cgfoki.blogg.se

As my friend Rick Maybury likes to point out, quite accurately, the reality differs quite a bit from the myth.

It’s mythologized, especially in a medieval context, as a system with noble kings, fair princesses, and brave knights riding out of castles on a hill to right injustices. It’s odd, to me at least, how much the human animal seems to like the idea of monarchy. to roughly the mid-1600s, the world’s cultures were organized under strong men, ranging from petty lords to kings, pharaohs, or emperors. The Industrial Revolution and the End of Kingdomsįrom around 12,000 B.C. Otherwise it was a sure thing that a nearby kingdom would enslave you and steal your property. If you wanted to stay tribal, you’d better live in the middle of nowhere, someplace devoid of the resources others might want. The more evolved societies had the numbers and the weapons to completely triumph over the laggards. Those who adapted to the new agricultural technology and the new political structure accumulated the excess resources necessary for waging extended warfare against tribes still living at a subsistence level. Large groups of people living together formed hierarchies, with a king of some description on top of the heap. People started living in towns and relying on agriculture as opposed to hunting and gathering. At the end of the last Ice Age, around 12,000 years ago, all over the world, there was a population explosion. Tribes are socially constraining but, considering the many faults of human nature, a natural and useful form of organization in a society with primitive technology.Īs people built their pool of capital and technology over many generations, however, populations grew. Bad actors are ostracized or fail to wake up, in a pool of their own blood, some morning. Everyone falls into a niche of marginal advantage, doing what they do best, simply because that’s necessary to survive. Tribes are small enough that everybody knows everyone else, and knows what their weak and strong points are. But they’re also natural democracies, small enough that everyone can have a say on important issues. Tribes tend to be natural meritocracies, with the smartest and the strongest assuming leadership. That made them the totality of people that counted in a person’s life-except for “others” from alien tribes, who were in competition for scarce resources and might want to kill you for good measure. Almost everyone in the tribe was genetically related, and the group was essential for mutual survival in the wilderness. In that man is a social creature, it was natural enough to be loyal to the tribe. In prehistoric times, the largest political/economic group was the tribe. The Agricultural Revolution and the End of Tribes Based on that, so far in history, only two really important things have happened: the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. But one of the acute observations he made was that the means of production are perhaps the most important determinant of how a society is structured.

Karl Marx had a lot of things wrong, especially his moral philosophy.

We can call them Tribes, Kingdoms, and Nation-States. Mankind has, so far, gone through three main stages of political organization since Day One, say 200,000 years ago, when anatomically modern men started appearing. I trust you’ll excuse my skating over all of human political history in a few paragraphs, but my object is to provide a framework for where we’re going, rather than an anthropological monograph. Let’s start by looking at where we’ve been. So it might be good to keep a hopeful prospect in mind. We’ll have an almost unremitting stream of bad news, on multiple fronts, for years to come. Now might be a good time to discuss the subject. Especially how phyles are likely to replace the nation-state, one of mankind’s worst inventions. This essay will discuss the topic in detail. There have been a fair number of references to the subject of “phyles” in this publication over the years.