In “Society Against the State,” Pierre Clastres observes numerous initiation rituals among nonstate societies that involve tremendous amounts of pain and often leave permanent scars. Clastres postulates that these are not performed for the sake of cruelty, but as leveling mechanism: we have all been through this, we have all suffered in the same way, and so we are all equals, none of us worth more or less than the other.

The Neolithic Trypillian culture, in what is now Ukraine and Moldova, left behind remains of cities that were as big as or bigger than their Mesopotamian contemporaries. Unlike Mesopotamian cities, with their walls and palaces and temples and central granaries, Trypillian cities who signs of remarkable equality and individual freedom. And, notably, the people of Trypillia would periodically—every 75-80 years or so—burn down all the buildings in their city and erect new ones on top of the rubble.

I’ve long wondered if this was a ritual along the lines of what Clastres was observing, a deliberate and physical leveling to socially encode egalitarianism ritually. “However better any of us might imagine we are than each other, we are all exactly the same in this moment.”

https://www.burmalibrary.org/docs21/Clastres-1989-Society_Against_the_State-en-red.pdf

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