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HUMAN ORIGINS DESTROY CORE FASCIST MYTHOLOGY  
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Yann Perreau
June 22, 2026
Canadian Dimension
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_ How prehistory challenges fascist myths of purity, hierarchy, and
identity _

Lascaux Cave, France., Photo by Traumrune/Wikimedia Commons.

 

The deeper we explore humanity’s past, the harder it becomes to
sustain some of the most powerful political myths of the modern world.

For more than a century, authoritarian ideologies have sought
legitimacy in origin stories: pure people, ancestral homelands,
primordial hierarchies, and civilizational destinies. Fascism, in
particular, has always been obsessed with beginnings. Whether in Nazi
fantasies of Aryan ancestry, myths of ethnic continuity, or
contemporary narratives of demographic replacement and civilizational
decline [[link removed]],
the past is transformed into a source of authority. History becomes
destiny. Origins become a source of legitimacy.

Yet archaeology, anthropology, genetics, and evolutionary science
increasingly tell a different story. Research across these fields has
challenged older assumptions about purity, hierarchy, and human
nature. Deep history reveals migration rather than isolation,
cooperation rather than perpetual conflict, and experimentation rather
than inevitability.

Georges Bataille

Few 20th century thinkers saw this more clearly than Georges Bataille,
who observed that competing visions of the past often conceal varying
perspectives of humanity.

Better known today for his writings on eroticism, sacrifice, and
transgression, French philosopher Bataille was also one of the first
major European intellectuals to recognize
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prehistory could serve as an antidote to fascist mythology. During the
1930s and 1940s, when fascist movements were mobilizing myths of
origin on an unprecedented scale, he turned to cave art, ritual, and
the earliest traces of human life, immersing himself in the latest
archaeological, anthropological, paleontological, and sociological
research.

His writings on prehistory
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drew extensively on the discoveries and debates of his time, delving
into philosophical, anthropological, and political interests at once.
What distinguishes humans from other animals? How did symbolic thought
emerge? What forms of community existed before states, nations, and
organized religions? These questions acquired a particular urgency
during the rise of Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in
Germany, when competing visions of humanity became a matter of life
and death.

Studying cave art and the discoveries emerging from sites such as the
Lascaux Cave in France, Bataille became fascinated by a simple fact.
The artists who painted the walls left no names. They founded no
dynasties. They erected no monuments to rulers or conquerors. But they
created some of the most extraordinary images in human history.

For Bataille, the lack of names was not a footnote; it was the point.

The caves revealed forms of collective creation that preceded
authorship, ownership, and sovereignty. Art appeared not as an
expression of individual genius or political authority but as a shared
symbolic activity through which a community understood itself and its
place in the world.

Instead of fascism’s cult of leadership, Bataille discovered a
humanity whose earliest masterpieces emerged from participation rather
than domination, anonymity rather than glory, and collective creation
rather than the cult of personality.

The political implications of these observations became increasingly
difficult to ignore during the rise of the totalitarian regimes that
would engulf much of Europe and Asia. In his 1933 essay “The
Psychological Structure of Fascism
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Bataille analyzed the attraction to sovereignty, authority, and
charismatic leadership. In 1936, he founded Acéphale
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whose symbol was a headless human figure.

The image was deliberately provocative. Against the Führer, Il Duce,
Stalin, and every cult of leadership, Bataille proposed a humanity
without a head. The figure was less of a political statement than a
symbolic reversal of the principles celebrated by totalitarian
movements. Against sovereignty, he imagined forms of collective
existence that could not be reduced to a single authority. Against
hierarchy, he emphasized participation, reciprocity, and shared
experiences.

Prehistory became important not because it provided an alternative
mythology, but because it revealed a past that resisted mythological
simplification. Bataille turned to caves such as Lascaux as they
seemed to preserve traces of human existence before nations, before
states, and before centralized authority. What he found there was not
an original people or an ancestral race, but forms of collective life
that escaped the categories through which modern politics often tends
to understand itself.

 

Historian, writer, and occultist George Bataille.

 

Against Hobbes

In this sense, Bataille’s reading of prehistory amounted to a direct
challenge to one of the founding myths of modern political thought. In
_Leviathan_
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(1651), Thomas Hobbes famously described life before political
authority as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Human
beings, he argued, originally lived in a condition of universal
conflict—a “war of all against all”—from which only a
sovereign power could rescue them.

This image has shaped centuries of political theory. It continues to
influence assumptions about human nature and social order. If conflict
is primordial, hierarchy appears necessary. If competition is
humanity’s defining characteristic, strong authority becomes easier
to justify.

Yet few anthropologists, archaeologists, or evolutionary researchers
today would recognize early human societies that were part of
Hobbes’s description. Over the past century, discoveries from
prehistory have gradually eroded the picture of humanity emerging from
a primordial war of all against all. Instead, these findings have shed
light on how the social bond preceded sovereignty.

Cooperation and human success

Research in the 21st century has begun to explain the reasoning behind
this. Far from being a secondary achievement of civilization,
cooperation was one of the conditions that made civilization possible.
Human infants require years of care, and this knowledge needs to be
transmitted across generations. Food sharing, communication, and
reciprocity were not late cultural inventions. They were essential to
survival.

Increasingly, researchers describe _Homo sapiens_ as a uniquely
hyper-cooperative species. In a landmark study
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_Nature_ in 2014, the authors argued that cooperative breeding and
exceptional levels of social cooperation played a decisive role in the
evolution of human cognition and culture. Shared childcare, collective
learning, and social transmission enabled forms of cumulative culture
unmatched elsewhere in the animal world.

Human beings did not become cooperative because civilization imposed
cooperation upon them: civilization became possible because humans
were already cooperative. American anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
makes a similar point in _Mothers and Others_
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networks of care extending far beyond biological parents helped shape
human evolution. Humans survived because they learned to depend upon
one another.

Developmental and comparative psychologist Michael Tomasello reaches a
similar conclusion. In _A Natural History of Human Morality_
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distinguishes human cognition is not superior individual intelligence
but the capacity for shared intentionality—the ability to coordinate
attention, goals, and actions with others. Human intelligence, in this
view, is fundamentally social.

A similar intuition reappears today in discussions about artificial
intelligence. Blaise Agüera y Arcas, an AI researcher, has argued
that intelligence is not simply an individual property but something
that emerges through communication, learning, and exchange. Language
may be less of an instrument of individual advantage than a technology
of collective intelligence.

While Hobbes saw society emerging from conflict, many contemporary
scholars suggest that society was shaped by cooperation.

The archaeology of possibility

The same shift has transformed our understanding of political
development. In _The Dawn of Everything_
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authors David Graeber and David Wengrow challenge the familiar
narrative of how human societies progressed through a fixed
sequence—bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and states—becoming more
hierarchical at every stage.

Drawing on decades of archaeological research, they describe societies
that repeatedly experimented with different political arrangements.
Some adopted hierarchical structures only temporarily before
abandoning them. Others alternated between centralized and
decentralized forms of organization according to seasonal rhythms.
Large populations sometimes existed without kings, standing armies, or
centralized bureaucracies. These accounts make human history look less
like a march toward the state and more like a field of political
experimentation.

The implications of this outlook extend well beyond archaeology. If
hierarchy is not inevitable, authoritarianism can no longer present
itself as the culmination of human development. If human beings
repeatedly invented different ways of organizing collective life, then
political alternatives are not utopian fantasies. They are historical
realities. The past does not reveal our destiny, but another
possibility of how to exist.

Deep history against race

The anti-fascist implications of prehistory became especially visible
during the 20th century.

As Nazi scholars attempted to transform archaeology into a science of
racial origins, other researchers moved in the opposite direction. In
_Man Makes Himself_ [[link removed]],
archaeologist V. Gordon Childe emphasized that human progress is a
result of innovation, exchange, and collective invention, instead of a
biological destiny. Anthropologist Franz Boas’s _The Mind of
Primitive Man_ [[link removed]]
dismantled theories of racial hierarchy and demonstrated that cultural
differences were historical rather than biological. Ethnologist Paul
Rivet’s studies of migration and the peopling of the Americas
highlighted human circulation, encounter, and mixture over purity and
permanence in the region. Working in different disciplines, these
researchers arrived at a similar conclusion: the deeper one
investigates human history, the less sustainable are the ideas of
fixed origins and permanent identities.

Advances in the 21st century in genetics have further strengthened
this conclusion. Ancient DNA research has transformed our
understanding of the past
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as the discovery of cave art transformed our understanding of
prehistoric culture a century ago. Across Eurasia and beyond, genetic
studies have revealed repeated episodes of migration, admixture, and
exchange that challenge older narratives of stable and isolated
populations.

Far from revealing isolated groups preserving fixed identities over
millennia, genetics shows continuous movement and transformation. Even
_Homo sapiens_ bear the marks of encounters with other human groups
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including Neanderthals and Denisovans.

The further we travel into the past, the harder it becomes to sustain
fantasies of racial purity.

Why Bataille’s thinking remains important

Prehistory does not provide a political program. It does not tell us
how contemporary societies should be organized, nor does it reveal a
lost golden age. The important point is not that prehistoric humanity
was peaceful, egalitarian, or morally superior. Human violence is
ancient. So are domination and conflict.

The lesson is something else.

Deep history undermines some of the stories authoritarian ideologies
tell us about humanity. Against the myths of racial purity, it reveals
a mixture of races. Against myths of primordial hierarchy, it reveals
experimentation with political structure. Against myths of sovereign
necessity, it reveals human cooperation. Against myths of fixed
identity, it reveals transformation.

Bataille understood that prehistory was not simply about origins. It
was also about what happens when origin stories lose their authority.
Now, with nationalism and authoritarian politics again looking for
acknowledgment in ancestry, identity, and destiny, deep history offers
a different perspective. The further back we go, the harder it is for
fascism to find validity in historical narratives. Instead, what comes
into view is a history of movement and exchange, cooperation and
shared invention.

Prehistory doesn’t excuse domination. It doesn’t erase it, either.
It places domination in perspective. And at a moment when
authoritarianism is once again on the rise, the deep past reveals
something both humbling and reassuring: our greatest strength has
never been purity or domination, but our capacity to cooperate,
connect, and depend on one another.

 

_Yann Perreau is a writer, educator, contemporary art curator, and
writing fellow for the Human Bridges project of the Independent Media
Institute. He has published several books on art, climate, anonymity,
and more. His articles have appeared in many publications, including
Libération, Art Press, and East of Borneo. He has served as a
cultural attaché for both the French Embassy in London and the French
Consulate in Los Angeles. He holds an MPhil in art history from
Paris’s EHESS._

 

_Canadian Dimension is the longest-standing voice of the left in
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* anthropology
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* George Bataille
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* Racism
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* Authoritarianism
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* Thomas Hobbes
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* cooperation
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* fascist ideology
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