We
support this thesis as who cannot? The
surprise to me was the sheer lack of evidence of a coercive power regime at all
during the Bronze Age. I had reasonably
presumed otherwise simply as a natural extensive of endemic tribal warfare in primitive
unorganized economies without the centralizing power of agriculture. Yet I also know just what a revolution cavalry
was to the ability to inflict one’s will at a distance.
This
was simply difficult during the Bronze Age and an organized society had nothing
to worry about except to keep thieves at bay.
Their numbers and the inability of a nearby enemy to concentrate assured
security.
This
is an important thesis because it reaffirms the long term stability of the
global Atlantean culture which succumbed to both geological disaster and the
resulting desperation of the survivors who instantly became roving armies
attacking what survived. The Sea Peoples
were one clear expression of this.
The State Is Out Of Date
The Greatest Discovery Never Made
By Gregory Sams
Books by Gregory Sams
Please join us in welcoming for May 2014 Author of the Month,
entrepreneur, writer and researcher Gregory Sams. Gregory has been changing the
culture from the age of 19, when he operated the historic natural and organic
Seed Restaurant in 1960's London. Within a few years he was running the nations
first and foremost natural and organic food enterprises. In 1982 he created and
christened the original VegeBurger, initiating the market for vegetarian food.
In 1990 Greg moved from food to fractals, opening the world's only shop
dedicated to new science 'chaos theory', publishing and licensing fractal art
worldwide. He then turned to writing, with his first book Uncommon Sense,
published in 1998, exploring the lesson chaos theory holds for humanity. His
next book, Sun of gOd, explored the profound implications of what was once
common knowledge throughout the globe. In 2013 it was time to re-release an
upgrade to his first book, re-titled The State is Out of Date - We Can Do It
Better. Greg will be available on the AoM Message Boards during the month of May.
There is a remarkable
discovery that has not yet emerged from our renewed interest in ancient
civilization. Yet few comment upon this glaring omission from the relics and
records we dig up and discover. I first
recognized its absence at a visit to the British Museum, and made a point of
going back a few years later for another check. Their Mesopotamian rooms
begin at 6500 BCE, and as you wander through the exhibits and look at the
artifacts and depictions of their culture there are none depicting warriors
or warfare, chariots or combat, clubs or swords until around 2700 BCE. As
for kings and rulers, there was a single image thought to be a king because it
looks like he’s wearing a crown. And what is this king doing? He is feeding
flowers to sheep.
Countless historical works
chart the rise and fall of dynasties and empires across recorded history, with
the British media trumpeting the discovery of a king’s skeleton in a car park.
Other works explain the architecture and explore the purpose of ancient
monuments. But the peacefulness of the earlier ancient world is rarely, if
ever, noted and because it is unseen we make unfounded assumptions about
the workings of our own world.
How many times do we hear
it expressed that people have been killing each other since time immemorial?
The Old Testament, and Hollywood, would have us believe as much. We see our
worldwide collection of coercively run states as a necessary evil – what would
we do without them…right? Who else has the power to impose peace and harmony
upon the world? Without that regulation from the top down many fear there would
be total chaos.
Hasn’t it always been this
way? “No” is the simple answer to that. We have lived together in the past,
successfully, without need of shepherds and sheepdogs directing our behavior
from the top down. Civilization in ancient
Mesopotamia pre-dated the first
evidence of a coercive state by some four thousand years, probably much longer.
Independent city states produced goods and traded with each other,
built irrigation canals and temples, traded incense and salt and foods - living
comfortable civilized lives. They were self-governed by free men and women who
left no evidence of military culture along with all the other relics of their
existence. The first record of war, perhaps lasting a single battle, was in
Mesopotamia, 2700 BCE, between a few hundred soldiers of Elam and Sumer. Five
hundred years later a psychopath named Sargon carved out the world’s first
empire, and slowly the idea of conquest by force spread, by force.
The Indus Valley
Civilization grew from small beginnings around 7000 BCE to become a large and
highly organized civilization by 3000 BC, covering most of modern day Pakistan
and parts of India, and Afghanistan. There were some five million
inhabitants in over a thousand cities and settlements that traded extensively
with each other. Cities were well planned with dockyards, granaries, places of
worship, and public baths. Their architectural skills produced well-built
houses with courtyards, serviced by sewerage and drainage systems that are
superior to many in Pakistan and India today. It was very highly developed and
stable, yet left no palaces or other evidence to indicate hierarchical
command structures or militarization. The underlying cause of their decline
from 1800 BCE is believed to have been climate change.
The great Tiwanaku civilization in Bolivia was in place by
300 BCE and thrived for fourteen centuries, expanding into (today’s) Peru and
Chile during its last 500 years. The relics indicate that did this not involve
coercion or a ruling class, with cooperation and community being key
elements of the culture. An advanced self-governing culture arose, highly
skilled in agriculture and architecture, expressing spirituality through joyful
worship of nature spirits and the Sun Maize beer and sacred medicinal plants were part of the culture, involving festivals tens of
thousands strong. People wanted to be part of the Tiwanaku culture. It came to
an end because of climate change, not conquest, after decades of drought.
From the 10th century
on, hundreds of Medieval European cities grew strong and vital enough to
unshackle from the local nobles demanding taxes at sword point. Peasants’ communes ran these cities from the bottom up, peasants being untitled
persons including bakers, architects, builders, artisans, and all those who
were part of the city. Trades and professions formed guilds to safeguard their
reputations and quality control. Cities built fortified walls, rebuilding them
as the city expanded, in order to protect themselves from greedy nobles. Florence,
heartbeat of the Renaissance, was one such city, which in 1342 had 8000 boys
and girls in primary education with 600 attending its four universities; thirty
hospitals provided 1000 beds. It worked.
After Sargon in 2200 BCE,
the raison d’etre of every new coercive state was to protect us from a more
frightening version of itself. Otherwise why on earth would anybody agree to finance a bunch of armed
men with the ability to tell them what to do, or else? Fear is still the tool
that secures our allegiance to those running this protection racket, with the
War on Terror having filled the fear gap left by the Cold War. In the past
century the cost of government has skyrocketed, largely because we, through our
own undirected efforts, have created a greater wealth for the state to feed
upon. When adding together all the taxes from income tax to VAT, from green
taxes to airport tax, from excise duties to death duty, together with charges
and fines for things once free, like parking, we find that 60% or more of all
the wealth we create is consumed by the state. After the ravages of
administration and wars, some of it sprinkles back, of course, in subsidies and
benefits that accrue both to rich and poor. Now imagine, if we self-governed,
that for every 100 units of value in free circulation today, we instead had
250. It is reasonable to suggest that poverty would decrease and charity would
increase.
We are by nature community
animals with empathy, intelligence and all the built-in skills needed to live
together without standing armies and top-down government, let alone arsenals of nuclear weapons threatening us all with
obliteration. What if living together in peace and harmony is actually a more
natural state for humanity than that of conflict which we experience today? Peace
and harmony cannot be drafted and enforced from above by rulers who have one
basic tool in their toolbox – coercion. The threat of coercion underlies the
state’s core modus operandi; “Do what we tell you or we will damage you.” This
is not the way that human beings successfully develop and evolve.
All of those things that we
value and rely upon in life arose from within our culture and not through any
state initiative or directive. We did not need a state to invent or produce
shoes or iPads, cars or canals, bread or
music, trains or airplanes, movies or literature. They all arise from the
network of feedback loops that connect us all when we are making choices and
decisions freely and independently, responding and reacting to a joined-up
world.
We can see, in the free and
borderless new continent that is the Internet, methods of self-government
evolving which do not involve police, fines, or prisons but which do detect and
exclude rogues from the system, whether they be buyers or sellers. Sellers
strive to satisfy customers and attain a five star rating; their reputation for service
and honesty is precious. We witness our true human nature coming out after
natural disasters, when people instinctively help each other, sharing what
they’ve got. I have been to free festivals where, unconstrained by regulation,
thousands will create and self-assemble a fully featured community over several
days or weeks, with cafes, performance, workshops, music, and a safe
environment.
Of course, this is how most
of the world works, as billions of people’s feedback loops link in and out of
everything else that happens, creating the weave that forms the fabric of our
civilization. Out of this magic weave come synchronicity and harmony,
flexibility and sustainability. When we have problems we figure them out; we don’t
turn them into institutions and feed upon them, as does the state. And we
evolve and develop, taking our communication from the telegraph to the smart
phone, our transport from the bicycle to the jumbo jet, our lighting from
candles to the laser beam and LEDs. Meanwhile, with the state managing our
security what has evolved? Well, they still bust criminals, judge and sentence
them, fine and/or jail them just like they used to. But little has
fundamentally changed other than a growth in the number of deeds deemed
criminal. The more crime, the more our security apparatus prospers. I acquired
a criminal record for non-completion of a government census form.
Many view corporations as
the big problem but it is through engaging the power of the state that they do
their worst. There could be no nuclear power plants or arms industry or GM
foods without the state. Big Pharma could not mass medicate, ban the
competition and shape health policy without the state. Police and military
would not be available to sweep away protesters and populations whose ancestral
lands had been sold, by their state, to a mining company. Today we see some
giant corporations pulling the strings of those who pass legislation but to
attack the corporations is to miss the bigger picture.Natural feedback loops
are better able to monitor corporations when there is no state for them to
manipulate. It is illegal in many US states today to exercise your feedback
muscles by showing pictures of meat production, or saying bad things about
Monsanto. There would be many more “standards” organization such as Fairtrade
and the Soil Association had the state not taken over responsibility for
trading standards and product purity. It would he hard to do a worse job.
Today in the West, it is
corporations. Religious fundamentalists, military juntas, oligarchs,
psychopaths, and an assorted multitude of power freaks have run nations,
conquered empires, and hacked at the feedback loops for many centuries before
the likes of a Halliburton or Monsanto appeared upon the planet. Rome wasn’t
run by corporations, but stole wealth from other nations and made slaves of
those they conquered. Corporations don’t run Saudi Arabia, where you need a
penis to drive a car; can be executed for rejecting Islam; and face prison and
savage lashings if caught being gay. There are always going to be bad dudes
getting their hands on the controls. I mean, you get to extract money from resources and people without even having to drill a
well or hold a knife to anybody’s throat – duh!
Today, public attitudes are
changing across the world as IT and social media allow more and more to see
through the mask of the state. It was once just students and youth who were out
in the streets making their voices heard. Today we are seeing all ages and
classes out protesting at the iniquity of the state. In established
democracies, growing numbers refuse to acknowledge any value in having a vote,
wanting something beyond another change of faces and policies or some new way
of picking who gets to interfere with the feedback loops.
The top-down state holds
its power because we believe in it. Ultimately it is as simple as that. There
is a Native American saying that goes "When you discover that you are
riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount." There is no point
in getting another rider, changing the horse’s diet, or buying a stronger
whip. The state is out of date, and just how we can do it better is a key
element of my book. The first step is to diagnose the disease and stop
expecting the state to ever legislate us into peace and happiness. – that is
not what they feed upon. Then get my book, in print or inexpensively online.
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