Excerpt:
Are human beings wired to dominate, or do we learn exploitation from the cultures we build? The answer lies not in biology alone but in the stories, rituals, and systems that shape how power is used—and justified.
1. The Question Beneath the Question
Is exploitation part of human nature, or is it a cultural construct?
The truth may lie somewhere between. Human beings do possess evolutionary tendencies that can lend themselves to exploitation—territoriality, competition, in-group bias, and resource guarding. But these are potentials, not destinies. Whether they become oppressive depends on how a society chooses to channel them.
2. The Anthropological Evidence
Anthropologists have long observed that not all societies are exploitative.
Among the !Kung of the Kalahari, excessive pride or greed is defused through the custom of “insulting the meat”—mocking a successful hunter to keep him humble.
Many Amazonian and North American indigenous groups maintained communal stewardship of land, and their rituals actively discouraged hoarding or domination.
These examples show that while the capacity for dominance exists in all humans, exploitation as a systemic pattern is culturally produced and socially reinforced. It is not inevitable.
3. How Civilisation Turned Predatory
The shift from small, mobile bands to settled, surplus-based societies marked a turning point in human history. What began as a practical adaptation — growing food, storing grain, claiming territory — gradually hardened into a new social logic: the concentration of power.
Agriculture and Surplus
When people began to cultivate crops and domesticate animals, they produced more than they could immediately consume. Surplus meant security, but it also meant control — someone had to manage storage, distribution, and access to land.
Those who controlled the granary or the irrigation system quickly gained leverage over those who did not. What began as cooperation for survival became the foundation of hierarchy: priestly administrators, warrior-protectors, and ruling households.
The logic of “more for me, less for you” became institutionalised, setting in motion the first class divisions.
Monotheism in Its Imperial Form
Monotheism need not be oppressive, but in its imperial form it proved highly efficient at centralising moral and political authority.
“One God, one ruler, one truth” became the spiritual mirror of empire.
Where earlier religions had multiple deities and local cults, imperial monotheism imposed a unified cosmic order — with the divine throne reflected in the earthly one.
Faith and obedience merged. The king or emperor claimed legitimacy not merely by strength but by divine right, and dissent could be condemned as both political treason and spiritual rebellion.
This fusion of religion and rule stabilised empire but at a profound human cost: it trained populations to equate submission with virtue.
Roman and Feudal Law
Rome perfected the idea that law could sanctify power.
Property, conquest, and slavery were not moral failings but legal categories — organised under the notion that domination could be just, provided it was orderly.
Roman jurisprudence, admired for its rationality, codified ownership and extraction as civilising forces. The feudal systems that followed simply localised this logic: the lord’s right to land and labour was seen as natural, even holy, while the peasant’s role was to serve and obey.
Thus, exploitation acquired the dignity of law — a principle that still underlies the modern economy.
Colonial Expansion
When European powers began to explore and conquer other continents, they exported this legalised hierarchy to the world.
Colonialism was more than greed; it was a moral crusade in disguise. The rhetoric of “civilising the savage” and “spreading the faith” masked the transfer of wealth and human life on a vast scale.
The competition between European states turned the planet into an arena of extraction — gold, sugar, cotton, slaves, oil.
By the nineteenth century, exploitation had become not merely an economic system but a worldview: progress through domination, wealth through depletion, order through control.
4. The Limits of Inner Reform
If those who benefit from exploitation are structurally rewarded for it, then moral awakening alone cannot transform society.
This is where many modern calls for “inner change” falter. Spiritual insight has meaning only when supported by new forms of community and shared value.
It is easy to tell individuals to “do the right thing,” but isolated virtue rarely shifts collective behaviour.
There is little point in one person giving up the car, consuming less, or practising kindness if the surrounding culture rewards competition and excess.
Change requires critical mass — a community of conscience that lives by shared restraint.
This is, perhaps, where Christianity lost its way.
It began as a movement of mutual aid and radical equality — a community built around the table rather than the throne.
But over centuries it became a hierarchy of control, managed by those who claimed divine authority.
The gospel of cooperation was replaced by the machinery of power.
In that inversion, a vision of collective transformation shrank into a doctrine of personal salvation — and the social potential of Christianity was largely neutralised.
Yet the original insight endures: goodness gains traction only when it is communal.
A single “nice person” in a predatory culture risks becoming either a victim or a hypocrite.
What redeems goodness is its shared expression — the moment when moral awareness becomes social structure.
5. Is Our Civilisation Doomed?
If the modern world continues to build on endless growth, extraction, and inequality, it will likely collapse under its own contradictions. Yet that need not be the final word.
Humanity has created non-exploitative cultures before, and the capacity for cooperation is just as innate as the drive to dominate. The challenge is not to perfect human nature but to re-educate it—to build structures that reward restraint rather than greed, reciprocity rather than conquest.
As Gregory Bateson warned:
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.”
6. Conclusion — Remembering What We Forgot
The culture of exploitation is not our genetic destiny, but it has become our cultural default. It thrives where dominance is rewarded and community is fragmented.
To break that cycle, we need both inner awakening and cultural remembering—a conscious retrieval of older values of kinship, reciprocity, and restraint.
Civilisation may need less reform than recollection: the rediscovery that freedom and dignity grow best where no one seeks to own them.
