The Ultimate Weapon
When early humans developed basic tools to give themselves an advantage in the natural world, they started down a path inexorably leading to exactly where we find ourselves today. We have come full circle with our ever-advancing weapons and are now utterly disadvantaged in the natural world.
In an era prior to the Neolithic revolution, when nomadic tribes followed migrating prey, their advanced hunting weapons gave them enough of an advantage that they could enjoy surplus. Slings made stones more lethal, nets and traps produced game more abundantly than hooks or spears. There was extra food that could be preserved and cached so that today’s hunting provided tomorrow’s meals. A cache of food needs to be defended and defense calls for different weapons and fortification. A good fortification is a settlement with a defendable perimeter and it is the antithesis of nomadic life. Nomads were now potential raiders and our former selves became a threat to our settled way of life. With less urgency in procuring food, but more urgency in protecting supplies there also came more time available to sit and think.
The act of thinking is not a passive activity by any means. Neural construction and development is a vigorous, if unseen, form of exercise that results in the kind of growth that offers exponential evolutionary advantage.
Agriculture complemented early settled life and called for some spears to be turned into plowshares and community life flourished along with innovation of domestic implements. Along with more material investment in their home turf came greater risk of loss by raiding adversaries and so communities prized innovation in weaponry. Systematic response to threat became part of the culture and its instruction was communicated in pictures, spoken word and then written language. Stories were told of the great conflicts and challenges overcome.
It was somewhere along in this stage of development that humans realized the greatest weapon of all was the story itself. Compelling narratives galvanized the collective imagination of tribes and clans and provided justification for forcefully prevailing by any means in a hostile world. The effectiveness of outnumbered forces could be multiplied with a powerful story. Killing was not a sin if the victims were recast from recognizable adversaries into the faceless armies of an evil enemy.
Also throughout this evolutionary era, physiological and neurological adaptations occurred and the capacity for abstract thinking increased along with the sophistication of stories. Communities became societies. All sorts of imaginative rationales were conceived and were put up against those of competing societies. Primitive deities were merged and made more complex and invoked for larger group identification and sanctification. Importantly, these hybrid religious narratives gave hierarchical advantage to the ruling class within societies. Enemies were now identified within societies and the weaponization of stories achieved more precise leverage.
At every stage of human development, either in lockstep or leading the way, the stories we tell ourselves have dictated our path’s direction. The stories that outcompeted those of the adversary became the prevailing cultural narrative because the victorious populations grew and others were extinguished. The armies with the best stories win. The enduring themes across the human era are those that prominently feature conquest and proliferation by the conquerors. Are these story themes a cause or a reflection of our perception that human beings are a violent and fecund species?
The answer is both unknowable and immaterial to our present circumstances. We find ourselves now swamped with advanced weapons and yet the world is vastly more hostile than ever. Stories gave us the self-justification for the need to dominate in every circumstance, or believe that we did. We swept aside cautionary tales like those of Icarus or the King on the Hill.
We are caught in a paradox of our own making: the evolutionary advantage we have strived for since the beginning has been fully realized and it is also now the impending cause of our species’ demise. We are currently foundering in self-created chaos because there are no longer any story patterns to follow for our predicament. The ultimate irony is we have run out of stories, lost our defenses and have fallen victim to the ultimate weapon.
