IV. The Origins of Tyranny

Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny: The Origins of Individualism, Political Oppression and the State (1985) seeks to explain how human beings broke away from kinship systems and began to organize societies as large collectives or states. Central to the process of separation from tribes, bands and villages, Sagan argues, was the development of the institution of Kingship—that represented a response to the desire to actualize the idea that omnipotent beings exist in the world.

As people attempted to separate from their families and kin, Sagan says, they needed the idea or ideal of an omnipotent leader. Such a powerful leader—with whom individuals could identify—represented a centrifugal force enabling individuals to pull away from their small worlds of the tribe or village--and to connect with the world of the large community or state. There seems to have been a need to “actualize in the real world a view of omnipotence.” The idea of this kind of power acted as a "lure," generating the psychological ability to separate from the small community,

What helped people to separate from their families and kin, according to Sagan, was the idea of omnipotence embodied in the divine king. People felt better when they could believe that powerful, omnipotent beings existed on the face of the earth. It is a mistake to imagine, he says, that the evolution of tyrannical power happened without the consent of the governed. If members of society did not want this kind of authoritarian power, the entire process would have been stillborn.

The desire to create or believe in omnipotent objects goes along with the desire to submit to these objects. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that our desire and willingness to submit—to humble ourselves before certain objects—is what leads to the creation of human beings or entities conceived as omnipotent.

Hitler said to his German people, “You are nothing, your nation is everything.” To elevate Germany into a position of being everything, one had to conceive of one’s self as nothing. This is what the SS-man’s vow to be “obedient unto death” meant. What was being asserted was that Germany is such a significant object--that one should be willing to abandon one’s life and individuality in her name.

Hitler and Germany embodied the fantasy of immortality. Human beings were willing to relinquish their own, individual lives—in the name of binding to an object imagined to confer omnipotence. The fantasy of immortality and idea of sacrificial submission are inextricably linked.

One may say that the willingness to sacrifice is what brings the idea of omnipotence into being. So almighty were the kings of complex societies that they constantly exercised the right to take human life in religious ritual. Human sacrifice constituted the “ultimate certification of the power of early kings.” The essence of being a king lay in his capacity to kill, that is, to authorize the sacrifice of human beings.
 

V. The Megamachine

In the second volume of The Myth of Machine, The Pentagon of Power (1970), Lewis Mumford develops his concept of the “megamachine” to interpret Twentieth Century phenomena such as atomic warfare and the military-industrial complex. Mumford demonstrates that the ancient model—the dynamic that arose in ancient Egypt—persists.

The concept of the “Pyramid Age,” Mumford says, refers not only to what occurred in Egypt 2700-2300 B. C., but to a typical constellation of institutions and cultural inventions revolving around the cult of divine kinship, the building of imposing, monumental structures (such as temples, palaces, walled-cities, canals and irrigation systems, etc.), and to organized conquest or war.

Mumford calls this institutions or invention the megamachine: a system of bringing large numbers of human beings to work together guided by a plan. What motivated people to come together and work on these massive projects--was belief in the divinity of the king. The divine king had the power to give orders—and to be obeyed.

The Babylonian god Marduk, Mumford tells us, insisted that when he gave a command, he had to be obeyed by his fellow gods without question: “Let my word instead of yours determine the fates; unalterable shall be what I may bring into being: neither recalled nor changed shall be the command of my lips.”

Mumford says that these words are worth noting because they set forth the “terms on which the new collective mechanism was brought into being.” Men believed in the divinity of the king, and therefore were willing to do his bidding—obey his orders. Thus, it was possible to organize a great labor machine that could build megalithic structures like the pyramids, and also a military machine of great potency capable of destroying massive walls, wrecking dams, razing cities and temples.

It is highly doubtful, however, that these heroic public works—that demanded an almost superhuman effort and purpose—would have undertaken for any purely mundane purpose. “Only prostration before the mysterium tremendum,” Mumford observes, some "manifestation of godhead" in its awful power and luminous glory, could “call forth such excessive, collective effort.”

Through out history, Mumford says, the great mission of kingship has been to call forth human devotion and effort. Attachment to the king acted to overcome the particularlism and isolation of small communities, wiping out differences that separate one human groups from one another. Kings demonstrate “How much popular communities, once they were collectively organized in great mechanical units, could accomplish.”