of modern society have engineered an environment …that maximize [s] consumption at the long-term cost of well-being.” They concluded after “a long-hominid history” we’ve arrived at a “socially-isolating environment with dire consequences.” U.S. antidepressant use is up 400% since 1990. Don’t dream of blaming the culture, just blame yourself. In 1985, when sociologists asked Americans if they had someone to confide in, 10% had no one. Now the figure is 25%. The CDC said in 2013, that for the first time more Americans were committing suicide than were dying in car accidents. It’s the culture, it’s not the person. Think of those thousands in prison for life (like Timothy Tyler or Bob Riley) for selling LSD or mushrooms at a Dead concert or to a “friend”. MDMA was first synthesized in the 1920’s at Merck and later used by therapists as an empathogen. The DEA forced it to be classified as no medical use (Schedule I) which killed its medical use. No one to date has ever died of an LSD overdose. As John Ehrlichman (Nixon’s domestic policy advisor) explained in 1994 to a journalist, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.” A pathologist testifying before the Senate in 1971 said, “The history of medicine is replete with examples of cures obtained years, decades, and even centuries before the mechanism, of action was understood for these cures.” Civilization does not appreciate the healing values of ayahuasca and iboga. But I am confident that if both drugs could be synthesized using fossil fuels and patented by a US company, that civilization might make a corporate exception. With psilocybin, patients learn to fear death less and embrace life more, they learn that they are not dying, but are alive until the moment of death. Remember in disaster movies how half of people meet the last seconds before the final tidal wave with appreciation and love of what they’ve had, while the other half choose to run while screaming, unable in their final moments to activate their DABDA Kubler Ross scenario. Use of psychoactive mushrooms for life lessons and healing suffering dates back 5,700 hundred years and predates all the major religions.

Thanks to opioids that only treat “superficial symptoms rather than underlying structural problems in how we live our lives”, now more Americans die every year (just due to overdose deaths) than soldiers died during the entire Vietnam War.

“Foragers see the world as spiritually alive, welcoming, and generous. Farmers see it as inanimate, forbidding, and reluctant. The gods of foragers are multiple, benevolent, and directly accessible by anyone; the God of farmers is solitary, angry and jealous.” “Agriculturalists are taught to hoard property and defend it to the death while foragers tend to see one another as companions in mutually beneficial relationships.” Christopher mentions Daniel Quinn’s anti-civ writings and remarks that when he first read about DQ’s Leavers versus Takers concept, Christopher thought of another valid polarity, hope versus fear. “OK people, we have to invade them, or they will invade us”. Every war is sold to us through fear. Advertising sells through fear; “you don’t want to be caught without this!”

Here’s a cool anti-civ quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald from the Great Gatsby, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” A reminder that capitalism with its endless growth is “the ideology of a cancer cell”. Ask why was Gobekli Tepe buried in trash? [see ancient-origins.net] Americans sort of get tribalism – street gangs with their colors and armchair warriors with allegiances to arbitrary sports teams – there’s a strong longing for human connection and group identity. We were all indoctrinated against tribalism with the book/film The Lord of the Flies. Civilization won’t tell you that in 1977, when a real-life Lord of the Flies scenario happened, the boys stayed alive by staying in pairs and one of them had to always stay awake for passing ships. Two boys on watch spotted a passing boat after 15 months. And no one was ever named Piggy.

Previous collapses have been regional. Our upcoming collapse will be planetary, and with no place to hide. People wonder why man was stuck for so long without progress before civilization, but he wasn’t stuck. He was home. True things didn’t change but that’s not a bad thing. From what I’ve seen, merely interacting one’s pets, or chatting with someone with a brain has been more fulfilling than watching TV. And evidence suggests humans were happier back then, when they weren’t breeding themselves into overdrive. Christopher sees the only answer today as this: put hunter-gatherer thinking in charge. Top-down structures must become “peer progressive networks” while divestment $$$ from war and weaponry must go to provide basic income for all and provide big incentives for not having children. Note that today’s progressive agenda often shares forementioned forager communal values, while today’s conservative agenda often aligns with the worst long-term aspects of civilization: patriarchy, monotheism, monoculture, raping a land base to secure $$$ and power, and a wildly un-Christ-like lust for money and organized violence (war). Great book that really covers good anti-civ stuff from a different angle than the older known anti-civ writers.
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Feb 19, 2020 Kent Winward rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Is the world going to hell, literally a hot hell of carbon dioxide? What makes life worth living? Are we all going to lose our jobs to robots? Are humans basically good or corrupt horrible human beings? Are we going to destroy ourselves in our arrogance or will our brilliance save us? And given the lifespan we are all inflicted with upon birth, what does it matter anyway, we will be gone before there is an answer.

Which is why I sometimes question my reading choices, a mad dash for answers always Is the world going to hell, literally a hot hell of carbon dioxide? What makes life worth living? Are we all going to lose our jobs to robots? Are humans basically good or corrupt horrible human beings? Are we going to destroy ourselves in our arrogance or will our brilliance save us? And given the lifespan we are all inflicted with upon birth, what does it matter anyway, we will be gone before there is an answer.

Which is why I sometimes question my reading choices, a mad dash for answers always raises the fear that you are missing the minutes for the ticking away seconds. Recently back to back to back to back, I’ve been reading non-fiction books that challenge the way we look at reality, but also present the current philosophical/religious trends. The technological singularity religion is scrambling for adherents and believers as the 1s and 0s copulate to save us in an orgasmic spasm of digital bliss. The paleo-anthropological-egalitarian return to the earth and good old fashioned copulation adherents who struggle with the trans-romantic fallacy of everything was brighter, cheerier, the water was cleaner, when the Earth was a garden of Eden until we got kicked out of the Garden to garden.

Our religions change, but to take a trick from Christopher Ryan in Civilized to Death, I will co-opt the T.S. Eliot quote:

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

Two of the the new religious tracts I read were Ryan’s book on how civilization is killing us and the techno-utopian The Future is Faster Than You Think. Intriguingly, the end result for both books remains about the same--a better life for you and me. The pathway of one is remodeling our Earth zoo to a more hospitable environment for homo-sapien sapiens. The other is flying cars and hyperloop tubes as we offload our brains into the digital dimension. For this baby boomer, it was like watching the Flintsones and the Jetsons back to back. (Youtube it I-gen.)

From those two books, I moved to a book by two economists, Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems, on how we can restructure our views of economics to more closely align with behavioral economics which is the economic world’s version of literary criticism, i.e. why are the characters behaving the way they are? This book also aligns with an optimistic overall view, if we can only figure out how to decouple economics and politics. This seems to be the most innervating part of all the reading

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Dec 12, 2020 Adnan rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: y-2020, zscience, zhisto-polit, zpsych-socio, b-schlechts, c-audible

To a whole degree, the book challenged a lot of my thoughts and beliefs. I was wondering on which basis he was basing his argument, which goes as follows: The greater woes of man,—cancer, depression, diabetes, STD's, anxiety, wars, greed, loneliness, chronic disease, (even tooth decay)—are products of civilization, of agriculture and modern societies. He compares the status quo with the pre-historic simplistic groups of people living off the land in hunter-gatherer societies.

I said, well-and-goo To a whole degree, the book challenged a lot of my thoughts and beliefs. I was wondering on which basis he was basing his argument, which goes as follows: The greater woes of man,—cancer, depression, diabetes, STD's, anxiety, wars, greed, loneliness, chronic disease, (even tooth decay)—are products of civilization, of agriculture and modern societies. He compares the status quo with the pre-historic simplistic groups of people living off the land in hunter-gatherer societies.

I said, well-and-good. It's not my area of expertise, and I have to listen to him. But then, he goes on about the modern woes of humanity by which inspired him to look for better times, and we find him ranting on inequality and such, even citing Picketty and Krugman. It becomes obvious that if someone is willing to base parts of his arguments on lies and bogus science, the rest is also suspect. If someone allows himself to cheat on half of his solution, I am still waiting in want of the solution. He discredited himself.

It seemed at first that this was a genuine inquiry into better times of the past. But little by little, I realized that he just doesn't like capitalism, he doesn't like Western society and Western thought, and he'd want anything but what the West offers. Upon these realizations, I would definitely say: If anxiety was the price for truth and knowledge, then I want anxiety over a life that's spent in play. I would prefer a life of meaning over a simple life of subsistence. Civilized to Death is shallow in many respects. He tells us that people live into old age, but they're depressed and are in chronic pain, and that was something that didn't happen in the past. Again, he misuses statistics and makes false conclusions that further undermine his argument.

I was happy at first that my beliefs were challenged. I would have to respond with intellectual fervor to the claims and ideas presented in this book. But I found out that I won't find these things here, and that I would have to look for scrutiny and closure elsewhere. Civilized to Death is not the book for me.

P.S. A lot of the book is a critique of what is called Hobbesianism; the belief that humans are extremely violent if left unrestrained. The author claims that humans are social and cooperative creatures, which I agree with. But then he takes the Rousseaueian claim that it is private property that leads to violence between people. Well, why not ignorance? Why not scarcity? Will the author say anything to promote egalitarianism? Why should private property only lead to greed? Many people give away a lot of what they own, if they believed in altruism, and often even when they don't. That's not an idea that I liked at all. ...more

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Jan 11, 2020 Benediktas Raulusonis rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

This book explains in detail what it states in its title - that civilization and modern lifestyle is slowly killing us. Sort of "A death by a thousand cuts".

Which is kind of true. Modern life is a novelty and neither our body nor mind is designed to live in it. Screens, sitting all day, social media - it is very, very new things.Book provides number of examples, let me list a few:
- Caesarean section, unless it's necessary, should be avoided - but it is increasingly avoided for the convenience ...more

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Nov 20, 2019 Greg rated it really liked it · review of another edition

First, a correction: Toads were not licked for DMT by indigenous peoples of the americas. I'm pretty sure the origin of this was in the last 50 years, as described in Michael Pollan's book How to Change your Mind.

Second, one of the best things about this book is that it is full of wry humor. Phrases such as "As with sex, drugs and decorative pillows, there can be too much of a good thing". (copied from memory)

Now, my big thoughts about this book. I read it eagerly in a few sittings. This is a bo First, a correction: Toads were not licked for DMT by indigenous peoples of the americas. I'm pretty sure the origin of this was in the last 50 years, as described in Michael Pollan's book How to Change your Mind.

Second, one of the best things about this book is that it is full of wry humor. Phrases such as "As with sex, drugs and decorative pillows, there can be too much of a good thing". (copied from memory)

Now, my big thoughts about this book. I read it eagerly in a few sittings. This is a book I could have written myself, based on my long fascination with evolutionary psychology.

I read Ryan's previous popular book, Sex at Dawn, a few years ago. I thought it was good but over-argued. I prefer the tone of Jared Diamond who is more upfront about unknowns, uncertainties and contradictions in the anthropological record.

I resisted Civilized to Death for similar reasons. The basic argument, that civilization is a pyramid scheme and we would be happier as hunter gatherers, is presented against weak counter-arguments. In short, the book is one-sided. In particular, Ryan is unfair on Steven Pinker's characterization of violence in prehistoric societies.

And he discusses very little the natural state of non-human animals, only venturing as far as our closest cousins, the chimps and bonobos. There is enough diversity in mammals alone to justify all political bents.

Likewise, Ryan doesn't touch on genetic engineering at all. Surely, one of his targets, the Silicon Valley tech elite, would offer that as the logical long-term solution to the human gene-environment mismatch.

Ryan's doomsaying leaves out one of the most biologically miraculous facts about modern humans: We are having fewer and fewer children as we get richer. This fact alone will allow us to catch our collective breath, and it undermines Ryan's assertion that civilization is all about growth.

Finally, I wish Ryan had written more about the basic sensory poverty of our modern environments. It's no coincidence that office buildings around the world are decorated with pictures of green fields, shady trees and shining blue water. Outside of counter-culture locales, I have yet to see paintings of office buildings, highways, and cubicles, the daily sights of modern human.

I write all the criticism because I was deeply engaged with the book and I wish it would be even more. Make n0 mistake: the message he delivers is incredibly important for every person on the planet and the future of our civilization. We are enclosing ourselves in a human zoo, and it is driving us all at least a little crazy.

I wish more people were aware of how our ancestors--foragers living off the land--really lived and how unprecedented modern life is. Stories like that of Black Elk. So thank you Chris Ryan for writing this book. ...more

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Dec 03, 2019 Antonio rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I really enjoyed this.
It was scary, thought provoking, interesting, and very informative albeit fairly grim at times.
It definitely kept me interested and it absolutely got my gears turning.

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“many of us have been convinced that we carry the darkness within us, in our selfish genes. “It is simply human nature,” we’re told, “to rape and kill and enslave—and anyone who thinks otherwise is a foolish romantic.” This messaging not only offends our decency and dignity, it insults our intelligence. The depiction of human nature embedded in the NPP isn’t science; it’s a marketing campaign for the status quo.” — 5 likes

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