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We in the West, looking back on our own immediate history, refer to this pre-civilized status as the Dark Ages. Actually, such Dark Ages are the transition stages between two periods of experiments with the building of civilizations.
All human communities, pre-civilized and civilized, have had gifted leaders whose thoughts and actions have brought about social changes. These "greats" were the divinely, ideologically or sociologically inspired. Divine inspiration or revelation led to the founding of religious faiths.
Successive conflicts involve an indefinite volume of overhead costs, which grow with the intensity and extent of the expansive survival struggle, creating a series of crises along a path that leads to self-destruction and the return of the experimenters to a condition of pre-civilized self-containment.
Internal conflict led to civil wars in the course of which the group was divided or the solidarity of the group was reaffirmed despite hardships imposed on disagreeing, divergent minorities. In the competitive struggle for survival which played such an important role in the life of pre-civilized communities, strategic geographic location was often decisive.
Confined by limitations on communication and transportation, pre-civilized man was circumscribed and localized. With the advent of cultivation, land workers were tied to a particular piece of real estate on which they lived and worked. When asked whether the village across the valley was Sunrise Mountain the local peasant could reply: "How should I know? I live here."
On the contrary, they are so acutely unhappy that many of them have come to regard acquisition and accumulation as a sterile rat-race. Consequently multitudes of people, young and old, have turned their backs on civilization, separating themselves from their affluent homes with their glut of consumer goods to live at non-civilized or pre-civilized levels.
Cooperation has been occasional and confined largely to pre-civilized communities. In all civilizations exploitation has been the rule; the exploitation of nature, of labor power and of the social fabric. The record of natural resources exploitation is well known.
Europeans living for the most part in a pre-civilized rural environment passed through generations of illiterate unawareness of the social process through which European life was expanding.
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