At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State

Excerpts from: Sagan, Eli (1985). At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression, and the State. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

XX—Loyalty to the king & fear of his power to oppress are forms that go beyond kinship. So close was the connection between the breakdown of the kinship system and the rise of the state that, in my view, the state may be defined as that form of society in which nonkinship forms of social cohesion are as important as kinship forms. Why only a tyrannical monarch had the power to overthrow the kinship system is one of the fundamental questions raised in this book.

15—The reasons for inventing social forms such as kingship or a great political hierarchy are not so obvious to us. It would be enormously profitable to know what drives human beings to invent new ways of coming together politically.

74—It is of great importance to ask, and to try to answer, the questions why people invented a public sphere, why they were not content to stay only with kin, and what were the pleasures and costs of this movement away from kinship.

185—People create literature to satisfy, imaginatively, psychological needs. Culture and society are created for the same reason.

194—The universal psychological needs that drive the literary imagination to adopt certain basic archetypal motifs also drive society to create certain basic social and cultural forms. The institution of kingship was invented in a thousand places because there was a human need for that particular symbolism. Human society is a human creation. Whatever symbolic structures exist in the world must have existed first in the human psyche.

233—It is my belief that the universal human impulse toward individuation, toward separation from one’s immediate family, the inclination to live a life larger than that offered by the family experience, provided the force that drove this revolutionary process and put an end to band society.

293—There seems to have been a need to actualize in the real world a view of omnipotence. People felt better because someone was omnipotent, even though, and possible because, they were required to humble themselves before that awesome power.

301—It is my position that we cannot understand the whole process of the breakdown and transformation of the kinship system, the erection of chieftainship, and the eventual creation of monarchy and the state without postulating a powerful human drive to separate and individual from the mother, from the parents, from the kin.

303—The progressive process that goes from clan headman to centralized monarch is a process of increasing the power of the person at the head of society. As we move from headman to chief to king, the person at the top of the political system increasingly rules more people, increasingly begins to giver orders rather than ask for advice or consensus, and is increasingly potent enough to enforce his commands over the resistance of others. Individuals with enormous political power are the end result of the whole journey.

It would be a mistake to imagine that all this happens without the consent of the governed. If members of a society did not want this kind of authoritarian power to evolve, as those in primitive society did not, the whole process would have been stillborn. There is only one king in a centralized monarchy, but there may be hundred of governors and subgovernors and thousands of petty officials attached to power, and hundreds of thousands who, unable to separate and individuate themselves, identify with a monarch who seems capable of omnipotence. The lowliest person on the ladder wants that kind of power to exist in the world—for others if not for himself.

In reality the kabaka (king) of Muganda had the power, but in fantasy everyone could be a kabaka; so today in fantasy everyone can be a movie star, a great quarterback, a rock singer, or a Nobel Prize winner.

304—The drive to separate and individuate, the drive to create powerful individuals, is as potent as any force that drives the development of society. By itself it cannot explain the whole process that has transformed human beings from hunters and gatherers to twentieth-century post-industrial beings, but it is a fundamental constituent of that process.

In the first monarchies, in the first states, the first omnipotent human beings walked on the earth, not in mythic fantasy but in reality. The kind of power those first kings wielded had never before been experienced. It was created not only to oppress human beings but also to exalt them.

319-20—(On kingship & the dream of omnipotence): Nothing seems to matter except that what is done is done on a scale of which mere humans are incapable.

322—Many students of early kingship use words like “divine” or “godlike” to help us comprehend the nature of these monarchs. From a cultural-historical point of view, such an approach is backward. The God Yahweh was a highly elaborated and sublimated symbolic form, one of the foundations of which was the omnipotent kingship of complex and archaic societies.

Yahweh was so powerful because he was kinglike. Our God has an absolute control over life and death because the ideal of early kings was that they have such power. If God holds the ultimate domination over death, if it is he who giveth and taketh away, his predecessors in this terrible office were the omnipotent monarchs of the complex societies which preceded the archaic civilizations of the Near East.

So almighty were the kings of complex societies that they constantly exercised a prerogative that even Yahweh was not sure belonged to any creature, human or divine—the right to take human life in religious ritual. Human sacrifice was the ultimate certification of the power of early kings. On the island of Tahiti, ritual homicide makes kingship. The heir to the throne, from birth on, was the subject of a multitude of rituals: circumcision, presentation to the various districts of the kingdom, coming of age. At each occasion, one of several human victims was killed for the greater glory of the prince royal.

In fact, so powerful a sanction was human sacrifice, and so apparently necessary was it to chiefly authority, that some chiefs, upon being urged by Europeans to give up the practice, exclaimed, “If we do there will be no Chiefs”.

It is impossible, given a form as complicated as human sacrifice, to find a single cause for its existence in complex society. It undoubtedly served many functions, but certain things seem to be true: the society was intoxicated with the idea that some humans could become omnipotent, and the exercise of ritual homicide reinforced that dream.

Such an extreme concentration of human potency would require equally exceptional rituals of obeisance from ordinary people.

323—In a democratic society, we have more sublimated ways to handle our panic and anger when we discover we are being ruled by those who cannot deliver omnipotence. No one gets elected if he or she merely hints that the omnipotence to solve all problems may not exist. Our journey in the large, nonkinship world is more frightening that we consciously allow; unconscious, we are insistently searching for all-powerful magical charms to keep us safe. Leadership without magic seems to threaten our existence.

327—The function of kings was to have people in the world who did not have to give up anything. This childlike power they wielded unfortunately brought death to others.

328—The break away from kinship-system society was obviously too difficult to be made by ordinary political process. Nothing short of an ideal of omnipotence could turn a million years of human history.

330—The “fear of freedom” that many have talked of really is a fear deep within everyone’s psyche that existence is not possible without omnipotence, that the full democratic life that puts an end to the dream of absolute power is itself merely a dream.

352—If one is an aristocrat living in a society whose highest members are in the process of liberating themselves from the kinship system, and if this liberation, as it must, produces a profound separation anxiety in each individual as well as in the aristocratic collectivity, inwardly an intense ambivalence about whether to make such advance will manifest itself. A part of the psyche of these new leaders of society will be anxious to plunge headlong back into the cozy ambiance of kinship solidarity.

The other part of the psyche will insist on marching forward into the sunrise of individualism and the state, and will hurl the usual invectives against the impulses of regression within the self: Impotent coward! Child! Woman! One solution to the sometimes unbearable anxiety and ambivalence is to catch a poor, weak peasant on the highway—a man who has not even begun to liberate himself from kinship attachments, a man who stands for all the cowardly, childish, womanish longings within oneself—and to cut his throat as an offering for the gods. Not only does one kill, thereby, the regressive passions within oneself; one also kills a representative of those—the kinship family—who are intent (so it seems) on drawing one back.

354—In the symbiotic stage, however (the child) cannot conceive of existence apart from the mother. The child exists and the mother exists, but neither, in the child’s view, can maintain life without the other.

358—People in our present society who wish a child to become successful have no choice in the rapprochement crisis except to bar the doors to regression and sternly announce to the child, “Forward march!”

As separation anxiety grows, the child entertains the idea of regression to the symbiotic stage as a mode of lessening anxiety. But this impulse, in turn, leads to a fear of re-engulfment by the mother, so that the child becomes trapped between two conflicting anxieties. This unavoidable intense ambivalence leads to a greater frequency of temper tantrums in almost all eighteen-month-old children.

The tantrum child also directs intense anger at itself, furious that it is experiencing desires to stay engulfed by the mother. The king in complex societies, who is the leader of the movement of separation from the kinship system, is expected, as we have seen, to indulge in tantrum behavior. He, too, is struggling against the fear of re-engulfment.

359-360—(Citing Mahler):

We believe a stable image of a father or of another substitute of the mother, beyond the eighteen-month mark and even earlier, is beneficial and perhaps a necessary prerequisite to neutralize and to counteract the toddler’s age—characteristic oversensitivity to the threat of re-engulfment by the mother.

We tend to think of the father too one-sidedly as the castrating figure, a kind of bad mother image in the preoedipal period. Loewald, to our knowledge, was the first to emphasize that, “against the threat of the maternal engulfment, the paternal position is not another threat or danger, but a support of powerful force.” If there is a relative lack of support on the part of either parent a re-engulfment of the ego into the whirlpool of the primary undifferentiated symbiotic stage becomes a true threat.

We begin to understand why it is the king who leads the attack on the kinship system and becomes the bulwark against the fear of reengulfment by it. For the small child, the mother is an omnipotent being—an all-powerful, all-providing, all-protecting, all-loving, all-hating entity. As the child begins to separate and individuate from the mother it begins to recognize that she is not a divinity but a person. This is frightening news, because the child thinks it must now stand completely on its own.

The panic of having to live without omnipotent support drives the child back toward the symbiotic stage, but here again the fear of re-engulfment, the fear of losing all the gains of individuation, keeps the average child from total retreat. One solution appropriate for this stage of development, something Mahler does not discuss, is to transfer the old omnipotence from the mother to the father. He now becomes the all-powerful provider of life’s necessities, and since he is not the mother, he does not present the same threat of symbiotic re-engulfment.

In the father, the child seeks to discover what we all long for: omnipotent support without the threat of symbiotic regression. That is why all kings, especially those in advanced complex societies, where the separation from the mother-kinship system is so recent, assume an omnipotent stance. And that is why most supreme divinities, especially in advanced religions, are fathers.

In the midst of this trade-off, however, something sinister occurs. The father, the king, the noble, all recognize that they now hold a tyrannical power back by the ultimate threat: Do as we say, or you will be thrown back into the maelstrom, sucked into re-engulfment, drowned in symbiosis; it is we, and only we, who stand between you and annihilation of your individuality; mothers will eat you if you leave our protection. It is no wonder the male tyranny over women and men, once established, held and holds such dominion over human life.

362—There is a crucial correlation between the xenophobia exhibited by most primitive peoples and the stranger anxiety that Mahler observed as recurring during the rapprochement crisis:

There was a recurrence in many children of stranger reactions. As in the earlier stranger reactions (at 7 to 9 months) we could observe a mixture of anxiety, interest, and curiosity. Now there was often a self-conscious turning away from the stranger, as if the stranger at this point constituted a threat to the already toppling delusion or illusion of exclusive union with the mother.

Faced with this conflict and ambivalence, primitive society excluded the stranger and sought reunion with the mother.

371—Once we observe that the child has the capacity—the necessity—to symbolize the two most important “objects” in its world, mother and father, we can see that the whole family situation can be generalized and symbolized even further. Society is the result of that capacity and necessity. Social action, in great part, is the attempt to work out family psychological problems on a higher level of abstraction. The ability to move to this higher level is a measure of psychic health. Without society, the burden of human pathology might be unbearable.

Included within the symbol-making capacity is the faculty to create symbolic transformations. All forms of social cohesion are based upon kinship and are descended from kinship. Patriotism, the sense of nationhood, love of country are important forms of social cohesion even in the most modern of twentieth-century societies; and yet all of these feelings are a direct transformation of the conceptions of kinship. State forms of social cohesion are kinship forms and not kinship forms. They are symbolic transformations of kinship, but a thing and its symbolic transformation are not identical.

375—People find it enormously difficult to live without kinship-system supports, or at least without an omnipotent ruler who will reassure us and assuage our anxieties. The “fear of freedom” is a separation anxiety caused by the loosening of the bonds of kinship.

379—I want to postulate a primary autonomy for the structure of the psyche that determines its potential developmental progress, and I want to suggest that the structure of social development does not have the same autonomous existence. Its structure is dependent upon something that is not social, which is the psyche itself. This brings us back to the categorical statement made earlier: the development of the psyche is the paradigm for the development of society and culture.

382—The myth of primitive man’s fighting a daily battle against the constant threat of starvation and losing that struggle with great frequency no longer has any validity. We have even discovered that the Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert in Africa, the most hostile of environments, who were supposedly living the most marginal of existences, spend at most 60% of their days in the hunting and gathering of food. Such, and similar, information has led Marshall Sahlins to declare half-ironically that hunters and gatherers were “the original affluent society.” It seems clear that the threat of starvation did not launch human society on the path that eventually led to complex monarchies

383—What seems plausible is that the energy that drives the whole history of the world is the force of the psyche struggling to fulfill its developmental destiny.