New World Order University Forum

Review of Marvin Harris, Cannibals and Kings, New York: Random House, 1977.

Marvin Harris became one of the most influential populizers of anthropology on the basis of his historical analysis in Cultural Materialism and Cannibals and Kings. Harris theorizes about the formation of the strong state systems that dominate history. He believes that agriculture arose from the depletion of large animals in various ecological environments and that animal domestication and agriculture arose together as innovative solutions to the problem of declining big-game herds. These two innovations gave the competitive edge to settled populations over bands of hunters and forced the hunters to domesticate. In the large river valley systems, rising populations then began to exceed the capacity for herd animals to supply protein to everyone. This led to a variety of cultural adaptations, including vegetarianism (for the lower castes) in India and cannibalism in Aztec Mexico.

Harris’ analysis is based on the relationships between animal food supply in ecosystems and more or less constant rising population pressure as the main dynamics driving cultural innovation and adaptation. Harris credits these twin “pressures” with forcing human inventiveness and technological innovation.

Harris devotes a lot of discussion to primitive methods of fertility control, including geronticide, infanticide, delaying pregnancy through extended lactation, delaying menarche, infanticide from neglect, as well as more familiar abortion and birth control measures. Harris believes these practices were needed due to the sheer productivity of human reproduction, everywhere and always. We found this discussion to be most interesting as we had not given attention previously to the shadowy history of female-centered fertility control.

Harris interprets religion mainly in terms of animal protein control (priesthoods gaining control over animal sacrifices and sanctioning human sacrifices), thus serving as rational allocators of resources in the constant battle between human reproductive capacity and the food limits of particular environments.

However one approaches ancient history, Harris is a provocative author as he deals frankly with the unpleasant realities of early humans engaged in the struggle for food and fertility control. We also like Harris’ characterization of large civilizations as essentially organized for the pleasure of the powerful elites while the masses of humanity served as slaves or serfs with long workdays and very few rewards. Harris contrasts the long workday schedules of man under civilization with the leisure options of men in hunter bands and makes a case that life as a hunter was much preferable to life under Caesar or pharaoh or the Chinese emperors, even with civilization’s advances in technology. Harris believes the exploitation of the worker continued under industrialism, so modern technological innovation and state-centered socialism have not solved the problem of modern resource scarcity versus ancient resource abundance that our first ancestors enjoyed. This observation may have been somewhat true in nineteenth-century Europe and in Communist developing economies, but Harris’ model breaks down under modern economics.

Harris also has a brief introductory discussion of the hydrology theories of Karl Wittfogel, and he observes that Wittfogel rebutted Marxism, which Harris recognizes as just another form of state-dominated slavery. However, Harris’ cultural determinism belongs to the line Malthus-Darwin-Marx, the attempt to make a science of history. Harris has not liberated himself from the errors of scientific determinism, he remains firmly in this camp. As we pointed out in The Hidden Masters, all attempts to make a science of history have resulted in pseudo-science.

It’s funny that the main error of the anthropologists is not walking across the hall to have a conversation with the historians. Historians rejected scientific history as false decades ago. That scientific determinism can remain as a basis for anthropology is a measure of how corrupt the universities are.

Harris wrote recently, during the reign of Cultural Marxism over the universities. But Neo-marxism is a confused mess, now contaminated with Freudism, occultism, feminism, parallel universism, global warming and other junk sciences, dope smokism, nasty global socialist overspendism into unmanageable debtism, deep eco death goddess worship, economic ignorantism, Zizekism, Lacanism, multiculturalism, Hollywood distort historyism, Obamaism, child abuse gayism, and what’s in it for meism. We’ve sorted our way through this mess in previous posts. There’s nothing of value in it.

But before we get to the really stupid ideas Harris promotes, let’s have a look at his main ideas about cultural evolution driven by resource shortages. We find this material compelling, and we want to do justice to his theories. We hope we are reading Harris correctly in our interpretation. We read Harris to say that priestly elites in the major civilizations were sharp observers of ecological deterioration, declines in food supply, and population increases, to the point of being able to direct agricultural practices and to direct women about fertility control to maintain population balance. This characterization of the priestly caste as both sharp observers and civilization-wide controllers conflicts with our more conventional belief that the state monitored food supply and the women monitored and controlled fertility on a decentralized basis. In other words, we don’t buy Harris’ characterization of religious elites as being everywhere sharp mediators between fertility and food supply.

If hunting and gathering were such a superior lifestyle, why wouldn’t there be a widespread turn away from agriculture and animal domestication back to hunting when conditions favored it? Because agriculture and animal domestication offer higher standards of living and greater economic security. Harris’ doesn’t believe agriculture and animal domestication offered these advantages. Instead he characterizes their invention as short-term solutions to the enduring problem of resource shortages.

Harris omits any discussion of natural disasters upsetting social arrangements. His “natural history” is a smooth theoretical continuum. Harris is speaking at a very general level and is subject to overgeneralization of a few key ideas. The men of theory usually fall into the same errors.

The demographic statistics he cites often do not support his theory. Harris acknowledges that human populations remained stable for many hundreds of years in many state systems, but he does a poor job of explaining why. Harris’ scope is so large and extends so far back in time that we doubt he has control of his subject.

If population pressure versus food resources was the main dynamic of civilized human history and the priesthood everywhere were allocating resources and controlling fertility, why didn’t ancient writers and state propagandists bring the problem into high focus in their texts?

Even though Harris salutes Wittfogel and downplays Marx, he does not abandon economic determinism leading to cultural determinism. His economic determinism relies on natural determinism, based on the central concepts of evolutionary theorizing, including the central arbitrating role of that supremely powerful force that doesn’t even exist, natural selection. Harris adopts the popular Marxist idea of culture as a “superstructure” resting upon an economic base. Not all Marxists are evolutionists, but Harris is a world population controller, and these controllers cannot resist the argument by analogy from evolution. Evolutionary theorizers fall into one of the most important fallacies in deterministic theorizing, the belief that human populations act as animal populations do. Naturalistic determinism is sometimes called “The Romantic fallacy” because this way of thinking arose during the nineteenth century when Romanticism ruled thinking about history.

Let’s focus on the aspects of Harris’ theory that most appeal to the world population controllers and the enviro-sadists. Harris believes that, before the modern era, the introduction of new technologies always led to population increase, whether it be the transition from stone to metal tools, rainfall to irrigation, or animal power to steam, coal, and oil power. Demographers call this “the demographic transition.” The key question for Harris, and the population controllers, is why Malthus was wrong, why population did not skyrocket in the nineteenth century as Malthus predicted. Harris’ answer is, greater fuel efficiency, improved contraception, and the shift in occupation from the family business and farm to the salaried job. This shift made children into economic liabilities rather than economic assets. Harris believes children today are only of economic value if they help their parents with the medical crises involved with aging, and this value will cease as governments insure aging populations with welfare and medical programs.

You can see here the inability of the anthropologist to theorize about human value as his conceptualization scheme relies on powerful forces determining human behavior. Materialists can only offer materialistic interpretations of human actions. They are entirely removed from the realm of human values. In such theories, the forces of nature must be supremely powerful and forcefully conditioning, otherwise materialistic determinism loses its underlying rationale. Harris’ clever contribution to this line of sterile thinking is, he puts all human creativity under the determination of two supremely powerful forces. The term for this fallacy is, reductionism.

Reductionism means, the collapse of categories of complexity into an oversimplified scheme. The oversimplification is always accompanied by the unwarranted belief that the theorist understands what is causing.

But Harris ignores too many positive developments under modern industrialization that really make modernism a watershed period in history. The modern agricultural revolution improved productivity dramatically through the mechanization of agriculture, development of pesticides and fertilizer, medical control of contagious diseases, scientific ag schools and ag extension services, introduction of new species to farm economies around the world, international shipping, land reclamation projects, etc. There isn’t a word in Harris about the green revolution in agriculture, the ability of breadbaskets to produce astounding surpluses using far less labor under mechanization. That is a pretty big topic to ignore if you want to theorize about resource shortages leading to fertility declines. All of the world population controllers consistently ignore or underestimate the productivity of the supply side.

Harris is so used to theorizing in terms of a few basic concepts (natural selection, technological innovation under pressure, the necessity for cultural adaptation to rising and falling populations and food supplies) that he continues to rely on them for the modern era. But technological innovation in the modern era is not driven by resource scarcity, it is institutionalized as a kind of science of invention that is required by market competition and the guiding worldview of progress.

The modern era is truly different, even if you want to characterize previous human history as “natural determinism” leading to cultural adaptation. Today, institutionalized and systematic technological innovation trump natural resource limits. This development more or less coincides with the rise of European secret societies as power centers competing to take over the world. Nature’s food supply limits ceased to be the main factor in human development in Europe a few hundred years ago, even if you choose to believe, with Harris, that it once was.

For example, Harris is in error in believing that the sexual revolution was a response to economic or population factors. It was a propaganda campaign of feminism. World population control proceeded from the eugenic basis, not from any understanding of the relationships of economic development to population growth, poverty, living standards, or even population statistics. In a word, Harris ignores New World Order history. In fact, he falls for every propaganda construction of late modernism that fronts for the New World Order, including peak oil, phony climate science, one-world environmentalism, and the deliberately false predictions of catastrophe offered by Green Marxists such as Ehrlich and Hardin.

Harris is also in error in claiming that future standards of living depend on transitions to “alternative energies.” Alternative energies are inefficient and insufficient to fuel the present level of economic function. Wind, solar, and biomass have already shown their failure. Biomass consumes too much food supply, wind requires too much land to efficiently replace power plants, and solar can’t be used to fuel autos and industrial plants. The hope is that alternative energies may someday constitute 3 percent of total world energy usage. This isn’t enough to make the field interesting. But every Green fool blabbers on about alternative energy sources and green jobs because they are caught up in the propaganda and don’t look into who creates the propaganda. Harris similarly seems entirely uninformed about the New World Order agenda.

Marxists appear deliberately naïve, or outright liars, when they rely only on Marx’s writings and ignore his role as an active revolutionary as head of the Committee of Just Men and the various iterations of the Communist International. The Neo-marxists act as if the revolution were about to happen. It already happened, and it didn’t work.

Harris also claims that nuclear power leads to the police state, and democracy depends on decentralized energy sources. These statements are so stupid we’ll just dismiss them without rebuttal. Napoleon invented the modern version of the police state, imitating Weishaupt’s methods of control, and every government since Napoleon has copied it. Nuclear power has nothing to do with it.

Harris claims that the energy-intensive nature of agriculture (the energy ratio) leads to exhaustion of the oil supply. But, bad news Mr. Harris, so much new oil has been discovered in the past ten years that the peak oil theory has crashed. There is so much oil and natural gas just inside the United States that the enviros are scrambling to lock it in the ground so that it can’t be used. Agriculture can get even more energy-intensive, at low cost, if the socialists would just allow it.

Let’s briefly summarize the main anthropological error as the error of Marxism, or, if you want a fallback position, the error of secular thinking. Anthropologists buy into economic determinism hook, line, and sinker. As they approach their studies armed with their conclusions in advance, what are they going to find? Economic determinism. All secular thinkers fall into the error of believing that the secular society is a form of progress, or that their ideas for social engineering are beneficial interventions in “evolutionary processes.” Anthropologists can’t just study primitive societies and let it go at that. No, they have to set themselves up as the knowledgeable arbiters of future human evolution. Their simple framework of thinking is, human history in the past suffered from determinative factors such as production and reproduction, which determined culture. The dynamic that was faulty in previous human decision making was setting short-term solutions and then building upon them for the long term. Somehow the Left believes that they are doing something different. They are so arrogant that they believe human history is the history of human unconsciousness, and their agenda will bring man out of an unconscious and determined life into a conscious, planned future.

Wow. If you can fall for that one, immediately enroll in anthropology. You are dumb enough to be an anthropologist.

Are anthropologists so dumb that they cannot recognize that the agenda of social engineering is a planned program of evil domination by global elites? Are they really unaware that every prediction of the Left about modern economics has been false? No cities choked by pollution leading to mass deaths, no oil exhaustion, no mass starvations except in Communist countries. Can’t they recognize that every serious resource shortage must be marked by extremely high prices and then higher prices as the resource disappears?

Is it really the fundamental error of the anthropologists that they didn’t study economics and the history of secret societies? Is that all there is to it?

Not exactly. There is also the agenda of falsifying data. Margaret Mead, for example, purposely falsified her data on Samoa, and the lackeys in anthropology let her get away with it. Today anthropology’s problem is, how is any professor concerned with methodology going to correct the observations of 20-year-old feminists sent into “the field” armed with false feminist history? They don’t, as the bookshelves full of false feminist theories shows. Anthropology does not do a good job of disciplining its discipline.

You also have to notice that anthropology today is taking weird forms. Theories are shifting to align with postmodernism, media studies, art theories, communication theories, and the peculiarities of gender studies. Anthropology is fad-driven, and always has been. Today these fads are under the control of the Neo-marxist cesspool of bad ideas. The same is true of psychology and other social sciences. The field of social psychology is almost entirely driven by the need to hide the origins of the New World Order conspiracy by discrediting conspiracy “theory.” It’s really amusing to read social psychologists under the dominant paradigm of naturalistic determinism explain that social panics arise in periodic “waves.”

Science requires that everything be a system, which is why it cannot deal with the individual, the particular, the unique. Social science makes of reality a system. This is its violence. Eventually such theorizing removes actors and actions, removes all qualities, and turns them into quantities and deterministic laws. The whole enterprise is a load of rubbish. Anthropological theorizing at the level of history is so lame that it begins to override all of the carefully observed local studies.

Lest you believe that this is all a harmless lark, an empty intellectual enterprise, we’ll explain in a future post how anthropologists have been recruited by the U.S. government as authorities and control experts to radically remake U.S. civil society.

Our dilemma under corrupt socialism is that we must search for pure sources from a less corrupted time, not merely to affirm the life principle and human values which science could not locate in materialism but also to link ourselves with the greatness of man’s history. Anthropology may have a certain appeal for naïve Stalinists who believe that mankind has been unconscious and materially determined whereas they are free, conscious, in possession of superior knowledge, and able to act to further the liberation of the masses to avert the errors of the past, but we see them clearly. We see them adopting every quality of false liberal consciousness and ignorant of the people who are really controlling the world. And that is your how-to-avoid anthropology lesson for today. Actually they are the biggest Marxist dupes and the worst overgeneralizers. But keep those government subsidies coming, because nothing could be sweeter than making up theories on our dime.

Human history is full of human confrontations that changed history. Buddha debated all the siddhis in the deer forest and converted them once and for all with the power of his argument.

Anthropology needs such a housecleaning, a public debate of theorizers who will put to rest the refuted theories. But anthropology doesn’t work in the open. It sponsors endless new theorizing while keeping the debate controlled to a few journals and elite forums. It doesn’t want fresh air. That way all the discarded and rebutted theories can remain in the fertilizer pile, ready for recycling at the next turn of the fashion parade. If all of you understood how many of the icons of anthropology have been proven wrong and were outright frauds, there would be no more naïve dupes to pull into their programs.

Anthropology is a politics of natural determinism, not a science. The study of ancient man is fascinating, but be careful who you do it with. Wordsworth observed at the beginning of the nineteenth century,

“the philosophy of mechanism in which everything that is most worthy of the human intellect strikes death.”

By reducing man to the state of an animal and convincing you that he is entirely shaped by “nature’s forces,” anthropology creates a false reductionist materialism that might even convince you that black is white and human population needs a world body to control it.

Theory is the pitfall of the intellectual. Seduced by theory, he will neglect to cultivate sympathy, humility, and the good. That is why the career path for anthropologists is into United Nations NGOs and foundations devoted to controlling other people’s families and siphoning off economic productivity into socialist control bureaucracies.

The only people who are capable of being so fooled are those who really really hate capitalism to the point of never studying its productive capability.

Of interest:

Biography and overview

Review of Marvin Harris, Cultural Materialism

From Cultural Materialism

Harris bibliography

Buying cultural determinism hook, line, and sinker.

Another favorable review arguing against “culture as accident.”

Of high interest:

Stone age primitivism as green agenda.

The Greens also work off of anthropological theorizing, and not just for the purpose of controlling other people’s family size. The Marxist Green agenda relies on the idea of “resource shortages” to justify its global socialist takeover. The Greens can pose as “saviors” from “capitalist waste” and consumer life-styles and as “preservers” of “environment” if they can get you to believe that fertility rates will overwhelm “resource limits.”

But we have exposed these frauds in previous posts. We are calling your attention to Zerzan today because he has one good point in his return to the stone age agenda. The question of importance Zerzan and Harris call attention to is, how much technology do you really want in your new society?

Our short answer is, more than Zerzan, but technology needs to be tightly controlled or the elites will exploit the masses. You will need to set up an institution to check the introduction of new technologies and set up test conditions before allowing widespread adoption of technology. You cannot have mass markets open to all producers or the techno innovators will build the global police state at the mass level. These are key questions to consider: do you want radio, TV, internet in your society? Why? Could these media be reformed and become useful, or are they entirely worthless, corrupting, vulgar, perverted?

Abolishing the relationship, “socialism funds science” is necessary to prevent the abuses of institutionalized science. We have covered the history of scientific fraud in The Hidden Masters. Most scientific research today is absurd and useless. The research agenda is controlled from the top of the pyramid, through funding. Big science serves the NWO takeover. Science has no human value and serves the controllers. The corrective to science run amok spreading pseudosciences like viruses is, every scientist must have a human-oriented controller.

If you don’t control science in your new society, you will end up with nuclear weapons, biological weapons, mind control weapons, weaponized vaccines, the whole disaster science has created for us.

Anthropologists study you to control you. There is a close parallel between anthropology and marketing research. It is the height of absurdity to volunteer personal information to marketing research companies, they only use it to learn how to sell you. Similarly, the correct response to meeting an anthropologists is, bash his brains out with a rock, cook him, and eat him. You must not allow a liberal near your tribe, or it is just a matter of time until they destroy your society.

Are anthropologists good for anything? Just one: they are a source of protein. Thank-you, Marvin Harris, for pointing that out. Otherwise, we can’t give you credit for any intellectual contribution because, you know, all culture is just a determined response to resource pressure. The main intellectual contribution of Harris and other cultural determinists is to make the great history of human creativity boring.

People who study other people are evil, even if they are simply naive dupes when they undertake their studies. Social scientists will not be allowed in White Village unless we are experiencing famine.

Tags: Cannibals and Kings, cultural determinism, Cultural Materialism, John Zerzan, Marvin Harris

This entry was posted by Director on Saturday, May 8th, 2010 at 12:39 pm and is filed under Book Reviews, Depopulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.