source: YouTube
Yes, it is rather presumptuous to claim to be able to say anything at all about something as all-encompassing and vaguely defined as "the human condition". Are we not all unique individuals? Do we not all live in different nations, cities and cultures? And given that apparent diversity, how can we presume to say anything worthwhile about the dynamic, fluid and always evolving matrix of humanity that results from an unimaginable number of interactions between all those unique entities? The randomness that's inherent to all complex systems would surely prevent that. Surely, if there's one environment where the butterfly effect is valid, it's our planet full of unique individuals, cities, nations, cultures, leaders, poets and thinkers...
Still, it's possible to discern common threads, trends and truths about the way we've evolved to operate and interact on large scales. One such truth is that we once lived tribal lives; as far as we can know, humanity started as a tribal experiment, bands of social creatures traveling wherever the food and the seasons brought us in small egalitarian communities where we all took care of each other. Once we invented agriculture, we freed ourselves from the need to chase the food and seasons, we settled down and were for the first time able to produce more food than there were mouths to feed. First cities, then city-states and eventually nations evolved near rivers, coasts and lakes where food was plentiful and ground was fertile; that was a pivotal moment in our evolution, for it was the birth of governance and the death of our egalitarian tribal roots. The individuals who claimed the farms on fertile ground became the governors, and the rest became the governed; no more did we rely or depend on each other, instead we all relied on the ones who owned the food. That was 12,000 to 10,000 years ago, and we still live with that same basic class-division of the haves and have nots...
I'm sure the early tribes had their own pantheon of gods and spirits to account for the things they could not yet understand. It's highly probable that when a member of the tribe died, the ones left behind would have reasoned that something inside the deceased had left, their life-force, their spirit had departed. Maybe it was as early as tens or hundreds of thousand of years ago that a variation of the modern religious concept of life after death evolved. To this day, anthropologists and archaeologists see the practice of burying and honoring the dead as one of the earliest signs of civilization. But these ancient tribal societies didn't leave behind written accounts of their individual or communal endeavors, other than some wall paintings and clay figurines of, often oddly shaped, humanoids and animals. The earliest surviving written accounts of our early predecessors consist in great part of religious texts, and there we encounter the next common thread in human history.
We're all somewhat familiar with the Bible and its basic accounts of the creation myth, original sin and God's punishment of mankind; the deluge or the great flood that killed all of humanity save some chosen individuals as well as plants and animals. According to the Bible we're all descendants of Noah and his family. What's intriguing, is that almost all ancient religions from all over the world have this exact same story, with the epic of Gilgamesh being the oldest. And what's also interesting to note here, is that all these stories containing a punishment from God or the Gods for mankind transgressing His, Her or Their rules, come from civilized societies living in city-states. They are the product of layered societies with rulers and ruled, with haves and have nots. I don't completely disregard the possibility that this common story about original sin and God's consequent punishment is the product of some global divine inspiration, but I strongly suspect there's another explanation here.
To this day we live our lives by the stories that we're told, and those stories stories still mostly follow the same basic narrative and structure of those early epics and poems. Even modern classics like Star Wars follow the "hero's journey" found in that epic of Gilgamesh from ancient Mesopotamia. Those stories convey the idea that there are heroes and then there's the rest of us; millennia of narratives have ingrained in us the belief that there are a few "special" people whose wisdom, strength and courage go above and beyond that of us common folks. And us common folks are not only beneath them, we're also the bearers of original sin. We are not special. We are not courageous. We are not wise. We are sinful, and we need to be governed by those few special people to prevent a state of chaos and confusion that will lead to our civilization's demise. We know that reading and writing was once in the purview of the elite alone, and we know that rulers have always depended on some common narrative to justify their lofty positions on top of the pyramid of society. That goes for rulers everywhere and in any era.
That common narrative of special individuals worthy of power over the masses, and the masses basically being portrayed as lesser and inherently sinful, evil and unworthy in this life, sounds like something made by rulers to my ears. Kings and emperors have always stood above us, higher up, closer to the Gods, and their power was justified by their closeness to those divine entities. That was called the divine right of kings. And that narrative has been with us, as far as we know, since tribal society was abandoned in favor of layered societies with owners and workers. On top there were the Gods, then the divine leader, the monarch, who gathered around and directly beneath him a class of clergy and nobility that propagated the narratives justifying the monarch's right to rule over the people at the bottom. This top to bottom dynamic is still alive today, and is sold to us as the natural state of humanity, as if we never were egalitarian tribal people.
Free market capitalism enshrined in the illusion of "meritocracy", is our modern version of the narrative that endows special individuals with special powers and rights. We know this to be true, because we all see through the facade of democracy; we know that government is the modern clergy, the millionaires the modern nobility and the multi-billionaires the modern monarchs. The monopoly on violence that is the state's unique right was invented and still used to protect the private property of the haves against the have nots who outnumber them 99 to 1. All socioeconomic narratives and systems we've known since 12,000 years ago, have always been variations of the Great Men whose rule, guidance and benevolence trickle down upon the sinful masses that need to be kept in check to prevent society from regressing into chaos and violence. It's good to be the king. And it's good to have a king; we've never truly let go of that eternal truth.
Only problem is that it isn't the truth. Not really. It's only true because of thousands of generations of telling each other the same old story. It's a story of man's relationship to his earthly possessions, and the right of those few special men to own most of it. It's not a story of man's relationship to his fellow men, other than his ability to gain his fellow men's earthly possessions. And that's the overarching reality of our species seen from a bird's eye view. The tribe probably had leaders too, but they had no rulers; there's a crucial difference between the two. The right to lead is based on consensus, while the right to rule is based on the power granted by an abundance of material possessions. The wars that have defined our nations' borders are and always have been the consequence of conflicts between our rulers, not between our peoples. That's all wars, cold wars and trade wars included. Without our rulers, with their obsessive need to protect their private property and their positions of power, we generally get along fairly well. Unless we're talking about the wars that ensued when people who were already raised in a system of rulers, with the idea that some people are more worthy than others, invaded territories with people who still held on to tribal ways of life; those were brutal wars of conquering in a system we now call "colonialism". It's only a matter chance, historical fate, that this amounted to white people thinking themselves better than colored people, and that "the patriarchy" consists of the power of white men.
So, what can we do about all this? Nothing in the short term that I can see. What I do know is that of all the "big ideas" and widespread idealisms, it took us until the 19th century before the exception to the rule of top-down narratives became popular. Marxism, socialism and communism are the first serious attempts to turn that old story in its head, is based on dialectical materialism and emphasizes the importance of real-world conditions, in terms of class, labor, and socioeconomic interactions. These ideas are a mortal threat to the powers that be, and have been since 12,000 years ago. I therefore laugh in the face of those confused souls who blame the concentration of power in the deep state and shadow governments on socialism or Marxist conspiracies. The monopoly on violence that ultimately is the root of all of the state's power was invented all those thousands of years ago to protect the private property of the ancient emperors and is now used to protect the private property, wealth and power of the capitalists. Crony capitalism is capitalism in its purest form, for the state has never existed to protect the people, the markets or justice, but has always been the institution that protects the haves against the have nots. Capitalism can not exist without an overbearing state, that's so easy to understand that even the grandfather of capitalism, Adam Smith, understood this to be true. The state exists to protect and enhance existing power structures, no matter if that state's headed by a President, Prime Minister, Dictator, King or Queen.
This is the reason why democracy has never really worked, or existed even. Democracy can not be democratic as long as the power hierarchy based on material possessions endures; there can be no political democracy without economical democracy. And that's what socialism ultimately entails: economical and material democracy, where the means of production are in the hands of the people who do the actual work. That idea scares the hell out of the ruling class, which is why Marxism is, and always has been, on the receiving end of massive propaganda against it. It's why millions of people actually believe that Venezuela is a socialist country, while they also believe that France, a country with much more of its industries nationalized, is capitalist. It's why people blame the government for their miserable circumstances, instead of the capitalists who own the government. If democracy were real, and if the government was by and for the people, instead of by and for the capitalist plutocrats, we'd have a far more approving opinion on the state and the state's power.
We live in a state of confusion because those who trickle down their narratives upon us want us to be confused. They tell us that they're special, and they tell us that we should become better, to perhaps one day become special like them. We're constantly told that who we are is simply not good enough, and that our time's best spent on trying to become better, stronger, smarter, not for the sake of becoming better, stronger and smarter, but for the sake of gaining the right to be happy and free. That's not right as far as I'm concerned. We can do better, I'm sure. Even if that means breaking through the ages old narratives and idealisms that have defined the sorry state of the human condition we experience right now. This is not who we are. Listen to the ending of the Zeitgeist documentary in the below linked video for some much needed inspiration...
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