Afghanistan, Primal Vitality, and Modern Degradation
Lessons Learned in the Desert
Afghanistan: A Crash Course in Human Life in the State of Nature
On a blisteringly hot afternoon in late July 2012, the CH-53E carrying my unit and I landed in Forward Operations Base (FOB), Shir-Ghazay, Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Shortly after unloading our gear and turning over with the previous units on base, our platoon loaded into our tanks and M88 recovery vehicles and left the wire for the first time. We rolled into the bazaar just around the corner from our base, where the pale dirt streets were flanked by shops, motorbikes, and tribesfolk. Men, women, and children alike watched us intently as we rolled by. Old men looked on stoically. Women observed us through veils, often accompanied by some scowling male. Adolescent boys shot particularly hostile glares, possibly foreshadowing their future as members of the next generation of Taliban insurgents. Young children either begged for food or pelted our vehicles with stones. Many adults casually toted their AK-47s as they walked the streets or whizzed by on motorbikes. A couple of times, we came across Afghan National Police (ANP), and the Afghan National Army (ANA) contingents patrolling through the community. The aesthetic was bare; homes were built from the same dust and dirt that they walked upon. Ornate rugs and modestly colored clothing made up the bulk of their observable art. Outside of weapons, vehicles, and a cherished modicum of modern tools and supplies, the living image of Afghanistan was defined by the simple austerity of the landscape from where it sprang.
The apparent scene I observed adopted a greater meaning as time wore on. The people in that bazaar and the surrounding villages lived in a state of de facto anarchy, only a few steps from the pure paleolithic and neolithic social organizations that we evolved in for tens of thousands of years. Life was structured along clan-based tribal lines. While Islam was the dominant religion with a clear presence in the country, religious identity in this social structure was secondary to group identity and loyalties. Religious emphasis in Afghanistan was enforced mainly and most emphatically by the Taliban. This was, of course, because they drew their legitimacy from it. In fact, Islam itself, just like the Zoroastrian, Hindu, and Buddhist faiths that it superseded, was an import from more “advanced cultures.”[1][2] The only organic religions in Afghanistan were probably shamanist or animist, religious categories generally characteristic of other cultural structures similar to those seen in Afghanistan.
It is truly remarkable that any foreign religion even managed to take root in a country where the people are renowned for their effective resistance to nearly all types of ideological and physical conquests. Throughout history, even the empires of Macedon, Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States have failed to leave anything more than trace influence in this country. Foreign ideals and unwelcome sovereignty lose their vigor and falter in the desert sands and mountainous valleys of the Central Asian territory. The kind of national identity that we, the West, were attempting to impose upon them, likewise, was a ridiculous alien concept to them. The entire country was a patchwork of culturally similar and loosely affiliated tribes that were just as likely to war with each other as they were to cooperate. No native “Afghan” referred to themselves as such. They were Pashtun, Tajik, Hazara, etc. Thus, the very concept of a “national organization” such as the ANP and ANA was preposterous in a land where one’s place in society was, at its core, kin-based. Thus, the ranks of institutions such as the ANP and ANA were largely filled by outcasts and criminals. Much of their behavior revealed them as such.
Their livelihoods, subsistence, and organic social institutions were minimal. The low-tech, rural, and agricultural structure of their societies meant that Afghans were intimately engaged in their natural surroundings, and their survival largely depended upon favorable weather such as a wet rainy season to ensure a bountiful crop yield that year. And forget about luxuries like hospitals and public assistance. When things went bad in Afghanistan, the clan was its own. Yet, despite minimal nutrition and resources, they were hardy enough to power through hard times just as their ancestors had for thousands of years. Such hardship was precisely the grindstone that sharpened their wits and their resolve.
The law of the land there was just as harsh as its environment and as tough as its people. In stark contrast to the kinder, gentler legal justice we enjoy at home, Afghan society was regulated by brute force. Hierarchical structures, tribal and Islamic laws, and general order and discipline were all enforced primarily through open acts of violence. Inter-tribal feuds and vigilante justice were common practices. Trial by jury? A bizarre, foreign, superfluidity.
In Afghanistan, there is no room for weakness.
Afghan society is, in summary, a primitive, clan-based agricultural society loosely bound by cultural similarities and religious affiliations. The people are immensely tough. They have guts and determination. It is a human social organization stripped almost completely to its bare essentials. It is the purest manifestation of the natural human condition that I have ever, and probably will ever, see in my life. The difference between life in Afghanistan and our own could not be starker.
The Return Home: A Horrifying Revelation
How did this stack up to our own “civilization” back home? I didn’t quite realize how until I returned.
Our plane landed at Cherry Point at around 11 pm in February 2013. From there we took a bus back to Camp Lejeune. Our bus rolled down lonely, tranquil country roads flanked by verdant trees under the moonlight. I was refreshed to see green again after my tenure in the near complete wastelands of Afghanistan’s impoverished Helmand Province.
Yet when we came into Jacksonville’s city limits, the refreshing sight of the serene countryside gave way to the grotesque sight of seedy strip clubs, half-dilapidated billboards, and endless rows of cheesy restaurants, tawdry shops, and neon lights. The air stank of fast food and exhaust. At that moment, I realized that I had finally left Afghanistan, a last bastion of man in a pure state of nature, only to be welcomed back into the arms of degenerative American consumerism. The palpable aura of cultural decay repulsed me.
When I turned the radio or TV on, it only got worse. If I wasn’t being force-fed ads on the latest hygiene product, restaurant stop, or vacation destination, I was graced with promotions for some upcoming sports event or the “exciting season finale” of whatever celebrity “reality” show was running at the time. Media devices spewed trivial swill onto its listeners and viewers. I was amazed at how well I once tolerated it all, How normal it all once seemed to me. However, after months of living a life shorn of Western culture’s superfluities amongst a people who cared nothing for them, I felt this “entertainment” amounted to mere escapism at best, and brainwashing at worst.
Nothing exemplified the latter characteristic than the “news.” Already of rather ill repute among the masses, its fear-mongering, indoctrinating effect was acutely felt by my newly detoxed sensibilities. For the first time, I was not merely consciously knowledgeable of the detrimental effects that its steady stream of hack journalism and over-processed commentary, but sickened by it. Its influence felt like an attempt to infest my mind, stretch and remold its parameters to its liking, and from there, slowly replace my thoughts with their own. I noticed, more than ever, the duplicitous tactics employed by these programs to conquer hearts and minds. Chaotic backgrounds that swirled with headlines, the dramatic faces and tones of the news anchors, and the alarming phraseology used to deliver “current events” all functioned to unbalance the viewer’s temperament and subdue their capacity to critically analyze anything.
I reinterpreted our media as something that conditioned us to focus on entertainment, consumption, and trivialities at the expense of the more real and serious matters of life. American culture presented itself as a place where the superficial eclipsed the essential. Our highly developed and complex institutions and social structures buried the obvious evidence and experience of our true human nature in distractions.
And what sends us running to these mind-numbing modern-day opiates to begin with? For one, the soul-sucking drudgery of our modern-day routines amounts to a Sisyphean misery that is almost unbearable without a steady supply of distractions and comforting illusions. The dissociation from our natural environment due to our sprawling and all-encompassing urban centers, suburbs, and districts has torn us from the Earth. This has resulted to our sense of helplessness and child-like dependency upon state and society.
Modern society revealed itself as a structure that crippled minds and broke wills, reducing its people to domestic beasts of burden stupidly meandering between the work fields and their stables. We were in jeopardy of devolving into the pitiful “last man” forewarned of by Friedrich Nietzsche, a final twilight version of humanity that neither aspires for nor creates anything, choosing instead to wallow in comforts and mediocrity. Such a tragedy would constitute a definitive blow and final insult against the intelligence, creativity, and willpower that has hitherto defined human excellence.
What was this I had returned to?! My time away from the United States, and perhaps more importantly, from Western civilization, it turned out, had rehabilitated me! Like a recovering alcoholic, I had lost my taste and tolerance for poison. The commercial influence, shallowness, and psychological manipulation that I had once regularly swallowed without flinching now tasted noxious and repellant and made me sick.
It should make us all sick.
But, can our prosperous modern society, with all of its opportunities, far from the tooth-and-nail, life-and-death struggles that define primitive life, really be so bad? “Oh, spare us all!” A skeptic might shout. “Oh, you poor unfortunate bastard”, he adds with biting sarcasm, “forced to live with all of these terrible conveniences at your very fingertips! Medicine, education, and rule of law? Oh, for the love of God, say it isn't t so!”
Yes, on the surface, it seems silly to deride modern conveniences so emphatically. Yet, it is precisely the root of our strife.
Modern society is structured in a way that deprives us of a core psychological need; the need for agency, meaningful challenges, and the satisfaction of gaining mastery and control over themselves and their environments. This is not a new concept; Ted Kaczynski (yes, that guy) termed this drive as the “power process”. In his manifesto, Industrial Society and Its Future, he argues that the lack of biologically necessary, effort-demanding challenges in modern industry is a primary source of the epidemic of mental health problems today. According to Kaczynski, most of our needs today are either easily met without much effort at all, or simply unattainable. The psychologically necessary satisfaction gained from overcoming difficult challenges today comes only in the form of what he calls “surrogate activities” like bird-watching or sports, used to replace the abundance of essential human activities that once satisfied the power process in the past.[3] In short, our rationally structured society is critically flawed because it denies people the ability to experience the feeling of self-affirmation and a sense of mastery drawn from overcoming difficult tasks that satisfy a primal need. This concept is somewhat similar the Friedrich Nietzsche’s “will to power”, whereby it is asserted that the drive toward mastery within strong and noble humans is greater than even the will to life itself. As Nietzsche wrote, “What I happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”[4]
This theory, I believe aptly explains the struggle facing the modern world today. We humans may love our comfort, but our affinity is akin to an addict’s love of heroine. Our overindulgence in luxury is just a salve for the routine, coordinated madness we have wrought upon ourselves. Despite all the hubbub about the instinct for self-preservation, our species is built for adversity— we live for the challenge. For us, the chase is better than the catch, and the fight is better than the prize. It’s just that we seem to have forgotten during our long exile from nature. Today, most of us pass our time simply running in hamster wheels and vainly attempting to fill the void left by our atrophied wills with superfluous consumption, escapism, fantasies. Our overall neurotic response to crises and adversity exemplifies this. In our attempts to satisfy all of our rational, practical needs and desires, we have failed to take any serious attempt to bolster the human will. In fact, society today, as in most other eras, seems hellbent on suppressing and controlling it. There is little wonder that the human psyche chaffs under these circumstances. After all, how high can we appraise life when our overflowing need to assert our will to overcome is stifled?
A Return to Primitive Society? NO!
But should we return to the state of anarchic state of nature (or war) observed in places like Afghanistan, though? As violent, benighted, and simple as these people are, surely at least they are not teetering through life like sallow heifers and gelded steers, right? No! Despite their relative hardiness and self-discipline, the raw tribesman is still a diamond in the rough lacking the opportunities to realize his full potential. In an intensely harsh environment, he is mired in an atmosphere of ignorance and superstition, gratuitous violence, and foolish traditions. The lack of plurality and social dynamics makes it nearly impossible for many of them to imagine life transcending the bounds of their tribal realities. The suffocating shroud of Islam draped over the country repels even the slightest influence of anything remotely foreign to it. In Afghanistan, raping others to assert dominance is commonplace, domestic abuse is the norm, and pouring honey into an infected ear amounts to cutting-edge medicine. The land is so impoverished that fathers are forced to euthanize their crippled children, and the onset or absence of October rain can mean the difference between life and death. Yes, such a dreadful environment can and does –as proven by the Afghan people—foster strength and toughness, but it cannot develop intellect and the insight required to complement it. To do that, a social structure specifically designed to reinforce an iron will with a strong, healthy body and sharp and well-trained mind is needed.
My analysis of primitive society (not meant as a pejorative in any sense) and our modern civilization is that societal development went in the wrong direction. The intelligence, creativity, and sheer willpower characteristic of the human race suggests the potential to construct a form of social organization that both encourages and develops our animal vitality and refines it, producing a better version of our primal selves. Instead, social organizations have historically been hellbent on domesticating people through control and the suppression or exploitation of their instincts. The result is a mass of humans little better than livestock, living under the illusion of freedom and agency.
Of course, there has been hardly any era in human history where ambitious groups and individual haven’t grappled with each other over holding dominion over this dung-heep. Historically speaking, societies and civilizations are characterized by a stratified hierarchy of groups, where different classes regularly jockey for power and resources. In these societies, the strongest class – likely the one best equipped with our primal talents – rises to the top, dominates the others, and rewrites the rules in their own favor. Then, over the course of generations, they almost invariably slide into a state of voluptuous effeminacy and fall at the hands of tougher factions. From there, the cycle repeats. As the saying goes, “Empires rise on wooden shields, and descend on glass slippers.” It would seem today, that our entire civilization has already discarded its shield, and is now donning its slippers in preparation for its walk of shame to the gallows.
How to Structure Society to Unite Willpower and Reason
The solution is to replace the values that determine the direction of our social organization. Instead of seeking comfort, our social goal must be the pursuit of challenge. Instead of frenetic profiteering, we must practice prudence and discipline in our industrial and commercial activities. The goal of media and ideology, if even tenable, must not be to control and sedate our primal instincts, but to encourage us to refine and harness them to our fullest potential.
Rather than demand obedience, promote responsibility. In place of worshipping equality, prioritize excellence. Instead of seeking safety and security in our institutions, a focus on independence and self-reliance should be revitalized. People must embrace their convictions, reject dogmas aimed to undermine them and charge forward with renewed strength of mind, will, and arms. These are the virtues through which empires are built and sustained. These are the values that every one of us must embrace, if we desire a life of greatness, achievement, and satisfaction fit only for the optimized human animal.
[1][1], https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/islam-afghanistan-and-the-fraught-history-of-state-making
[2] https://www.ijssrr.com/journal/article/view/1321
[3] Kaczynski, Theodore, “Industrial Society and Its Future”, pgs. 12-14
[4] Nietzsche, Friedrich, The Antichrist, pg. 7