Is this how we should live?
• A small minority of men hold a monopoly on making rules everyone else will live by.
• This minority enforces these rules on everyone else.
• The minority extracts regular payments from everyone else. This is said to be necessary for protection and justice.
• The minority fails to provide justice on a daily basis and very often sends the children of the majority to fight in battles to the death.
• A minority-aligned intellectual class assures the majority that this is the best that can be had and that it has been sanctified by some higher power (gods, ancestors, tradition, reason, experience, progress, or whatever).
• No one is permitted to escape this model. Those who try are punished as traitors and heretics.
This is the primary model of human organization and has been for some 5,000 years. And aside from arguing over details (or fury over the audacity to say it), there is no real challenge to this statement. Moreover, this model has been an abject failure – a demonstrable failure:
• Wars have continued throughout its entire reign.
• Justice has never been achieved and generally came closest in places away from power centers.
• Human happiness has not noticeably increased.
• Even when science has broken out, it has been recaptured and forced to serve the model. (The internet, for example.)
On top of that, this model has to be maintained by force.
• This minority enforces these rules on everyone else.
• The minority extracts regular payments from everyone else. This is said to be necessary for protection and justice.
• The minority fails to provide justice on a daily basis and very often sends the children of the majority to fight in battles to the death.
• A minority-aligned intellectual class assures the majority that this is the best that can be had and that it has been sanctified by some higher power (gods, ancestors, tradition, reason, experience, progress, or whatever).
• No one is permitted to escape this model. Those who try are punished as traitors and heretics.
This is the primary model of human organization and has been for some 5,000 years. And aside from arguing over details (or fury over the audacity to say it), there is no real challenge to this statement. Moreover, this model has been an abject failure – a demonstrable failure:
• Wars have continued throughout its entire reign.
• Justice has never been achieved and generally came closest in places away from power centers.
• Human happiness has not noticeably increased.
• Even when science has broken out, it has been recaptured and forced to serve the model. (The internet, for example.)
On top of that, this model has to be maintained by force.
