What is the difference between a termite mound and a skyscraper?
Is the difference qualitative, or merely a matter of quantity, of physical magnitude? Both involve a vertical alteration of natural spaces. Both are built entirely out of materials synthesized from the natural world. Both involve the carefully coordinated activity of “armies” of laborers.
It seems to me that there are at least two important ways that these two things differ. First, termites collectively constructing their towering mounds are acting out their evolution-derived social and biological impulses. Termites are mound builders by design; mound-construction is part of how termites adapt to the demands and opportunities of a specific environmental niche. Mound-building is an inseparable part of what termites are; it is an authentic termite behavior. They are simply born that way.
Mound building termites, since their emergence as a distinct species of insect, have always built mounds. Humans, however, since their emergence as a distinct species of primate, have spent over 99.9% of their tenure on the planet in the entire absence of a single multiple story construction of any kind.
Skyscrapers are not part of human design. No human is born to build skyscrapers. Constructing tall buildings is not a response to evolution-directed social or biological impulses. It is a response to evolution-directed social and biological impulses that have been severely distorted, yoked to unnatural power hierarchies, and redirected through a combination of fear and coercion underwritten by lethal violence. The necessity of violence is proof of the unnaturalness of the act; without fear and force skyscrapers would never be possible. No monumental human construction has ever been brought into existence in the absence of violence or the threat of violence imposed on those doing the actual construction. A horse would never agree to pull a plow without the whip, and a wild horse, not even then.
This might sound somewhat provocative: to say that violence is a requisite for tall buildings. If so, it is only because in the modern civilized world the violence is not normally overt; it has long ago been systematized, literally infused throughout the social-economic system in which the building activity happens.
A welder or crane operator is simply doing his or her job. On the surface there’s nothing violent about that. But the whole idea of a job as something distinct from other kinds of activity, and the pressure to have a job in order to preserve a bearable level of personal comfort, are direct results of systemic violence in the guise of economic coercion. And the whip, the ever-present threat of unemployment, gets its sting from a system where access to power and resources is forcefully limited, where money is an entry condition for participation, where life’s basic necessities must be purchased.
Modern cities no longer employ hordes of outright slaves driven by the threat of the whip. They employ hordes of wage slaves forced to operate as servomechanisms in a massive bureaucratic machine and driven by the threat of social marginalization and starvation.
Sure, there are carrots as well as whips. But for a carrot to be an effective enticement, the threat of hunger must first be present. Hunger (deficiency in all its forms) is a consequence of restricted access. Restriction of access to life’s necessities is a consequence of asymmetric distribution of power–the very definition of power.
An egalitarian society could never build a skyscraper.
