Competition and independence: modern and primitive society^*

An important element of the anarchoprimitivist myth is the belief that hunter-gatherer societies were free of competition and were characterized instead by sharing and cooperation. Collin Turnbull’s early writings on the Mbuti pygmies seem to be quite frank, but his work leaned increasingly toward political correctness as time went by.¹⁹² Writing in 1983 (18 and 21 years, respectively, after he had published Wayward Servants and The Forest People), Turnbull noted that Mbuti children had no competitive games,¹⁹³ and after referring to the high value that he claimed modern society placed on “competition” and “economic independence”,¹⁹⁴ he contrasted these with “the well-tried primitive values of family-writ-large: interdependence, cooperation, and reliance on community ...rather than on self...”.¹⁹⁵

But according to Turnbull’s own earlier work, physical fighting was commonplace among the Mbuti.¹⁹⁶ If a physical fight isn’t a form of competition, then what is? It’s clear in fact that the Mbuti were a very quarrelsome people, and, in addition to physical fights, there were many verbal disputes among them.¹⁹⁷ Generally speaking, any dispute, whether it is settled physically or verbally; is a form of competition: the interests of one person conflict with those of another, and their quarreling is an effort by each to promote his own interests at the other’s expense. The Mbuti’s jealousies also were evidence of competitive impulses.¹⁹⁸

Two things for which the Mbuti competed were mates and food. I’ve already mentioned a case of two women who fought over a man,¹⁹⁹ and quarreling over food apparently was common.²⁰⁰ It’s worth noting that Turnbull, in his early work, described the Mbuti as “individualists”.²⁰¹ There is abundant evidence of competitiveness and/or individualism among other primitive peoples. The Nuer (African pastoralists), the pagan Germanic tribes, the Carib Indians, the Siriono (who lived mainly by hunting and gathering), the Navajo, the Apaches, the Plains Indians, and North American Indians generally have all been described explicitly as “individualistic”.²⁰² But “individualism” is a vague word that may mean different things to different people, so it’s more helpful to look at definite facts that have been reported. Some of the works that I cite in Note 202 do back up with facts their application of the term “individualistic” to the peoples mentioned. Holmberg writes:

“When an Indian [Siriono] has reached adulthood he displays an individualism and apathy toward his fellows that is remarkable. The apparent unconcern of one individual for another—even within the family—never ceased to amaze me while I was living with the Siriono. Frequently men would depart for the hunt alone—without so much as a goodbye—and remain away from the band for weeks at a time without any concern on the part of their fellow tribesmen or even their wives....”.

“Unconcern with one’s fellows is manifested on every hand. On one occasion Ekwataia went hunting. On his return darkness overcame him about five hundred yards from camp. The night was black as ink, and Ekwataia lost his way. He began to call for help—for someone to bring him fire or to guide him into camp by calls. No one paid heed to his request. After about half an hour, his cries ceased, and his sister Seaci, said: ‘A jaguar probably got him’. When Ekwataia returned the following morning, he told me that he had spent the night sitting on the branch of a tree to avoid being eaten by jaguars”.²⁰³

Holmberg repeatedly remarks on the uncooperative character of the Siriono, and says that those of them who became disabled by age or sickness were simply abandoned by the others.²⁰⁴ Among other primitive peoples, individualism takes other forms. For example, among most of the North American Indians, warfare was a decidedly individualistic enterprise. “The Indians, being highly individualistic and often fighting more for personal glory than group advantage, never developed a science of warfare”.²⁰⁵ According to the Cheyenne Indian Wooden Leg:

“When any battle actually began it was a case of every man for himself. There were no ordered groupings, no systematic movements in concert, no compulsory goings and comings. Warriors mingled indiscriminately, every one looked out for himself only, or each helped a friend if such help were needed and if the able one’s personal inclination just then was toward friendly helpfulness. The Sioux tribes fought their battles as a band of individuals, the same as we fought ours, and the same as was the way of all Indians I ever knew”.²⁰⁶

During the first half of the 20th century, Stanley Vestal interviewed many Plains Indians who still remembered the old days.

According to him:

“It cannot be too often repeated that—except when defending his camp—the Indian was totally indifferent to the general result of a fight: all he cared about was his own coups. Time and again old men have said to me, in discussing a given battle, ‘Nothing happened that day’, meaning simply that the speaker had been unable to count a coups”²⁰⁷; “Plains Indians could not wage war by plan. They had no discipline. On the rare occasions when they did have a plan, some ambitious young man was sure to launch a premature attack”.²⁰⁸

Compare this with modern man’s way of waging war: Troops move in obedience to carefully elaborated plans; every man has a specific task to perform in cooperation with other men, and he performs it not for personal glory but for the advantage of the army as a whole. Thus, in warfare, it is modern man who is cooperative and primitive man who is, generally speaking, an individualist.

Primitive individualism is not confined to warfare. Among the Indians of subarctic North America, who were hunter-gatherers, there was an “individualistic relationship to the supernatural”, “self-reliance”, and a “high value placed on personal autonomy”.²⁰⁹ Australian Aboriginal children were “taught to be self reliant”.²¹⁰ Among the Woodland Indians of the eastern United States, “great emphasis was placed on self-reliance and individual competence”,²¹¹ and the Navajo “insisted upon self-reliance”.²¹² The Nuer of Africa extolled the virtues of “stubbornness” and “independence”; “Their only test of character is whether one can stand up for oneself”.²¹³

Evidence of competition among primitives is ample. In addition to the Mbuti, at least some other hunter-gatherers competed for mates or for food. “One cannot remain long with the Siriono without noting that quarreling and wrangling are ubiquitous”.²¹⁴ The majority of quarrels “arose directly over questions of food”, but sexual jealousy also led to fights and quarrels among the Siriono.²¹⁵ The Australian Aborigines fought for the possession of women.²¹⁶ Poncins reports the case of one Eskimo who killed another in order to take his wife, and he states that any Eskimo would kill in order to prevent his wife from being taken from him.²¹⁷

Notwithstanding Turnbull’s remark that Mbuti children had no competitive games, some Mbuti adults did play tug-of-war, which clearly is a competitive game²¹⁸; and certain other primitive peoples too had competitive games. Massola mentions war games among the Australian Aborigines, and a ball game in which “the boy who caught the ball the greatest number of times was considered to be the winner”.²¹⁹ The game of lacrosse originated among the Algonkin Indians.²²⁰ Navaho children of both sexes had foot-races,²²¹ and among the Plains Indians almost all of the boys’ games were competitive.²²² The Cheyenne Indian Wooden Leg described some of the competitive sports in which his people had engaged: “Horse races, foot races, wrestling matches, target shooting with guns or with arrows, tossing the arrows by hand, swimming, jumping and other like contests”.²²³ The Cheyenne also competed in war, in hunting, and “in all worthy activities”.²²⁴

Richard E. Leakey quotes Richard Lee thusly: “Sharing deeply pervades the behavior and values of !Kung [Bushmen] foragers. Sharing is central to the conduct of life in foraging societies”. Leakey adds: “This ethnic is not confined to the !Kung: it is a feature of hunter-gatherers in general”.²²⁵

Of course, we share too. We pay taxes. Our tax money is used to help poor or disabled people through public-assistance programs, and to carry on other public activities that are supposed to promote the general welfare. Employers share with their employees by paying them wages.

But aha! you answer, we share only because we are forced to do so. If we tried to evade payment of taxes we would go to prison; if an employer offered insufficient wages and benefits, no one would work for him, or perhaps he would have trouble with the union or with the minimum-wage laws. The difference is that hunter-gatherers shared voluntarily, out of loving, open-hearted generosity ...right?

Well, not exactly. Just as our sharing is governed by tax laws, union contracts, and the like, sharing in hunter-gatherer societies was commonly governed by “rigid procedural rules” that “must be followed in order to keep the peace”.²²⁶ Many hunter-gatherers were just as grudging about sharing their food as we are about paying our taxes, and just as anxious to make sure that they got not a bit less than what the rules entitled them to.

Among Richard Lee’s Bushmen: “Distribution [of meat] is done with great care, according to a set of rules. Improper meat distributions can be the cause of bitter wrangling among close relatives”.²²⁷ Among the Tikerarmiut Eskimos, even though the rules for distribution of whale meat “were scrupulously followed, there still might be vociferous arguments”.²²⁸ The Siriono had food taboos that might have served as rules for the distribution of meat, but the taboos were very often disregarded.²²⁹ Though the Siriono did share food, they did so with extreme reluctance²³⁰:

“People constantly complain and quarrel about the distribution of food. Enia said to me one night: ‘When someone comes near the house, women hide the meat. Women even push meat up their vaginas to hide it”‘.²³¹

“If, for instance, a person does share food with a kinsman, he has the right to expect some in return. Reciprocity, however, is almost always forced, and is sometimes even hostile. Indeed, sharing rarely occurs without a certain amount of mutual distrust and misunderstanding”.²³² The Mbuti had rules for sharing meat,²³³ but there was, “often as not, a great deal of squabbling over the division of the game”.²³⁴ “Once an animal is killed, it is taken to be shared out on return to the camp. This is not to say that sharing takes place without any dispute or acrimony. On the contrary, the arguments that ensue when the hunt returns to camp are frequently long and loud”²³⁵; “When the hunt returns to camp, men and women alike, but particularly women, may be seen furtively concealing some of their spoils under the leaves on their roofs, or in empty pots nearly”²³⁶; “It would be a rare Mbuti woman who did not conceal a portion of the catch in case she was forced to share with others”.²³⁷

The fact that some hunter-gatherers often quarreled over the distribution conflicts with the anarchoprimitivists’ claims about “primitive affluence”. If food was so easy to get, then why would people quarrel over it? It should also be noted that the general rule of sharing among hunter-gatherers applied mainly to meat. There was relatively little sharing of vegetable foods,²³⁸ even though vegetable foods often constituted the greater part of the diet.

But I don’t want to give the impression that all primitive peoples or all hunter-gatherers were radical individualists who never cooperated and never shared except under compulsion. The Siriono, in terms of their selfishness, callousness, and uncooperativeness, were an extreme case. Among most of the primitive peoples about whom I’ve read there seems to have been a reasonable balance between cooperation and competition, sharing and selfishness, individualism and community spirit.

In stating that hunter-gatherers did not usually share vegetable foods, shellfish, or the like outside of the household, Coon also indicates that such foods might indeed be shared with other families if the latter were hungry.²⁴⁰ Notwithstanding their individualistic traits, the Cheyenne (and probably other Plains Indians) placed a high value on generosity (i.e., voluntary sharing),²⁴¹ and the same was true of the Nuer.²⁴² The Eskimos with whom Gontran de Poncins lived were so generous in sharing their belongings that Poncins described their community as “quasi-communist” and stated that “all labored in common with no hint of selfishness”.²⁴³ (Poncins did note, however, that an Eskimo expected every gift to be repaid eventually with a return gift.²⁴⁴) The importance to the Mbuti of cooperation in hunting and in some other activities is described by Turnbull,²⁴⁵ who also states that failure to share in time of need was a “crime”,²⁴⁶ and that the Mbuti shared to some extent even when there was no necessity for sharing.²⁴⁷

In contrast to the callousness shown by the Siriono, the old or crippled among the Mbuti were treated with a care and respect that derived mainly from affection and a sense of responsibility.²⁴⁸ Poncins’s Eskimos would abandon helpless old people to die when it became too difficult to take care of them any longer, but they must have done this reluctantly, because as long as they had the old people with them, “they look after the aged on the trail, running back so often to the sled to see if the old people are warm enough, if they are comfortable, if they are not perhaps hungry and want a bit of fish”.²⁴⁹

Just as one could go on and on citing examples of selfishness, competition, and aggression among hunter-gatherers, so one could go on and on citing examples of generosity, cooperation, and love among them. I’ve emphasized primarily examples showing selfishness, competition, and aggression only because of the need to debunk the anarchoprimitivist myth that portrays the life of hunter-gatherers as a kind of politically-correct Garden of Eden.

In any case, when Colin Turnbull contrasts modern “competition”, “independence”, and reliance on “self” with “the well-tried primitive values of interdependence, cooperation, and reliance on community”, he simply makes a fool of himself. As we’ve already seen, the latter values are not particularly characteristic of primitive societies. And a moment’s thought shows that in modern society self-reliance has become practically impossible, while cooperation and interdependence are developed to an infinitely greater degree than could ever be the case in a primitive society.

A modern nation is a vast, highly-organized system in which every part is dependent on every other part. The factories and oil refineries could not function without the electricity provided by power plants, the power plants need replacement parts produced in the factories, the factories require materials that could not be transported without the fuel provided by oil refineries. The factories, refineries, and power plants could not function without the workers. The workers need food produced on farms, the farms require fuel and spare parts for tractors and machinery, hence cannot do without the refineries and factories and so forth. And even a modern nation is no longer a self-sufficient unit. Increasingly, every country is dependent on the global economy. Since the modern individual could not survive without the goods and services provided by the worldwide technoindustrial machine, it is absurd today to speak of self-reliance.

To keep the whole machine running, a vast, elaborately-choreographed system of cooperation is necessary. People have to arrive at their places of employment at precisely designated times, and do their work in accord with detailed rules and procedures in order to ensure that every individual’s performance meshes with everyone else’s. In order for traffic to flow smoothly and without accidents or congestion, people must cooperate by complying, with numerous traffic regulations. Appointments must be kept, taxes paid, licenses procured, laws obeyed, etc., etc., etc. There has never existed a primitive society that has had such a far-reaching and elaborate system of cooperation, or one that has regulated the behavior of the individual in such detail. Under these circumstances, the claim that modern society is characterized by “independence” and “self-reliance”, in opposition to primitive “interdependence” and “cooperation”, appears bizarre.

It might be answered that modern people cooperate with the system only because they are forced to do so, whereas at least part of primitive man’s cooperation is more or less voluntary. This of course is true, and the reason for it is clear. Precisely because our system of cooperation is so highly developed, it is exceedingly demanding and therefore so burdensome to the individual that few people would comply with it if they didn’t fear losing their jobs, paying a fine, or going to jail. Primitive man’s cooperation can be partly voluntary for the very reason that far less cooperation is required of primitive man than of modern man. What gives modern society a superficial appearance of individualism, independence, and self-reliance is the vanishing of the ties that formerly linked individuals into small-scale communities. Today, nuclear families commonly have little connection to their next-door neighbors or even to their cousins. Most people have friends, but friends nowadays tend to use each other only for entertainment. They do not usually cooperate in economic or other serious, practical activities, nor do they offer each other much physical or economic security. If you become disabled, you don't expect your friends to support you. You depend on insurance or on the welfare department.

But the ties of cooperation and mutual assistance that once bound the hunter-gatherer to his band have not simply vanished into thin air. They have been replaced by ties that bind us to the technoindustrial system as a whole, and bind us much more tightly than the hunter-gatherer was bound to his band. It is absurd to say that a person is independent, self-reliant, or an individualist because he belongs to a collectivity of hundreds of millions of people rather than to one of thirty or fifty people. As for competition, it is more firmly leashed in our society than it was in most primitive societies. As we’ve seen, two Mbuti women might compete for a man with their fists; they might compete for food by filching some or by having a shouting match over the division of meat. Australian Aboriginal men fought over women with deadly weapons.²⁵⁰ But such direct and unrestrained competition cannot be tolerated in modern society because it would disrupt the elaborate and finely-tuned system of cooperation. So our society has developed outlets for the competitive impulse that are harmless, or even useful, to the system. Men today do not compete for women, or vice versa, by fighting. Men compete for women by earning money and driving prestigious cars; women compete for men by cultivating charm and appearance. Corporation executives compete by striving for promotions. In this context, competition among the executives is a device that encourages them to cooperate with the corporation, for the person who wins the promotion is the one who best serves the corporation. It could plausibly be argued that competitive sports in modern society function as an outlet for aggressive and competitive impulses that would have serious disruptive consequences if they were expressed in the way that many primitive peoples express such impulses.

Clearly, the system needs people who are cooperative, obedient, and willing to accept dependence. As the historian Von Laue puts it: “Industrial society, after all, requires an incredible docility at the base of its freedoms [sic]”.²⁵¹ For this reason, community, cooperation, and helping others have become deeply-ingrained, fundamental values of modern society.

But what about the value supposedly placed on independence, individualism, and competition? Whereas the words “community”, “cooperation”, and “helping” in our society are unequivocally accepted as “good”, the words “individualism” and “competition” are tense, two-edged words that must be used with some care if one wishes to avoid risk of a negative reaction.

It is routinely taken for granted that words like “community”, “cooperation”, “helping”, and “sharing” represent something positive, but “individualism” is seldom used in the mainstream media or in the educational system in an unequivocally positive sense. “Competition” is more often used in a positive sense, but typically it us used that way only in specific contexts in which competition is useful (or at least harmless) to the system. For example, competition is considered desirable in the business word because it weeds out inefficient companies, spurs other companies to become more efficient, and promotes economic and technological progress. But only leashed competition—that is, competition that abides by rules designed to make it harmless or useful—is commonly spoken of favorably. And, when treated in a positive sense, competition is always justified in terms of communitarian values. Thus, business competition is considered good because it promotes efficiency and progress, which supposedly are good for the community as a whole.

“Independence”, too, is a “good” word only when used in certain ways. For example, when one speaks of making disabled people “independent” one never thinks of making them independent of the system. One means only that they are to be provided with gainful employment so that the community will not be burdened with the cost of supporting them. Once they have found a job they are every bit as dependent on the system as they were when they lived on welfare, and they have a great deal less freedom to decide how to spend their time.

So why do politically-correct anthropologists and others like them contrast the supposedly primitive values of “community”, “cooperation”, “‘sharing”, and “interdependence” with what they claim are the modern values of “competition”, “individualism” and “independence”? Certainly an important part of the answer is that politically-correct people have absorbed too well the values that the system’s propaganda has taught them, including the values of “cooperation”, “community”, “helping”, and so forth. Another value they have absorbed from propaganda is that of “tolerance”, which in cross-cultural contexts tends to translate into condescending approval of non-Western cultures.

A well-socialized modern anthropologist is therefore faced with a conflict: Since he is supposed to be tolerant, he finds it difficult to say anything bad about primitive cultures. But primitive cultures provide abundant examples of behavior that is decidedly bad from the point of view of modern Western values. So the anthropologist has to censor much of the “bad” behavior out of his descriptions of primitive cultures in order to avoid showing them in a negative light. In addition, due to his own excessively thorough socialization, the politically-correct anthropologist has a need to rebel.²⁵² He is too well socialized to discard the fundamental values of modern society, so he expresses his hostility toward that society by distorting facts to make it seem that modern society deviates from its own stated values to a much greater extent than it actually does. Thus the anthropologist ends by magnifying the competitive and individualistic aspects of modern society while grossly understating these aspects of primitive societies.

There’s more to it than that, of course, and I can’t claim to understand fully the psychology of these people. It seems obvious, for example, that the politically-correct portrayal of hunter-gatherers is motivated in part by an impulse to construct an image of a pure and innocent world existing at the dawn of time, analogous to the Garden of Eden, but the basis of this impulse is not clear to me.

^* From The Truth about primitive life: a critique of anarchoprimitivism, by Theodore Kaczynski.

Notes