We live in an age of great change. The economists predict growth, from modern, to industrial, to postmodern information age hyper-industrial GDP rising like a flood water lifting even the most waterlogged of third world boats. The ecologists see destruction, species going extinct, an ancient natural world being relentlessly crushed under the human machinery.

Is there a deep root, a common cause to the difficulties that humanity faces? How could it be that we are so intelligent in some ways, and yet so completely blind in others? Social movements respond to specific pressures, specific causes. Thus we have a forest protection movement, a "right to life" movement, a feminist movement, a civil rights movement, etc. But who is looking at the deep root, the broad cause of social blindness?

That is our purpose here, to step beyond any specific current movement, to seek the deep root of our social order, to understand from whence it grows, and to redirect it. Is conscious evolution just another impossibly inflated vision of our miraculous salvation? There is reason to think otherwise.

Human cultural evolution, up until now, has always been non-conscious. Societies the world over have evolved along parallel lines, from relatively egalitarian gathering bands, to stratified chiefdoms, to imperial and sometimes democratic states. Throughout all of this change, people the world over have never had access to the information and resources that would allow them to understand the evolution of their own societies, or to build a movement based on that understanding. We are perhaps at a unique point in history. We have access to unprecedented information about our past and other societies, and the means to communicate it.

The parallel evolution of human cultures indicates that there are patterns that govern our cultural evolution. Culture operates as a system; each component is linked to other components to form an integrated functioning whole. Our current industrial society seems so unchangeable because it is integrated as one global cultural system, one that has gown out of our recent global history of rapid population growth and ecological depletion. There is no other show in town. But the integration of the current system also indicates the depth at which change is possible. We are capable of creating very different cultural systems.

Non-conscious culture is a non-concept in our time, not something people talk about. And yet, do you know why men have more power than women the world over? Why humans evolved from egalitarian bands to stratified, oppressive, states? Why some societies evolved into democracies and others did not? Why is our culture so stunningly technologically sophisticated, and yet so unaware of the roots of its own most basic social institutions?

This is not the place to put together the pieces the large puzzle of the untold side of human history, only to point to its existence. A coherent, cross cultural explanation for male supremacy is radically less complex than the technology in a modern desktop computer. The same can be said for all of our social institutions. But social technology is repressed in our society. Thus neither ordinary people nor academics generally have much of an explanation for the most prominent institutions in our society.

Why is social understanding so repressed? There are several reasons. In the 1990s, the big oil companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars paying scientists to conduct studies about the greenhouse affect. The purpose of these studies was to cast doubt on the scientific solidity of global warming theory. It worked. The average American was, and remains, convinced that global warming is only a "theory." As the shock of global warming has grown dim, we have become inured to the problem. In response to the oil companies activities, climate scientists banded together and to make a near unanimous statement regarding the seriousness of global warming. The first battle was lost though, and we are continuing as if global warming does not exist.

Thus we have one reason why social technology is repressed - the actions of vested interests. With each politically charged issue, there is some vested interest publishing mythology to advance their cause.

A second reason social understanding is repressed concerns the integration of technology. Students of our mechanical technological revolution have pointed out that technology develops in an integrated fashion. It was not possible to build an internal combustion engine until advances in metallurgy and electricity (for the spark plug) created a technological foundation. Likewise, micro-computers did not become possible until an advance understanding of electronics developed, including the ability to make resistors, capacitors, transistors, integrated circuits, and micro-chips. Thus it is with social technology. Oil companies have suppressed the social awareness of global warming. Wealthy interests pursue witch hunts (the War on Drugs, capital punishment) that obscure the real causes of urban decay and social problems even as they turn people's fears against each other. Other groups generate misinformation about abortion and women's roles in society. Any piece of purposeful misinformation is unfortunate, but taken together, the actions of vested interests in our stratified society have the affect of halting the development of an integrated social understanding. We do not know the specific causes of particular social institutions, and we do not put those pieces together to understand the system of culture.

There are other factors that obstruct the development of social technology. In any society, people are sometimes compelled to behave in ways that are inconsistent with their own morality. This creates a kind of cultural dissonance whereby people generate rationalizations for their actions that obscure the truth. Some farmers in India must by economic necessity raise more female calves than male calves. Cows are more necessary to their farming technique than bulls. So they starve male calves. But their religion forbids this. They deal with this contradiction by generating myths that female calves are stronger than males, thus alleviating their cultural dissonance that arises when they kill their male calves. We do the same thing in our society. Often people will tell me that it is more energy efficient to leave computers running, or to run a dishwasher rather than wash by hand. For the record, neither is true. In fact, idling computers now account for about 5% of national electricity usage. But such explanations alleviate our guilt about the costs our modern conveniences. It is also not difficult to find people who will explain that poor people are poor because they are lazy, or that particular ethnic groups are lazy or dishonest. It is more than simple prejudice. The way our economy is currently managed, there is a purposeful creation of a structural underclass that serves to restrain inflation, which in turn keeps the top-heavy corporate economy in balance. Prejudice occurs after the fact to alleviate the dissonance between the realities of our current regime of economic management and our morality of economic equality. On the greater social level, the affect of cultural dissonance is the suppression of the development of social technology. We do not understand particular beliefs or actions because of comfortable myths, but the collective affect is that we do not have the pieces to build the larger puzzle. We do not understand our culture as a system.

The final cause of the suppression of social understanding is itself a cornerstone of stratified cultural systems, and that is how we raise our children. Small children think in a different way than adults. It is not just that they have less information, they process information in a completely different fashion. Childish cognitive patterns allow small children to process information based on a limited understanding of the world, and to feel safe and strong in that world. Small children tend to see the world as being organized into absolute categories. Thus rules are eternal, not generated by mutual consent of people. In a sense, children's thinking is spiritualistic; they tend to very naturally believe in deities and supernatural beings. They make magical connections between events in the world. They believe that their own individual actions can have magical impacts on people far away. (Thus they are sadly susceptible to religious guilt.) For small children, the greater universe is condensed into one ordered, omni-powerful, beneficent (hopefully) entity. Parents, God, larger social institutions are part of this omnipotent, never-changing, protecting universe. Children feel a personal, magical connection to, and protection from, the omnipotent powers of the universe.

As children grow older, their interactions with their peers teach them that rules are made by the consent of the people playing the game. In time, children learn that adults, and many of the social institutions that they thought omnipotent, are indeed human, variable, and fallible. They develop such understanding, that is, with those institutions with which they have a personal, and more or less egalitarian, interface. The odd thing about our highly stratified culture is that children are held in a hierarchical relationship to some institutions throughout their development and into adulthood. It is normal in less stratified cultures for children to take on adult roles in their teens. In our society, children are held in childish roles, subservient to higher power, throughout high school, college, and perhaps beyond. This is no accident, but rather a cornerstone of our cultural system. The affect of perpetuating hierarchical roles into adulthood is to perpetuate a child's way of thinking about particular institutions into adulthood. Thus the institutions of industry, the state, and education remain for most people far-off, powerful, part of the omnipresent universe in which they take security and do not assess critically. This is not just what they think, this is HOW they think. It is a deep cognitive pattern.

The perpetuation of childhood ways of thinking into adulthood means that most people look up to established institutions with a God-like awe. They take personal security in their allegiance to these institutions, and do not challenge them critically. This generates a level of conformity that is most useful to our stratified industrial culture, and to other stratified cultures as they push their citizens to work, conform, and in time, go to war.

The affect of cognitive arrest that occurs in stratified cultures is that some social institutions are relegated to the realm of the Gods, not questioned by the average person. This has a powerful impact on the development of social technology, namely, to impede it enormously. This is the reason rational discussions of issues like poverty or international affairs so readily become sidetracked into discussions of God and Country. People take great security in their protector, and do not challenge that omnipotent entity.

A conscious culture would seek to empower children, and to teach them about culture and its evolution. There are myriad examples of student-run educational programs. The point is not simply the personal enlightenment or empowerment of individual students, but rather to fundamentally alter the way in which children, and hence adults, relate to powers larger than themselves. Political consciousness is "taught" simply by doing it. If students are involved in the civil life of their school, and their community, then they will hold a radically different perspective on the larger institutions of society than if they are forever held subservient to higher power.

To sum up, social technology in modern society is heavily repressed by the combined affects of vested interests, cultural dissonance, a lack of integration between different "issues," and hierarchical child rearing patterns that selectively arrest cognitive development. Taken together, these factors utterly stall any progress of social awareness in society at large. The idea that we are somehow more enlightened than our forebearers about social issues is self-flattering, and utterly misrepresents the real nature of cultural evolution. The reality is that our modern industrial society is no less mythologically based, no less blind, than any that have come before it.

Every human being living today has one thing in common - each and every one of us lives in a world that is a lot more crowded than it used to be. A lot of what we see as ordinary in our time is the outcome of this peculiar historical circumstance. A lot of what we take for granted - or call "human nature" - is the response of human cultures living in increasingly crowded circumstances. Our world is dominated by one cultural system. As human cultures evolve along parallel lines, they respond to ecological stressors in very similar ways. These responses involve the creation of male supremacy, social hierarchy, and centralized political power. All of the large cultures of our time share a common history of rapid population growth and ecological depletion, and they have all developed similar institutions in response. We are at a peculiar place in history, but we must understand it in those terms. There is nothing inevitable about our current social order. But to create a new social order is going to require that we understand our past in a way that we never have before.

A long time ago, we lived in gathering bands. Gatherers were, generally speaking, healthy, freedom loving peoples. Over time their populations grew. Given a choice, people take the shorter path. Gatherers tended to dig the largest roots they could find, and hunt large animals. As population grew, they ran out of small roots and big animals, so they dug smaller roots and hunted smaller animals. When they ran out of small roots and any volume of huntable wild animals, our ancestors started planting seeds and domesticating animals. It took a lot more work to plant than to gather, and primitive farmers were actually less healthy than gatherers. But the land could support a lot more farmers than gatherers. Farmers worked harder than gatherers, but they had little other choice to feed their growing numbers.

We have this idea that all of our cultural evolution has been driven by an inexorable march toward progress, that our past was dark and difficult, and that we have moved our way ever so slowly into the light. It isn't that way really. The changes in how humans have fed themselves are indicative of the real factors driving technological development.

Technology has evolved in response to growing population and depletion. Food is one example, clothing is another. Gatherers used animal skins to clothe themselves. These were readily available and made high quality clothing. In Euro-American history, animal skins became scarce as population grew and people settled into farming villages. Thus they started using wool to clothe themselves. Wool garments took more labor and more sophisticated technology to produce an inferior garment, but there was little choice owing to the number of people living on the land. Populations continued to grow and pressure the land. In time, cotton became available to Europeans from colonized lands. Cotton garments took still more labor, and even more sophisticated technology to produce a garment that was inferior, but ecological pressure dictated a change. And now we have synthetics, which require enormously complex technology to produce.

Ecological pressure dictated a change from digging stick agriculture to more intensive forms of plow and irrigation agriculture, and then to industrial agriculture. Our ancestors did not consciously make these choices. Each of these changes involved a transition from a resource that was easily available to one that required more labor, energy and complex technology to extract and use. But these more effort-ful resources occurred in greater abundance, thus the transition was made to support growing populations. These choices were made by the unseen machine of cultural evolution driven by population growth and ecological depletion.

In every area of our lives, we have done what is easy first, until we have to do something more complicated. It only makes sense. But there is also a caution here regarding the religious devotion to technology as our a savior. The dazzling machines of our time are being created on top of a foundation of depletion of easier means. The average American landfill contains a greater density of copper than some of our active copper mines. Technological magic cannot replace the tonnage of easily accessible minerals we are digging up and spreading about. Some would claim that technology will solve our energy crises once the pressure is strong enough to do so. But we already solved our energy crises a long time ago. Technological magic will not replace the easily accessible fuels we have expended. Technological magic will not replace big trees, clean water, shallow coal, or any of the other resources that we are rapidly expending. We use up the easy part first. It only makes sense. But ultimately we are putting ourselves in a race between depletion and technological development. We are currently ahead in that game because of the input of large reserves of fossil fuel. We cannot stay ahead in that race forever. Just as a fishing people worship the fish that feeds them, we hold a spiritual faith in our technology. It is a blind faith created by the unseen machine of cultural evolution.

At the peculiar place in history in which we now live, the most striking similarity among all large human cultures is that they are all highly stratified. This is most peculiar when you consider that proto-humans and humans lived for millions years in relatively egalitarian gathering cultures. In the last few thousand years - a mere blink of the historical eye - our cultures have exploded in size and become hierarchical. Social stratification not only impacts the intellectual development of our children, it shapes every fiber of our social fabric. When one understands that our human intelligence evolved in egalitarian bands, when one sees the differences in social culture between hierarchical and relatively egalitarian cultures, one comes to realize that institutional social hierarchy is the antithesis of what makes us human.

Why did human cultures stratify? It was the result of non-conscious cultural evolution responding to population growth and ecological depletion. The first signs of ecological strain, and the response to it, can be seen among modern gatherers.

Even though gatherers diet consisted primarily of vegetable foods, they were sufficiently dependent on animal foods that they would be loathe to give them up. As gathering populations grew, they began to over-hunt, and hunting became harder work involving longer treks to search for increasingly scarce game. Gatherers thereby developed a reward system to encourage hunters. The odd thing is that the particular form of that reward system has been spontaneously recreated in hundreds of different cultures all over the globe. That reward system consisted of social respect and sexual access.

Gatherers by and large practiced various forms of monogamous, non-restrictive marriage. (In general, their attitude toward sex was greatly relaxed compared to Western norms.) But some of the best hunters in some groups had multiple wives. There were strong social sanctions in gathering groups against people becoming arrogant, even good hunters. No women had multiple husbands, and no men other than good hunters had multiple wives. The sexual reward system is the root of male supremacy, and it has grown greatly.

After gatherers became settled farmers, they still did not develop social hierarchy with any great speed. But they did develop charismatic leaders. These leaders were kind of like community cheerleaders, urging people to get up and plant for the next community feast. Many cultures actually practiced a kind of competitive giving whereby they tried to outdo neighboring groups with their generosity at public events. So much for greedy human nature.

The cheerleaders of early agriculturalists did not gain any better food, housing, or any other privilege for all their work, except for sexual access and social respect. The leaders were men and, if they were successful, they had multiple wives. Sex is closely associated with social acceptance, and social status. So much so that sexual access and social status become the same thing in many cultures. These leaders also were war leaders, warfare being another cost of the agricultural life. It is with remarkable consistency that human cultures the world over have chosen to develop a sexual reward system to motivate people to do what the culture needs them to do. Because of the gender-based division labor, men were in the role of hunter, which put them in turn in the roles of warrior and politician. As the world became more crowded, these were precisely the roles that determined the survival of groups in competition with each other. Thus women were sexualized and prized as a sexual reward. Men who fulfilled the most vital, albeit ugly, roles of waring agriculturalists, were granted greater sexual access.

In time community cheerleaders became chiefs who could not only cheer people into action, but give orders. Each step along the way, population was increasing, and people were developing more technologically elaborate and labor-intensive means of feeding themselves. Once agricultural groups started fighting with each other in earnest, then the groups that were more successful were the ones with more soldiers, and more productive agricultural systems. Thus began the race of empire. While individuals, over the course of generations, experienced a loss of civil liberty as cultures grew into chiefdoms and states, they would only be left to the plunder of more powerful groups if they did not develop into a hierarchical social order. These choices were not made consciously. They were made by a blind process of non-conscious cultural evolution.

By the rules of non-conscious culture, hierarchy is how you motivate and organize people to get them to work hard and together, to produce, or fight against an enemy. That remains true to this day. Hierarchical organizations are capable of pointing a lot of human energy in a given direction with haste. Such organizations also tend to be blind. That is the kernel of the dilemma in our time. That which unifies, makes us strong. That which unifies, makes us blind. Thus our calling is to create forms of social organization that are both aware and powerful.

As our predecessors went from gathering, to planting, to imperialism, their belief systems evolved. The gods were many among the gatherers. They were friendly or mischievous, but not omnipotent. Some of the chiefs proclaimed themselves immortal, and kings ruled by divine right. With the rise of states, God developed a bad attitude and went to live in the sky, and Satan was born. An omnipotent God and and ever-present Satan are most useful for imperial states to help maintain obedience among the masses. But a more fundamental point is that our beliefs, including our beliefs about God, evolve out of our economic system. That is the blind nature of culture, and it is as true today as ever.

The development of male supremacy paralleled the development of social hierarchy. In the world today, men hold the greater share of wealth, political power, and cultural prerogative just about everywhere. Why do men consistently have greater privileges? Is it because men are smarter? We think not. And even if men are in some ways physically stronger, what does that have to do with who is elected to political office, or appointed CEO of a corporation? I don't recall seeing any arm-wrestling matches intended to resolve corporate or political appointments.

Human cultures elevate the status of particular social roles - and the people who fulfill those roles. Thus a fishing culture that lives on a South Pacific island, among the palm trees swaying gently in the bright sun, will elevate the status of those among its members who are good at catching fish. Some cultures are very stratified, others are more egalitarian, but in general, the social roles that are necessary for the survival of a group of people are elevated by that group of people.

This is true of America as well. In colonial times, women were integral to the farm economy. Women worked hard, and men helped take care of the children. Premarital sexual involvement was accepted as normal. Women were not fully equal, but they held more power than in more recent history, having the right to vote and inherit property in many states. Industrialism in the 1800s disempowered women. Some early factory owners tried hiring entire families, but this didn't work out, and soon men were earning all the money in factory jobs as the agrarian economy gave way to an industrial one. Women lost power, and were relegated to a second-class, domestic roles. After World War II, women again entered the economy in large numbers, and again gained social and political power. As women have increased their role in the economy, so they have increased their power.

Does this mean that we are all simply automatons responding to changes in our economy? No, but deeper structural changes in our economy and our society have great impact on the success or failure of individual desires and social movements. The women who fought for greater personal power in the early 1800s lost. The ones who fought in the 1960s won. Structural economic changes make the difference of when social movements are able to succeed, and when they are crushed.

Neither in our culture, nor in other cultures, are people much aware of this underlying machine that has so much influence over our future. Our mechanical technology is highly developed. Our social technology is not simply under-developed, it is heavily repressed.

We are living in a time when civil liberties are, in general, expanding like the unsteady but unstoppable growth of economy. This has left us with some dangerous misunderstandings, and self-defeating arrogance about where our liberty comes from.

Democracy, and the expansion of civil liberties that come with it, are not simply the work of enlightened "founding fathers." Democracy, like male supremacy, follows a global pattern. The societies that have evolved into democracies include the Greeks, Romans, numerous European nations, and U.S. Americans. In each of these societies, a central powerful state with a land-owning elite grew first. (The land-owning elite was not as entrenched in America.) As these cultures grew, they sent their militaries into foreign lands, and became colonial powers. As the wealth of colonial exploits arrived back in the motherland, a mercantile class grew up to trade these foreign goods. Over time, the volume of goods arriving from the colonies grew, and the power of the mercantilists grew, until finally, they were able to challenge the power of the landed elite. Thus civil liberties were expanded to the mercantile class. (It is hard to conduct business if you constantly have someone plundering your profits, or looking over your political shoulder.)

So what's this got to do with us? The thing that is important to understand is that the expansion of civil liberties has, in our culture as in every other, followed the expansion of resource extraction. When a society has an enormous inflow of resources, from colonial exploits or from fossil driven extraction, it is economically useful to have a large group of people who are personally empowered. Those empowered souls serve as entrepreneurs, mercantilists, and consumers, driving the economy forward. Democracy can be defined as the ability of groups of people to use their economic position to assert political power. In the absence of an expanding economy, democracy does not expand. In the U.S. after World War II, the income of African Americans was expanding rapidly, as it was for women. This is not coincidental with the success of the movements to gain civil liberty for these groups. But we must also heed the lessons of the Greeks and the Romans, because as their resource base declined, they reverted to military dictatorship. We would be unwise to imagine that their will to freedom was any less than our own.

Why would cultures move so readily from freedom (as we had when we live in gathering bands), to dictatorship of early states, to democracy, and back to dictatorship? Are we in Western society headed for a return to dictatorship? If we allow the gears of unconscious culture to keep blindly grinding along, then yes, we will in the coming decades return to a more authoritarian government. Civil liberties will be restricted from the lower classes upward as our resource base contracts.

The core of cultural evolution is the feedback process. Social movements come to power in response to ecological and economic stressors. If people's personal circumstances thereafter improve, the belief system of society moves toward that of the social movement. Conscious evolution would not seek to avoid or destroy the selection process, but rather to redirect it.

Transnational corporations have acquired a level of power that supersedes our elected governments. Day by day, our world is growing more economically polarized. A broad array of social change movements have come together to oppose the new globalization.

An understanding of culture tells us that the fulcrum of the evolution of beliefs and politics is economy. If we want to have the greatest impact, that is where we must engage. We must harness the energy of the anti-globalization movement to redirect the movement of money away from corporate pockets and into local communities and sustainable businesses. Over time we will have greater influence over political policies and the beliefs people hold in our society than if we argue directly with policy or belief. The point is not political disengagement, but rather to couple engagement with a longer term vision. The root of the culture is the economy, and we need to transplant a new root. Trimming branches will not do. We have to have the patience and the focus to guide the growth of the new economy from the root.

The hallmark of transnational corporations is the brand name. The average individual can name far more corporate brand names than they can plant species. The brand names have become part of the omnipotent mother culture, a fundamental piece of who we are, something we do not question. People hold a religious faith that enormous superstores are cheaper, and that known brand names are of higher quality. Many people think, and economist argue, that centralized production of almost any product is more efficient. These beliefs are part of the mythology of our non-conscious culture. The truth is a far different matter.

The cost of creating jobs in industrial social has steadily increased as production has become more and more mechanized. If a few people are working on looms to weave clothing, then the cost of creating those jobs consist of the cost of building the looms, the building in which they work. If the clothing industry gives up on hand-powered looms and builds enormous, fully automated weaving machines, then jobs are eliminated. More importantly, the remaining jobs are very expensive to create. A job in modern manufacturing or extractive industries may cost tens of thousands or even millions of dollars to create.

Heavily mechanized production means that goods have a lower labor cost, but a higher embedded energy cost. For many industries, there is a predictable amount of energy cost increase for every job that is mechanized. Cheap energy drives this process forward.

The faith in growth has become a blind dogma, self serving for the wealthy and powerful classes. It is no coincidence that the rise of this dogma in America coincides with the transplanting of manufacturing to the global south and the rise of stock ownership in the west. The contradictions inherent in class divided society have been spread across national borders, the result being that the most harshly affected have no political voice.

Agriculture is one area where smallness is well-documented to be more efficient. Small farms the world over have been shown to be more efficient than large farms. Towns that have a small farm based economy also have a much more vibrant social culture, more civic groups, volunteer associations, public events, etc. Corporate farming towns have fewer civic groups of every kind. Corporate farms increase at the expense of small farms because of their financial might, not because of their superior efficiency or social benefit.

We have to reclaim economic power, and put it in the hands of ordinary people. That means localizing production in as many areas as possible. That local economy then will become the base of empowerment from which the most powerful institutions can be challenged. Right now, the gap between the individual and the powerful institutions that govern our lives, produce our food, and manage or media reality is huge. The individual stands dwarfed looking up at the mighty corporate edifice. We cannot in a historical moment dissolve the corporate entities and their client governments, but local production, local currency, independent media, and a conscious culture movement can together build the steps of power that ordinary people can climb upon until they can look the the paper deity in the eye. With sufficient organization, we can guerrilla-macro manage the economy from the bottom up. We do not need anyone's permission or consent. We do not have to await the overthrow any government or corporation, nor should we expect their praise or support along the path.

We must beware, the methods of political organization and resistance developed in previous decades will not continue to work in the coming age of resource contraction. In the past, workers have organized unions, women and minorities have had some successes redressing the oppression and power imbalances of our class-based society. We must beware, what has worked politically in an expanding economy will not work in a contracting economy. Just as past civilizations have passed from democracy to authoritarian government, so will be the cultural evolutionary tendency of our society. The rising fundamentalisms across the world and in America are the tip of an iceberg of authoritarian organizations well suited to economic hardship and polarization. We will not defeat them with legislation, with traditional political demonstrations and civil disobedience. We will only defeat them and bring about the birth of a more conscious and sustainable society with a systematic movement that is at once economically rooted, politically and spiritually engaged. We have to rebuild our culture from the bottom up. We have to develop a more sophisticated understanding of long term cultural change. And we have to find the will to act on that awareness. It is on that latter point that those in the global south are most likely to lead. The global corporate system may now seem invincible, but the revolution that will bring its downfall has already begun.

1 Zeigler, Alexis, Conscious Cultural Evolution, Understanding Our Past, Choosing Our Future, Ecodem Press, Charlottesville, 1996, aslo at www.conev.org