When I asked you to articulate what you thought you’d lost, you said, as a first pass:

the potential to be a roving band of adventurers, the intimidating and sexily toughened skin we might have developed if we’d been able to hack coming to understand what it was we ourselves actually wanted, the motivation that arises from being surrounded by a group who have been through ‘it’ together.

But I notice that your suggestion, that there’s a trade-off in modern life between the group’s ability to know itself and the group’s ability to act, is incompatible with this. I seem to be grasping at the idea that there should be some strengthened ability to act from that very self-knowledge, although it’s coupled with disruptions short term social harmony. Do we disagree here or is there something else going on?

At a high level, we don’t disagree; something else is going on. My sense is that you’re sketching a model of ‘group agency’ which is generated (largely) from within the post-modern/post-agrarian cultural milieu. I’m trying to sketch an alternative model of group (and individual) agency which is

1. totally orthogonal to the (predominantly Western) post-agrarian tradition;
2. within the bounds of what we know homo sapiens can do, cognitively & culturally, individually & together; &
3. robustly functional & healthy now and in the immediate future.

This project is tricky to communicate for a few reasons.

First, you and I are both in that (predominantly Western) post-agrarian tradition. This is water. When we beg the King for our freedom, we speak in the King’s own language.

Second, while ethnographic evidence mostly sucks, any project that seeks to ground itself in the ‘concretely possible’ of homo sapiens by necessity relies on the ethnographic record. We can’t engineer cultural practices from a first-principles understanding of culture. At best, all we can do is point to the traces left behind by other humans and call them ‘existence proofs’ for different kinds of relations.

Third, a central pathology of the dysfunctional & unhealthy—in this domain, at least—is the belief that ‘robustly functional & healthy’ is a myth. When I say ‘this domain’, I mean the psychological states that are common to normies in this somewhat-traumatising-by-default thing-that-also-generated-godlike-technologies-and-powers which we call modern Western culture. Hurt people hurt people, and there’s a lot of hurt people telling each other that hurting & being hurt is universal.

In spite of the trickiness, today, I’m going to try to communicate my current view in two parts. In the first part, I’ll give you my best account in abstract language. In the second part, I’ll recapitulate the view by talking about soldiers, motorbikes, and a bit more D&D. I do all this because the thing I’m calling my ‘current view’ is, to borrow a phrase, “an abstractum that cannot be separated from its concreta”.

Abstractum

Okay. Here’s my current best reckon.

If you first specify that a given group is mostly composed of people who:

1. were raised in modern industrial civilisation;
2. aspire to any version of ‘status’ or ‘success’ in the lower-middle-, middle-, upper-middle-, or upper-class hierarchies of their society; &
3. are not extremely psychologically abnormal,

Then there is a predictable trade-off between

1. that group’s ability to communicate openly & honestly about the reality of their own internal social relations, &
2. that group’s ability to ‘win’ in meaningful-to-them ways in interactions with the wider ‘outside world’ that exists beyond the bounds of that group.

I think this trade-off is present unless some pretty extreme measures are taken to cause that given group to become ‘agentic’. Insofar as those ‘extreme measures’ are taken, I think they’re

1. mostly taken in (relatively isolated) subcultures within modern industrial civilisation;
2. only enabled by the wider modern industrial civilisation insofar as that wider civilisation benefits from the resulting agency; &
3. only tolerated by the wider modern industrial civilisation insofar as that wider civilisation is able to fictionalise & mythologise the process of taking the measures (and the ‘kinds of people’ who take them), and is able to criminalise & pathologise the effects.

I also think that—relative to different, less traumatised cultural contexts—the ‘extreme measures’ we’re talking about (usually) only create a kind of ‘hollow shell’ of agency: within narrow bounds, such measures are capable of generating groups which ‘get shit done’ and ‘play to win’ and ‘trust each other’ and ‘coordinate and collaborate’, but they’re not capable of doing so while keeping the epistemics & ontologics of the participating humans fully intact.

In other words: I don’t think it’s possible to take a group of ‘normal’ people from our peer group and ‘make them agentic’ in the way we’ve been describing without also (a) making them super-extra-newly traumatised, or (b) making them ‘weird’ in novel ways that would destroy their ability to ‘be successful’ all the spaces that previously regarded them as ‘normal’.

To be clear: my claims are contingent, not universal.

I’m saying that there was a set of cultural practices that was common to fixed agrarian modes of living. I’m saying that this set of cultural practices was transformed in post-Enlightenment Europe, and became extreme (and near-universal) in industrial post-modernity.

I’m saying that, right now, in a toxic This Is Water kind of way, most people are systematically incurious about The Forces That Got Humanity This Far. They’re also systematically incurious about the cultural practices and cognitive affordances that Actually Keep The Lights On today.

I’m saying that I think that the modern institutions that enculturate ‘normal adults’ are de facto chronically traumatising.

I’m saying that phrases like “Capitalism is destroying the world” and “human nature was always like this” are thought-stoppers.

I’m saying that it obviously wasn’t always like this. I’m saying it was otherwise, could be otherwise, is otherwise elsewhere, etc.

I’m saying that robust group & individual agency is natural in most healthy adult humans, but so uncommon today that it is treated with an admixture of venomous suspicion and jealous lust.

I’m saying that the most cursory reading of ethnography, or archaeology, or longue durée history—or even just the history of material technological development—provides ample evidence of ‘agency’ as default mode.

I’m saying that we should both be curious and precise about everyone’s incuriosity and compulsive vagueness.

In that sense, I don’t think we disagree.

Concreta

In our previous letters, we’ve talked about the depictions of the military men of the early SAS, and about some of the tensions between bureaucracy, small-group agency, and State violence. Despite my best efforts, I’ve got a few family friends who had careers in the Australian SASR. One story is illustrative.

(A cloud necessarily hangs over the following anecdote, but I’ll tell it anyway.)

As our Career SASR Operator tells it, he was [overseas] on a multi-day mission. As part of this mission, his team had to make a river crossing at night. To make the river crossing safely and quickly, they needed another Australian soldier—not from their team, but from their side—to solve a few logistics problems ahead of time. In the planning of the mission, he said he would, but, once they were out there, our Career SASR Operator discovered that The Other Soldier hadn’t. The boat wasn’t exactly where it was supposed to be, at the time that it was supposed to be there. By the time the team unfucked the situation, they were crossing the river in dawn light. The mission still went fine, and nobody even saw them cross, but it was an extra kink and a (probabilistically) dangerous delay.

As our Career SASR Operator tells it, when the team got back to base, he pulled The Other Soldier aside.

“This was our first time working together,” our Career says he says, “so maybe you didn’t know how this works, but if you fuck up like that again, I’ll kill you myself.”

Now, The Other Soldier was technically his superior, and also on his side, so every civilian who hears this story asks the same question: “But you wouldn’t actually have killed him, right?”

To which our Career replies, visibly confused, “Of course I would have. Without a second thought. And any one of my guys would have.”

I think our Career’s reply is a plausibly honest.

When I say that it’s possible to take extreme measures in order to create a ‘hollow shell’ of agency, the worldview that I think is created is one which replies like this. To a first approximation, I think that agency was created inside the skull of our Career, and all his teammates. On closer inspection, I think it’s obvious that the agency created is a low-fidelity simulation of a healthier, less violent, un-traumatised, more natural view.

I’ve said as much before:

Modern states such as America and Australia rely heavily on small teams of highly-trained, ‘special’ forces to enact the most personal violence. And it’s a fraught affair. First, as far as I can tell, modern States find themselves in need of extremely specialised, personalised, high-precision forms of personal violence. The occasional Achilles, in addition to a cop. First, the State tries to (re)construct low-fidelity simulacra of Men Like Achilles from a subset the already-usefully-traumatised-and-reliable mass of ordinary soldiers. This doesn’t work, or rarely does, and so the system instead resigns itself to selecting people who can’t or won’t submit to ordinary military structures and—at a kind of strange “arm’s length” remove—allows the older and more experienced of these to recruit, train, instruct, and direct the younger and less experienced ones. Provided these small teams are sufficiently violent in useful-to-the-State ways, they’re given the resources and freedom to develop a kind of parallel culture. It barely interfaces with the normal military, because it barely can. Inside a given team, one sees largely structureless, formal-hierarchy-disrespecting, positive-sum interactions; members of these communities believe, fundamentally, that every person and thing ‘outside’ their group is mere environment or terrain (and so not morally relevant). Including their ostensible commanders.

For the kind of person I’m calling ‘a genuinely healthy adult human’, the game is ‘Players vs Environment’, and the set of ‘Players’ includes all other humans & intelligent agents. We’re all working together, in positive sum ways, to get wins against a harsh Outside.

For the kind of person who is regarded as ‘normal’ today, the game is “Player vs Player”. While a few people talk around this ‘reality’, a common strategy in the (perceived) competition is pretending that no game is taking place. (Sound familiar yet?)

For our Career SASR Operator—who began as (modern) ‘normal’ and then was re- moulded, via further trauma, as a post-modern simulation of ‘genuine healthy adult human’—everyone outside his Team is ‘mere environment’; everyone inside can be trusted absolutely. Why kill The Other Soldier in the anecdote? Well, why not? The Other Soldier is just Harsh Environment. You’ve gotta protect your edge and play to win. The Other Soldier is, here, little more than a problem to be (quickly) overcome.

This relation to a ‘harsh environment’ brings me to my second concretum: motorbike licences.

If you want to travel, there are a range of strategies for relating to the material reality of terrain that is large and sparse. At one extreme, you have a worldview rooted in ‘generally staying put, but taking as much as possible with you when you move’. You can call this the ‘coffee machine in your caravan’ strategy. At the other extreme, you have a worldview in which being ‘on the move’ is synonymous with ‘life’, and one must travel obsessively, philosophically light. I think of this as the strategy of ‘keeping small bag packed’.

It’s notable, I think, that the question “Has anybody here got a motorbike licence?” is synonymous, in Australian military slang, with handing out the shit job. Having a motorbike licence is a competence, but one which will get you tricked into low status work.

It’s notable also, I think, that motorcycles are tightly entangled with ‘outlaw’ status. To travel on a motorbike is to travel light, alone even when in a group.

In a recent conversation, I found myself expressing this pattern in the language of D&D. In Australia, bikes (and perhaps beat-up old utes) are in the standard starting equipment list for most PCs; houses with Hills Hoistsand caravans ‘with the lot’ are in the starting equipment list for NPCs. In a denser terrain—even America—a motorbike is only in the starting equipment for the Rogue class, and Chaotic Evil NPCs.

Why such signals? In part, because ‘travelling light’ means choosing to forgo ‘the right tool for the job’. It means making do with a more abstract multitool: one’s own capacity to solve problems; one’s ability to process novel information, rather than act as a cog in a well-oiled machine; one’s ability to handle complexity; the generalised grey matter affordance in one’s skull.

Yet all of this pales in comparison to the level of agentic sensibleness that’s captured in, say, a group of five old women surviving for five days, in the desert, at the height of summer. Even in the face of centuries of colonial cultural genocide, it seems obvious that the worldview of those women was (and is) agentic and ‘in contact with reality’. The ability to think and act, individually and together, is not necessarily hard or rare.