The Civic Platform - A Political Journal of Ideas and Analysis

Here are some excerpts from Erich Fromm’s book, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness:

This lack of heirarchy and chiefs is all the more noteworthy because
it is a widely accepted cliché that such control institutions as are
to be found in virtually all civilized societies are based on a
genetic inheritance from the animal kingdom. We have seen that
among chimpanzees the dominance relationships are rather mild, but
they are nevertheless there. The social relationships of primitive
people show that man is not genetically prepared for that kind of
dominance-submissio n psychology. An analysis of historical society,
with five or six thousand years of exploitation of the majority by a
ruling minority, shows very clearly that the dominance-submissio n
psychology is an adaptation to the social order, and not its cause.
For the apologists of a social order based on control by an elite,
it is of course very convenient to believe that the social structure
is the outcome of an innate need of man and, hence, natural and
unavoidable. The egalitarian society of the primitve shows that
this is just not so. (p. 142)

Primitive Hunters ~ The Affluent Society?

A very relevant point ~ and one even interesting for the analysis of
contemporary industrial society ~ is made by M. D. Sahlins with
regard to the whole question of economic scarcity among primitive
hunters and the modern attitude toward the problem of what
constitutes poverty. He argues against the premise that led to the
idea of the aggressiveness of primitive hunters, namely that life in
the Paleolithic period was one of extreme scarcity and constant
confrontation with starvation. In contrast, Sahlins emphasizes that
the society of primitive hunters was the “original affluent
society.” (p. 144)

Prehistoric Societies and “Human Nature”

This picture of the mode of production and social organization of
hunters and Neolithic agriculturalists is quite suggestive in regard
to certain psychical traits that are generally supposed to be an
intrinsic part of human nature. Prehistoric hunters and
agriculturalists had no opportunity to develop a passionate striving
for property or envy of the “haves,” because there was no private
property to hold on to and no important economic differences to
cause envy. On the contrary, their way of life was conducive to the
development of cooperation and peaceful living. There was no basis
for the formation of the desire to exploit other human beings. The
idea of exploiting another person’s physical or psychical energy for
one’s own purposes is absurd in a society where economically and
socially there is no basis for exploitation.

The impulse to control others also had little chance to develop.
The primitve band society and probably prehistoric hunters since
about fifty thousand years ago were fundamentally different from
civilized society precisely because human relations were not
governed by the principles of control and power; their functioning
depended upon mutuality. An individual endowed with the passion for
control would have been a social failure and without influence.
Finally, there was little incentive for the development of greed,
since production and consumption were stabilized at a certain
level. (p. 160)