kingtycoon | (no subject)

mordicai sent me a prize to replace my lost prize. It's great. He's a good friend.

So I was thinking about history, the history of the world, of civilization. Because I'm trying to finish up the Grave Onus put upon me by

symbioid I'll try and sum up the history of human civilization today.

Previously I'd talked about the original stratification of society into the different social orders based on Nobility (martial authority) and Servility (production). I might have indicated that the Nobility existed as a kind of tacked on parasitic appendage to the producing classes - governing by extortion and terror. I stated as well that this kind of authority - which in the ancient world was summed up often as the Power over Life and Death - would be subsumed by time and these ancient despots would in turn be deified. I assume that all the various gods and objects of worship are remnants of earlier waves of despotism. And from there you have religion. That's a summary.

Now- I do think that you can extrapolate a straight line through all of history with this paradigm pretty much guiding things. You have a productive underclass a despotic parasitic overclass and a religious class that looks backward to an imagined period of glory. This is not to say that the world is now as it was and everything is eternal - but you can see as well that entrenched values and systems are entrenched, and that without these kinds of strata you might not even have civilization at all. Think of this as one bone in the skeleton.

So other bones. I would put forward abstractions like math and law as being contiguous between the past and the present. And especially the confluence of these abstractions which is money. Money as a placeholder for another type of good is really not what it's cracked up to be. A lot is made of that portability, as if cows being transacted was too difficult, so they used coins instead, Ases in Rome, for example- which translates literally to mean Cattle. But that doesn't make much sense does it? I have a coin and it's worth exactly one car - if you want to give me a car, you can give me a coin instead. Except that I am trading you for a car, not a coin. What's the use? Well - the use comes from people gaining the value of the good without the use of it. And this practice comes from despotic ownership - where the ruler owns the items, but doesn't do anything with them. So they need to transact with other despots and soon - very soon, they put together that you can accumulate a lot of coins that don't represent any kind of good at all. Einstein said that Compound Interest was the most powerful force in the universe and when he did, he was speaking as a mathematician - because mathematically there exists far more money, now, than can ever be produced to represent a good or service. There aren't enough goods or people or skills to be replicated by the money in circulation, and the amount owed people will only increase forever - far in excess of the total value of everything that is on the Earth or will be on the earth. Because money is an abstraction that is grown in abstraction. Nowadays a lot of libertarian types grouse about fiat currency without really accepting that all currency is currency by fiat.

The law is similarly practiced by fiat and it tends to enshrine these transactions and establish rules of ownership. Much is made of the rule of law, but it's important to think of the rule of law as being an enshrining of rules of property. The Law doesn't have that much to do with morality or ethical behavior. Consider the laws that exist and their underpinning meaning. Theft is unlawful as is murder - but a murder is a theft of property in that it's the theft of an heir or a provider. Rapes are unlawful, but they are a kind of theft of lineage - you can coerce people into raising your offspring for you like the cuckoo bird. Kidnapping and etc... there is not an ethical component, but a specific property orientation. This speaks to the patriarchal origins of civilization and it's continuing implications.

So you have the law, and you have money and out of these there arise another social class. A professional class that has come to encompass all of the legal, financial and currently medical fields. These professional classes by needs work for the upper classes, and it's in their interest to maintain the wealth of the overclass because their wealth derives from it in turn. This professional, technocratic class then becomes the agent of the existing structures. This is seen over and over throughout history - the establishment of an old guard. The Avant Garde comes into play when these structures no longer sufficiently compete with the alternative systems that are in action in neighboring areas. So - the old feudal system falls when the competing mercantile systems overwhelm them and these mercantile systems arose because the existing feudal system in South and East Asia was outcompeting the feudal systems of western Europe and the feudal system came into play with the breakdown of the imperial system, and the imperial system came about because of the failure of the kingdom and so on. This competition between cultural systems to provide work, wealth and stability to the different social classes is an ongoing concern - it's the basis of revolutions and discord.

A good example, to me, of the competing cultural systems is the 2nd World War - Japan and Germany were both far behind in the Imperial/Mercantile/Colonial system. The Germans, borrowing manifest destiny from the Americans said that slavs were unfit to govern themselves and just look at their barbaric feudalism (now dressed up as the supremely unfashionable communist system). The Japanese likewise wanted colonial possessions - so they went to China, and then southeast asia - preying upon the failed and failing feudal systems already in play - and trying to compete with the established empires of Britain, France and the US. So following this whole disaster the US and Soviet empires became the only reigning systems - both based upon technocratic principles and liberalization.

So that's part two of my thematic history of civilization. I think next time I'll try to talk about...? Really I don't know. Language was one of the ideas that was mentioned, maybe I'll get into that.