In part 1 of this article, the internal socio-economic form of hierarchical mass societies based upon agriculture, were shown to comprise of a top-down authoritarian class structure. The external relationships with the rest of life on earth (nature) are such that in order to maintain or increase the population numbers of this particular economic form, a certain existential logic unfolds. The life support resource requirements of its class structures will sooner or later, require increasing amounts of land and resources to meet them. Therefore, if the only extra organic and inorganic resources available are already fully supporting another human (or plant, insect or animal) community then it becomes obvious that to survive as discrete species systems both human communities must struggle to possess and control these vital resources. Forests, must be cut down, animal herds, insect colonies and human communities will be disturbed or dispersed to make way for fields of intensive planting or animal grazing. Human communities, therefore, by either defending existing resources or by conquering new ones, would tend to become even more authoritarian and even fascistic, than when not faced with an existential crisis. Nevertheless, when they are, a war of some kind both within or between communities would ensue.

In most cases, the decision to expand will be taken by the respective elites regardless of any previous ideological stances or preferences individuals may have because it stems from the logic of the hierarchical mass society system. The fierce ownership and/or control of extra land and resources needed by the expanding community, arises therefore, not from an abstract intellectual desire, but from an existential imperative. The historical record of European hierarchical mass societies over several thousand years, stretching from ancient Sumer to the Roman empire, provides evidence that if the existential imperative is strong enough, these societies will exhibit periods of fascistic intolerance and genocidal extermination of anything or anyone standing in their way. Moreover, in the last four decades, with the global population expanding by billions, the symptoms of this logic have again reappeared. An increasing number of hierarchical mass societies have moved away from left-democratic forms of authoritarian governance toward right wing and openly military backed authoritarian regimes. Russia and Israel are just the latest example of the trend of establishing authoritarian forms of governance and forcible resource-grabbing tendencies which are already embodird in the regimes governing North Korea, Turkey, India, Pakistan, Iran, Indonesia, Syria and Saudi Arabia, etc..
Genocide becomes generic.

Thus crimes against humanity in their most extreme form of genocide are not the occasional wayward aberration they may seem to be from a less than comprehensive consideration of them, but a necessary part of the development (or further development) of any kind of hierarchical mass society. The facile nonsense that war between human communities is somehow ‘in the blood’ of humanity (I read that again this week in a left journal!!! RR) or the superstitious nonsense that ‘evil’ is part of the bedeviled human psyche, just demonstrates that Victorian levels of relative ignorance are still circulating in 2024. Those who utter or write such banalities have not bothered to discover and fully understand either the bio-chemical essence of life on earth nor the socio-economic structures of human societies. The only things circulatihg in blood are cells, microorganisms, minerals, assorted other nutritional materials required for distribution around the body of animals to their various organs or the occasional absorption of a virus. Evil is just an invented term to fill or cover a large gap of ignorance concerning human motivations. Despite any spurious triggers or flashpoints, wars and crimes are the results of the existential needs of hierarchical mass society elites and other individuals to take from other communities more resources than they already have, or to prevent other such societies from grabbing them first.

Moreover, this socio-economic logic, outlined in more detail above, will unfold whether the needy or greedy hierarchical society elite identify themselves as Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Socialist, Communist, Fascist or by a geographically located National identity. In this way, “the project that commits genocide in our name.” which the Jewish writer quoted in part 1 (and many others before) wished to be free from, is a hierarchical mass society form in general but in that case with an ethnically concentrated Jewish population. The formation of a Jewish identity cohering around a hierarchical mass society form, like any other human sub-group identity (i.e. German, French, Spanish, American, Russian, etc.) is itself the project which commits genocide in the ‘name’ of its socially chosen structure. Furthermore, every ‘project’ of determined nationalism has antecedents leading up to its ‘final solution’ in genocide.

The Jewish/Israeli final solution to ‘their’ Palestinian problem is now nearly complete. It is in it’s late ‘stage-management‘ phase which is being ably assisted by the holocaust alliance led by the elites of US, UK, France and Germany. Their fake concern for Palestinian loss of life and their pretence of censure against Israel will continue for some time until it is unnecessary and its all gone and forgotten and the elites on all sides (including Hamas elites) having sacrificed their pawns, will move on in their hierarchical mass society positions. Meanwhile as usual, because killing and conquest is fundamentally abhorrent to practically every normal human being, particularly when perpetrated on a mass scale, there becomes a need for the ‘thinkers’ of each developing hierarchical mass society system to create a convincing ideological justification for engaging in it. Conquest, dispossesion and the killing of those human beings already occupying the desired land and resources has to be justified before, during or after the main genocidal events.

Ideological justifications.

Such prior or post ideological justifications for conquest and dispossesion invariably comprise of the following two anthropocentric focussed elements. A) The manufacture of reasons why the targeted community do not deserve the land and resources they currently control. (Reasons of religious superiority such as ‘Our god gave us this particular land, not you’;) This can also involve an intellectually constructed dehumanisation of the targeted group. (Such as; ‘you are an inferior/uneducated people’); B) The manufacture of a superior categoral definition in order to elevate the status of the conquering group above the needs of the targeted group. (Such as; ‘We are Yahweh’s/Allah’s chosen people’; ‘We are ‘civilised’ you are no better than animals.’ .) The reader can confirm the ruthless continuity of this intellectual pattern of de-humanisation of other humans by doing their own research on the practical history of ancient and modern society conquests, dispossessions, tortures, rapes, killings and enslavements of human beings and their resources.

The historical and contemporary evidence validating the above assertions I have made here is overwhelming, conclusive and very easy to locate and verify in libraries and on internet sources. Similarly, the material on the dehumanisation of the ‘other’, the ideology of racism, the imagined superiority or inferiority of pale or dark-skinned people in the past and current colonisation and financial control of Africa, the America’s and Asia is easily available. That together with material on the imagined partisan superiority of each religion over all other religions, and the long history of distorted mentality of ‘killing in the name of God’ are all readily and easily available. Interestingly, the written evidence on these characteristics are all easily available because more often than not the original authors of the religious and secular histories of these systems (and their modern counterparts) were (and often still are) actually proud of, and boast about, the genocidal acts and ‘great’ conquests of their ancient and less ancient ancestors.

From this historical record it is not difficult to conclude that the so-called modern European and North American ‘values’ are elite values and are fundamentally values of a hierarchical privilege to exploit their own citizens, dispossess colonised people and to exercise extreme forms of financial control over foreign communities. In order to justify this practice to themselves and others, the realities of oppression and exploitation are intellectually distorted and misrepresented as ‘economic necessity’, ‘civilised progress’ and the promotion of ‘democratic sensibilities’. But from a natural, evolutionary and non-European, non-Anglo-Saxon perspective these values are neither necessary, progressive, democratic or natural. Evolutionary logic and archaeological evidence suggests that over many multiple generations, a species of hominid, developed from within the animal species of social life forms and gradually became fully bipedal.

For hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years these ‘stone age’ hominid species sustained a voluntary form of cooperative living in bands and tribes which spread across the planet and this species eventually evolved into our present homo sapien form. Later still in a number of places, some members of those voluntary forms of cooperative human living (also using only stone and bone tools) engaged in the most talented, ambitious and unique forms of cooperation. They did so by collaborating together to build megalithic structures of immense size and sophistication such as Stone Henge in the UK and numerous other ‘henge’s’, stone circles and huge mounds around Europe and elsewhere. Parts of South and North America also had similar structures.

Imagine there’s no Country..

I maintain that these Megalithic structures were a series of voluntary-association community builds, because the means of compelling any such large-scale cooperative ways of living and working were lacking prior and during, those long stone age periods. To compel animals, human or otherwise, to do things that are beyond what they consider is necessary to survive, that are not pleasurable and are not ‘natural’ requires a system of shackling and punishment. Moreover, such compulsion needs to be administered by a separate armed and determined contingent within any human community. If such fundamental divisions and enforcement techniques within communities are lacking, the animal labour force or the human community members needed to labour excessively just get up and leave any situation which they have not fully agreed to become part of. This is why slaves and animals used as compulsory labour forces were chained and shackled day and night or locked away in the caves, dungeons and stock yards of ancient Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome. It is also why slaves were shackled and whipped when the large-scale practice of slavery reappeared in the New World and Asian colonies of 17th, 18th and 19th century administered by elites in Britain and in other European nations.

Incidentally, it is also within the above noted ancient hierarchical mass societies, based in Europe and the Fertile Crescent region of the Middle East, that the ideologies of superior people, exceptionalism and entitlement to plunder were initiated on the basis of this hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation. Unsurprisingly, therefore, such ideological expressions of what was actually taking place within and between the rising city states in the region, eventually became embodied in the triad of Abrahamic monotheistic religious belief systems. Consequently, the Abrahamic God in the guise of the Jewish, Christian and Islamic monotheistic personifications, became the mythical dispenser of real-estate acquisitions in the minds of some hierarchical mass society elites of that period. In resource acquisitions and transfers within the ancient Mediteranean and Middle Eastern region, the winning sides elites invariably claimed God had both willed the conflict and assisted them. Even the Jewish secular elite heading up the 2024 Israeli genocidal destruction of the Palestinian people could not resist utilising the Jewish Torah (Bible) narrative of the Jewish destruction of the rival tribe of Amalek.

So the term “exterminate all the brutes”, used in much later centuries by the author Conrad to sum up the attitude of the European colonisers on the African continent to those ‘natives’ who resisted them, is symptomatic of the attitudes developed within the hierarchical mass society form of human aggregation as far back as ‘by the rivers of Babylon. The term ‘brutes’ was just a more modern version of the ancient hierarchical mass society attitude toward indigenous communities who already peopled territory and controlled assets coveted by rival hierarchies. It is perhaps no accident that the pioneers of European colonialism were a mix of those ruthlesly and persistently seeking to extract material wealth and those ruthlessly and persistently seeking to extract conversions from pagan belief systems to their own version of the Abrahamic monotheisms of Judaism, Christianity or Islam. Religious ideology since then has been as much of a tool of elite social control as the sword or gun. From the ancient period to the modern, the elites of all three Abrahamic religions, whilst assisting in building hierarchical mass societies in the form of tribes or nations, considered themselves the upholders of superior versions of a ‘true’ form of belief. From that period on they have addressed themselves enthusiastically to the process of relieving other communities of their land, goods and often their lives. The practice of ‘killing in the name of God” as well as in the name of the nation, started way back then and continues to this day.

Although monotheistic religions did not initiate hierarchical mass society building their elites and followers have done nothing to prevent it. They merely adopted the previously established pagan pattern of genocidal elimination of the ‘other’ and the pillaging of their their naturally and socially acquired resources. What the previous conquering pagan elites in Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome had normalised was enthusiastically adopted by the religious elites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam when they took over the unnatural social pyramid they had inherited and continues because of its internal logic. . What has yet to dawn on those who subscribe to these belief systems, is that the intellectualised categories of division among the human species, such as religion, nationality and race are also neither natural nor essential. They are just entirely made up categories invented by a species, that for many generations has lacked a level of wisdom and understanding commensurate with the level its technical capabilities. For those who doubt this assertion, just consider the following.

And no religion too.

Even a superficial consideration of the evolution of life on earth leads to the following conclusion. That throughout the previous 100, 000 year period of natural human evolution between the hominid stage and the Homo sapien stage, there were no such thing as institutionalised religions. Indeed, for hundreds of thousands of years prior to that pre-historic period of hominid and human existence there is absolutely no basis or evidence for religious or secular belief systems – of any set in stone kind. Humanity for hundreds of thousands of years had no option but to aggregate in relatively small numbers until the advent of large-scale farming or fishing. Furthermore, outside of Europe and the Middle East, there existed no institutionalised Abrahamic religions in the rest of the globe until during the 16th century period of colonial exploration and colonisation when European based religious and national identities were exported and imposed upon indigenous peoples.

At certain points in the evolution of our homo sapien ancestors (approximately ten thousand years ago) some human communities commenced to live either seasonally or permanently in settled communities based increasingly on obtaining nutrition from agricultural crops and animal herding. Written historical evidence suggests that by five or six thousand years ago some settled human societies had begun to form into independent hierarchical social structures, with an embryonic three-class (or multiple caste) system replacing the earlier hunter-gatherer egalitarian social structures. Humans organised in these settled social formations were grouped into an upper class of elites who governed; a lower class of agricultural, mine, quarry and craft workers; a middle sector located socially between the elite and the workers, who became administrators/organisers. In some hierarchical mass societies the divisions were further sub-divided into separate categories such as in India with its multiple Caste divisions based upon occupational categories. It is from the genesis of this hierarchical mass society model, that the divisions, competition and unreconcilable antagonisms within humanity began and all the characteristics noted in the first five paragraphs of this second article on the Genesis of Genocide, commenced.

Incidentally, the failure to fully understand the socio-economic dynamic of hierarchical mass societies is also why the modern middle classes think the global climate crisis can be solved by nationally organised reductions in fossil fuel use. Yet this COP strategy is bound to fail – and indeed is already failing. The elites of each hiearchical mass society and their citizens are almost exclusively focussed on their own particular (and often) internally conflicting needs and interests and they will continue to prioritise these. It is precisely how these hierarchical mass society systems have been designed to function. Consequently their elites cannot operate in any other way, nor do they wish to alter their status or the system which benefits them disproportionally Their one and only overriding task is to ‘conserve‘ the present hierarchical socio-economic system – at all costs. This fact should be glaringly obvious by now. If during 2024, the international elite can manage to put so little effort into preventing a whole human society from being almost totally wiped out by industrial levels of genocide in Gaza, then continuing to put very little effort into reducing their extraction, production, consumption, pollution and energy use will continue.

So when, and while, other communities are being slowly or rapidly decimated and even destroyed by climate change-induced heat or floods or other forms of eco-system collapses or human ‘manufactured’ disasters, the fact that elites will be focussing exclusively on their own welfare and their preferred system, will simply be par for the course. Indeed, despite all the current climate, pollution and ecocide ‘writing on the wall’, practically every hierarchical mass society elite in the global network of such societies in 2023 and 2024 have devised plans to increase their national productivity and the levels of their economic output and this includes increasing the levels of ‘ready for action’ military weapons production. Even while engaging rhetorically with climate and pollution related issues during one part of the day, (or week) at another part of the day (or week) they are are engaged in introducing national measures and practices which increase the international problem.

Living life as one.

Viewed from within the intellectual and anthropocentric cultural confines of the hierarchical mass society systems themselves, the tasks facing humanity are primarily conservative. They are to conserve the entire hierarchical socio-economic global social system in its current conceited form defined as – ‘civilisation’! In contrast, viewed from the ecological and humanist perspective on ‘life on earth’ – as a whole – the tasks facing humanity are revolutionary. There is an urgent need to revolutionise the relationship of humanity to it’s own species, by replacing competition with cooperation: and to revolutionise the relationship of humanity to the rest of the currently ‘unbalanced’ systems of life on earth. Recreating an economic system which does not undermine the balance between natural reproduction rates and the consumption of them by humanity is a task requiring globally integrated cooperation. To implement the latter, humanity must eliminate the current hierarchical socio-economic system or the current hierarchical system will continue to eliminate humanity directly by wars and also indirectly by continuing to eliminate the life-support networks supplied by plant, insect and animal forms of life on earth.

The ideologies of Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism which for the last several thousand years in Europe and the Middle East have been the additional elite based rationalisations for prejudice, discrimination and warfare were unknown to humanity until these organised religions were created in that region roughly two or three thousand years ago. The whole billion year old evolution of nature and all its species – including the human species – existed without hierarchical mass societies and without organised religion for 99% of its evolutionary development. The ideology of nationalism is even more recent and again all species evolving within nature (including the human species) existed for 99% of their evolutionary period of existence without the social form of nation states.

Finally, the invented categories of ethnicities and race among the human species is of even more recent construction. Religion, Ethnicity, Nationalism and Race are the intellectually invented ‘idols’ of an anthropocentric obsession which are currently naively worshipped and need to be abandoned. These socially devised categories played no part in the past evolution of life on earth nor in the biological evolution of the human species either and can play no positive part in the future of humanity or of life on earth in general. They have led literally and metaphorically to dead ends for past generations of humanity and now threated a dead end for multiple complex forms of life on earth. The only project of any current and future value for humanity is the project of pursuing an international solidarity of the human species and creating a movement among us dedicated to changing what goes on now and what has gone on in the past by ecologically balancing the global modes of production. There is an existential need to end and reverse the current causes of climate change, ecological destruction, pollution and the self-destructive path that elite humanity has imposed upon human life in particular and the whole of ‘life on earth’ in general.

Roy Ratcliffe (June 2024)