Updated: 8/2/14 The Best Lecture on Activism I Have Seen
Updated: 8/17/14 Techniques of Control in families, organizations and social groups.
Updated: 8/14/14 The Techniques Elites Have Utilized Down The Centuries To Control Their Populations.
Updated: 8/13/14 How have elites maintained control in societies through the centuries?
Updated: 8/12/14 Egypt and Nubia
Updated: 8/9/14 Pigmentation Over Thousands of Years
Updated: 7/24/14 If the history of societies has been mostly about domination what have been solutions and positive non-domination outcomes we have observed in that same history?
In a word, what factors in societies historically we have seen to promote democracy?
Updated: 7/23/14 what have we learned to this point about Homo Sapiens?
Updated: 7/19/14 Elites Drove Ancient Trade and the Real Story of English Peasants and their revolt against elites
Updated: 7/1/14 The Matriarchy-Patriarch Battle: The Battle over Chastity. Who was Thecla?
Updated: 6/30/14 Great video on pre-history secrets and accomplishments
Updated: 6/28/14 Egypt and the Battle Between Patriarchy and Matriarchy
Updated: 6/19/14 Cities: Elites and Sacrifice Cultures
Updated: 6/17/14 Meet The Man Who Created the Idea of Monotheism? Akenaton
Updated: 6/17/14 Why Cities Fail
I have made the argument in this essay that almost all cities fail, especially the larger ones.
Historically, this has certainly been the case as the videos above in part one of this blog attest.
I mentioned that most cities fail because:
1. Logistics: It is simply impossible to get food and water to large concentrations of people in cities especially as cities become more and more populous.
Mexico City has to have bottled water brought in every day and that is not enough. Sewage for cities, old and new is poor for most of the world, even under the best of conditions. Cities have a limit on how large they can grow because of the limitations of being able to feed people and get water to them on a daily basis and in the fact that only 0.1 percent of the the Earth's water is potable.
Most modern cities have only three days supply of food on the grocery shelves. Water, like everything else now, depends upon electricity and the failure of the water supply can happen over night.
Modern cities, as flood and disaster events commonly show, begin to fall apart after three days: chaos reigns revealing that modern cities are, in fact, more vunerable than ancient cities, which could hold out against attackers for years.
This is not true today where we have become so over-technologized the vunerabilities have increased not decreased.
2. Disease: Large cities breed disease. Put a lot of people together and one gets a bug, that bug can kill, and has killed millions in cities. One can travel abroad and bring back exotic bugs, now not only from other humans but also from the growing number of animal-to-human diseases abroad. This has been true of human settlement throughout history. We domesticated animals and some of their diseases started to infect us right away.
3. War: Cities are targets for country-side people who quickly understood that cities had stored up food, wealth and gold, and were easy targets.
They could be besieged, starved out or attackers simply polluted the water supply and many cites surrendered and hoped for mercy from the attackers.
All throughout history the country-side people, the poor, slaves, nomads, exiles from the cities, roaming bandits, have gotten together, stormed cities for plunder, rape and power and usually have won, no matter that cities for thousands of years thought moats, 30 foot walls would protect them. They did not. Cities fall and have fallen for thousands of years. City dwellers, in essence, once in the cities were trapped into the city life; most could not hunt again or move to other locations, or roam. The king had them trapped behind city walls and outside those walls was almost certain death from roving brigands and gangs, or pointedly the kings own hired thugs and knights.
Most of the so-called great conquerers in history hit cities' weak spots: lack of mobility, hemmed in, low food, water, and, in time, lets face it, from Alexander to Hitler, cities have been easy targets and easily conquered. Both Hitler and Alexander used mobile calvary and armour to out flank cities frozen in place and to cut their supply lines.
It did not take genius to figure out how to defeat a city.
4. Internal collapse: Cities simply become too much to administer and often prove just too costly to maintain. From an ever increasing army of functionaries and hangers-on, nepotism, to corruption, to malice and vice, city residents usually succumb to these vices and the city goes down or up in flames and/or simply are abandoned when a new site is found.
5. Civil War: Often the victorious can't agree on how to share the spoils, disputes arise and the two armies fight it out. But then, weakened by the fighting, the victor is taken over by outside third forces. Witness the Roman Empire example.
6. Add to this list things like climate change, volcanic eruptions, asteroid strikes and floods, (most cities are near oceans and lakes) it is no small wonder that most do not survive.
7. Slavery: Most of the earlier cities were based on the most brutal human debasement-that of slavery. And note slaves always revolt. Moreover, slavery is labor intensive as it is brutal also often becomes too difficult to administer, especiallly with the advent of writing. Slaves in most slave-based societies out-numbered free men and elites three-to-one. Rome's 1.2 million citizens had 400,000 slaves. Elites point to monuments, great buildings and other people they have conquered as their contributions to civilization but to be clear slaves built these civilizations and all this was done on the backs of women and the underclasses.
Slaves were not happy and looked for chances to revolt. This scary to the elites who felt they would be killed in their beds sleeping. And many were.
Modern slavery is economic slavery, or wage slavery where elites figured out that keeping slaves for life was too expensive so control over the economic system was a better way to maintain their power. You can get virtually free labor from low wage so called free men and not have to feed and house them for life. The modern version is to keep people poor and loan them money instead of paying a living wage. Wage slavery is a real thing. It has been the way of elites for centuries as a means of control over the masses. People will accept wage slavery if that is what they have to do to feed their families. The ones who resist can be isolated and killed off or incarcerated, usually in a public manner as a warning to other potential resisters.
Simultaneously elites buy the the silence of mid-level groups to all of this and co-op groups like nobles, middle classes, military personnel because in that fashion they have a stake in maintaining the domination systems. This has been the pattern through out history.
Non-slave societies like Egypt did better than slave societies, lasted longer and had better outcomes. Egypt did have slaves but their entire society was not based upon slavery. It was based upon a middle class and free farmers. They were mostly paid for their work.
Longevity in societies and stabilitly is best achieved with free citizens and with the practice of sharing wealth. Of course, elites are loath to do this-the Roman example notwithstanding.
The genius of Rome was that although slave based Rome also offered freedom to slaves and outsiders based, even Barbarians could gain Roman citizenship, and, in the days of the Republic, Rome routinely offered freedom to various sectors of society.
But, in the ebb and flow of power, the Republic was taken over by dictators and power mad emperors and the military all of whom mostly ended up being murdered by close friends or members of their own families or or other generals. This was the true cause of the fall of the Roman Empire-dictatorship.
A last one which I will mention is drought.
Many cities simply die because of prolonged droughts, Egypt as a civilization almost collapsed from a prolonged drought. Civil society fell apart for a time and people saw that as a major failure of Pharaoh who was supposed to protect the people and the land from such scourges. Many kings , priests and military dictators historically were killed or deposed when their claim to control nature and protect the people failed.
See below:
The horrors of the famine and the drought
Many, many times divine earthly powers failed and were deposed. Chaos, and gradual re-building is the common pattern.
Modernism has sought to recreate successful versions of community life now stressing sustainable communities, walkable communities, solar and wind based energy sources, all this an admission that the modern city is not workable. We can look at Detroit and see that cities can and do die.
But next time lets look back in history and ask what and where are examples of successful cities. There have been some and we will take a look.
6/17/14
Meantime meet the man who Invented Monothesism. Akenaton-Great Videos!
Our thesis is that cities then and now benefit elites creating huge disparities and inequalities in wealth.
Trade patterns in the video below verify this thesis in that trade in ancient times was dominated by trade in luxury items. Luxury items mind you. Why is that?
Egyptian mummies showed traces of opium, tobacco and cocaine, indicating trade even in this early period may have occured between the Americas and Egypt.
To be sure every day items were also traded but these for obvious reasons were local in nature. Local trade was not necessarily profitable, but trade in luxury items then and now are.
The drivers in the luxury trade were of course, the king, nobles and wealthy merchants. The extent of that trade is only now fully coming to light.
A second video above looked at peasant life and inequalities in the middle ages in England. Astounding in nature, it gives the view of the background and history of the brutality of life for English peasants. The myth of the happy peasant is just that a myth. The king, knights and the aristocrats were predatory, thugs and the peasants revolted
It is a shame that we tell fairy tales to our children of kings, knights and princesses when in fact this is the elite group preying upon the masses whose work sustained their life style of castles and fine steeds.
Castles were built to provide a garrison for knights and kings to wall in peasants and was the base used to prey upon the peasants keep them in line as they toiled in the fields living in mud huts providing food and wealth for the kings, knights and nobles. This was the pattern all through the middle ages all over Europe and in other cultures as well.
This is the true history of societies.
It is instructive that only with the black plague did the plight of the peasant in England change in that half the population died forcing lords and kings to increase wages for peasants in a short labor supply situation.
A lesson is to be learned here, is the one that if labor supply is plentiful overlords will drive peasants and free laborers alike into poverty and try to keep them there. This lesson is instructive for today and it is fairly clear that elites of today would like to see a reversion to a new semi-feudal system.
The peasant revolt fueled by anger and the situation created by the black plague nonetheless left scars on peasants their families. Sadly their brutalization for so many centuries created the following dynamic:
By the end of the peasant era:
1. Land hungry peasants burst out of England and all of Europe as well, hungry for land and wealth. In the end they roamed the world seeking to imitate the life-style of the lords and kings they hated. They wanted huge castles, plantations, and manors in the newly conquered lands, the Americas, India, most of the world, democractic trends not withstanding. In America the free white men thought of slaves as the new peasants.
2. The violence and brutality used in their own history was easily transfered and utilized in conquering the lands of others and were a direct reflection of the violence with which the peasants were treated for centuries back home in medieval times.
But lets look at some videos of the period.
What have we learned to this point about Homo Sapiens and the human race? It is always risky to summarize about topics as large and broad as this one. But here are the facts.
1. Civilization and citified societies have exacted a murderous price on underclasses historically to the present time. This is not in doubt. Millions from the advent of cities came under the domination of political, priestly, military and economic elites. This pattern has persisted for thousands of years but not without periodic challenge from those rebelling against this domination and revolting seeking democratic societies. Today even the worst of dictators at least claim to be democratic or claim rule in the name of the people.
2. A favorite tactic of elites, historically, has been divide and rule, pitting races, classes, countries, religious groups and many other social groups against one another.
This is been a ruthless tactic because brutalization by elites makes underclasses vulnerable to hatred of one another which works to the benefit of elites. We see this time and time again in history, and today as well.
3 Breaks in the above pattern has occurred as well, and I have enumerated some above but here are a few more.
Breaks occur when:
a. Underclasses combine to wrest power from elites and essentially murder them and take over.
b. Elites fight among themselves and a bloody civil war erupts followed by a revolts from below as weakened elite factions lose their power.
c. Elites systems often become so bureaucratic that they simply fall apart from their own weight and or become paralyzed by in-fighting and exhausting internal and external wars.
d. Whole systems of domination and bloodletting will often run their course and populations abandon elites and the system due to exhaustion, drought, disease and other factors and/or simply abandon the entire life style and the society and go back to more simple and more sustainable life styles. This is true of many of the empires in South America.
e. I have posited that human kind evolved from chimps and bonobos and argued that there are perhaps two kinds of humans: the war-like chimp strain perhaps has in many, if not most, societies dominated the peaceful bonobo strain in humans.
Moreover, we see that chimp strain has been dominant, psychopathic, murderous and has preyed upon the peaceful bonobo strain over the millennia.
It is, after all instructive, that of the 17 strains of humans which have existed historically all of them died out and later ones, like the Neanderthal strain, died out once in contact with Homo-Sapiens.
The fact is that citified Homo-Sapiens have murdered and killed other humans (and ate them) and plainly has, as well, caused the extinction of more animals on this planet than any other animal.
(I make a distinction between citified homo sapiens and pre-history human kind. Here is a video on pre-city human kind, and the bottle neck issues that more fully explored in the video below.
Prehistory humans did not create domination societies and there are clear reasons why not.
It is difficult not to come to the conclusion that our species citified is and was not normal, despite, achievements (bonobo achievements?) and human kind has been largely murderous.
It is appalling to me to see history books laud murderous individuals and civilizations as "great" civilizations ignoring that slavery was the basis of most; others were based on mass violent crimes, rape and ritual murder of the most reprehensible type.
Ordinary people, from which most of us are descended, and, therefore, most of us are descended from slaves, are largely ignored in the history books. Small wonder these history books were and still are written by these very same elites in the most transparent self-serving manner. Yet no one speaks of it. We never hear the history of slaves, of dominated peoples, of revolts.
This is not coincidential.
The education system in most societies in history has been strictly controlled. Knowledge is indeed power, elites seldom want to share power, wealth or their priviledges.
Thus, so far, my journey through this history of societies, has been stunning to me as to what the facts have been and continue to be.
But there is hope for change. That next time.
7/24/14
The basis for hope in all of this lies in examining the factors in society we can observe historically which have eventuated in change.
Here are a preliminary few for today.
1. All power in societies is actually based upon the labor of the many for the benefit of the few. We see that from ancient times to the present. Note this was not true in pre-city societies. These societies were not elite-based societies but anthropologists seldom point this out. City-based societies bring in domination.
Factors for change:
When peasants in England revolted they had provided, a continual supply of cheap labor, that labor supply was reduced by plague by 50%. Their labor now scarce and in demand they gained more power and say over their lives.
Witness the impact of the black plague in England. Half the population died. Labor, the basis of elite wealth and elite power was diminished and led to the Magna Carta and major steps toward a more democratic system.
Wealth coming from the merchant classes saw their power increase in that they provided the money for kings to pursue endless wars.
(Middle class money and the labor of the poor still forms the basis of power in most western countries.)
2. The Guttenburg press made books and reading more wide spread. The church refused at first to allow the translation of the bible into English fearing rightly that it would lead to revolt on religious grounds by the common man. The church fathers were the only ones who could read latin and were using this as a basis of their power around religious doctrine. They literally sold passes to get into heaven to peasant and king alike so strong was the belief in christianity, thereby enriching themselves, and giving the church overweaning power in society.
3. External factors mentioned above, drought, war, collapse etc., sometimes gives the underclasses a change to remake society on more democractic grounds.
4. What is absolutely new in this the 21st century is that social media and instant communication now allows underclasses to communicate with one another across the globe, share information, and organize in ways that were not possbible a mere decade ago. Social media is the single greatest threat to elite power. And, of course they know this and have taken steps to prevent this trend from growing.
How they are doing in this is something we wlll take up later.
But for now the most effective change mechanism seems to have been mass defections from the system, people simply walking away and resistors taking the moral high ground and appealing to third party support.
This for example is how the American Revolutionary War was worked in part with appeals to France for help and the fact that the long re-supply lines between England and the colonies proved to be too much for the Crown. Similarly in the Roman example, Rome simply stopped paying its mercenaries and soliders and they simply left their posts and merged and assimulated with the "barbarians" outside their garrisons.
Let's look into this more closely ask how has all of these patterns been maintained over the centuries. How have elites managed it. Why hasn't it simply died out as the world has become smaller and smaller. Discrimination mechanisms and racial politics have grown, it would seem, not diminished. Why?
8/12/14
Now the first question is how have elites managed to maintain domination in so many different societies over the millennia?
Here are some of the answers:
Citification helped enormously and has been key. Having thousands of people in one place to do your bidding facilitated control over populations. Scattered around the country-side or having populations be predominately nomadic had the opposite effect; if you can't find the population, you can't control them, or at least it is more difficult.
Citification made control through the military and or thugs operating directly on the population easier, made terror tactics more effective, in that, if you could have resistors, killed, stoned, sacrificed in public this had the effect of frightening the majority into submission.
This factor continues to be effective to the present day in our public executions.
Note much of this was not possible in the pre-city period. Scattered bands fiercely resisted domination, as the history of so many countries will attest. They were referred to as "barbarians" by city dwelling elites, animals to be enslaved or killed. That attitude still persists to the present day.
Another factor facilitating control was that, with the creation of the city-state, a state of constant war between these city states down the centuries has been apparent.
Constant population growth meant elites could and needed to engage in constant wars over resources, over power, for plunder, slaves, women, gold and the rest. Citification made wars, especially long wars, possible and had and still do entrench power into the hands of elites themselves not their subjects.
Stone-age people, who survived on this planet for 40,000 years prior to cities, did not war. They raided, but large scale war was rare for the simple reason it was too risky to lose even one member of the clan, such was the criticality of each individual to survival.
As I have detailed elsewhere, there are, and were, genetic factors at play as well.
In society after society elites were often displayed an astounding capacity for ruthlessness, a trait I have sought to explore in terms that psychopathic individuals tend to take over in city situations, in what I have described as a situation where our human-chimp genes predominate over our bonobo genes.
Just a theory at this point but the evidence from genetics makes this idea more and more feasible with each discovery.
However, of the several sources of continuing elite power down the millennia, is their absolute mania to maintain their power by institutionalizing it is one of the the major strategies they have utilized which accounts for the longevity of this strata in societies historically.
Power is a drug and they sought to institutionalize their power through several mechanisms aimed at maintaining that power beyond death itself. The point to be made here is that maintaining power in the western civilization example means power becomes immortal, in that it is continued through:
1. Families and dynasties, through huge institutions such as the military, control over religion through a priest caste, over land with little or no opportunities for advancement. There were exceptions, of course, where individuals did advance into the ruling class, even moving to the top to become kings. But the point here is that kingship remained the institutionalized locus of power whomever was king.
This is perhaps the single greatest source of power for elites aside, from military power, down the millennia.
8/13/14
How have elites maintained control in societies through the centuries?
2. But before we leave this topic there are other aspects of elite power which bear examining.
The concentration of an ever increasing population in cities also meant a great demand for resources to keep populations fed and watered, and for ever growing cadres of soliders to control them; and to protect against other cities on the move to gain land and plunder.
Taxation was and is a key component. Aside from taxation for certain services, elites depend upon taxing citizens to pursue foreign wars and to conquer the territories of others. This is the spiral of constant war, to feed elite greed and to feed and keep population growth manageable.
War is not only "profitable" but huge losses make the issue of feeding large numbers of people more manageable. This is the delimma of cities, they are inherently unworkable for the above reasons irrespective of whether the system is communism, capitalism, feudal etc. Dependent populations, under rule are more controllable than self-sufficient populations at large taking care of themselves on the land. This pattern persisted for thousands of years before cities and elites.
Taxation as well has been with us since cities. It was and currently, is useful to elites for debt creation. Many who could not pay their debts could be and were enslaved, or forced into the army, or simpy imprisioned. Private debt, by banks until very recently has served the same purpose. Land and assets can and were simply repossessed in lieu of such taxation and debt.
Plunder, taxation and tribute have been the three most useful tools for population control down the centuries and has worked by and large toward institutionalization of elite power over generations.
If the above fails city elites simply declare marshall law and use military force against their populations and to "protect" the citizens they must be imprisoned. This is common and has, been common down the centuries.
Thus, it is not particularly strong leaders, good ones or bad ones, which account for elite control; it is the institutionalization of power in essentially immortal institutions which accounts for the longevity of elite power.
Finally, note that the military is the bedrock of elite control. It is their trump card in maintaining power.
This next time, and in addition, the use of the famous divide and rule stratagem. Then the Bread and Circus manuver.
8/14/14
Aside from the above, elites have learned an entire catalog of techniques over the centuries in the process of maintaining and extending their control over subject populations.
I will list a few below and then go back into detail on each later. But here is the flavor:
1. Manufactured Chaos via divide and rule, manufactured conflicts, introduction of drugs and disease into populations along with artifical shortages of water and food and fuel as means of control.
2. Coups and subterfuge. Great generals won many battles because they infiltrated populations with spies before any battle occurred and recruited informants as to any weakness in city defenses.
3. Eliminating a potential leadership group in a population. This was often deliberate policy: kill the men, impregnate the women and sacrifice the old and the young.
4. Killing or co-opting the young men in a population, and destroying families with rape, plunder and murder to prevent resistance from any indigenous ruling group was standard practice among the ancients and is still practiced today.
5. Fomenting hatred in subject populations is and was common, especially around race and ethnic groups and then selling arms to both sides in a conflict such that warring groups weaken each other, making a given population easy to take over after the conflict and civil war easier to defeat and/or maniuplate.
6. Forbidding or strickly controlling eduation, knowledge, trade, propaganda, and control over new ideas in communities.
In the American south whites were forbidden to teach a slave to read, under pain of 20 lashes. This has been common down the centuries.
7. Use of religion as factor of control: religion and the state are aligned; where individuals were required to make sacrificices and provide tribute to local gods of goods, grain etc. These goods and grains were in fact taken by kings and priests to support their lavish lifestyles. The list goes on and on.
8. Creation of industrial slave continguencies. Most slaves worked, outside Rome, for example, in copper mines, in gem stone mines, building roads, and did so on an industrial scale not seen since.
9. Use of race, ethnicity, age, disablity, women, the young, the metally ill as examples of "other" who could be killed and provided examples to the population of what could happen to resistors.
10.Bread and Circuses Public sacrifices. Every Roman city had an arena, hundreds of them. Why, because bread and circuses were an integral part of Roman stragtegy to control masses. It was the internet and TV and movies of the day.
11. Use of various genetic and extermination strategies where the goal was simply to kill every one the inhabitants of a town, city, ethnic group such that they would never be a threat. The Romans defeated Carthage and salted the soil such that nothing would ever grow there, ever again.
There is more, but the above, as you can see, is plenty for now.
8/17/14
There is additional ground to be covered here prescriptively that I should mention to get your brain cells perculating. That is that many of the techniques identified above do not, and have not, existed in a vaccum.
They are used in families as well, especially ones with a psychopathic history, or ones with a psychopathic family member who dominates the family utilizing the very techniques described here.
They are used in cities, in nation-states, in organizations, in clubs, in sports teams against other teams, and I am beginning to suspect that, as well, part of the entire process is hereditary.
Genes interact with the environment and cross generations, become embe dded in cultures and we now understand that such traits on the genetic level are transmitted down and across generations, it would seem, from the research.
Discouraging I know, but hear this additional bad news as well: such psychopathic behavior I have described herein is not curable to date.
(If it were it might have died out rather naturally.) But researchers say, as of this date, there is no cure available.
Psychopaths breed psychopaths.
I will check to see if there are hopeful signs but as the date of this writing: seems not.
Interesting article in the story section. The same could be said for nations, although geographic barriers and languages tend to make them more cohesive over time. We are now reaching a point where the problems that besiege the cities are beginning to affect the countryside as well, especially as it becomes more ordered and mechanized like the cities and less natural wilderness. There are lessons to be learned about the downfall of cities. California, with an economy that would make it the sixth largest country in the world, is facing many dilemmas right now. All they would need is a major earthquake and their current economic problems could escalate into chaos. Katrina by the Bay.
Democratic Dilemmas and Divine Inspiration examines the significance or relevance of the idea that the U.S. Constitution was, as many believe, divinely inspired. How much did that belief matter to founders of the nation and how much does it matter no
Democratic Dilemmas and Divine Inspiration examines the significance or relevance of the idea that the U.S. Constitution was, as many believe, divinely inspired. How much did that belief matter to founders of the nation and how much does it matter no
