MODERN LIFE ON PLANET EARTH started when cells, which, for around three billion years were fine flying solo, started self-organizing. Single-celled organisms became multicellular. Simple systems got way more complex. And before they took a moment to look around—assess, go “What the fuck just happened?”—they turned to the next guy and ate him.  

     
There’s a memory I return to. (It must be trouble.)

I was a teacher’s aide in high school. Grading papers for the middle school English teacher while she tallied votes for the yearbook. Class clown, most likely to succeed, etc. And what she said next became proof intelligent people are incapable of taking advice. She said, “I really don’t think I should tell you this. But the number of times you’ve come in second for these categories is nuts. Of course, there’s no award for runner-up.”

    
One of my favorite rappers penned the lyrics, “If you come from nothing that’s what you aspire to.” And he didn’t mean you become more like your friends every day. Though, that’s a hell of a bar.

I grew up in the ‘90’s. Raised by a single-parent of two. On four dollars and twenty-five fucking cents an hour. While young, I realized we were different. Which, honestly would have been fine. Except that I noticed in many ways we seemed the exact same as everybody.

Just like everybody, I coveted anything my classmates had. So, I started asking for those things. And every time—be it a trampoline, Nerf gun, or saltwater taffy—I got the same answer: we can’t afford it. 

Seeing the pain in my mom’s eyes giving me that answer, I did what anybody would. I curbed my wants. First by keeping them to myself. Then by silencing them altogether.

I learned our family didn’t have a five-year plan. Or a two-year one. We didn’t plan. Period. Because, experience taught us, personal desires are meaningless. When you come from nothing that’s what you aspire to.

To do otherwise seemed pointless.

    
Existential horrors are obfuscated by modern comforts. So, there’s nothing like venturing to the world’s least-hospitable places to shed light on them. That’s why I can’t thank Wener Herzog enough for Encounters at the End of the World.

At the thirty-seven-minute mark, lasting a couple of minutes, he interviews Samuel S. Bowser on the day before his retirement. Bowser is a cell biologist who dives under the ice to study life on the microscopic level. But here, appears as if he’s hanging his hat up after a career in a World War II foxhole. He’s sullen. Wrung out. Taking an extra beat to answer Herzog’s question.

“The creatures down there are like Science Fiction creatures,” he says. “They range in the way that they would gobble you up. From, slime-type-blobs—but, creepier than classic Science Fiction blobs—having long tendrils that would ensnare you. And as you tried to get away, you’d just become more and more ensnared by your own actions. And after you would be frustrated, exhausted, then this creature would move in and take you apart. And there are other worm-type things with horrible mandibles, jaws, bits to rend your flesh. If you were to shrink down, miniaturize into that world, it’d be a horrible place…”

    
I can’t remember where I heard it (probably one of you assholes), a story of this family that, like so many nowadays, waited until they were in their forties to have a child. And upon hearing of their good fortune, the man’s brother, who was younger but had four kids of his own, slapped him on the back and said, “Welcome to the Human Race.”

    
If I were to describe a group from the not-so-distant past who cannibalized their enemies, then another who practiced ritual sacrifice, an organization would happen. Listening, you would rank people who carved the insides of their relatives onto a slab of rock as being way more civilized than those who ate brains.

And what if I described another that, instead of eating flesh and drinking blood, gathered each Sunday to participate in the ritual of doing so? Except the “flesh” was only a cracker and the “blood” was Kool-Aid. What would you think of them?

The desire to turn to the next organism and gain their energy and resources by consuming them is still inside us. In many ways, “Human Progress,” is simply the protracted tale of various attempts to distance ourselves from this violence through ritual.

Something resembling spiritual plaque accumulates throughout life. A pressure. Or need. This feeling can grow to become a solid thing that inhabits us. And, as we know, physics demands that any solid be broken down. First to a liquid. Then a gas.

Only then can its weight no longer be felt.

Something you might remember from physics class is sublimation. It’s the direct transition from solid to gas. The process jumps what is otherwise a necessary step in nature. Ritual, in a similar manner, is the process we have to sublimate our plaque without resorting to violence first.

Communion is one example. Another is therapy.

Welcome to the Human Race.

    
Herzog, in his deeply pensive fashion, responds, “And this is a world earlier than human beings. Do you think the Human Race and other mammals fled in panic from the oceans and crawled on solid land to get out of this?”

Without pause, Bowser goes, “Undoubtedly, that’s exactly the driving force that caused us to leave the horrors, to grow and evolve to escape what’s horribly violent at the miniature scale,” before dropping his head and considering what he’s said.

To escape this bloodbath, organisms not only fled, they started working together across species. Especially in those that are most vulnerable, cooperation became key. And as soon as cooperation got invented, you just know Life fucked it up.

Because, to wrench order out of chaos, we need rules. Even in a petri dish, if a single bacterium amongst a group starts freeloading, perhaps sucking too much of a particular nutrient and betraying the group for more than their share of the spoils, the colony sends signals for all other bacterium to murder it.

To witness the fact playing out is sobering.

The other day, as if possessed, our neighbors’ chickens began haranguing and pecking a hen. They do this if they detect an illness. Or some weakness that might attract a predator and compromise the flock. Or if they sense resources are low and allowing the weak link to continue utilizing them might affect the survival of others. You’ve heard the phrase, “pecking order.”

The neighbors’ dogs, likely in some duty to the flock, joined in. And my wife and I screamed. And clapped. We shook the fence. But eventually fell silent as the hen’s movements ceased and the dogs continued thrashing it back and forth in their jaws for a little while. Eventually the movements of not only the dogs but of all the various species in the backyard went back to their normal, boring routine.  And we felt what witnesses of public hangings must have felt five minutes after the man’s foot gave its final jerk.

Speaking of public hangings—the last one took place on August 14, 1936, in Owensboro, Kentucky. Rainey Bethea, a 22-year-old Black man, got executed for the rape of a 70-year-old woman. The event drew roughly 20,000 spectators. But, because of its intense media coverage, paired with the circus-like atmosphere, described by some in attendance as “ghoulish,” the spectacle prompted the end of the practice for good.

But, until then, less than one hundred years ago, public hangings were seen as a totally civilized ritual.

Way better than say, cannibalism.

    
Four years after Rainey Bethea was hung by the neck in front of more people than generally attend a NBA game, Steven Michael Lukes was born. Lukes is a British political and social theorist. Mainly interested in individualism, rationality, conceptions of power, and moral conflict. In many ways, Lukes is obsessed with the cooperative species we call Homo Sapiens.

And particularly interesting, to me, are his theories on power.

The desire to eat someone next to you is inarguably a desire to express power over them. In fact, it is the most blatant, in-your-face package power comes in. And since this essay is about how dominating others has been primarily what life’s been about ever since life started, and it (the essay) plans to pivot in an attempt to convince you—soon—that domination wasn’t wrung out of our species just because we developed culture and accrued a couple morals in our 300,000 year history as a species, but instead, it simply subverted, cleverly shifting its packaging, I really think you need to hear about “ideological power.”

Sometimes called “soft power,” as the name suggests, it doesn’t walk around carrying a big sword lopping peoples’ heads off. It’s sneakier than that. Damn near invisible. And therefore, more effective.

Soft power is how people have their beliefs and preferences shaped and affected by the powerful, often without them realizing. It is especially adept at making people want things opposed to their own self-interest.

The cigarette industry has maybe been the most astute example of public-facing soft power. Because, the fact cigarettes cause cancer has been known since 1964. Yet, here we are, still buying them to an extent that the global tobacco market was valued at 943.87 billion USD in 2025.

What is truly fucked up about power packaged softly, is that the powerless, i.e. normal people, are manipulated in a way where they actually consent to their being manipulated.

According to Lukes’ theory, the Christian missionary push (an activity that persists today in religious communities like the Latter-Day Saints) of the 19th Century, wasn’t so successful because Christians had extremely rad ideas. It was successful because Christians were physically there. Day in, day out. And whatever society they were infesting repetitively saw the fancy, new-fangled doodads Christians had compared to what they had.

And they coveted them.

    
Back before the inherent violence within power got so subverted as to be nearly unrecognizable, its evolution was traceable. Tracking it is almost cool, really.

Almost.

You might wonder, how did early societal groups, as they grew from mostly-relatives into larger, mixed company, go from practicing cannibalism to something like ritualized sacrifice? You think they just collectively put down their favorite brain forks one day and thought, “My god, we’re monsters. Why has no one thought of murdering seven virgins, instead?”

Primal urges are generally the ones that most necessitate release. To repress feelings comes at a great cost. Yet, to succumb to them carries a cost as well. As you move further from cannibalism, societies seem forced to implement more and more rules and rituals in order to acquire the same sense of expression previously afforded by eating human flesh.

The Kwakiutl Natives of South America, until discovery in the late-18th Century by Europeans, existed as small, constantly warring tribes. Their story became a great example of how ritual can evolve over time.

At first contact, there were still isolated examples of cannibalism within the tribe. But for the member of the community who was actually partaking of flesh, a litany of rules resembling extreme examples of OCD—only using their left hand to eat, not before turning four circles outside their home, refusing daylight for four weeks afterward, etc.—was required. Headhunting was also practiced, which is a common “next step” for societies leaving behind cannibalism. But, extremely interesting, was a form of “symbolic combat,” that got substituted once Europeans moved in and said, “Hey, knock it off with eating each other!”

Similar to what might happen if Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk were to “fight” over someone’s admiration by buying up the menu at a Michelin restaurant before buying the restaurant itself, two individuals from the Kwakiutl tribe would compete for status by seeing who could destroy more of their property than the other. The only difference between what was happening in South America 250 years ago, and what could easily be imagined to happen between Musk and Bezos today, is the aggressive element of the interaction wasn’t hidden or denied.

In one surviving account, after a tribesman in effect “beat” another by having a member of the tribe take his coppers (money) and throw them in the river, the man said, “Hap! Hap! Hap!” Translating as, “I’ve eaten you! You are all in my belly now!”

    
In a simplified, sliding scale model, cooperation can be seen as progress. While competition tips the scale backward.

In our era where competitive sports are king, we still much prefer if athletes murder each other collectively rather than as individuals. So, maybe we are capable of progress? (On the topic of sports, The Olympics started as part of a religious festival—a ritual, you could say—later renounced as paganism before being revitalized into its modern iteration.) But we still struggle to believe that diversity, or the group, on the whole, is a good thing.

As I see it, social media is a very Western invention. Since our inception, The United States has been hell-bent on twisting the one thing we need to operate as a cooperative species—rules—into a ritual to inflict and perpetuate violence.

We’re a punitive society. Just look at our prisons.

The desire to punish those we see as wrong or inferior can be described by no other word than lust. And if you want to see “civilized” peoples’ eyes fill with cannibalistic, murderous lust, look no further than the internet.

The place we go to offload our primal urges is no longer a house of worship, it’s Twitter. And instead of promoting cooperation, social media is a big umbrella under which everyone can fractionalize into weirder and weirder niches and find support.

If a child bites a stranger, they are gently scolded. Then we wait. Hoping the behavior corrects. If an eight-year-old runs around the room biting everyone in his class, the societal pressures get more advanced. But, if an adult regularly chomps down, they’re chucked from society.

Societal norms are highly effective at encouraging cooperation. But, as of now, are absent in social media. And the primal urge for violence is creeping back.

Pay attention. In our next politicized, viral event, no matter what morals/ideals a person is spouting, what they’re summoning is death. Admit it, if you were to learn the ICE agent/president/immigrant/liberal you saw posting yesterday came out as having died today, you’d be happy.

No—happiness isn’t the right word. You’d feel like you just ejaculated.

    
I turned forty. And, for the first time, I’m about to become a dad.

Welcome to the Human Race.

Although it seems like our culture has fewer rituals and rules than in the past, it’s only because, like so much of our society, they operate invisibly now.

You still hear phrases like “He murdered that,” after Kevin Durant plays an especially stellar game, or, “She ate,” after a female rapper drops an impressive freestyle. Modern examples with a direct bloodline to the Kwakiutl.

But it doesn’t bother me.

We’re humans, after all. We all have to release our primal urges somehow.

It’s while I’m standing on the cusp of bringing life into this world that I want to understand the epoch of ritual in which we’re currently situated. Especially if the ritual doesn’t sublimate violence, but instead, softly weaponizes it.

A lot of parents wonder, How do we keep going? How do we exemplify life that holds onto growth and achievement and goals and progress, but leaves behind the more violent trappings of competition?

And I don’t have these answers. That’s why I’m an essayist.

But, until someone smarter ushers in a new ritual, I’m going to try my best to make living a better experience for those around me. And, when I do find myself wanting to engage in friendly competition, will look upon those I’m competing with—perhaps a student body of only forty-five people—and think, without irony, “I hope I get runner-up.” •





Tyler Dempsey is the author of 4 books and host of Another Fucking Writing Podcast. He lives in Arizona with his wife and dogs.

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