What the Demise of the Comanches Can Teach Us About TikTok

Or deconflicting our ancient minds with modern technologies

The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man. Pete Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder. 1615

I have been digging into Montaigne, and I had forgotten that our word for essay originally meant “to try.”

I cannot think of a better definition for essay writing — attempting to understand the cosmos and our place within it.

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TikTok. It is an onomatopoeically precise name. This is the same sound a grandfather clock makes. Each tik and tok poses us a question: what are you doing with your time?

I have seen one video on TikTok. It was of a man doing what appeared to be target practice with a fake pistol. From what I can recall, the pistol was wirelessly connected to his television screen so that his shots at a target on his wall could be tracked virtually. This was not reality. It was neither a real gun nor a real range, and his room had no windows. I was stunned to notice that my entire mood changed over the course of a twenty second video. I felt a sense of loss, not just for the man’s sake, but for the sake of the millions of people who watch videos like this while the pendulum beneath the grandfather clock counts the passing of time.

Why is TikTok is so engaging? What does it mean for those engaged by it? Who designed it to be this addictive? My hunch is that TikTok was designed with two goals in mind: to render us both inert and dependent.

This would not be the first time in history this has happened.

I believe if we want to preserve freedom, we should study those who have lost it. Let us turn to the Spanish in the eighteenth century.

Spaniards surged through the New World until they ran up against the Comanches. The Spaniards knew the Comanches were warriors who would fight and bleed until the end. They also knew that the ancient bow and arrow was superior to the modern musket for the American way of war: that is, the small raid, similar to modern day special operations missions.

The bow and arrow is always at the ready and easier to fire from a galloping horse. An arrow can be strung faster than powder and shot could be loaded. An archer was more accurate than a musketeer whose musket was so inaccurate that the command was to “level” and not to “aim” prior to firing.¹

Viceroy Bernardo de Galvez understood the muskets weaknesses, so he decided to arm his enemy – with muskets.² The intent was twofold: one, for the Comanches to become less effective in combat, and two, for them to become dependent on the musket, which in turn would make them dependent on the Spanish.³ If the Comanches rebelled, de Galvez could refuse to sell them guns, powder, and shot.

It is of interest that many technologies can only gain widespread adoption by first destroying our ability to flourish without them.

What then was the musket? It was not an inaccurate yet elegantly crafted weapon of metal and wood so much as it was a Trojan Horse. It weakened Comanche muscles, it removed Comanche callouses, and it castrated Comanche warriors.

The Comanches assumed they were gaining an edge when in reality they were giving their edge away. Their initial advantage was knowledge. They knew how to whittle a tree into a viscerally beautiful killing weapon. They knew which ash tree was best for bow, which dogwood was best for arrows, and how to hang on to the side of a galloping horse between slinging arrows at the clumsy fools with muskets. With the loss of their knowledge came the loss of their freedom. Humans are unique among the animal kingdom in that we rely on knowledge instead of instinct: within a single generation, tens of thousands of years of accumulated wisdom of how to survive free and unhindered in the wild can vanish. All in the name of wanting the next best thing.

The irrelevant fact is that the bow was superior to the musket. The significant fact is that the Comanches chose the musket over the bow anyway. This says something important about human nature. My sense is that it is easier to crave what we do not have than it is to appreciate the value of what we do have. This may be an evolved adaption that spurs us to want the higher tensile blade for skinning and the more colorful headdress for leadership displays, and that this desire is why we survived the crucibles spanning the five million year gap between us and our chimpanzee brethren. On the other hand, this same impulse combined with the dazzling array of new objects in the modern day may be why we forfeit our freedom for boom sticks and smart phones.

In sum, the Spaniards wanted Comanches who were putty in their hands, while the Comanches wanted something novel.

But the musket merely made the Comanches slightly less effective combatants; TikTok turns its most ardent users into corpses, albeit corpses capable of circulating a bit of blood. Whether at the airport, the market, or walking down the street, it is hard not to see glazed eyes and spastic thumbs – thumbs swiping and tapping just fast enough to prevent the mind from thinking too deeply on what it is about to commit itself to. All the while, the grandfather clock continues to tik and tok.

Let us take a look at our thumbs. The TikToker does not know why he has thumbs. Thumbs are why we can climb trees for figs and bananas, chip away at statues, and handle a pencil. Thumbs are why we can craft elegant and deadly blades from stone and guns from ore, and then handle knives, spears, swords, bows, muskets, and M4s in combat and on the hunt. Thumbs are why we are able to protect kith and kin when the power grid blows out, the plumbing stops pumping water, and the dark things crawl out of the shadows.

Unlike the Comanches, all too many TikTok users do not even realize that they are putty in the palms of two great dragon hands – in this case, a Chinese Communist Party funded tech company. Some know and do not even care. It is significant that China restricts how much time their youth can spend on TikTok and other social media platforms, and biases the content to be educational as opposed to mind rotting.  

I wonder what a Comanche warrior would say to the man I watched in that TikTok video – and to all those millions who watched him as well. I imagine he would say something like, “We died fighting. Bow or musket, it does not matter. We did not watch someone play war in their windowless living room. We had sun and moon and sweat on our skin. We stood across from our enemy. We fought, bled, and died for our freedom. But you? What are you doing?”

Our young were born to ride the bare backs of horses beneath the moon, stalk narrow paths along the rolling prairie with faces painted half red and half black, and swim and scream like savages in forty degree mountain lakes at the sheer joy of being alive. Instead, our young are watching self-help videos for lives that are not being lived.

Chronic TikTok users are conditioned to roll their eyes at one or two novel things happening over the course of an entire lifetime – fire, wheel, sail, printing press – and to expect something novel every thirty seconds.

“The change that matters is the change of a societies axioms.”⁴ What then are the new axioms of the TikTok generation? I will hazard a guess at a few. One, “I expect new things at all times.” Two, “ I do not care if they are better than the old things.” Three, “I care more for dopamine today than for freedom tomorrow.” Four, “I choose to watch rather than do.”

What follows? If we do not harmonize our ancient minds with our modern technologies, I do not think these new axioms will lend themselves to any other outcome than an entire generation exposing their necks to the next two bit despot.

Ten Bears, a Chief of the Comanche, said, “I was born upon the prairie, where the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun. I was born where there are no enclosures and where everything drew a free breath. I want to die there and not within walls.”⁵

Nor would he, I imagine, want to die in front of a screen.

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Thank you for reading What then?

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See you for the next essay on Tuesday.

1. Keeley, Lawrence H. War Before Civilization. New York, Oxford University Press, 1996.

2. Hämäläinen, Pekka. The Comanche Empire. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2008.

3. Gálvez, Bernardo de, and Donald E Worcester. Instructions for Governing the Interior Provinces of New Spain, 1786. New York: Arno Press, 1967

4. Hoffer, Erik. Before the Sabbath. Harper and Row, 1979.

5. Brown, Dee. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee : an Indian History of the American West. New York. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970.