Before Priests, Kings & Bosses
Hello Friends,
I’m most excited to share a new series of articles with you. It’s big history meets radical anthropology meets imaginal strategy.
Part One is an invitation to re-examine our often overlooked origins as egalitarian hunter gatherers. Part Two unpacks an all important and little known difference between the two types of tribes. Part Three explores some of the lessons we can learn from organic society. Part Four compares the best and worst of civilisation with what came before and Part Five offers a vision of what integrating such ancestral wisdom into our modern day technological cultures might look like.
I’ve included the artwork and a few lines from each of the first four articles below and will send out the fifth and final part in its entirety next week. Hope you Enjoy!
Before Priests, Kings & Bosses Part One: 59,804 Reasons To Think Again
How should we measure the health of our societies? Are a sense of belonging, meaning, egalitarianism and symbiosis with our surrounding ecologies what matters most? Because if so then I'd suggest our modern cultures are a long way from the high water mark of human flourishing. While Steven Pinker, Bill Gates & Hans Rosling (AKA The New Optimists) all confidently proclaim that now is clearly the best time to be alive, personally I'm not so sure. In fact I’d go as far to make the claim that…
Before Priests, Kings & Bosses Part Two: The Two Types Of Tribes
The way we structure our societies tends to determine whether we end up dominating or empowering our fellow humans. And while the more common modes of civilisational structure such as democracy, communism, autocracy and monarchy (etc.) are familiar to us the different kinds of hunter gatherer society are much less well known. But there are fascinating differences in how the hierarchies of various tribal structures directly impact the…
Before Priests, Kings & Bosses Part Three: Eleven Life Lessons From The Original Egalitarians
I often wonder what it was like to have lived in the tribe that first painted the caves at Lascaux over 20,000 years ago. Was dancing around the fire with your cherished kin in reverent gratitude for a successful hunt as nourishing as it sounds? Was Palaeolithic mating, mushrooms and drumming as much fun as modern day sex, drugs and rock and roll? And did we already have an intense obsession with the constant progression of our technology? If you have a hard time imagining what it was like back then you’re not alone…
Between Priests, Kings & Bosses: An Unflinching Exploration Of The Best & Worst Of Civilisation
Our species appears highly adept at engineering fantastical new ways to wipe itself out. So far we’ve managed to collectively dodge the bullet of all out nuclear war but we’re yet to face up to the full brunt of radical climate change and widespread ecological degradation. And there’s the possibility of either a rogue A.I or genetically modified viruses cutting short the human story.
And yet despite the fact that our socioeconomic systems are directly responsible for generating such a wide range of existential risks it still remains highly taboo to question whether or not…
Part 5 - Beyond Priests, Kings & Bosses: A Neotribal Declaration coming soon…
Joe Lightfoot is a writer, podcaster and apprentice community weaver. He is the author of A Collective Blooming: The Rise Of The Mutual Aid Community and the host of The Lightfoot Podcast. You can sign up to his newsletter The Lightfoot Letter and also find him on Facebook.