3  The Descent of Man:  Out of Africa

 

This chapter puts together a picture of the way humans got here.   It focuses on the final steps that took place between 6.7 million years, ago and 50,000 years ago, when the first members of the group called ‘modern humans’ appeared on this planet.  

Our group of beings, meaning our species and subspecies, is ‘homo sapiens sapiens.’

 

Note that the term ‘sapiens’ is repeated
This is not a typo. 
          Until DNA evidence showed otherwise, scientists placed modern humans in a species of our own.  We were ‘homo sapiens.’  DNA evidence has confirmed that there were two other groups of beings in this species.  They bred with our ancestors and had babies that were viable.  The internationally accepted rules of zoological classification require that they be placed in the same species. 
          This means that all three of these groups of beings are ‘homo sapiens.’ 
          There are three subspecies in this species:
         
          1.  Homo sapiens neanderthalis (neanderthals)
          2.  Homo sapiens denisova (denisovans)
          3.  Homo sapiens sapiens (us). 
         
          The term ‘sapiens’ means ‘intelligent ones.’   Homo sapiens are the most intelligent hominids.  Our subspecies, also sapiens, means that we are the most intelligent of all of the different super-intelligent hominids. 

 

Denny

 

I want to take a little aside here to talk about something you may find if you are trying to get more information about this topic on the internet or in research journals.  Earlier, I talked about the perspective this book takes:  I want to look at our past as would an outsider with no vested interests, no need to try to match whatever standards currently pass for political correctness  and no vanity to protect.  That last one is pretty important.

People want to believe that humans are, well, a lot better than the evidence of our past tells us we are.  I kind of want this, and I pride myself on being open minded.  We want to believe that there is a clear and dramatic differences between humans and the beings that used to be called ‘animals’ and now are called ‘lower animals’ (because even the most resistant to change have a very hard time finding arguments to defend the claim that humans are not animals.)   We all kind of want to think there is a hard line between ‘us’ and ‘them.’   (After all, we eat them.  We don’t want to think we are eating beings that are basically in the same category as we are.)   This makes us naturally resistant to the basic premise of evolution.  Evolution says there is no hard line.  It says there is a transition, tiny step by tiny step, codon by codon in a 1 billon character block of genetic code, with each step being indistinguishable from the one before it. 

DNA provides clear evidence that we, modern humans, are in the same species as both neanderthals and denisovans.  Evidence in one particular cave, the Denisova Cave in Sibera, includes DNA of denisovans, neanderthals, ‘modern humans’ and evidence of ‘first generation hybrids of these beings, bones from a 13 year old ‘mixed breed’ girl who anthropologists call ‘Denny’ (technically ‘denisova 11’). 

A great deal of other evidence has shown that we descend from denisovans and neanderthals:  All modern humans yet tested have some DNA from either denisovans, neanderthals, or both.   But people still want to find a way to draw a line.  As long the only evidence is tiny fragments of DNA that could conceivably predate the ‘creation event’ that led ‘our species,’ they can make this claim:  It is still up in the air.  All the facts are not in.  There is a line between us and animals.  We are not animals.  Denny’s DNA provides some pretty convincing evidence that this line does not exist. 

I have spent most of my life in academia and academics prefer a certain kind of evidence:  we like evidence from something called ‘peer reviewed journals.’  To get and keep a job in academia, people must publish articles.  (The old saying goes ‘publish or perish.’)  this doesn’t mean publish articles in a local newspaper.  To count, the articles must be published in an established and reputable peer reviewed journal.  The people who review professors in universities to determine how much to pay them have ratings of all of the journals and give points for publishing in the ones with higher ratings.  This is where I like to find my background information.  It comes from sources that have been subjected to intense criticism and survived. 

Much of the information I got from this source went against the commonly accepted ideas about how existence works.  It isn’t possible to give searchable and verifiable references to the articles themselves because the journals require all authors of the articles to sign over all rights to the article to the journals before publishing.  The journals then charge enormous sums of money to anyone who wants to even read one of these articles.  Even if I could find a way to get the text, most people wouldn’t be convinced, because academics use language that almost seems intended to be confusing, and their proofs are generally mathematical and wouldn’t be comprehensible to any without backgrounds in higher math.

I wanted to find links in the part of the internet that is of interest to and available to ordinary people to back up some of the information I got from other sources, and put together in this book.   This is where I found that the ‘common people’ ideas about how the world works and the academic ideas are very, very different.  One example makes this pretty easy to see.  The vast majority of the articles I read that were written for lay persons (ordinary people without academic credentials) state, with a great air of confidence (but without any references) that that neanderthals and denisovans are both ‘extinct species’ of early humans.  Many of the articles that state this include quotes from articles that clearly show that modern humans have both neanderthal and denisovan ancestry.

This fact contradicts the claim that ‘they are extinct.’  If your great grandfather is dead, and you are still alive, it is not possible for your grandfather’s species to be extinct.  It still exists in you.  Neanderthals are not extinct.  We are them and they are us.  Denisovans are not extinct.  We are them and they are us. 

I want to let you know why this is important:  Shortly, we will look at evidence that shows that some members of the pan genus, our evolutionary ancestors, clearly had and still have (among those that survive in the wild) societies that work very much like modern human societies.  Their species is divided into groups called ‘troops’ that are a kind of tribal units.  Each troop has a territory.  The territory is surrounded by borders.  The members of the troop organize patrols of these borders.  If the individuals on border patrol detect violations of their borders, they send one of the border patrol agents back to the home base where other members of the troop are waiting, while others attack the ones who patrol their borders.  When reinforcements arrive, they fight in brutal battles that often result in death.  From time to time, these battles over borders grow to such severity that analysts who watch them call them ‘wars.’  They look just like human wars. 

We do the same thing.  Why?   It doesn’t seem that anyone has sat down and determined that this was a good idea, that the people of the world (at some point) voted on it and agreed it was the way to organize our societies.  These systems must have come to exist some other way.

This is why understanding and accepting evolution is important:  If we can understand it and accept it, we can follow the line of events and see how the societies of the ancient apes of Africa evolved into the societies we have now. 

We will see that there are very clear reasons that apes lived this way:  Evolutionary forces required them to do it.  But there is no real need for beings that are capable of higher intellect to live this way.  (They were fighting over feeding territory.  We have trucks that can move food anywhere; we have no real need to be the absolute masters of agricultural land to eat.) 

However, if we accept that we evolved from them, and the societies we inherited evolved from the societies they passed down to their descendants, we can see why we do many of the things we do that are otherwise pretty much impossible to explain.  We aren’t really forming into countries and building nuclear bombs to defend the borders to land that God gave to our ancestors in some land grant 4,000 years ago.  (You can find various land grants to important people in all three religions described in Genesis starting Chapter 10 in the Christian version and in the same general position relative to other scriptures in the holy books of Judaism and Islam.  People have been using religion to get people to turn into animals so they will kill with wild abandon for at least 4,000 years.  If you read today’s news, you will the leaders use these same arguments today.)  

Why do we do this?  In the next few chapters, I will show that there is a very smooth and clear transition that we can follow, step by step, from the early systems of the ancient apes to, well, yesterday’s conflicts.  It is all understandable.  But it is only understandable if you are willing to accept that the transition took place.  In other words, if you can allow yourself to believe that there was no magic event where some being said some words or a spark from lighting changed a being that was still an ape into an entirely different being that you would recognize as a human. 

This is where perspective matters.  Scientists and analysts from another world, with no vanity to protect and no embarrassment about what they might be implying if they accepted the evidence, would not hesitate to accept the evidence.  It tells us that there was a smooth and orderly transition that took place over a period of more than six million years that started with apes and ended with you and me.  There was no hard line anywhere in this transition. 

There is an old saying ‘don’t beat a dead horse.’   It means don’t keep going on a topic after you are sure that the people listening already accept the things you say.  I know it seems I am beating a dead horse here, but I have a reason for this.  Most of us accept evolution on one level and will argue it until the end of time against a religious person.  But there is still a part of us, I think all of us, that don’t want to really accept.  I think that this is one of the main reasons that we are in the mess we are now in.  There is information we can use to help us move to a better world.  But we just don’t want to accept, at least not fully. 

So, I want to ask you a favor.  Please be open minded when you read the passages that follow in the next few chapters.  I think you will be torn between two different emotions that push you to reject it.  The first will be the feeling that it is demeaning to think of humans as simply apes that happen to be able to speak in complex ways and have the brain connections needed to design and build nuclear bombs. 

You will feel, on the one hand, that I am insulting not just you, but all of the great people who lived in the past and did incredible things.  They have some sort of special quality that sets them apart from apes.  They are not in the same category and there has to be some point where a magic event took place.  

On the other hand, you will feel insulted and patronized about the continual attempts to reinforce the message above.  You get it.  It is insulting to keep beating the dead horse.  I want you to know that I feel very deeply about what I am trying to do.  I am not trying to insult anyone.  Try to see if you can muster the same perspective I have.  You are not you, a human on this little blue world with a need to make a living, pay taxes, and support an insane system.  You are an outsider, with the ability to look at these beings as they really are, not as they think they are.  From this perspective, you will see that there really are solutions to the problems that you would think do not have solutions if you get too close to them.

 

Where are we From?

 

Let’s start by setting the scene: 

Our closest evolutionary ancestors, the chimps and bonobos, lived in tropical Africa between 6.7 million years ago and today.  This is where our ancestors are from and therefore where we are from.  It is our ancient homeland. 

The illustration below is a satellite image of Africa.  It is essentially a photograph, showing what you would see if you were on a satellite about 2,500 miles over Africa on a clear day. 

 

 

There are several important details I would like to ask you to take note of: 

First, the central part of the image is deep green in color.  This tell us several things.  First, it tells us that this area gets a lot of rain.  The horizontal line at the center of this green area is the equator. 

This is the half way point between the north pole and south pole.  It is the place where the sun beats down on the earth every single day of the year with the same ferocity.  The sun has more energy here than anywhere else on earth because it is shining from directly above, not at an angle. 

Most of the surface of the earth around the equator is ocean.  When the sun hits the ocean, the energy of the sunlight causes water to evaporate.  Giant clouds billow up from the equatorial ocean every day.  The clouds want to stay around the equator:  the air currents that blow clouds to the north and south in areas far from the equator don’t exist in this central location.  The clouds contain millions of tons of water in the form of vapor.  They circle the globe.  If they hit mountains, they would rise and cool, causing their moisture to fall as rain.  But there are no mountains for more than 10,000 miles to the east of Africa or more than 5,000 miles to the west.  The clouds accumulate and get thicker and thicker. 

Eventually, this ring of equatorial clouds hits the mountains of Africa. 

The highest mountain range in equatorial Africa is called the Rwenzoris.  When the moist air hits the Rwenzoris, it has to rise.  The higher it goes, the colder it gets.  At a certain point, it is too cold for the moisture to remain in vapor form.  It condenses into rain.  It rains in these mountains nearly every day.  With rich soil, abundant rain, and plentiful sun, plants grow better here than they do just about anyplace on earth.  As a result, this is one of the most densely vegetated on earth. 

If you look closely at the picture, you will see many of different shades of green.  Each represents an different vegetative area. 

Most of the green area is thick jungle.  In many places it is so thick that, if you travel to the ‘canopy’ (and you can do on canopy walk tours), you can’t even see the ground. 

Note that if you go just a short distance from the equator, about 12 degrees to the north, the green disappears entirely.  All you can see is tan, the color of the immense sand dunes of the Sahara desert.  The change in the south is less dramatic, but you can still easily see that the land to the south is not as green as that along the equator and there are many brown patches indicating barren desert. 

Note that the green zone is isolated from any possible rout from equatorial Africa to what we may call the ‘rest of the world by a massive desert, the Sahara, which is the hottest and driest part of the world and, even today, is roadless and generally impassable.  If you left the green zone in Sudan, and tried to travel to the north across the desert, you would have to go more than 4,000 miles, to Tunis, to find another habitable place.  To the east and west are oceans.  The to the south isn’t connected with the rest of the world. 

There is one way, however, to get from the green zone to the rest of the world that takes you along a habitable route:  If you look closely at the photo, you will see a tiny ribbon of green that snakes through the desert to the north.  (It is tiny because we are looking at it from 7,500 miles away in this image).  This ribbon of green is the Nile River. 

A group of beings that lived in the green zone and wanted to go to the rest of the world (for any reason at all) would probably have no real chance of getting out unless they could find the Nile and follow it. 

We will see shortly that this is a very important fact because, if we understand it, we can understand a great many of the mysteries of human evolution, including the mystery of how the first sapient beings learned how to use fire and how this dramatic change altered the evolving beings in ways that basically forced them down the paths that they later took, and that we are still on today. 

The story of descent of man starts in the green zone, where our ancient ancestors evolved. 

 

The Pan genus

 

The genus ‘pan’ has two surviving members: 

 

1.  Pan troglodyte (chimpanzees or chimps),

2.  Pan panicus (bonobos, nicknamed ‘hippie apes’)

 

When scientists began studying these animals in the 1960s, thought they were looking at two entirely different species.  Different species must have different names, so they gave them the different names listed above.  (The genus is ‘pan’ in both cases.  One has a species name ‘troglodyte’ and the other has a species name ‘panicus.’) 

DNA evidence has shown scientists that this classification was wrong.  These two kinds of animals had almost identical DNA.  They lived differently and were anatomically different.  But their DNA was virtually identical.  Some suspected they might be members of the same species.  To test this, they put chimps and bonobos together in the same zoo enclosure.  (These two different animals have entirely different habitats and don’t come into contact in the wild.  But once humans capture them, we can put them wherever we want.)  

When they were put together, they had sex and babies. 

Under standard zoological classification rules, if two animals can reproduce and have viable offspring, they are the same species.  So, chimps and bonobos are actually the same species.  Scientists haven’t had a chance to give this a single species name yet, but eventually they will have the same species name. 

Why where researchers so sure they were different species? 

This is actually an important issue for the analysis here, so I want to go over it.  The basic reason is that these different groups of animals live entirely differently and have entirely different arrangements of existence or ‘societies.’ 

These two different groups choose different geographical areas in their living spaces.  Chimpanzees (pan troglodytes) only live in rich and highly productive areas that have what Jane Goodall called ‘monopolizable patches’ of land.  (Goodall was the first researcher to try to study these animals in the wild.  Her findings were highly controversial when she first published them, because they made chimps appear to be far closer to humans than zoologists thought they would be.  But her findings have since been verified by many others.  She posts most of her results on her website https://janegoodall.org.)  

Chimpanzees live stationary lives, staying in a very tiny area from birth to death.  (She says they are ‘homebodies.’)   The areas where they live are so rich and productive that they never have to leave:  there is ripe fruit available for them to simply grab any time of year. 

Goodall’s term ‘monopolizable patches’ areas refers to the fact that specific groups of chimpanzees (called ‘troops’) can monopolize these areas using techniques that are practical for them.  They monopolize these areas by creating borders around them, building paths along these borders, and patrolling the paths on a regular basis.  They use aggression and intimidation to make sure outsiders (members of their species that are not part of their troop) don’t approach too close to the borders.  If outsiders do approach the borders, they use violence against them and either drive them away or kill them. 

Using these techniques, the chimpanzees monopolize the resources in these patches of land.  Chimpanzees are extremely aggressive, possessive, violent, and highly territorial.  They form into tightly knit troops that are fanatically loyal.  They have almost constant conflict with outsiders.  These conflicts often escalate to the point where researchers use the word ‘wars’ to describe them.  Death in these wars is one of the leading causes of mortality in chimpanzee societies. 

Bonobos (pan panicus) live entirely differently.  They don’t seem interested in the highly productive areas where chimps want to live.  (Perhaps they have learned from experience that they will have to fight very aggressively, with a high likelihood of death, if they want to live on the land that is most productive.  Perhaps some evolutionary force tells them they are more likely to survive if they simply shun these areas and move to areas that the chimps don’t want.  They can live there without fighting, killing, and risking death daily.  We will look at the details below.)  

The bonobos live in land that doesn’t produce enough to be monopolizable.  This means they can’t stay in the same place and live in the same ‘homes’ (nests) every night.  They have to migrate, at least part of the year.  This makes it impossible for them to monopolize any area (pick it out, build borders around it, and then use violence to prevent outsiders from sharing the land). 

Chimpanzees are fanatically territorial.  If outsiders cross their borders, they will kill them and tear the dead bodies to pieces to leave as messages to those who may try the same thing. 

Bonobos are not territorial at all. 

They travel from place to place, moving from one food source to another as seasons change. 

Chips are fiercely loyal.  They form into very tight groups called ‘troops.’  The members of these troops act collectively to protect the interests of their troops.  They are clearly willing to kill for the benefit of their troops.  They are also clearly willing to die for their troops.  They will often give their lives to make sure that outsiders get the message:  the land inside their borders belongs to their troop.  They have monopoly rights to it.  No member of their species that is not a member of their troop can expect to get away with trying to benefit from the existence of this land. 

Bonobos don’t even form into groups.  I will quote some research below that  shows that they intermingle to such an extent it isn’t even really possible to classify them as members of groups at all.  They are a bunch of individuals who get along with all members of their species.  They travel a lot and socialize with others wherever they go. 

Chimps and bonobos are the same species.  This species made its appearance 6.7 million years ago.  Then it split into two groups that lived two entirely different ways

What could cause a split like this?

This actually isn’t very hard to explain.  Chimps and bonobos live in entirely different environmental conditions.  Animals must adapt to their environments.  If they don’t, nature destroys them.  We will see that the two environmental conditions call for entirely different behavioral patterns.  In one area, aggression and violence are necessary:  groups that don’t act this way will not be able to live there.  The animals that wound up going to these areas and living there adapted in ways that led to the chimp societies described above. 

In other areas, aggression and violence are disadvantages:  animals that live this way will not be able to survive under these environmental conditions.  Only those that adapt to be tolerant, generous, empathetic, and non territorial can live there.  The animals that moved to these areas were, at first, identical to chimps.  But over time, they adapted to the realities of their environment to form the bonobo societies discussed above.  After millions of years of separation and adoption, they began to look a little different.  But genetically, they are virtually identical. 

Later, when we got to the early stages of human evolution, we will see that early humans lived in different environmental conditions also. 

Some early members of the homo sapiens sapiens (modern humans) lived in the vast and nearly empty tundras and steppes of Siberia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Nepal, and Tibet.  (Many still live there.)   They adapted to their environment and came to have societies that operated a very particular way.  Others lived in crowded ‘city states’ with massive walls that separated them from the outside world.  These people adapted to their environment also.  This adaptation led to entirely different societies than the ones that evolved in remote areas. 

In today’s world, people raised with different ‘ways of life’ or ‘societies’ don’t see eye to eye on many matters.  This leads to conflicts.  Many of these conflicts have been quite serious.  I shouldn’t really use the past tense here, because they aren’t over:  the conflicts are ongoing, and you can read about the latest in today’s news.  These conflicts have great potential to escalate into wars that may destroy the world.  If we want to understand these things, we need to understand the way the different cultures or societies of the world evolve. 

The two members of the pan genus are our closet evolutionary ancestors that still exist.  We have some closer ancestors.  Homo erectus, for example, homo habilis, homo sapiens neanderthalis and homo sapiens denisovan are all closer to modern humans than pans.  But we cant study their cultures or societies because none of these closer relatives are with us in the world today.  If we want to study the way the societies and behavioral patterns of modern humans came to be as they are, and want to try to ‘turn back time’ and study the behaviors of our ancestors, the best we can do is look at these two members of the pan genus. 

 

Our Aggressive and Territorial Ancestors, the Chimpanzees

 

The quote below is from an article on the website of the Institute of Human Origins, a division of Arizona State University:

 

When male chimpanzees of the world’s largest known troop patrol the boundaries of their territory in Ngogo, Uganda, they walk silently in single file

Normally chimps are noisy creatures, but on patrol they’re hard-wired.  They sniff the ground and stop to listen for sounds.  Their cortisol and testosterone levels are jacked 25 percent higher than normal.  Chances of contacting neighboring enemies are high: 30 percent

Ten percent of patrols result in violent fights where they hold victims down and bite, hit, kick and stomp them to death.  The result?  A large, safe territory rich with food, longer lives, and new females brought into the group

Territorial boundary patrolling by chimpanzees is one of the most dramatic forms of collective action in mammals.  A new study led by an Arizona State University researcher shows how working together benefits the group, regardless of whether individual chimps patrolled or not

The team — led by Assistant Professor Kevin Langergraber of ASU’s School of Human Evolution and Social Change and the Institute of Human Origins — examined 20 years of data on who participated in patrols in a 200-member-strong Ngogo community of chimpanzees in Kibale National Park, Uganda.  The study was recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Chimpanzees are one of the few mammals in which inter-group warfare is a major source of mortality.  Chimps in large groups have been reported to kill most or all of the males in smaller groups over periods of months or years, acquiring territory in the process.  Territorial expansion can lead to the acquisition of females who bear multiple infants.  It also increases the amount of food available to females in the winning group, increasing their fertility

Chimpanzees are highly intelligent, but they aren’t capable of what’s called “collective intentionality,” which allows humans to have mutual understanding and agreement on social conventions and norms.  “They undoubtedly have expectations about how others will behave and, presumably, about how they should behave in particular circumstances, but these expectations presumably are on an individual basis,” Watts said.  “They don’t have collectively established and agreed-on social norms.”

Humans can join together in thousands to send men into space or fight global wars or build skyscrapers.  Chimpanzees don’t have anywhere near that level of cooperation

“But this tendency of humans to cooperate in large groups and with unrelated individuals must have started somewhere,” Watts said.  “The Ngogo group is very large (about 200 individuals), and the males in it are only slightly more related to one another than to the males in the groups with which they are competing.’

“Perhaps the mechanisms that allow collective action in such circumstances among chimpanzees served as building blocks for the subsequent evolution of even more sophisticated mechanisms later in human evolution.”

 

Jane Goodall, the most widely noted analyst of members of the pan species, notes that chimpanzees live in ‘monopolizable patches.’  The picture below is a satellite view of central Africa with the Gombe National Park marked.  This area is very close to the equator, which means it has no winter or summer.  The days are the same length all year long.  The park is right on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, and has a network of clear blue rivers and towering waterfalls that lead from the mountains to the lake and from the lake to the  Nile and other drainage rivers.  Fruit hangs everywhere and is available for passers by to grab.  Each day, enough fruit ripens in each of these ‘monopolizable patches’ (to us Goodall’s term) to support the troop that lives there. 

When I look at the pictures, I am reminded of the biblical story of the Garden of Eden.  They are in paradise.  All they have to do to remain there is patrol the borders and kill any who try to cross. 

 

Hippie Apes  (Bonobos)

 

Not all parts of  the world are as productive as this. 

Members of their pan genus can still live in other areas:  they produce plenty of food.  But most areas don’t produce enough to allow them to live in a tiny area and never leave it their entire lives.  The pans that live in the unproductive areas simply can’t stay in these areas all year long.  They have to leave.  When they are gone, they won’t be able to prevent outsiders from moving in and taking the places where they lived. 

To see why it is impossible for them to live the same way s the chimps, let’s consider a few numbers from Goodall’s research.  One troop she follows has an average of about 200 members, of which about 50 are adults and the other 150 are juveniles.  They live on and defend an area that is about 2,000 acres (8 km²) in size.  The border (perimeter) of this area is about 7.5 miles long.  It takes the chimps about 4-5 hours to compete a circuit, if they don’t encounter any problems that delay them.  If necessary (if threats are abundant) they can do a patrol every day and will still have enough time to go home and have a good meal before they bed down for the  night. 

But the lands where the chimps live is some of the richest natural land on earth.  The chimps are basically living like the first humans lived in the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden.  Other surrounding land is still very, very rich, compared to most of the earth’s surface.  But it  produces less, per acre, than the best patches.  Let’s consider what might happen if the land was only about 1/4^th as productive. 

Their 200 members would now need four times the land to provide their food.  This means they would need 8,000 acres or 16 km².  The border is now 30 miles long.  It would take 16-20 hours to finish a patrol.  In the tropics, the days are always within a few minutes of 12 hours long.  This means they wouldn’t be able to do even one compete circuit in a day.  It would take them at least two days.  During the time they are patrolling, they focus only on looking for the enemy and preparing for a fight.  They don’t eat or rest or bathe.  Even if they patrolled all the time they were awake, they wouldn’t be able to defend a parcel that was large enough to support them:  they couldn’t be everywhere; enemies that wanted their land could simply move in and take possession, as soon as the patrol passed.  By the time they got back to that area, it wouldn’t be their land anymore

That doesn’t mean that pans can’t live in these areas.  It just means that, if they want to live in other areas, they have to find some other way to organize themselves. 

The following quote is also from a research study sponsored by the Institute of Human Origins.  It describes these other pans: 

 

Humans display a capacity for tolerance and cooperation among social groups that is rare in the animal kingdom, our long history of war and political strife notwithstanding.  But how did we get that way?

Scientists believe bonobos might serve as an evolutionary model.  The endangered primates share 99 percent of their DNA with humans and have a reputation for generally being peace-loving and sexually active—researchers jokingly refer to them “hippie apes.” And interactions between their social groups are thought to be much less hostile than among their more violent cousins, the chimpanzees

Some, however, have challenged this because of a lack of detailed data on how these groups work and how they separate themselves.  A new study led by Harvard primatologists Liran Samuni and Martin Surbeck on the social structure of bonobos may begin to fill in some of the blanks

The research, published in PNAS, shows that four neighboring groups of bonobos they studied at the Kokolopori Bonobo Reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo maintained exclusive and stable social and spatial borders between them, showing they are indeed part of distinct social groups that interact regularly and peacefully with each other

“It was a very necessary first step,” said Samuni, a postdoctoral fellow in Harvard’s Pan Lab and the paper’s lead author.  “Now that we know that despite the fact that they spend so much time together, [neighboring] bonobo populations still have these distinct groups, we can really examine the bonobo model as something that is potentially the building block or the state upon which us humans evolved our way of more complex, multilevel societies and cooperation that extends beyond borders.”

Bonobos have been far less studied than chimps due to political instability and logistical challenges to setting up research sites in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the only place where the primates are found.  In addition, studying relationships among and between Bonobo groups has been further complicated by the fact that subgroups appear to intermingle with some frequency

“There aren’t really behavioral indications that allow us to distinguish this is group A, this is group B when they meet,” Samuni said.  “They behave the same way they behave with their own group members.  People are basically asking us, how do we know these are two different groups?  Maybe instead of those being two different groups, these groups are just one very large group made up of individuals that just don’t spend all their time together [as we see with chimpanzee neighborhoods].”

 

Different Societies in the Same Species

 

Chimps and bonobos are in the same genus, the Pan genus.  They are also in the same species.  The information that showed they are the same species came, originally, from DNA analysis.  After this analysis showed they appeared to be the same species, scientists put them in the same enclosure and they bred and had viable offspring.  They are the same species.

Over the more than 6 million years the pan organized their ways of life in entirely different ways in different areas.  In the rich areas, they organized into troops and fought over territory.  Nature required this:  the land produced enough to be monopolizable; since it could be monopolized, it had to be monopolized:  If the pans that lived in the area didn’t monopolize it, a neighboring troop that was organized for conflict would remove them (in the same way that the ‘whites’ removed the ‘Indians’ so they could monopolize the territory that, given their technology, they were able to monopolize.)  

New members born into the troops in these monopolizable areas would be raised with the realities of territorial sovereignty societies.  It would be all they knew; as far as they were considered, it was the way the members of  their species all lived.  They would have borders that were patrolled.  When mothers were traveling through the forests with their children, they would make it clear that the border areas were dangerous.  (People in general, and children especially, learn many things through empathy as a result of something called ‘mirror neurons.’  If a child sees her mother is terrified when approaching an area, the child will learn this is a dangerous area.)  When young males get close to adolescence, their instincts would push them find a position in the social hierarchy of the adult males.  The adult males organize for patrols of borders and war parties to deal with problems that border agents have identified.  (There is no rational analysis behind this, of course:  Pans don’t have the brain components needed for logical analysis.  But their instincts drive them to do it.) 

Pans born into other areas will be raised in entirely different conditions and grow to accept entirely different realities.  They don’t have ‘troops’ to speak of (as the quote above indicates) but they do have social groups.  Children stay with their mothers and their mothers have peers they work with to meet their needs.  (Bonobos tend to share meals; individuals will collect different foods and they put them together and eat together.)  These social groups feed in areas that have food until the food is scarce, then they move to other areas.  They encounter a lot more individuals that are not in their social group than chimps.  (Most chimps will never encounter individuals who are not in their troops, unless to kill them in conflict.)   Over the generations, previous generations found ways to make their situation worked.  The intense hatred and fear that dominates the chimps would not work for them.  They are better off if they can find a way to get along.  Children will see that their mothers and other members of their social group go to great lengths to get along with outsiders.  This are the only social rules they will learn and, generally, the only social behaviors they will ever witness.  As far as they are concerned, it is the only way their species lives. 

They have entirely different ‘types of societies.’  Part of the difference is due to the different evolutionary forces that operate in different areas. But another part is their background and training.  Put these things together and you can get generation after generation of animals that live and act entirely different in different areas. 

This is an important observation.  We will see that humans also have had different ‘types of societies’ over the period we have been on this world.  Although there are a lot of variants, the types generally fall into two different categories: 

Some of the places where early humans evolved were incredibly productive.  They produced so much that the people there could surround an area by borders and live within the borders, never leaving their entire lives.  These lands are ‘worth fighting over,’ using this term in the economic sense.  This basically means that these parts of the world produce enough wealth that they can support the producers (imagine this as ‘farmers’ for simplicity), with enough left over after paying the producers to support militaries and groups that control militaries (governments, which are often enormous organizations).  

Other areas can support human life.  Humans can live almost anywhere.  In some places, at certain times of the year, the land can support enormous numbers of people. 

 

I spent a lot of time growing up in Montana.  Everything that grows there comes up within a few days in the spring and grows like crazy, with full sun all day and plentiful moisture.  Before the conquest, this plant life attracted millions of migratory buffalo.  The ‘Indians’ followed the buffalo and lived on these plains in the hundreds of thousands for a  few months.  (The last such gathering recorded was in 1876.  It was interrupted by Custer who came, with a small group of troops, to remove the ‘Indians.’  This was one of the few cases where the ‘Indians’ fought back against the conquerors.)  Then, when the grass was gone, the buffalo left and, as the food was no longer there, the ‘Indians’ left too.

 

At other times, it can’t support anyone at all.  People can live in these areas, but they can’t live the same way they live in rich areas.  People have to be flexible and willing to travel to meet their needs at different times of the year.  In these areas, entirely different cultures evolved.  People are social animals and formed into social groups.  But these groups were not like the ‘troops’ of chimps or the ‘city states’ (small ‘countries’) of the territorial descendants of the chimps.  They were traveling groups, probably very similar to the ‘Indians’ of the plains of pre-conquest America.  They lived in tents that were actually fairly comfortable.  The tents would be set up in organized camps and they would have organized ways of life.  Children raised in these communities would learn there were certain behaviors that helped them get the things they wanted.  They would learn what they could do and what they couldn’t do.  The traveling bands would often meet with other bands.  In many cases, the bands considered themselves to be the same ‘tribe’ with a common spoken language.  When bands from the same tribe met, they would interact socially.  Then, they would travel on.  If bands met other bands from other tribes, they would normally try to find some way to get along.  (It is always best to get along if you can; humans get a lot more through cooperation than through conflict.)  Normally, they would find ways to do this. 

You can find numerous references to this in books written by people from natural law societies in the Americas, like the Autobiography of Black Hawk, Plenty Coups of the Crow and many others.  The book American Indian Autobiography deals with the literature in general with general descriptions and lists of ‘as-told-to’ autobiographical accounts and references to help you find originals if you are interested in this topic.  I find it fascinating and always prefer to read about people’s lives in their own words from their perspective.  (It is hard to really understand a person reading books written by people who were raised to think that the being they are describing is not really a human, but a ‘primitive savage’ who they are trying to wipe out.)  

Did these people have ‘societies?’ 

The American Heritage Dictionary defines the term this way:

 

societies /sə-sī′ĭ-tē/

Plural form of society

noun

The totality of people regarded as forming a community of interdependent individuals.

"working for the benefit of society."

A group of people broadly distinguished from other groups by mutual interests, participation in characteristic relationships, shared institutions, and a common culture.

"rural society; literary society."

An organization or association of persons engaged in a common profession, activity, or interest.

"a folklore society; a society of bird watchers."

 

These people had societies by definition:  whenever any beings live together in organized ways, they have societies.  But their societies operated entirely differently than the societies that existed in richer areas at the same time.   

For most of human history, these two kinds of societies coexisted on the same planet.  Some groups of people lived in cities surrounded by walls and defended by armies.  But only a few areas produced enough to support these ‘city states.’  Most of the people of the world lived in the other kind of society.  As time passed, both kinds of societies evolved. 

 

The Principle of Cultural Evolution

 

Evolution works through many different mechanisms. 

A lot of people want to oversimplify Darwin’s work and claim that he simply describes one process, the one he calls ‘natural selection.’  (Often called ‘survival of the fittest.’)  Actually, Darwin described many different mechanisms that can cause change.  The full title is ‘Descent of man and Selection in relation to Sex.’  This book focuses more on sexual selection, which Darwin feels is more important than natural selection in higher primates. 

Nature doesn’t always select the ‘fittest’ individuals for survival. 

Often, groups compete for territory. 

Groups that work well together will have advantages over groups that don’t work well together. 

The easiest way to see this is to look at animals that live together in large colonies that act as a single unit, called ‘eusocial’ animals.  Bees provide a good illustration of this principle.  Bees form into hives with different castes, each of which performs a different tasks.  Working together, they create a healthy hive.  The better they work together, the healthier the hive.  Drone bees live only a few days.  During this time, they devote their life to gathering food for the hive.  When they have finished their useful lives, they submit to death inside the hive, where their bodies become food for others. 

Evolution isn’t going to select the smartest drones for survival.  Smart drones will realize they can live longer if they simply don’t do the things their instincts program them to want to do and that their queens punish them for not doing.   Evolution will select the group that works best to meet the needs of the hive.   The drones have to be good slaves for the colony to compete with other colonies.  If a colony evolves either genetic or cultural programming techniques that turn drones into better slaves, that colony will prosper.  This is true even if the individual drones are not nearly as smart or strong as drones in a another colony. 

Just as individuals in different environmental conditions evolve differently, different cultures evolve differently.   Let’s start with the way societies in monopolizable areas evolve:

 

Cultural evolution in ‘Monopolizable’ Areas

 

Chimps compete for territory using brutal and savage methods.  They kill others and tear them apart.  If a group has genes or social programming or any other factor that makes them better at doing this than other groups, the better group will have advantages in wars over land. 

Chimpanzees inhabit ‘patches of land with monopolizable supplies of ripe fruit.’ 

Imagine that a group of passive, tolerant, and sharing simians find an area like this which happens to be unclaimed.  It is like the garden of Eden to them:  they can stay in the same place, sleep in nests that they can work hard to make nice, and basically go from tree to tree and pick food that is hanging above them.  This area is clearly very desirable. 

Now imagine that another group comes along that is still very tolerant, but exhibits slightly more aggressive expressions on their faces and in their posture.  This second group is a tiny bit less non-confrontational than the first.  (In other words, they won’t back down from a fight quite as easily.)  They show their displeasure at the group that is already there. 

The members of this other group doesn’t want to leave.  But they are not as willing to accept a confrontation, so they move on. 

Eventually, a displaced group of chimps, or a particularly aggressive neighboring group that wants their land, will attack.  There will be war.  The troop that is best at war not always win.  But it will always have an advantage.  Aggression, violence, brutality, loyalty, all bring advantages.  Empathetic, compassion, generosity, kindness, tolerance, and patience all bring disadvantages.  Evolution will slowly alter the societies of the pans that live in these areas. 

Evolution is patient.  An objective observer (say an outsider watching these ancient animals without interfering) would see the societies of these pans evolving in ways that make them more and more violent, aggressive, and territorial over time. 

 

Evolution in Less-Productive Areas

 

In other areas, the aggressiveness and violence may not be advantages at all, but disadvantages.  Imagine a group of members of the pan genus that live in an area that only produces a fourth as much ripe fruit than ‘garden-of-Eden’ area described above.  The troop would need four times as much land as a troop in the ‘garden of Eden’ area.  A troop with 50 adults and 100 juveniles could live in about 2,000 acres in the better land.  They would need 8,000 acres to support themselves in this less desirable land.  This would make it impractical for them to patrol the border and protect it all the time. 

A border around this area (if they made one) would be 30 miles long.  It would take 16-20 hours to do a single a patrol.  They wouldn’t be able to do even one compete circuit in a day.  Even if they patrolled 24 hours a day, they wouldn’t be able to keep out intruders.  They couldn’t be everywhere.  Outsiders could move into whatever area was away from their border in large numbers.  When the border patrol agents for the troop that was trying to hold the and arrived, they could kill them. 

The members of the pan species could live in these areas.  But the wouldn’t be able to live the same way they lived in the richer areas.  There is food.  There just isn’t enough available all the time to keep them alive if they stay in the same tiny area all the time.  They will have to migrate, at least occasionally, to other areas.  They will have to be willing to share the land in some sort of orderly way.  They will have to accept that other members of  their species that were not members of their groups would come and spend time with them.  They would have to find some way to get along with these outsiders.  They would have to be tolerant.  They would have to be peaceful and willing to share the land. 

Evolution would work to reinforce the opposite behaviors realities as it did for the group in the ‘garden-of-Eden’ areas.  Individuals that were competitive, confrontational, violent, aggressive, and spent all their time fighting wouldn’t have as much energy left for mating and raising their young as others, who refrained from these wasteful behaviors.  Like humans, these apes (members of the pan genus) are cooperative social animals.  We can’t meet all our own needs ourselves.  We work with other members of our species that can do things better than we can.  Individuals that are mean, obnoxious, argumentative, contentious, and confrontational would not be as likely to have good relations with others as those that are tolerant and cooperative.  We would expect the process of evolution to work more on an individual level in these areas, giving preference to individuals that are good at forming social alliances and working well with others. 

 

Why Does this matter?

 

We can all see the wars going on all around us.  Wars require weapons.  Weapons—modern ones at least—require industry.  Industry requires fuel and lots and lots of resources.  More weapons and a larger industrial complex means more success in war and more raw materials means more weapons and more industry.  We are destroying the world around us to get weapons to destroy each other.

Why? 

Some say it is because of something they call ‘human nature.’ 

They say it is in our nature to divide the world into ‘countries’ with borders and rape the land to get materials to make weapons to defend these countries.  We are, by nature, highly territorial, highly possessive, dangerous, violent, destructive, and animalistic beings. 

We can’t change human nature:  it was determined by the will of the creator (for those who are religious) or the realities of evolution (for those who are not religious).  Whatever determined our ‘nature’ happened in the past.  Since we can’t go back in time, we can’t change it.  It is fixed.  If the reason we have destructive societies is our ‘nature’ we are doomed and there is nothing we can do to prevent our extinction. 

If we were the only species that had societies that operated this way, this argument might make sense.  Human nature, people seem to want to believe, is unique.  We are special, created in some sort of blessed act or circumstances.  (Even people who aren’t religious seem to want to believe this.)  We are not animals.  We are better than them.  Whatever reasons are behind our actions, they are unique to us. 

What if we could trace a continuous line between the animals that came before us and ourselves?   What if there is a chain of DNA links that changes, one tiny mutation at a time, to take our bodies, our minds, our mental wiring, and even our societies, along a path that leads from ‘them’ to ‘us?’  What if we don’t think of evolution as one of many different things that we need to work into our beliefs system (the systems that we learned from our human ancestors), but a scientific truth that can’t be mixed with beliefs? 

What if it really what happened?

If that is the case, we aren’t on the verge of extinction because of human nature at all.  The human part of our nature, the logical and intelligent side, is telling us that this is an insane way to live.  We do these things because of our animal nature.  We are doing it because we have inherited instincts that tell us to do it.  (We interpret these instincts as ‘feelings,’ another word for ‘emotions.’)  

We live this way because our intellects aren’t strong enough to overpower our instincts (feelings) with logic. 

We are fighting ourselves. 

And we are losing

 

 

But the same evidence that explains how we got into this mess can help us understand how we can get out of it.  The basic forces that operate on us, and push us to act as we do, come from adaptation to environmental realities. 

The environmental realities of the earth have changed dramatically in the last few hundred years.  We know that it is possible for the societies of a species to adapt and change.  Given current technology, the territorial model that we inherited from chimps isn’t suitable.  We will see that the passive and totally non-territorial approach of bonobos isn’t perfect either.  But we don’t have to choose between living as chimps or living as bonobos. 

We are humans.  We have capabilities no members of the pan genus has.  We can create truly human societies.  We can use science, logic, and reason to design societies that operate according to principles that are capable of moving our race toward a better future. 

If we can accept the basic principles of evolution, including the idea of cultural evolution we can take charge of the realties of our existence.  We can ways to work with other members of our species to design a sane society that meets the needs of the entire human race.  Then, we can use our understanding of the factors that cause societies to change (which we can learn by studying evolution) to cause the societies we inherited to change into sane and sound societies. 

The information in this chapter is designed to do more than present some information about a part of the history of the human race that few people give any real thought to.  It is designed to help build understanding that can help us understand what we can do that will put us onto a path to a better future. 

 

Lucy

 

Evolution is a ‘trial and error’ process.  Nature ‘tries’ different things.  Genes change and different animals exist at the same time.   They compete (either as groups or individuals).  If both can find a niche in nature, they can both survive.  If both try to fill the same niche, and it can only hold one species, one will eventually survive and the other will perish. 

We would expect to find a large number of examples of what we may call ‘failed trials.’  An animal species evolves and lasts for some length of time.  Eventually, changing environmental conditions or another species that is more capable wipe it out.  We find artifacts.  We can’t always fit them into a model of links in a chain.  This appears to be the case for one important and widely publicized archeological find.  Research is underway and, eventually, the remains classified as ‘Lucy’ may be fit into a model that shows it is a link in the chain.   But it may also be one of the branches of the tree that didn’t make it. 

In 1974, a group of archeologists discovered a nearly-compete skeleton of a female hominid that looked like something between a human and a chimpanzee.  The researchers thought this was a major find and celebrated that night with drinks and music.  One of the researchers had a tape of Beatles songs that included ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.’  He proposed that they name the female ‘Lucy’ and the name stuck.  Lucy’s bones were in a place with unusually dry conditions that preserved them for a very long time.  Eventually, they were dated to 3.2 million years BP (before the present). 

Lucy is not a member of the genus ‘pan’ (the genus of the pan genus). 

She is not a member of the genus ‘homo’ either (this is the genus of modern humans). 

She appears to be between these two genera. 

There is no controversy about her existence.  She did exist.  Her remains are now on display at the Naturmuseum Senckenberg, a museum in Frankfurt Germany.  The picture below shows the exhibit. 

 

 

There is a lot of controversy about her position in evolutionary tree.  Some claim that she is on the same branch as we are, between the pan genus and homo genus.  Others claim that she is on a branch of her own, that happens to have sprouted between the pans and homos, but she is at the end of this branch and not our ancestor. 

We have reason to believe that Lucy’s people were far more intelligent than any members of the pan genus.  Close to the place where she was found, researchers have found stone tools that had signs of having been manufactured (with marks showing they were shaped) and bones with marks that indicated the animals they came from had been cut up with the stone tools.  The evidence has been dated to 3.4 million years ago, 200,000 years before Lucy’s time. 

The tools are far more complex than any tools ever used by chimps or bonobos.  The ability to make these tools seems to require the ability to think through a project in advance, work out the steps in design, engineer the parts, and then do the manufacturing. 

It seems to require something we call ‘intention.’  Beings that made these tools almost certainly had the ability to think in ways that we generally associate with higher intellect. 

Many aspects of evolution are controversial.  Was Lucy a link in the chain that led to humans?  Is she your great x 128,000 grandmother? 

Perhaps. 

But perhaps not. 

I propose that it isn’t necessary to answer this question at this time.  It is interesting.  But not necessary.    We don’t need to know very detail of the evolutionary process in order to understand how our societies came to work as they do today.  Perhaps, at some point in the future, people will find that there is a genus between the pan genus and the homo genus that can be proven to be links and had a key role in the transition between the two genera.  If this is shown to be the case (and experts don’t seem willing to commit to this), we can factor it into our analysis.  However, at this point, the consensus view is that she is not a link and I want to proceed with the assumption that she is not. 

 

SEO keywords:  Human evolution, Out of Africa theory, Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, Denisovans, DNA evidence, Chimpanzees, Bonobos, Pan genus, Cultural evolution, Territorial behavior, Social structures, Primate societies, Lucy (fossil), Stone tools, Australopithecus afarensis, Evolutionary biology, Human origins, Primate behavior, Anthropology,

 

When I went to school, I was taught that the field of science was showing that many of the ideas we had about the way the world worked were wrong.  Until very recent history, people accepted that the world worked the way our prejudices told us it should work.  For example, the earth appears to be flat so it must be flat.  Heavy objects should fall faster than light ones, so this must be true.  (Galileo proved this was  not true:  gravity affects all objects the same way and, except for the effect of air resistance, they all fall at the same speed.  Galileo failed to convince the jury of this however: their prejudices were too strong, so he was jailed for life for ‘teaching false sciences.’

Science often tells us that things we think should work a certain way really don’t work that way.  Science is a precise field.  It starts with observation.  We see things happening.  We then come up with something called a ‘theory.’  The theory is basically a guess about how all of the things we see could have happened at the same time.  For example, in 1905, Einstein was working in a patent office and came across Tesla’s request for a patent on a devices that turned sunlight into electricity.  Einstein had gone to school and learned this was impossible:  sunlight was energy and electrons were matter.  They are different things and pure light energy can never move electrons.  But Tesla had shown that this did happen.  He had already patented the devices in the United States and wanted a patent in Switzerland where Einstein was working.  Einstein made a device like the one Tesla had built (instructions are in the patent application) and it worked exactly as Tesla had said.  It was impossible, according to the standard laws of physics.  But he could see with his own eyes that it was happening.

Einstein came up with a theory to explain this.  His theory was that matter and energy are not two different things, they are two different forms of the same thing.  Under the right conditions, energy could turn into matter and vice versa.  He went through the math to determine what exactly how much energy was contained in each unit of matter.  He determined that e=mc², meaning that total energy in joules was equal to the mass in kilograms times the speed of light (in meters per second) squared. 

We know that this is correct. It doesn’t sound like it should be right.  How can a kilogram of matter be turned into energy to blow up an entire city?  How can something that appears to have no weight, like a light wave, move enough electrons through a wire to run a refrigerator or television? It doesn’t seemright.  But it has been proven.  It is not a ‘theory’ it is a ‘scientific principle.’  If you are a scientist, you don’t have the option of picking and choosing what to believe.  If it a proven scientific principle, you can’t reject it without also rejecting science, and you are therefore not a scientist anymore. 

Sometimes, people don’t likethe things that science has proven. When Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, for example, he faced furious opposition.  People didn’t want to think that humans evolved. They want to accept that we are special and look for was to accept this.  They want to accept religious principles that have been accepted for thousands of years.  They want to be on the same page with the people they talk to, who talk about the miracle of creation and love that the creator had for us.  But Darwin proposed various tests that could be performed to verify his theory. It passed every single test. Many people have tried to find tests that show the opposite.  None have succeeded, at least not using any scientific methods.  People don’t like the principle and try to claim it is not a principle at all, but  still a theory:  a guess that is as likely to be wrong as right.  But they can’t claim to be scientific and still make this claim.  If you accept science, you have to accept the truths it gives you, even if you don’t think this is the way the world should work or the way you want it to work. 

There are many aspects of our ‘cultures’ or ‘societies’ that we can see are real but that can’t really be explained if the world works the way we think it should work.  Why do we divide the world into ‘countries’ with imaginary lines and then use the activity called ‘war’ to try to alter the locations of these imaginary lines?  We all care about the human race.  (Have you ever known anyone who really and truly wants it destroyed?) We love our fellow man don’t we? We all want fairness and justice, don’t we?  How could we do the things we do, if these are our priorities?  How could the cultures or societies of the world work as they do if people build societies around their desires and priorities? 

It just doesn’t fit. 

This appendix proposes what I call a ‘theory of cultural evolution.’  The idea is that societies aren’t created by wise people of a culture or by deities that love us and want the best for us at all. They evolve in accordance with understandable principles.   It proposes that we have destructive, dangerous, and violent societies today for a reason.  This reason is not magic. It isn’t evil.  It isn’t a devil that wants to harvest souls, or undead rising to punish us for bad things that happened to them.  These societies work this way because they evolved from the destructive, dangerous, and violent societies of our ancient evolutionary ancestors. 

 

The theory of Cultural Evolution

For more than a hundred thousand years two entirely different kinds of human societies coexisted on the same planet.

One was territorial, violent, aggressive, and possessive.  The other passive, tolerant, and non-confrontational.  We could trace these two different arrangements of existence back even before the first true humans evolved.  We could go back 6.7 million years, to the different arrangements that different groups in the genus ‘pan’ organized their existence. 

The evolutionary process called ‘group augmentation’ caused this split in these different ways of life or ‘types of societies.’  Even before humans evolved, the beings that lived in different areas had to learn to live differently to adapt to the different realities of the world around them.

There were areas that provided so much food for their simian residents that they could sleep in the same nests/homes every night, and wander around their local area, grabbing food as they swung from tree to tree.  Jane Goodall called these areas ‘monopolizable patches of jungle.’  It was practical to monopolize them because the groups cold create borders and patrol them.  They wouldn’t have to leave because the land produced enough for them all year long. All they had to do to have plentiful food was to keep outsiders out.  If they did this, they wouldn’t have to share their garden of Eden with anyone.  It would belong only to them.

The evolutionary principle of group augmentation caused the aggressiveness, violence, and brutality of the groups that controlled these areas to increase steadily over time.   If a troop that controlled one of these monopolizable patches of land was tolerant, passive, and liberal, and a more violent, aggressive, and brutal troop arrived and wanted the land, there would be a fight.  The more violent and aggressive troop would have advantages in this fight.

The more aggressive, possessive, territorial, tribalistic, and violent groups may not win every single fight. But they would have advantages in these fights.  If two troops were otherwise evenly matched, the more brutal and savage would have a slight edge.  This would lead to slow and gradual increases in the basic realities of their society.  Groups that could better inspire loyalty, sacrifice, and create a mentality accepting of murder and other savage acts would have advantages.  We would expect all of these characteristics to increase in strength over time. 

After all of the monopolizable patches of the jungle had been taken by aggressive and violent simians, displaced groups would wander around the jungle and look for poorly defended territories to take over.  They would then start a war like the one Jane Goodall described in her many articles about the ‘Gombe Chimpanzee war’ she observed.  If both sides were otherwise evenly matched, but one had more group loyalty (what we call ‘patriotism’ in humans), a greater willingness to fight to the death for the right of their group to have the territory, and a greater willingness to kill and kill, without compassion or empathy, that group would have some advantage in the fights.  Nature and evolution would weed out groups that have characteristics that make them weak in war (tolerance, liberality, compassion, and justice, for example) in the same way it weeds out weak individuals within groups:  it would ‘select’ them for extinction and replacement by groups that were better at war.

Over time, the simians would evolve. As their mental capabilities increased, they would be able to devise more and more complicated and effective weapons, tactics, and techniques for  indoctrinating youngsters with group identity, group loyalty (patriotism), and mental tools that would make them capable of more brutal and aggressive behavior. They would get better and better at war.  But the evolutionary process would continue to push toward possessiveness of land (group territoriality), and greater brutality and savagery. 

Eventually, they would cross a threshold (described below) that would give them what we call ‘sapience.’  They would become ‘homo sapiens,’ or sapient hominids.  They would not have feelings that push them to do things that logic and reason would tell them are not beneficial to their race or even to the individuals in their race.  Their feelings (remnants of the cultural conditioning and genetic factors tht push them to be possessive and territorial) would tell them that each part of the world belongedto the group that conquered it.  Their feelings would tell them that their group was a real thing, and not just a collection of individuals who were brought together because the happened to have been born inside of certain arbitrary imaginary lines.  Their feelings would tell them they had an obligation to isolated their group from outsiders with borders and kill any members of their species that were not members of their group who tried to benefit from the existence of ‘their’ part of the world.   Their logic would tell them that a system that works like this can’t meet the needs of their race.  It would tell them that it prompts and promotes needless conflict that could be so profound it could easily take more resources to maintain the borders than to feed and house the people in it.  At some point, they would have weapons that were so powerful that their logic would tell them that these feelings were pushing them ever closer to extinction. 

They would then try to rationalize their feelings.  The feelings wouldn’t make sense.  But rationalization means ‘to find a way to justify something.’  They would come up with religions that say that the feelings are right:  a higher power defined the groups and a higher power defined the territories. 

 

 

Religion provides one kind of rationalization for the inconsistency between what our latent instincts tell us to do (fight and kill to define a territory and defend it) and what our logical minds tell us to do.  There are others. 

One common rationalization involves creating a name for the group that controls each part of the world and then claiming that it a wonderful entity (almost godlike in its power) that gives us everything worth living for, including liberty, justice, freedom, equality, bravery, courage, the beauty of the purple majestic mountains and of the sunset shining over the sea.  The early city-states all had names.  Fiayum, for example, was almost certainly one of the earliest city states ever built. Children would be taught that there was such a thing as the ‘state of Fiayum.’  It had a separate existence from the existence of the individual people who lived there:  The people would change constantly as old people died and new citizens were born but the state would continue to exist forever. 

The state didn’t kill everyone who did anything at all the people who ran the state disapproved of.  The ones who ran the state could therefore tell people, honestly, that they gave them liberty and freedom:  there were some things they could do without checking with the authorities and getting approval.  They were at liberty in these areas and had the freedom to act as they wanted, as long as they followed the law.  This liberty and freedom was givento them (or so the schools can tell them) by the state.  The state had an organized structure and laws. People who violated these laws were punished.  The people who ran the state could therefore honestly tell the people that their wonderful state gave them something they would not have if they lived in a less tolerant state: Justice.  Even if they had no real elections over any issue whatever, they could claim it was a democracy if they every asked anyone their opinion on any topic whatever, even if they didn’t have any obligation to consider the opinion.

 

 

When I lived in China I visited some schools and listened to the children singing. In one song they waive their hands to the sky and wiggle their fingers.  I asked the teacher why.  She said that the songs lyrics said that Mao (considered to be the father of the country) makes the flowers grow and causes the sun to shine. 

No logical person could really claim that Mao Zedong, the founder and first leader of the country now called the ‘People’s Republic of China,’ is responsible for the sunshine or the flowers.  But children who sing this over and over may have a part of their minds that tells them that he is somehow more responsible for good things than the average person.  When they grow up, if people criticize Mao, they will instinctively feel a little resentment:  one of the great heroes of their county is being blasphemed.  As young adults, many will join the military and have to swear allegiance to their country and its leaders.  (This is the oath of enlistment that all must take, translated into English:  ‘I am willing to be under the leadership of Chinese Communist Party, serve the people wholeheartedly, obey the orders and discipline, be brave in battle; and under no circumstances would I betray the People’s Republic of China and the People’s Liberation Army.’) 

What are they fighting for?  Is the ‘People’s Republic of China’ even a real thing?  Would it even exist if the people stopped accepting it was real in their imagination?  Does it really give everyone born inside the borders freedom, justice, liberty, and equality?  Somehow, the school books are able to make a case that the country is real and does actually bring these things.  But there is scientific analysis behind this.  Logic tells us that is an imaginary construct and couldn’t bring people freedom, justice, and liberty any more than Santa Claus could bring these things. This is just a rationalization: an argument designed to make something that doesn’t make sense appear to make sense.

As the apes evolved into humans, some of the realities of their world around them would change.  But the basic forces that determined the realities of their societies would not really change.  The chimps were influenced by forces that pushed them to form into groups that were territorial.  The forces described above pushed them to remove members of their species that are not members of their groups from land, define borders, and patrol the borders. These same forces operate for humans today and almost certainly operated at all of the levels of evolution in between.

There would be some differences, but they would mainly involve the different tools and techniques that were used to fight over land and instill patriotism and group loyalty into the minds of children.  As they got more intelligent, they were able to do this better and better. 

 

The Areas where the Hippie Apes Lived

The group territoriality societies couldn’t exist everywhere.  They could only exist in places where production was high enough that the individuals in the group could support themselves and get everything they needed without any need to migrate.  They can’t defend a piece of territory if they can’t stay there.  Once they left their territory, they wouldn’t be able to live as they had lived before. They would have a different kind of society.

Only a tiny amount of land is able to support a permanent group of people constantly, without any need to bring in resources from the outside.  The rest of the land may be extremely productive and produce a great deal of grain or other resources.  But if it can’t produce enough to feed the people who involved in production plusall of the people needed to build and maintain the walls and defend the land, it can’t have this kind of society. It must have some other kind of society.

This is true for apes and it is also true for humans.  Ape researchers saw a dramatic split between groups that live in areas with different geographies.  They saw such dramatic differences in the way the different apes lived that they thought the apes in the less productive lands were a different species.  In most areas, the apes would have to travel to meet their needs, at least for somepart of the year.  This made it impossible for them to define a territory with borders and defend them. The groups  that lived in these areas had to scratch and work just to get enough to keep them alive.  They required large amounts of land to keep them alive and it was not practical for them to patrol borders constantly on this land to keep outsiders away. 

We all know from the realities of the world around us that building and defending borders is fantastically expensive. Apes that triedto do this, when it just wasn’t practical, would have wasted a lot of effort they could have used to get food.  They would not be as well fed or healthy as those who didn’t waste this time and, when hard times came, nature would ‘deselect’ them for survival. 

Cooperation would bring rewards in the less productive areas that it wouldn’t bring in areas where people could live behind borders and never leave the bordered area.  People in the areas with group territoriality societies didn’t have to get along with outsiders.  They could live even if they never had peaceful contact with outside groups at all. 

In the less productive areas, most groups couldn’t meet all of their own needs, even with migration. Consider, for example, the different tribes of people who lived in the Americas before the conquest started. Some followed animals and hunted them. They had plentiful meat and skins. But you can’t really remain healthy if you only eat meat and they could only effectively use a tiny fraction of the skins they got themselves.  They would have wanted camas for tortillas, onions, potatoes and other roots, beans, apples, berries, mushrooms, sugar (made from the syrup of the maple trees), eggs, rice, and other foods that they wouldn’t have time to gather following the migratory animals.  Different groups could hunt or gather many other items.  They could then come together for the kinds of events that were called ‘pow-wows’ in the pre-conquest American communities. 

They would find ways to share and trade. 

Evolution would reinforce this kind of cooperative behavior.  Groups that engaged in it would be able to meet their needs better than groups that didn’t.  The more cooperative groups would be ‘selected’ by evolution for survival, while those that weren’t cooperative would be selected for elimination.

If it were possible to observe these groups from an objective perspective (say as would a group of scientists studying earth history from a remote place where they couldn’t interfere), we would expect to see levels of cooperation increase over time.  Even the pre-human simians would find ways to cooperate with each other.  But as they evolved into humans, they would find better ways to do this.  Later, we will look at the literature written by people who lived with the pre-conquest American people and wrote about the experience. We will see that they had items they used as stores of value.  These things were money to them.  (Aztecs used gold, silver, copper, and cotton for money. The people who traveled with Cortez note that the markets were far larger with a much larger variety of good than were available in Europe.  Lewis and Clark talk a lot about ‘Indian money,’ and complain that the government had not given them enough to finish the journey:  they ran out and had to resort to theft in the later stages of their trip.)    

As they made the transition through levels of evolution (described below) to become humans, they would get better and better at finding ways to organize themselves so they could avoid conflict.  They would get good at this.

This doesn’t mean there would never be any conflicts.  Primitive emotions take hold from time to time and no amount of reason can prevent a fight.  (Teenage and young adult boys will fight over girls.  You can talk to them all you want and tell them how bad it is to fight.  But they will do it anyway.)   It just means that the basic pressures on them will push them to find ways to get along with others, to avoid confrontation, to avoid possessiveness toward land or anything the land can produce. 

If genetic profiles in certain groups pushed people to such fits of hatred or territorial possessiveness that the groups couldn’t get meet their needs (because they couldn’t get things their enemies had or because they spent so much time fighting they didn’t have time to hunt and gather the things they needed), that group would be deselected for survival.  The groups that found ways to get along better would be selected for survival.  Over time, the pressures would act on their societies. 

 

 

Evolution is a complicated process. It selects both at the group and individual level.  The groups must adapt to the realities of life in the areas where they live.  If they do, they are selected for survival. It also selects the more capable and intelligent individuals withineach group for survival. 

In societies built on group territoriality, each group had limited resources. Some individuals were better at getting these resources.  They had advantages over their peers.  When times were hard and there wasn’t enough food to support everyone, some people would perish from want, malnutrition, hypothermia, or opportunistic diseases that fed on their malnutrition or otherwise inferior living conditions. The more intelligent and capable would survive.  Over time, the average  intelligence of the most capable primates increased. 

The simians advanced through a chain of steps that is only now being explored.  Different groups evolved in different ways.  In some cases, there were dramatic differences changes between groups.  These differences often got so great that, when they did get together, they either didn’t want to have sex with each other or did, but then were so different they couldn’t give birth to viable offspring.  At this point, a new species had evolved.  In most cases, the new species had such great advantages over the one in the previous link that the lower species couldn’t compete and went extinct.  By this process, evolution led, step by step, from the primitive simians to modern humans.  

How did this happen?

We are developing tools that are very powerful that can eventually help us answer this question with great precision. So far, however, these tools haven’t been around enough for us to use them to work thought the steps in a scientific way.  However, I think it helps a great deal if we piece as much information was we have together to work though the way this process most likely happened, and consider this to be a working theory.  As time passes, and we gain more information, we can revise it.  In the meantime, we can use it as a crutch to help us create a mental picture that we can use to help us get an idea how the basic forces in our past worked:

 

The Theory of Human Cultural Evolution

Sometime more than 1.2 million years ago, homo erectus, the first primate species to ever be found out of Africa, gained the use of fire.  These beings were not nearly as intelligent as modern humans.  But they were far smarter than their simian ancestors. 

These beings migrated down the Nile River.  Almost certainly, these first explorers did not originate in the stationary territorial communities of the Pan Troglodytes, with their sedentary lifestyles, stationary communities, and enforced borders.  These animals were conditioned to be territorial and colonial, by the forces discussed above.  They were used to living in dense communities.  They were afraid of outsiders.  They were aggressive and intolerant.  They were used to sleeping in the same beds/nests every night. Almost certainly, these beings wouldn’t have taken the step of leaving the safety and security of a constant food supply to head out and explore the vast unknown. 

The bonobos would have been used to traveling.  The didn’t ‘own’ any part of the world and couldn’t sleep in the same beds every night. If they traveled anyway, why not go someplace different once in a while?  There is a vast river.  Wild rice grows all along that river.  Birds flock to the area and make nests, so eggs are always plentiful.  The river teems with thousands of different kinds of fish.  Some of the simians with very adventurous spirits would head down the river a few miles.  They would then know what was there.  This would be a part of their migratory habitat.  A few years later, their habitat would be a few miles down the river.  The apes living on the river would live differently than the ones who weren’t quite as adventurous and remained in the jungles.  In time, they would start to look different.  They would become a new species. 

We probably went through several steps to get from the bonobos to homo erectus.  (For example, Australopithecus afarensis may have been a step in the transition, or it may have been a different branch of the tree than homo erectus.)  But eventually, homo erectus existed.  These beings clearly traveled a great deal.  We know that they had mastered the use of fire and wore clothing as of 1.2 million years ago.  We don’t know for sure when they got these abilities. 

 

The Naked Ape

In his book ‘The Naked Ape,’ Desmond Morris explores the way that humans developed the one characteristic that he claims sets us apart from all other apes:  our nudity.  We have no protection against rain (which hair deflects), cold, sharp objects; our skin is thin and tender; it burns extremely easily with ordinary sunlight and freezes at the freezing temperature of water.  We can’t walk through ordinary swamps without protection and can be torn to pieces by the claws of animals that are a tiny fraction of our own size.  Mosquitoes and parasites love us:  few animals have skin as easy to penetrate as ours.

How did this come to pass? 

Morris argues that our nudity indicates that we have to have had clothing and fire for hundreds of thousands of years.  (He wrote during times when people believed nothing, including humans, was more than 6,000 years old.) 

Evolution doesn’t like to waste resources.   It takes resources to build extra layers of skin, extra layers of fat, and the kinds of hair that can protect us from the weather.  If two groups have clothing and fire, and one of them develops genes that use resources for intellect (rather than building thick skin and layers of fat), but the other doesn’t, the group that uses its nutritional resources for intellect will have advantages in competition for resources.  Nature will ‘select’ it for survival and deselect the group that wastes resources. 

This process takes a very long time. But eventually, we would expect to see homo erects descendants that didn’t look anything like the ones that left Africa.  They would look more like the species ‘homo sapiens denisova’ or ‘denisovan man,’ who we know lived in the remote parts of Siberia.  Eventually, they would be a different species.  We know from DNA evidence that homo sapiens denisova traveled extensively.  Their genetic markers are everywhere.  During the last 400,000 years, we had four ice ages.  During these times, many species perished, as the land that had produced whatever they ate was covered with glaciers that were, in some cases, more than a mile thick.  Homo erectus was one of the species that didn’t make it.  Homo sapiens denisova, however, was far more intelligent and capable.  They survived these ice ages. 

 

Homo Habilis

In the meantime, the more aggressive and territorial primates were still in Africa.  Evolution acted on them too.  Individuals with greater intelligence or other capabilities had priority over breeding rights and food supplies.  They survived and spread their DNA.  Less capable individuals had disadvantages.  They had less offspring.  The average capabilities of the most capable beings gradually increased.

Sometime between 200,000 and 400,000 years ago, they also learned how to control fire.  They may have figured this out themselves, or they may have learned it from other hominid species (homo erectus or denisovans).  They also made clothing.  With these advantages, they were no longer limited to the jungles of central Africa.  They could spread out into other areas.

They began to spread down river, just as the homo erectus had before them. But this new species didn’t originate from the hippie apes.  It evolved from the territorial primates, probably chimps.  They were so different than the homo erectus (who were still living along the Nile) that they couldn’t interbreed with them.  They were a different species, the ‘homo habilis.’

Like homo erectus, they lived in homes (which includes caves) that had heat and they wore clothing.  They began to evolve also.  Their extra hair and thick skin was an evolutionary liability to them, just as it was for the homo erectus.  Evolution favored thinner skin and less hair.  Eventually, they also became so different than their ape ancestors that they couldn’t or wouldn’t interbreed with them.  They became a new species. 

Originally, scientists called this species was called ‘homo neanderthalis.’  Recent research has shown that they are the same species as we are now, but a different subspecies.  They are homo sapiens with the subspecies of neanderthalis. The neanderthals were not nearly as prone toward adventure and exploration as the denisovans.  We know this because both kinds of DNA markers from denisovans are found all over the world.  The only place where both key kinds of genetic markers are found in modern inhabitants is Europe.  (See map below) 

 

Qqqq map of neanderthal markers

 

 

Neanderthals descended from groups that had highly territorial societies.  These societies tended to spread by a process of colonization.  Where groups of individuals traveled to other areas that had productive land. They then created a ‘colony’ there. They lived much as they had in their previous territorial area.  The colony grew and eventually became so crowded that there wasn’t enough food available to support everyone.  (Remember, the had walls that were very high and lived off what could be produced inside these areas.)  They would then head out to look for a new place to colonize.  

They seemed to be extremely reluctant to cross desolate areas.  If you look at satellite images, you will see there is really only one path of migration open to them that doesn’t require them to cross immense parcels of desolate land, and also takes them through areas that would have been ice free during the ice ages:  they would have to travel to the north, through what is now Israel, then Lebanon, Turkey, and into what is now Greece and then to western Europe.

 

 

Homo sapiens sapiens

Neanderthals bred with denisovans. As noted above, in most of the world this appears to have been one way:  male neanderthals breeding with female denisovans.  In some areas, the DNA evidence indicates only a tiny bit of mixing, perhaps only one sexual encounter in thousands of years.  But it was enough to mix the nuclear DNA of the two species, creating a new species.  

This new species eventually evolved into us.  We are a mixture.  We are part neanderthal and part denisovan.  We have DNA from both. 

Not all of this DNA is equal. Some of us have very strong neanderthal markers and very weak denisovan markers.  Some have very strong denisovan markers and very weak neanderthal markers.  This creates a great variety of people with a great many different genetic characteristics. 

 

 

This is us.

 

Two Cultures

Although the neanderthal DNA spread worldwide, their culture did not spread worldwide.  In all but Europe, the incursion of DNA was very tiny and came onlyfrom the male side.  In other words, there is no evidence of female neanderthal DNA anywhere but Europe.  This tells us that the DNA almost certainly came from a few adventurous males who traveled into areas where denisovans lived and had sex with the women the found. The strength of the markers outside of Europe is so low that it may well have come from one single neanderthal man who traveled to a few areas that had denisovan, had sex, and came home. 

 

 

The neanderthal cultures remained in Europe.  The denisovan cultures spread everywhere else.  Given enough time, the neanderthal cultures would spread.  But by 26,000 years ago, they had not spread beyond Europe. 

When the first known humans crossed the bearing strait into America 26,000 years ago, they had the more liberal, tolerant, cooperative, and less territorial societies of the denisovans. The people spreading from Siberia were thousands of miles (across barren landscapes) from the nearest neanderthal cultures.  They probably wouldn’t have even know that these other cultures existed.  As far as they were concerned, there was only one way humans could live.

Most of America was covered by ice sheets until about 10,000 years ago.  Some people were able to travel anyway and there were people in the Americas before the ice melted.  But not many.  After the glaciers were gone, the land could support much higher populations and the population grew. 

Meanwhile, in Afro-Eurasia, people were traveling and trading.  People from denisovan cultures traveled to Europe, from time to time, and saw the way the neanderthal cultures there worked.   Some of these people then went to rich areas that could support the territorial systems and formed systems modeled after the territorial systems they saw there. 

People would be raised in these territorial societies.  They would have mostly denisovan DNA but they would adopt the neanderthal cultures. The people in rich areas would build border walls and defend them, just as the first neanderthals in Europe built border walls and defended them.  China, India, Japan, and the Indonesian islands would eventually have these territorial societies, or versions of them.  (There are still major differences between the culture of Asia and that of Europe, but they are built on the same foundation.) 

Eventually, all land that was productive enough to justify colonization would be found and colonized by people with the territorial societies.  But this would not spread to the Americas, at least not until 1493.  For the first 25,600 years of their history, the societies of the Americas would be built on the tolerant, passive, cooperative, and non-confrontational systems of the denisovans. 

 

The Theory of Human Cultural Evolution

This appendix explains a theory.

I don’t claim it is a ‘principle.’

We don’t yet have the tools to test this theory.  We will soon, and hope it will be tested soon.  But until we have evidence to confirm it, it is a theory.

A theory is a guess. 

It is the way we startto understand something.  We see things happening. We look for some sort of explanation for them.  At times, we can’t do much more than guess.  We make guesses about what factors may account for what we see. 

We live in a very strange world.  It works in ways that don’t make sense.  Horrible things happen all the time.  If we can’t understand why these things happen, we can’t do anything to stop the horrible events.  We need to start with theories. 

As we go through history in the next few chapters, we will see a lot of things that are hard to explain (many impossible to explain) without some kind of theory to help us understand the way human cultures came to work as they do.  If the above theory is correct, and we accept it (even if just as a working theory), just about everything that follows in history falls right into place and seems to make total sense.  There may be flaws in the details, but I think that, when  we have evidence, we will find that the basic framework above provides a very solid foundation that can support an understanding of the way our societies came to work as they do now. 

Throughout this book I have tried to paint a picture of history that is wider, longer, more diverse, and more fruitful than the pictures of human history that schools teach and that most people accept.

We have not just been here a few thousand years; we have been on this world for millions of years. We have had organized our existence many different ways in the time we have been here. We have done a lot and this tells us we are capable of a lot.

You and I were born into societies organized around very dangerous, violent, and destructive principles. But we are not locked into these societies. We have great capabilities. Humans are capable of living differently. We know this is true because humans have lived differently.

If the capabilities of humans are greater than the people who teach us how the world works today, we may wonder exactly how great the capabilities of the human race really are. What could we do if we put all of the enormous power of our intellect behind our efforts? What lies in the future for the human race? A certain path through circumstances has brought us to the point where we are now. From here, there is not just one path, but a multitude of paths. We—the current members of the human race—are in a position to choose which path to go down.

Which path should we choose?

A logical way to start would be to use the best tools that we have at our disposal (including our incredible intellectual skills) to figure out where the paths into the future may eventually lead. What kind of existence is the human race capable of? What kinds of ‘societies’ are possible? We may work to create a ‘science of society,’ one that analyzes the capabilities of our race in the same way that scientists now analyze the paths of intercontinental ballistic missiles or the destructive power of weapons that have not yet been built. Once we understand what societies are possible, we may create a forum to discuss the issues, using the two great tools described in the last chapter: a ‘global humanitarian corporation’ (GHC) similar to thousands of other GHCs that already exist can act as the medium to facilitate the forum. People who are interested in this topic can participate through the mediums the GHC sets up, which may be structured to provide venues for everyone who wants to participate in the discussions. We may then decide as a group which of the myriad of paths that are open into the future we wish to take. The scientists in the ‘science of society’ field may figure out the different choices that need to be made to ‘steer’ our existence down the intended path and submit the plan to the people for a vote. If approved, we can head down that path.

A Short Overview of Human History

The Earth formed 4.683 billion years ago out of gasses left over from a previous galactic event. The first scientific evidence we have of living things here goes back 3.6 billion years.

These first living things were very simple.

Over time, more and more living things came to exist. DNA evidence indicates that these more complicated living things did not come to exist from separate acts of creation, but are descendents of the simpler organisms, indicating that a process of evolution took place. Evolution favors more capable living things and eventually living things with great capabilities came to exist, in the family that scientists now call ‘primates.’ The first scientific evidence of primates goes back 46 million years. Primates have greater mental abilities than those of any other Earth animals, and are the only animals known to make tools.

Different primates have different abilities to make tools. The ability to make and use tools must confer great advantages on beings with this ability, because primates with higher and higher capabilities came to exist over the next 42.7 million years. The first evidence of complex tools (tools with many components, made separately and then assembled) goes back to the time of the first evidence of human beings (human remains), to about 3.3 million years ago.

This is when human history starts.

The ability to make complex tools implies a very high level of intellect. This intellect gives humans abilities that no other Earth animals can match. When we arrive in a given area, we can figure out what foods that area produces. When we first arrive, other animals will, of course, already be taking advantage of this food. But we can use our intellectual abilities to figure out how to collect the food before animals can get to it, store it in an animal-proof enclosure, and use it for our benefit. Everywhere we went, we had this ability. We could take whatever the land produced or contained and use it for our benefit. This allowed us to feed our children, even when other animals could not. With plentiful food and other necessities, children could grow up to be healthy and have children of their own. The human population could grow.

When our population in a certain area got higher than the number the land could support, we could spread out into new areas. We found the first evidence of humans in Africa, a continent that is connected to two other massive continents (Europe and Asia). This collection of continents can support a vast population: even with the most primitive methods imaginable, it could provide food and other necessities for a billion people.

If we use mathematics (rather than religion or beliefs) to calculate the number of people who were born, lived, and died prior to 3.294 million years ago, we would have to conclude that the number would have to be trillions of people, far more than have lived in the last 6,000 years.

 

 

The First Societies

How did these people live?

The evidence we have indicates they lived in societies based on respect for nature and the belief that nature is the source of all things humans need and want: natural law societies. Societies built on natural law have incentives that reward good stewardship of the land. We know that the people who lived for this immense time kept the land healthy and did not destroy it. Natural law societies don’t have forces that push people to divide land into nations with walls or borders. We know that people did not do this prior to 6,000 years ago.

Societies built on natural law don’t have incentives that push people to make large investments or build large production facilities capable of producing things cheaply and efficiently. They don’t have inherent incentives that reward people who create new technologies. We have no evidence of any significant improvements in technology or production abilities that go back more than 6,000 years. We also have evidence of Western Hemisphere societies, which are known to have existed for at least 50,000 years, and which we could not deeply study until very recently. These people had natural law societies. This evidence, and a great deal more, supports the conclusion that people had natural law societies for the first 3.286 million years humans lived on the Earth, and more than 99.99% of all the people who ever lived on Earth were born into such societies, were educated in them, met their mates in them, had their children and educated them in the ways of these societies, and then left this world without knowing that any other modes of existence were even possible.

People born into and educated in such societies must have lived in such close harmony with the land that, after they were gone, nothing much would remain to testify to their existence except their bones, the components of their tools that were durable and did not decompose, and perhaps a little of their artwork which happened to have been made in caves and could therefore be preserved over time. This must be true because it makes up basically all of the evidence we have to indicate that they existed at all.

Sovereignties

Eventually, the pressure of population pushed a group so far that its members decided to abandon the principles of natural law. They decided to accept that the planet we live on is just one more thing that human beings can own. They either divided the land they lived on in some way or accepted that someone or some group owned it. The owners created rules to protect their (claimed) rights to land and either convinced or forced the group as a whole to accept these rules. Societies that accept ownability of land naturally divide the people into two ‘classes,’ the owners and non-owners. Owners of bountiful land can hire people to collect the things the land produces and live quite well without working.

Owners have incentives to figure out how to make weapons and hire people so they can ‘take’ land inhabited by people with natural law societies. In time, some will react to these incentives and start to ‘take’ land. More land means more to spend on armies and weapons, and great advantages in the land grabs. People will compete to take land as quickly as they can. The new ownership-based societies will grow like cancers grow: they will send out tendrils into healthy areas, set up forts in these areas, extract whatever resources are needed to build more weapons, and expand their development until they can’t grow anymore. This expansion can happen very quickly and entire continents can be converted from natural law societies to societies built on ownability in a matter of a few hundred years.

The people in natural law societies will not have advanced weapons or a social structure that allows them to have full-time soldiers. They will be relatively easy to defeat. Once all of the natural law societies are gone, the ownability-based systems will start to fight each other to gain more land.

On Earth, we call each group that claims a certain part of the planet belongs to them a ‘nation.’ The rulers of each nation will start to organize their ‘nations’ for defense against aggressive nations. Often, the best defense is a good offense, so they will also develop offensive capabilities. If they have these capabilities, they have incentives to use them. (It seems like a waste of money to spend on something that will never be used.) Wars will become a constant part of existence. This became the reality of half of the planet Earth, the part called the ‘Eastern Hemisphere,’ about 5,000 years ago. (The rest of the planet still had natural law societies.)

Cities

The military commanders will hire researchers to find new and better ways to kill other people and destroy property. Eventually, the researchers will discover that the reddish-orange dirt and rocks they see around them contain a metal, iron. By itself, iron is not very hard, but if worked properly, it becomes one of the hardest and strongest metals known: steel. Eventually someone will figure out how to make steel.

Armies with weapons made of steel will have fantastic military advantages over nations that don’t have these weapons. On Earth, the oldest steel weapons appeared about 2,000 BCby the calendar we use. Once one military has steel weapons, the other militaries must get them too or they will be conquered by the better-equipped armies. Steel use will spread.

A lot of people have to come together in one place to make steel. Wood doesn’t burn hot enough to ‘smelt’ the metal out of the ore; charcoal is needed. Armies of loggers must work tirelessly to cut down the hardwood forests to make the needed charcoal. Large numbers of charcoal makers must work to turn the hardwood into charcoal, and teamsters with wagons and oxen must work around the clock to haul the charcoal to the smelting facilities. Smelters require large numbers of people for construction, maintenance, and repairs; foundries require additional workers, the weapons manufacturing mills require many workers. The operations will require salespersons, finance experts, bankers, lenders, and a great many people with other skills. Everyone will need housing and food leading to the need for people to build homes, stores, and restaurants.

The rulers of the feudal states may not want to allow these people to come together in one place, because they pose a threat to the system. But the rulers don’t have any choice: they need the weapons that can only be produced in cities, so they need to allow cities to exist. Eventually, the land will transform in a way that leads to cities spaced at regular intervals among feudal agricultural states.

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander

Socrates was born into one of the cities about 2,400 years ago.

He looked around him and realized that the system he lived in fed off of war and destruction, things that didn’t advance the human race toward a better future. He realized that the system was not built on logic and reason, but on beliefs. He said that the system he was born into could not meet the needs of the human race (couldn’t have δικαιοσύνη) and we would have to reevaluate human existence if we wanted to ever have such societies.

The cities had more jobs and better lives for everyone when wars were ongoing; everyone knew that the cities functioned better in times of war than in times of peace. Athens was aligned with several feudal states in wars against the Spartans and Persians, both of which had been depicted as evil monsters trying to destroy everything decent about the world. Socrates was criticizing the society built on the idea of political units owning parts of planets. He was telling people that these societies were responsible for truly horrible things. If people listened, his message could hurt morale and cause the evil ones to win and gain control of the land.

They had Socrates arrested, tried, and executed. But some people understood his message and believed it provided great hope for the human race. They didn’t want the message to die with the messenger. Plato created a school to teach Socrates’ message and this school attracted some of the finest minds in the area. The most noted scholar to attend Plato’s school was the brilliant Aristotle. Aristotle gained a great reputation and King Phillip of Macedonia, looking for the best teacher he could find for his son Alexander, hired Aristotle for this job.

Alexander was nearly as brilliant as his teacher. Together, the two worked out basic principles of intellect-based societies. When Alexander gained power, he started to put these new ideas into practice. He didn’t ‘take over’ land, at least not in the traditional sense, he merely gave people a better existence. Word got around and people clamored to join his system. In some cases, rulers resisted this transition but, with the virtually unanimous support of the people, all Alexander had to do was provide some military advisors and equipment, and the people would gain control of their own kingdom and join it to Alexander’s. His empire became the most prosperous, fastest-growing, freest, and largest that had ever existed.

Unfortunately, when the people got power and wealth, the kings and rulers lost it. Some of the rulers realized that they could stop the transition by killing Alexander and arranged for his assassination. When Alexander died, the old system came back quickly.

The Unholy and Holy Roman Empires

The warriors kept fighting. The walled cities kept playing the feudal societies against each other to keep the wars going and demand for weapons high. One military commander, Gaius Julius, studied the successes of Alexander and realized that he could take land by organizing society so that the people gained benefits when they joined his system. He didn’t understand Alexander’s entire model, but understood enough to make him very dangerous. He used his talents to gain more and more land and build larger and larger armies. He eventually gained enough military power to take over the giant city-state of Rome and add it to his empire. Once he had unified the feudal system with the city, he was able to build a system that operated more or less smoothly to send food to cities, keep cities producing weapons, and allow more and more conquests.

This system was still of the type that Socrates had called a Πολιτεία: it accepted that groups of people can get together and call their groups ‘nations.’ Then, acting as nations, they had unlimited rights (sovereignty) over a certain defined part of the planet. But it was a new kind of sovereignty society in that it combined the resources of agricultural land and industry of the cities in an organized way. The system was designed to keep the industry in the city working smoothly so the war machine could grow to enormous size.

Such a system can work very well as long as war is a perpetual affair. The war creates huge numbers of jobs, both as weapon makers, providers to weapon makers, soldiers, and suppliers to the armies. If ever the system doesn’t produce enough jobs for the working-class population, leading to unemployment that might cut demand and destroy the system, the leaders can reduce the working-class population by setting up futile battles where thousands of working-age men are killed. Fewer working-class people alive means fewer looking for work and lower unemployment.

By keeping unemployment low, the government can keep wages high. As long as workers have a lot to spend, they can buy more and better housing, more and better food, and more and better consumer goods of all kinds. This creates large numbers of jobs providing the secondary (consumer) economy.

For hundreds of years, the wars were constant.

Then disaster came: peace arrived.

Industrial sovereignties simply can’t handle peace.

Millions of soldiers lost their jobs. They weren’t needed anymore. The weapons factories closed, laying off their workers. The factories stopped buying steel, forcing the foundries to close. The foundries no longer needed iron and the smelters closed, they stopped buying charcoal and ore, so hundreds of thousands of charcoal makers and teamsters lost their jobs. The mines closed and all of the people who worked in all of these fields lost their incomes and began to starve. They couldn’t afford food and stopped buying food; the farmers couldn’t sell their food and couldn’t make their costs. Eventually their creditors shut them down and boarded up the farms, leading to a dust bowl when large portions of the Earth simply blew away. The economies of the cities depended entirely on industry and when industry left, the cities collapsed.

This was the situation that was in effect when Constantine came to power in 320 AD (by the calendar he created). Constantine thought anything was preferable. He realized that industrial sovereignties were not workable systems and decided to destroy them. He ordered all books burned and all knowledge forgotten or destroyed. All power was turned over to a church, to be called the Catholic Church, which would work aggressively to prevent progress and the resurgence of technology and industry.

The unholy Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire.

Knowledge was illegal. Those trying to gain it were punished by death.

We now refer to the period that followed as ‘the Dark Ages.’

Renaissance

Chinese scientists invented the first workable explosive, gunpowder, in the late eleventh century. Persian weapon makers began to build workable cannons, bombs, rockets, and grenades in the late 12^th century and began an assault on the Christian world at that time. The Christians, with their primitive weaponry, couldn’t defend themselves. Church leaders realized they would have to reopen their systems to learning; they had no choice.

They reversed their policy very abruptly: now, education was considered good and godly. Thousands of schools opened within a few years after the policy change, and, with generous church support, some of the finest universities the world had ever seen were created. Not everyone had destroyed their books as the church had required and, as soon as people were allowed to learn to read again, the old knowledge resurfaced quickly. The Italian Toscanelli built a large library of pre-Christian books and, using the information in these books, created a map of the world based on the idea that the world is round. That meant it was possible to get to the east by sailing far enough to the west. This map found its way into the hands of Christopher Columbus, who used it to obtain funding to find a route to India going west. He discovered a large island in the Caribbean Sea where people still had natural law societies. The conquest started just as soon as he could return home to Spain, and then come back to the New World with modern weaponry.

The people with natural law societies couldn’t defend themselves against the invaders. Mile by mile, the invaders took land and sold it. The competition for land was almost unimaginable in its fervor and people developed new tools to help them gain advantages in these wars. In 1600, the first ‘joint stock’ corporations came to exist. These corporations could raise far more money and build far better facilities than had ever existed before, giving fantastic advantages to the nations that had them. Within a century, the tiny nation that found the best way to utilize corporations, England, became the most powerful nation on Earth with a global empire where it was said the sun never set.

In the 1700s, some people in British colonies found a way to make corporations even more powerful and capable. They would make corporations perpetual, turn them into ‘persons’ under the law and give them guaranteed rights. Corporate persons would be granted control over the governments (by giving them the freedom to ‘lobby’ and to support the candidates of their choice), giving the owners total immunity from anything the corporations did or any damage the corporations caused. The new corporations could build facilities far beyond anything that had existed in the past. They began to make discoveries about ways to turn the resources of the world into goods with various uses. Of course, they concentrated on the most profitable operations, which involved weaponry. Nations would pay whatever they had to pay for the most advanced weapons, because they had to have them to defend themselves. But their discoveries also found uses that benefited the people and improved their quality of life.

The new corporations were essentially beyond the control of governments. If a government gave the managers of a corporation problems, they could simply move their corporation to another country, and keep operating it as before. People took advantage of this to play governments against each other, forcing them to meet the needs of the corporations. Some people who formed corporations wanted to use these tools for something other than profit: they wanted to use them as tools to advance the interests of the human race. Many people made various attempts at this, proving that it could be done. (Perhaps, if they had Aristotle to teach them how to build intellect-based societies, or they had a ‘science of societies’ to help them figure out how different ‘modes of existence’ worked, they could use this tool to build one, using the tools of these new corporations to make governments cooperate.)

In the 1960s, military commanders realized they couldn’t fight a nuclear war without reliable communication, and nuclear bombs would wipe out ‘conventional’ communication channels. They needed to create a new communication system that operated under as many different protocols as possible, to make it as difficult as possible to disrupt. They created the Internet. They realized that, if enemies couldn’t disrupt the new system, the governments that created it wouldn’t be able to interrupt it either. This involved huge risks: the people of the world (including the people of nations they called ‘enemies’) would be able to communicate with each other freely. They would be able to get access to information that had never been available before and would learn that much of what they had been raised to call ‘history’ was actually political propaganda. They may then take advantage of tools that were beyond government control (like the humanitarian corporations) to alter the order of society in ways that created true equality, liberty, justice, freedom, and even a true democracy.

This was a very big risk for governments. They know that the majority of the people are harmed by the system as it works. They would prefer that the people remain ignorant and out of touch with those the governments want them to believe are somehow different than they are.

But they had no choice.

The new realities of war made unbreakable communication systems essential. To create these systems, the governments had to allow an open architecture, so that many different people would develop many different protocols for connections. Since the connections all worked in different ways, enemies couldn’t destroy enough of them to shut down communications, and nuclear powers could communicate and respond to nuclear attacks. It was a big risk, but the only option they had, so they accepted the risk. We may hope that historians born many centuries in the future will find this ironic. The need to make war ultimately provided tools that the human race could use to work together and eliminate the basic forces that cause humans to divide into ‘sovereignty nations,’ thereby eliminating war.

The Future

This book is one book in a series of books about important realities of existence and the things that we can do to move ourselves to a better world. The next book in the series, Preventing Extinction, explains a new approach to the analysis of the human condition. Rather than starting with ‘what we have now’ and complaining about the things that ‘they’ (the mysterious ‘they’ who supposedly love us all and are going to fix everything for us if we just tell them what to fix) should ‘do something about,’ it starts from scratch. It starts with a basic reality of human existence—our needs for food and other physical items over time to sustain our bodies—and the way human beings must act if we are to meet our needs and survive. It shows what is possible, given the advantages and disadvantages that humans have that other animals do not have.

We can structure our existence various ways. Each different option leads to different incentives. If we understand the way these different modes of existence create incentives, and we understand the fact that humans must respond to incentives in order to stay alive, we have all the information we need to analyze human options for societies scientifically. We can understand how each different choice that humans may make about the basic realities of their existence will affect the evolution and progress of our race into the future.

We did not choose the conditions of our birth. We happened to have been born into societies based on beliefs that people held in the past about the intentions of an invisible all-powerful superbeing they believed lived in the sky. They believed that this superbeing wanted the world owned by whoever had the strength and power to take control of it. They ‘conquered’ land and became its ‘owners.’ They then built networks of rules and laws and created armies, police forces, prisons, and death camps as tools to help them force others to respect the rights they claimed they had. You and I did not create this system: it was already in place before anyone now alive was born.

Although we did not choose the conditions of our birth, we are now grown up and we are in charge. The human race is the dominant race of beings on this planet. (I know the people who designed our societies originally and run them now don’t believe this, but science, logic, and forensic evidence tells us it is true.) If we accept this reality, we will naturally also accept that we have both the ability and right to think about the different ways human societies can work, so we can figure out how to proceed from here. Preventing Extinction is the second step in the process: it is designed for people willing to accept that the human race is in charge of its destiny and want to understand the choices we have.

I want very much for as many people as possible to read Preventing Extinction and understand its message.

I hope to create a kind of passion in readers that inspires a real interest in the idea of creating a science of society. I hope it will inspire readers to both build on the work in Preventing Extinction and to find and correct any inaccuracies they see so that, eventually, we will have a science capable of moving us toward a future of our desire.

 

 

 

Chapter Thirteen The Most Significant Attempt to Change the Nature of Society Ever made (Alexander The Great)

I AM NOT THE FIRST to claim that the problems with the societies that we have now are structural problems, integrally related to the foundation that these societies rest on. Many others have seen this relationship.

About 2,450 years ago, the great thinker and mathematician Pythagoras spread the same basic message. His ideas offended many people who believed in the established order and wanted others to believe in it too. Pythagoras was asked to stop saying such things several times.

He didn’t stop. People began to threaten him. He was trying to undermine the existing order. They believed in the existing order. They wouldn’t allow him to do this. He decided to take his message underground. He created an organization called the ‘Pythagoreans,’ what historians record as a ‘secret society.’ Pythagoras had a keen logical mind. He had worked out several mathematical principles that helped people understand important aspects of our existence, including the famous ‘Pythagorean theorem’ that we all learned in school.

Pythagoras actually had a very wide impact on human thinking. His theorem about right triangles was only one of hundreds of theorems that he worked out; these theorems form the foundation for mathematics as we understand it today. Pythagoras is also responsible for western music, as it is played today. He created something called the ‘circle of fifths’ that forms the foundation for the chromatic scale (the 13-note scale that is the foundation for all music in the western world today; to play this, you play all keys on the piano keyboard). He showed that there is a simpler scale inside of this 13-note scale, which has only 8 notes. (This is called the ‘harmonic scale; to play it, you play only the white keys on the piano.) He explained the mathematical relationships between the things we call chords (the chord C, on any instrument, includes the notes C, E, and G; these notes sound good together because of mathematical relationships that Pythagoras explained).

Pythagoras made contributions to many fields. But he devoted his later life to his analysis of human societies. Pythagoras believed that the basic structures of human societies could be made to make sense in the same way that music and mathematics made sense.

We know very little about Pythagoras and have nothing directly from him. We know that he traveled a great deal and was devoted to both teaching and learning; he is claimed to have gotten his great wisdom from various different places where he lived, including Egypt, Persia, Greece, Italy, Crete, Palestine, and Macedonia. We don’t know for sure when the Pythagorean secret society came to exist, but we do know that it eventually became very large, it included many people who were very important to history, and it survived a great many very dedicated attempts to destroy it.

In 495 BC, Pythagoras was giving a lecture in Croton, a town in southern Italy. His enemies heard about this and must have decided it would be a good time to destroy the movement. Led by the politician Ceylon of Croton, they blocked all of the exits of the building where Pythagoras was giving his lecture and set the building on fire, killing everyone inside.

This didn’t destroy the movement. It still had chapters in many places in Europe, Africa, and Asia that met on a regular basis. Again, because these meetings were illegal and didn’t provide a paper trail that might have allowed the authorities to treat other members of the group as they had treated Pythagoras, we don’t really know much about them; we just know that this society existed and had many followers in the places where Pythagoras had lived.

The most important and influential Pythagorean in history was Alexander the Great. Roughly two centuries after Pythagoras was killed, Alexander made the most significant attempt in history to create rational societies, by putting Pythagorean principles into effect.

We can learn a lot from Alexander’s attempt. We can see that certain rather simple changes to society can have an enormous impact. We can see that many of the tools that Alexander created (almost certainly with the aid of his tutor, Aristotle), are capable of working to create a healthy society. We can see that his attempt almost worked, and we can use this information to see what we can do to build on his successes.

His failures also tell us a great many important things. If we know what attempts people made to do something we want to do, and we know why they failed, we can know what we have to worry about. To really understand what Alexander the Great did and how we can learn from it, we need to go back to before he was born and examine the development of the ideas that he tried to put into place. Alexander got his ideas about society through a chain of brilliant scholars that starts at Pythagoras. Socrates’ grandfather, Timaeus, was a noted Pythagorean and raised Socrates to think about human societies logically, something the Pythagorean society taught. Like Pythagoras, Socrates’ ideas offended many; Socrates was eventually put to death for heresy (disputing that the gods created the structures of societies) and sedition (teaching ideas potentially harmful to the state to young people). One of Socrates’ students, Plato, didn’t want Socrates’ ideas to die and wrote a series of books explaining Socrates’ ideas (the Πολιτεία, the Timaeus, and the Critias, discussed below). Plato opened a very famous school, the Academy, that attracted scholars from all over the world to study Socrates’ ideas; the most famous of these scholars was Aristotle, who became the personal tutor to Alexander the Great.

To understand the ideas that eventually made their way to Alexander, we need to look at the only place where they are really written down: the series of three books that Plato wrote about Socrates’ ideas for society.

The books are:

1.The Πολιτεία [The Politica Society]

2. Timaeus [The perspective of Timaeus, Socrates’ grandfather and a follower of Pythagoras]

3.The Critias

I want to go over these books a little here because the book you are reading, ‘Preventing Extinction,’ follows the same basic line of analysis as Socrates followed in these books.

The first book, ‘Πολιτεία’ (Politica Society) is an attempt determine if the type of society that dominated Europe at the time, a society that divided the world into independent political units (countries) could meet the needs of the human race. The book clearly shows that it cannot. In the book, Socrates first explains why this kind of society can’t meet the needs of the human race. Then, several of his students try to argue that it can work well, and its foundations are sound, it just needs certain minor modifications to work well. Socrates shows clearly that this is not the case. The problems in the πολιτεία (politica society, a society that divides the world into individual political units like sovereign states or sovereign countries) are structural. No superficial changes can make any difference.

Why?

The book shows that any society built on this foundation will necessarily have war. The benefits of war are essentially infinite in this society and they will push with ever increasing force until war ultimately breaks out. It is not possible to prevent this. (The book uses the Greek term αναπόφευκτος, which means ‘inevitable;’ war, it says, is inevitable.)

War creates certain needs that force societies to operate in very dangerous ways. The leaders and decisions-makers in these societies must organize their societies around the needs of war, not the needs of the people. As a result, there is never any real attempt made, in politica societies, to even try to meet the needs of the people. The governments kind of pretend to be trying to meet the needs of the people, but anything that improves their country’s ability to make war will become reality, even if it does great harm to the people and anything that harms the war effort will stop, even if it brings great benefits to the people of the country.

In the final analysis, war is nothing but organized, planned, and intentional mass murder and destruction. This is an ‘inevitable’ part of any politica society; it is a side effect of the operation of the most foundational forces in these societies. We can’t start with a society that must be built around organized mass murder and build a sound, safe, peaceful society. The book concludes that a politica society cannot ever be sound, safe, or healthy. It can’t meet the needs of the human race. (The exact word used in the book is δικαιοσύνη, pronounced ‘dikosey,’ which is often translated as ‘justice’ or ‘righteousness’ or ‘piety’ or ‘morality’ but actually has a far broader meaning. It basically means ‘the ability to meet the needs of the human race.’ This is something that the politica society can never have, the book shows.)

The next book in the series is the ‘Critias.’ This book presents transcripts of conversations between Critias, Timaeus (Socrates’ grandfather) and Socrates that discuss how to build a society that can meet the needs of the people.

The book opens with a discussion about a continent that the speakers claim exists on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. They call this continent ‘Atlantis.’ The book claims that the continent was low and easily flooded; it ultimately washed away entirely, leaving nothing but an archipelago of islands, where the inhabitants of Atlantis fled after their continent sank. The book starts out by describing the society on one of the islands in this archipelago that is 375 miles by 275 miles (3,000 Stadia by 2,000 Stadia), the same size as the island of Haiti, the place where Columbus landed and the island he made his home. Here, Critias describes the people who lived on this island:

They possessed true and in every way great spirits, uniting gentleness with wisdom in the various chances of life, and in their intercourse with one another. They despised everything but virtue, caring little for their present state of life, and thinking lightly of the possession of gold and other property, which seemed only a burden to them; neither were they intoxicated by luxury; nor did wealth deprive them of their self-control; but they were sober, and saw clearly that all these goods are increased by virtue and friendship with one another, whereas by too great regard and respect for them, they are lost and friendship with them.

 

Unfortunately, the details of the societies on this island were lost: many book burnings took place word and almost all of the ‘Critias’ was lost.

Here is what we do have: this book introduces the societies of the people who lived on the other side of the Atlantic in glowing terms, in the passage above and similar passages. Then, it goes into a passage that seems to be trying to lay open arguments that show that, although this society had great advantages, it wasn’t perfect and had some very serious flaws. The surviving part of the book then ends, very suddenly, in the middle of a sentence. My copy ends with: ‘The rest of the Dialogue of Critias has been lost.’

We can get some idea of what the lost part of the book probably says by looking at the third book in the series. The third book is ‘Timaeus;’ it describes various conversations between Socrates and his grandfather (a noted Pythagorean). This book starts by accepting that the readers already understand the way a sound and healthy society works. This makes it seem pretty likely that this is exactly what the ‘Critias’ explains.

But what might this society look like?

It can’t be a politica society. The first book in the series showed that this society can’t be the foundation for a sound system. It can’t be exactly the same as the societies of the people who lived on the islands on the other side of the Atlantic: the book clearly is getting ready to explain flaws in these societies. If this is the case, why start with a description of both of these unsound societies? Why bother to describe the society on the western islands at all? Clearly, people have to understand both of these societies to understand the sound and healthy society explained in the ‘Critias.’ If this is the case, it seems very reasonable to assume that the sound and healthy society mixes together the features of the two starting societies. We can tell by analysis of the changes that Alexander the Great was later to make—clearly inspired by the ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—that the society he was trying to create had many of the features described above for the socratic. (We will examine the similarities shortly.)

The third book doesn’t go into great detail about this society (something that most historians call an ‘ideal society,’ and which I simply say is a ‘sound and healthy society’). The ‘Critias’ clearly does describe it but we don’t have these descriptions.  The third book is about the idea of societal change. What must we do if we don’t like the society we inherited and want something else? Timaeus had ideas in this regard. The book goes over these ideas.

Plato and The Academy

How did all this get to Alexander?

To understand this, we have to know a little bit about another person in the chain, Plato.

At his trial, Socrates talks about one of the charges against him, the charge of sedition or ‘corrupting youth.’ Socrates believed that the type of society he lived in was structurally unsound and could not meet the needs of the human race. He met people who thought otherwise: they thought the idea behind the country-based society was sound, that the particular country where they were born was superior to other countries, and that by advancing the interests of the country, they were making the world better. Socrates talked to a lot of people who believed this and came to believe that these people could not defend their position logically. It was based on beliefs, prejudices, implanted patriotism (the book ‘Politica’ goes into great detail about the idea of implanting patriotism). These people claimed to be wise and the people who followed them thought they were wise, but Socrates called them ‘pretenders to wisdom.’ If he could get these people into a discussion, he could ask them a few simple questions about how and why these societies were sound; in trying to answer, they would show that they were fools and the people around them would realize that they did not really know what they were talking about.

At his trial, he discusses the reason he was being charged with sedition (‘corrupting youth with dangerous ideas’):

 

Young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing. Those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!

If somebody asks them: Why, what evil does he practice or teach?

They do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges which are used against all philosophers about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected—which is the truth. As they are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are drawn up in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate accusations.

And this is the reason why my three accusers, Meletus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians. As I said at the beginning, I cannot expect to get rid of such a mass of calumny all in a moment. And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing. And yet, I know that my plainness of speech makes them hate me, and what is their hatred but a proof that I am speaking the truth? This has led to the charges against me.

 

Socrates said he just asked questions. The questions made the people who claimed to be experts look like fools. Young men liked to hear this and, after they saw it, they imitated Socrates, asking the same questions to others claimed to be experts, who were also revealed to be ‘pretenders to wisdom.’ He is not to blame for this; he wasn’t trying to corrupt anyone and never sought out followers or made any attempt to influence them. He just wanted to understand how societies worked.

Plato was one of these ‘young men of the richer classes.’ He came from one of the richest and most well-connected families of Athens. In the year 388 BC, Plato inherited a property that had once been owned by the one of the most important people in Athenian history, Hipparchos. Hipparchos had developed this property as a kind of private retreat. It had an enormous gymnasium, several heated pools for soaking and swimming, luxurious accommodations, and about 3.5 acres of park-like land with olive groves, surrounded by a 30ft high wall with guard towers at regular intervals.

(Why did he feel he need this security? Hipparchos is also known as the ‘tyrant of Athens.’ He had a lot of enemies and wanted to be able to feel safe himself and entertain his guests in a safe space.)

Hipparchos named this resort after an Athenian military hero of the ancient past; he called it Ἀκαδημία, which would be pronounced ‘Academia’ or ‘Academy’ in English. Originally, this had nothing to do with learning; it was simply the name of a military hero.

Plato inherited this property 11 years after Socrates had been executed. In this 11-year period, Plato had written the three books described above. He continued to believe that Socrates was right: the societies built on political divisions (politica or πολιτεία societies) couldn’t meet the needs of the human race. If we want sound and healthy societies, we need something else. Of course, this line of inquiry was not considered acceptable and couldn’t be discussed in public. However, the Pythagorean secret society continued to expand. A very large number of people believed that we needed to use logic and reason on societies. Plato wanted a place where these people could come together and discuss this issue, and consider the contribution that Socrates had made, without having to worry about the authorities.

The walls stayed up. There was one entrance; people could only get in if they were known to have the right state of mind. Although we don’t know much about the details, because secret societies obviously don’t want to make their practices public, it is thought that the society that came to be called the ‘Masons Templar’ used the same general practices to identify their members as the Pythagoreans. (In the recent excavation of the Academy, researchers found that the Academy buildings used the same symbol as the Pythagorean, which happens to be the same as the Masons Templar, the mathematician’s compass.)

 

Aristotle

The Academy was originally designed and built as a luxury retreat for the richest and most powerful people of southern Europe. It was a very pleasant place to spend time. I can imagine people getting through the gates of the Academy and away from the hustle and bustle of the city, into the shady groves, going to the baths for a soak, sitting beside the pool drinking wine and talking.

The Pythagorean society had chapters in many cities. Aristotle was born in Stagira, a small city in the nation of Macedonia, about 350 miles northeast of Athens. Aristotle heard about the Academy at an early age, presumably from other Pythagoreans. He moved to Athens in 367 BC to study there. He remained at the Academy, living on the grounds for another 20 years, studying under the direct tutelage of Plato.

He came to the Academy when he was 17 years old. Plato was 60 years old at the time. I can imagine the eager teenager questioning the wise Plato about the ideas of Pythagoras, the lectures that Socrates had given, the idea of a sound society—as discussed in the Critias, which Plato had written—and the tools that practical people might be able to use to create a system capable of meeting the needs of the human race.

Plato passed away at the age of 80 in the year 347 BC. Plato was rich and had a lot of political connections. As long as he was alive, people felt safe at the Academy. After his death, many people believed it was no longer safe to remain and left the property. One of the residents was from Turkey. His name was Xenocrates and he and Aristotle were close friends. Xenocrates and Aristotle left for Turkey shortly after Plato died. Xenocrates was friends with a Turkish sultan named Hermias. Aristotle became friends with Hermias and, shortly after they met, Hermias made dramatic changes in his administration, making some of the changes that Alexander was later to make in the areas under his control. (This seems to back the conclusion that the ideas behind the changes that Alexander made came from Aristotle.)

His changes led to an extremely rapid and immense increase in prosperity in the parts of Turkey under Hermias’ control. Aristotle got diverted: he fell in love with Hermias’ daughter, Pythias. They married and spent their honeymoon on the Greek island of Lesbos. They liked it there so much they decided to stay and raise their family there.

According to many accounts, Aristotle was one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. When I read his books today, I am in awe of his mental skills. He was a prolific author and wrote a very large number of books on an incredible variety of topics. No matter what topic he dealt with, he started with an analysis of objective evidence that could be verified scientifically.

He worked out what must be happening in botany, biology, physics, chemistry, or many other fields, based on logic that most historians credit Plato for developing and that Aristotle is famous for using. By the time Aristotle moved to Lesbos, he was already famous all around the Mediterranean for his mental talents.

In 343 BC, King Phillip of Macedonia was looking for a tutor for his son Alexander. He interviewed several scholars who were eager for the position. But his first choice Aristotle. He sent people to Lesbos to try to convince Aristotle to take the position. Aristotle’s terms were very strict, and we can tell by Phillip’s acceptance of these terms how badly he wanted Aristotle to teach his son.

Aristotle would only agree to teach Alexander if Phillip first totally eliminated slavery in his kingdom. Phillip would have to buy back all slaves from their owners and free them. If the freed slaves had owned property before capture, Phillip would have to restore it to them; if it had been destroyed, Phillip would have to rebuild it. I can’t think of a more persuasive argument for the incredible intelligence of Aristotle than the fact that Phillip wanted him so badly he was willing to accept all of these terms.

Aristotle arrived at Naoussa, the location of the school, in 340 BC. He was Alexander’s personal tutor for the next four years. Aristotle was 41 and Alexander was 13.

Four years later Phillip was assassinated, and Alexander became the king of Macedonia. Alexander was 17 years old, the same age that Aristotle had been when he had arrived at the Academy 28 years earlier.

 

What We Know And Don’t Know

In the next 17 years, Alexander did the seemingly impossible. He united more than 500 million people in a new kind of society that stretched over more than 2 million square miles, included hundreds of ethnic groups with dozens of different languages and cultural backgrounds. He built more highways than had ever been built before in history, including most of the highways that are still the main arteries today in the lands that were a part of his new society. He built the largest and most complete libraries that had ever existed, he founded universities, he introduced new kinds of capital markets, he created banking and credit systems, and he built more than 20 master-planned cities from scratch.

The changes he made led to massive increases in production, creating great prosperity that brought opportunities to all members of society. In the new system he created, cast and class distinctions weren’t nearly as important as in the old society. People could start with nothing; by taking advantage of the information in the open libraries and the funding opportunities that came from his new financial systems, they could make something for themselves.

The changes that Alexander made were unprecedented; the world had never seen anything like it and if we put it into realistic perspective, we would have to say that nothing even similar has taken place in the more than 2,300 years since. Alexander did more to advance the human condition than anyone ever had done and, today, he is one of the few men who are remembered as truly great.

And he did this all in less than 17 years.

How did he do it?

It is very unfortunate that the book burnings that started shortly after Alexander was assassinated were as successful as they were. The libraries that Alexander built throughout the lands were some of the finest and most complete that have ever existed. They almost certainly contained complete descriptions on exactly how Alexander accomplished what he accomplished. After Alexander was out of the way, people brought the old system back and did their best to destroy any evidence that anything better had ever existed.

Unfortunately, the book burnings were incredibly effective. Almost all of the details were lost. All we have left are a few scattered records that weren’t destroyed because they weren’t considered important enough, and the remains of the durable structures he built and devised that the Romans and later conquerors continued to use (and continue to use to this day) because of the great benefits that they brought to them.

We do know this: Alexander didn’t just make a few modifications in the details of the society around him. Working with Aristotle, he analyzed the societies that were in place at that time (the same type that Socrates had claimed could never be healthy or workable societies, which are the same type that we have today). He examined their structural elements and worked out changes that would cause these structures to operate differently.

He didn’t just create a slightly modified version of the politica societies that were in place, he actually built an entirely different system. Alexander clearly did not believe the principle that the wealth inside of the lines that make up a given country are supposed to only benefit the people of that country. If Alexander thought a shipping port should be in a certain place, and the particular political unit that controlled that part of the world didn’t produce enough surpluses to afford the port but the land of another political unit did, Alexander didn’t see anything wrong with violating inherent principles of independence and sovereignty for the political units by using the wealth where it was most needed. Alexander was also flexible with the principle of ownership of land. Many people thought of the idea of ownership as a religious or philosophical principle: if you own, you own everything; if you don’t own, you don’t own anything. Alexander could see that it is possible to allow people to buy and own certain rights to use the world without owning that part of the world itself. He realized he could grant rights to people who would own those rights, but not own the land itself.

Alexander did things no one else had ever done before and achieved things that no one after him has been able to match. It is hard to understand how he was able to do these things if we think of him as simply trying various combinations of minor alterations to the details in the then-existing societies and hoping for the best. If we think of him as building on the work of Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle to work out logical and reasonable principles that put societies on an entirely different foundation, the things he did do make sense.

 

Military Advantages That Come From Granting Rights to People

For more than 2,000 years, military analysts have tried to figure out how Alexander could possibly have gained control of the massive amounts of land he came to control in such a short time. In less than 17 years, he gained control over 2 million square miles, which is about the area of the lower 48 United States. This land had 500 million inhabitants, significantly more than the current population of the lower 48 United States.

Before Alexander came along, this land was divided into hundreds of kingdoms. The kings had all built walls, hedgerows, and other barriers and heavy fortifications to protect their land. They kept highly trained armies equipped with the best weaponry the kings could afford to protect their land. These fortifications had held for centuries. What kind of military genius could overcome all of these defenses, taking more land in a single month than had been conquered by all military commanders combined in centuries before Alexander came along?

To see how difficult this task is, consider one tiny part of the land that became a part of Alexander’s community of nations: the 250,000 square miles that is currently called the ‘country of ‘Afghanistan.’ As I write this, the United States has been fighting to gain control the administrative apparatus of Afghanistan for 20 years, longer than the entire 17 years Alexander was in power. But this giant superpower with all its advantages and technology and enough nuclear bombs to destroy the world thousands of times over is no closer to forcing the people of Afghanistan to accept its rule in 2020 than it was in 2001 when the war began. If you try to use force to make people conform to your wishes, they resist in many ways. They may pretend to be your friends and pretend to be complying but if you turn your back on them, they will do anything they can to make sure you don’t get what you want.

The people of Afghanistan today hate the United States invaders just as much as they hated the next most recent invaders of Afghanistan, the Russians. Neither of these superpowers has had any success at bringing this land under its dominion. Alexander annexed Afghanistan in passing. This annexation took so little time and effort that historians didn’t even bother to record the events; they weren’t interesting, there were no battles and there was no resistance.

How could this be?

I submit to you that Alexander didn’t try to do the things the United States is trying to do, and the Soviet Union tried to do. He wasn’t trying to force the Afghan people to accept control by his military. He didn’t ‘conquer’ Afghanistan at all.  He gave people an opportunity. He understood how to put together societal structures that benefited the people. People who wanted to join could do so; he would help them build the necessary institutions and get them started. He let them know that many people had joined the system so far and if they joined themselves, they would be joining a community of humankind, not a ‘country’ that would try to advance its interests at the expense of other countries. The empire he was forming was vast, productive and prosperous; if they joined, this prosperity would begin to flow to them immediately. The wealth of the empire would be used to build roads, schools, parks, libraries, banking systems, and other facilities that pull them out of poverty and want and into the modern world. Alexander did incredible things, things no one else had ever done or has ever done since. He came closer to changing the realities of human existence, and putting us on a path to sustainable, peaceful, non-destructive societies, than anyone else either before or after him.

Shortly after his 33^rd birthday, Alexander began to show signs that are associated with arsenic poisoning. Alexander trusted people around him because he believed they loved him and most of them did love him. He got invitations to dinner all the time and went out frequently. He was very fond of wine and often got so drunk he had to be helped back home. He didn’t take precautions against poison. He was 33 years old, in his prime, an age when men believe death is so far in the future that they don’t even have to think about it.

Arsenic has cumulative effects. A few drops will hardly affect you; the same amount added tomorrow will make you a little sick; another dose will confine you to the toilet for a few hours; a few more drops and you can’t leave your bed. Eventually, the body stops functioning. Alexander’s aids kept detailed records of the last two weeks of Alexander’s life. We can’t really account for the symptoms with any known disease, but they match arsenic poisoning perfectly.

Alexander clearly had a plan. But we know from his communications with Aristotle that he hadn’t really explained all of the details of this plan with the people around him. (In letters, Aristotle admonishes Alexander for discussing certain principles of society in public.) He had not appointed or trained a successor. When he died, there was no one to take over.

We can get some idea of what he hoped would happen from his last will and testament:

People of the Near East are to be encouraged to marry with those of Europe and those of Europe to do likewise; in so doing, a new culture would be embraced by all.

 

He wanted a world community that included all members of the human race. Their rights wouldn’t have anything to do with which ‘nation’ their mothers were in when they were born, their race, their language, or their culture. Humans would all have human rights. The system he started to set up would have made all humans a part of community of humankind. The flows of value that had been going to the kings and governments of the world, and used mainly for war, would go instead to the people of the world, to help them have better lives.  After Alexander was out of the way, the old power systems came back very quickly. Immense flows of wealth were available. Alexander had used these flows of wealth to build roads, libraries, universities, to build port facilities for shipping and trade, and to fund banking systems to finance capital improvements. People who controlled military units, or had the means to raise them, realized that they could take control of the land that produced the wealth, call it their ‘country,’ and then rule the country for their own benefit.

The wealth that had gone to universities and libraries could be used to pay for castles and harems. To prevent the system from rising again, the scholars were purged, the books burned, and any who supported the now-dead Alexander could be put to death. The old system could be wiped from the face of the Earth and from the memories of survivors, in the same way that Cortez was to wipe out all of the books and libraries of the Aztec people.

We can learn a lot from Alexander, from his successes, his failures, and the aftermath of his period of history. From his successes we can learn that if we can set up a system so that the interests of the individuals in society align with the interests of society as a whole, we can have truly fantastic progress. A system can grow very rapidly. Considering the technology that existed 2300 years ago, and the progress that he made in a very short time, we might imagine that if someone had the background, training, and leadership skills that he had, combined with the communication technology and other very powerful tools that we have now to bring people together, the world could be united in an extremely short period of time, perhaps as short as a few decades.

His failures tell us that the vested interests in the system now in place have great power. We need to be aware that even a great movement toward a better world can be crushed. Certain people who run the sovereignty-based societies of the world today know how to prevent the kinds of changes that would harm their power base. These people need the world divided: as long as we are fighting each other in petty and ridiculous disputes that don’t change anything fundamentally about the world, and as long as we believe these wars are the most important reality of existence, we aren’t going to take the time to understand anything really important about our world. We aren’t going to come to understand the big picture. The structures that enrich the tiny minority at the expense of the great majority can remain in place.

In his book ‘1984,’ Orwell discusses the idea of mind control at great length. He claims that our minds can only really be controlled if we let them be controlled. We must consciously split our minds and think of certain things logically, while refusing to think of other things logically. He calls this splitting of the mind ‘doublethink.’ He claims that doublethink is a primary tool that the people in power use to prevent us from having hope, so that we will never make progress:

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth. Ultimately it is by means of doublethink that the Party has been able — and may, for all we know, continue to be able for thousands of years — to arrest the course of history.

Alexander failed to change the world. But this wasn’t because his plan was bad. He needed to show the people that a better world was possible before they would truly believe it. The people had been raised and educated to live in fear and hate: their countries were the source of all good things and the enemies were the ultimate in evil, trying to destroy all good things everywhere. After people realized that this was nonsense, and the training had been designed to turn them into tools of a defective system, they could safely be given power and control over enormous flows of wealth that came from the planet; they would use this power and wealth to advance the interests of the human race, rather than to try to split themselves into teams and fight for the rights of the teams.

From the aftermath, we can learn the true danger, the one thing the people in charge know can alter society: knowledge. After Alexander had been taken out of the picture, and the structures that removed power from the entities called ‘countries’ had been disassembled with power redistributed, the people in charge began burning books. Alexander had proved that a better system was possible. If people accepted a better society was possible, they would spend their time and effort to try to recreate the structures that had made the world better, not trying to find better ways to give their ‘countries’ advantages in wars, or otherwise trying to change details that had no effect over any large scale structures of societies.

After Alexander was gone, the libraries were put to the flames. The schools were closed, the scholars persecuted and sent to places they could do no harm, because no one would hear them. The people who had been displaced and removed from power by Alexander’s system knew that knowledge was their enemy, reason and logic were their enemies. If the people knew that a better society was possible, they would try to create it; Alexander had proven that a better society was possible. They had hard evidence it could be done. This evidence must be destroyed.

The historians then played a neat trick on future generations. How could they make it appear that Alexander had not done anything extraordinary? They couldn’t hide the evidence: the roads, aqueducts, ports, and other structures he created were still there. But they could create a general picture that Alexander was ‘just another conqueror.’ They could portray him as a soldier who just happened to be a little better at soldiering than others. They could play down the importance of the structural changes he made to the areas that joined his system. They could play down his relationship with the heretics of the past, including Socrates and Pythagorean, who claimed and taught that humans really could do better. If they worked hard enough, they could cause Alexander to simply fade into the background of history, perhaps giving him a page or two and having these pages claim nonsense that he was primarily a military man with no social conscience. They could make it appear that he hadn’t really done anything structurally at all: he simply figured out the system well enough to manipulate it to his advantage.

In his book ‘1984,’ Orwell talked about the idea of ‘disappearing’ people who caused problems for the power structure. He uses the term ‘disappearing’ as a verb, something that the ‘Ministry of Truth’ (which hides and distorts the truth) does to wipe all traces of dangerous people from the books and, through the ‘Ministry of Love’ (involved with torture and mind control), from the minds of the people. Alexander the Great is probably the most dangerous of all historical figures to those in power because he gives us hope. He shows it is possible for humans to organize themselves differently and, if we do, we can have a much better world. The historians couldn’t totally ‘disappear’ Alexander. His impact had been too great. But they could render him fuzzy and semi transparent and prevent future generations from seeing him clearly enough to understand that he really does give us hope.

Alexander never finished the system he was building. He had priorities. He had to do certain things first. First you bring prosperity to the people. Once people are lifted out of poverty and given the tools they need to make something of their lives, the society as a whole moves forward. Then, the people need to be educated: they need to know the things that Socrates and Aristotle understood about how human societies work. They need to know that people who try to divide them from each other, by splitting off land and people and calling each combination a separate ‘sovereign and independent country,’ and training them that they owe their  allegiance to the country they live in—not the human race or planet Earth—are only trying to trick them. You can’t really tell them that they have been tricked and hope to get them on your side. People don’t like to think of themselves as dupes: tell them that they have been tricked and they only get angry at you. You need to bring them to a condition where they can realize this for themselves. They can see that the people who claim that they know why the divisions are for the best and try to make them fight for the divisions are, to use Socrates’ term, ‘pretenders to wisdom.’ You can show them that these people don’t know what they are talking about by letting them live in and experience a better society firsthand. They will see that it has nothing in common with the war-driven systems that the ‘pretenders’ claim is the best.

Then, after you have created this state of mind in the people, it is safe to give them tools that allow them to control their collective destiny. They will realize that the ways of the past are primitive. They will not use their control over wealth to divide themselves into clans called ‘sovereign states’ or ‘sovereign countries’ or anything similar and build weapons to use in battles against others with these beliefs. They will realize that the old ways were silly, the people who taught them that they were the right ways really were ‘pretenders to wisdom’ and had themselves been duped to believe nonsense. After you have created the required mindset, you can transfer power to the people.

Unfortunately, Alexander didn’t have time. I was a 33-year-old man once. If you had told me I had to prepare for the time when I wouldn’t be there, I would have laughed. This time was far in the future. Unfortunately, it wasn’t far in the future for Alexander. He didn’t prepare.

His successes show us that there really are great advantages to organizing society in a logical way. They show that prosperity really does increase when wealth is used to unite people, rather than to tear them apart. It shows that opportunity empowers people and that people who were normally stupefied by poverty can become highly productive and create real wealth.

His successes tell us that a movement towards a sound society can gain momentum over time: success leads to more success. Over time, people will realize that things can be done that they had believed could not be done. They will get on board to changes that they otherwise would have opposed.

His failures tell us that the vested interests in the system now in place have great power. We need to be aware that even a great movement toward a better world can be crushed. Certain people who run the sovereignty-based societies of the world today know how to prevent the kinds of changes that would harm their power base.

 

Two Approaches to Converting to a Healthy Society

We have a lot to learn from the past. Two approaches have been taken to alter society; each has their advantages and disadvantages.

The first is the approach that Henri Dunant took involves leaving governments and countries out of the equation entirely. Start with an NGO. Have the NGO do things that bring real benefits to the human race. The people will support it because they will want it to do more. (We know this happens; the Red Cross grew into one of the largest organizations of any kind in the world.)

I am personally drawn to the idea of starting with a non-governmental organization and working for change through avenues that have nothing to do with governments. Perhaps a part of my attraction comes from prejudice: I have a general mistrust of governments that derives from my experiences growing up. Governments don’t know what the people want; only the people know what the people want.

Since non-governmental organizations work outside of the nationalistic system, and take advantage of structures that governments have to protect in order to function, governments won’t be able to prevent its growth even knowing in advance that it will eventually put the human race in charge of variables that the governments of nations now control.

But Dunant’s approach has disadvantages. The first is that it takes time. Even with an enlightened populace, it may take more than a human lifetime before this approach creates enough power and wealth for the human race to give us the ability to prevent wars and destruction.

We may not have the time.

The second problem involves information. Before this approach will work, a large percentage of the people of the world have to know and accept on a conscious level that the society type that they inherited from past generations can’t meet the needs of the human race, that a sane, sound, and healthy society is possible, and that certain steps will take us to that society.

At first glance, the required steps seem to have nothing to do with the problems of war and destruction. They are based on the idea that war and destruction are symptoms of a disease, not the disease itself. They deal with the underlying forces only, not the symptoms.

For thousands of years, governments have been successful in making people think that the entities called ‘countries’ are real things and that we have some sort of moral obligation to fight, kill, and even give our lives if this can help advance the interests of the country of our birth. Socrates described the methods used during his time to create this mindset in great detail (in the ‘Πολιτεία,’ available in full on the PossibleSocieties.com website). If you read this book, you will recognize that the schools of today use the exact same tools to instill this state of mind that schools used in the time of Socrates, more than 2,400 years ago. These tools were effective 2,400 years ago. They are still effective. It may be that people thus trained simply aren’t able to open their minds enough to think about society objectively.

This is my greatest fear. Brave people like Pythagoras, Socrates, Sir Thomas More, and George Orwell, have told us that the people who run the systems we live are tricking us and controlling our minds for thousands of years. Yet the deception continues and seems to work as well as it ever did. I hope that the scientific revolution that is taking place, together with the availability of correct information on the internet, will help change this. But it may not.

The real problem with Dunant’s approach is that it relies on enlightenment to work with enough speed to have any hope of helping us get out of our mess. I hope that the new tools that are now available are contributing to enlightenment. But there doesn’t appear to be any way to tell for sure.

The second approach, the approach that Alexander took, has different sets of advantages and disadvantages. He gained control of a nation and then set up a system that was not nationalistic. Set up a system that takes advantage of incentives to encourage progress and growth, as Alexander did, and use the wealth generated for projects that lead to even greater wealth creation.

Rather than expanding by conquering and subjugating people, it can expand by welcoming people outside of the starting nation to abandon their own nationalism and join the system. Make it clear that there is no ‘base system’ that will use wealth the newcomers provide to improve the lives of the people in the base system. Make it clear to any who may want to join that, if they do join, they will be working for the betterment of the human race as a whole, not just the collection of people who originally created the system.

This system also has advantages and disadvantages. The first advantage is speed. Alexander showed how fast such a change can spread. If it could spread as rapidly as it did 2,300 years ago, during a time with no telephones, jets, or even cars, we might expect it to spread even more rapidly in our own time.

The second advantage involves education. It isn’t necessary to make everyone aware that foundational changes are needed and are taking place. The ordinary people will see only that the conditions of their own lives are improving. They will see that backing change increases their incomes and makes their lives better.

They don’t have to know there is a grand plan; they only have to act in their own interests.

That is something we all know how to do.

The disadvantages of this system involve the fundamental problems of granting power to any group with any tools at all. The group that asks for power so that they can work to put the human race in charge may be lying from the first. Politicians will say anything they have to say to get into power. Once in power, they can then act as if they never said anything and do whatever they want. We all can dig up as many examples of this as we want.

This system depends on one enlightened person to take charge. This gives it an important weakness: eliminate that individual, and the movement can be killed rather easily.

But we don’t have to do one or the other. The different approaches taken in the past aren’t necessarily exclusive. If we are smart, if we use logic and reason, if we put together the best of what we can learn from the past with the best of what is available now, we can have a real hope of success.

 

 

How did we, the members of the human race get where we are now?

We are in a dangerous situation: 

Our world is divided into entities we call ‘countries,’ that engage in activities called ‘wars’ as a matter of policy.  Wars are organized and planned mass murder and destruction events.  These ‘countries’ don’t simply fall into these ‘wars’ by accident, they appoint or elect leaders to plan them well in advance; they extract fantastic sums of money from their people to pay for them.  (As of 2024, Governments are planning for the next generation of wars, which will use artificial intelligence and other technologies that don’t even yet exist, to kill and destroy more thoroughly and effectively than we can now.)  To provide resources that the ‘countries’ can use in these organized destruction events, the entities called ‘global corporations’ are raping the world, taking everything of value the best technology allows them to take, and spreading toxins that never existed before into areas where they can never be cleaned. 

This can’t continue forever. 

At some point, war will get out of hand.  As you read this, numerous countries are doing research to build weapons that they call ‘doomsday weapons.’  They aren’t doing this secretly:  they actually issue press releases and openly describe their research.  In some cases, this involves what we may call ‘second-tier military powers’ whose leaders are claiming they need these devices because it is the only way they can deter attacks by first-tier powers.  They need to make absolutely sure that a conflict will result in mutually assured destruction (MAD) and the only way to do this involves building giant devices that will make the world uninhabitable if used.  First-tier powers, however, don’t want to be caught with a ‘doomsday weapons gap.’  They need to keep up, and are building doomsday weapons also.  

If we are lucky and the struggles between the entities we call ‘countries’ don’t destroy us, we aren’t out of the woods.  Global corporations pose just as many threats as the entities we call ‘countries.’  These corporations have always been dangerous.  (We will see that corporations go back much farther than most people realize; they try to keep a relatively low profile in history so we don’t know about them, but these entities are responsible for a great deal more damage and threats than most people realize.)   But, without the high-tech tools they have now, corporations haven’t really been capable of wiping out the entire planet or human race.  This has changed.  The destruction now far exceeds the ability of the natural world to respond and repair the damage.  This leads to an accelerating downward spiral with very predictable consequences. 

War only poses risks of destruction.   There is a possibility that we may be very lucky and escape, perhaps for several more centuries.  But if environmental damage continues to grow at current rates, the end is not just possible, it is certain.

How did this situation come to exist?

What set of events set us on this path we are now on?

This is vital information. 

In many ways, this is the most important question faced by the human race today. 

If we want a better future—or any kind of future at all—we need to understand exactly where we are in our path through time and how we got here.  We need to understand our past.  We need to understand history.

 

The Failures of Conventional Histories

 

The silly political histories that we are taught in school will not help us understand these things.  These histories are not objective and unbiased records of past events that the human race as a whole can use to understand what is behind us so we can work together to build a better future.  The histories we were taught in school are biased and subjective.  The worst problem, however, is that they don’t provide any foundation for understanding how the realities of the world came to work as they do. 

You need to know the basics before the details make any sense.  

If you don’t understand the big picture, learning the details is a waste of time.  You have no idea how things fit together.   Memorizing the names and dates of the wars between the countries of the world (as all of us were required to do in school) does no good if you don’t first understand what the term ‘countries’ means, how the entities called ‘countries’ came to exist on earth, and the reasons they came into conflict.

You can’t expect to understand why something is broken and doesn’t work right if you don’t even know what it is.  It would be like someone who has never heard of car engines and doesn’t know anything about cars at all except the them except the names of certain car makes and dates they were released trying to understand why his car no longer goes forward when he pushes down on the accelerator.  You need to start understanding the basic elements, then work from there. 

The histories we are taught in school don’t start with the beginning and explain how the key institutions of the world around us came to exist.  You can’t understand the things you see around you if you accept everything important somehow magically appeared, operating at its inception the same way it operates now.  You need to know about the background. 

Fact Based History is about the way the world came to work as it does now.  It explain show how the key structures and institutions of our world today came to exist and then evolved into their current form.  It is designed to be a useful history, one that we can use to understand why the problems of the world around us exist so that we can have the tools we need to solve them.   

 

Possible Societies

 

Sometimes, when you are trying to understand a complex problem, it helps to change your perspective and the way you look at it.  Here on Earth in the 21^st century, we only have a very limited view of Earth events and, given this perspective, is hard to really understand the reason things work as they do.  I want to ask you to change your perspective and look at the world as would someone not embroiled in the struggles that are happening here and now: 

The TV show ‘Star Trek’ is about a group of explorers from various worlds who live in the distant future.  They are traveling among the stars to study new life and new civilizations.’ 

From time to time, they come across a planet that organizes itself in an incredibly dangerous way, one that seems almost incomprehensible to the explorers:  The people on this world divide their population into groups and its territory into divisions that are like the Earth entities we call ‘countries.’  These countries fight over things that don’t really make any sense to the explorers, like where the imaginary lines called ‘borders’ between the countries will be located and which of the ‘countries’ has the right to govern and provide services for a certain group of people.  The people on these worlds take these fights very seriously and use whatever weapons they have at their disposal to gain advantages in these fights.  As their technology advances, their weapons become more and more destructive. 

These episodes generally start when the starship encounters one of these worlds.  The members of the crew, who are very intelligent people, seem to have a hard time accepting what they are seeing.  The people seem to be intelligent:  they have technology that makes it clear they can think on a conscious level.  They can talk and make arguments that show that they are at least capable of reason.  But the system their people have built seems crazy and clearly does not benefit the world or its people.  The wars are fantastically expensive, both in terms of material wealth and human lives.  This welth would be enough to allow everyone to live in great comfort, if it were used for this purpose.  But these people don’t use it for this.  They use their wealth to kill each other and destroy the world around them.  This not only impoverishes the people, it places them at ever increasing risk of extinction.  

It just isn’t logical. 

What do they get out of it? 

What is the advantage of setting up a system like this? 

There doesn’t seem to be any. 

These systems only bring hardship, misery, death, destruction, and eventual extinction.  It hardly seems to be anything that intelligent beings would design and build. 

 

There is a very simple reason that a system could exist on a world with intelligent beings that does not meet the needs of those intelligent beings:  It was NOT designed intentionally, either by these beings themselves or by any other beings with intelligence.  It came to exist through some process other than intelligent design.
          In this book we will see that that virtually infinite evidence points to the conclusion that there was no intelligent design process for humans or for human societies.  Both of these things came to exist through a process of evolution.  If you go back in our genealogy far enough, you get to animals that didn’t have the ability to reason, think, and plan on a conscious level.  They were not stupid (apes are far more intelligent than most Earth animals) but they didn’t have our level of intelligence.  They did, however, have organized ways of living.  They had social structures (alphas, for example were leaders and had first priority over sexual partners, ‘homes’ or ‘nest sites,’ grooming rights, and food).  There were rules to these systems.  They had ‘ape societies.’
          Over time, both the DNA and the societies changed and adapted to the growing intelligence of the beings and the changing realties of their lives.  Their DNA changed into our DNA and their societies changed into the societies that we have now.  This happened very, very slowly and there was no sudden or dramatic transition.   There was no point where the evolving beings suddenly realized that they were evolving beings and that the societies they inherited from their animal ancestors no longer met their needs.  (This point has not come yet. I am hopeful we will get there soon.)
          This may explain the reason that worlds with intelligent beings can have societies that are not able to meet the needs of those beings.  We know this can happen, even without being able to travel among the stars ourselves, because the one planet that we know of that has intelligent beings, the Earth, has societies that clearly can’t meet our needs. 

 

The crew members on the starship discuss this among themselves.  They are looking for something about this particular system, or these particular people, that made them adopt this crazy, dangerous, and destructive system.  They never come up with anything reasonable, at least not in any of the episodes like this I have seen.   Sometimes, late in these shows (which are actually quite common:  the audience can clearly relate to this plot) some people say something like:  Well, it may seem strange, but a lot of worlds seem to have these strange societies.  The planet Vulcan, for example (home world of Spock’s father), and Klingon, had them; even the Earth had them. 

In the show, someone often says something like:  ‘yes, but they got over it.’

They don’t say how the people of these other words got over it.  If we could go to their history, to see how the people of these other worlds got over it, we could understand how it was done and we could do it ourselves.  But, of course, the story is fiction and fiction writers are allowed to skip over steps in their narrative to create a story. 

What if we wanted to figure this out? 

What if we wanted to figure out how a group of intelligent beings that become aware at some point in their evolutoin, that they had a system like the one above (one that divides these beings into countries which then fight over territory) and that this system couldn’t meet their needs?  What if they wanted to ‘get over it?’  What steps would they take?

It seems logical to start with an analysis of the system that they have inherited:  How did it come into existence?   If they want to fully understand the system, they may start as early as possible, going back, perhaps, to before their world even existed. They may trace the steps that led to a world, then life, then advanced life, then proto-humans, then true humans.  They may follow the changes in the way the animals lived as they evolved, paying special attention to the past few million years, which include the final stages in evolution.  They will see that they have been on a path through time.  They can trace the steps along this path they have taken.  This will allow them to figure out where they are and understand what they have to work with. 

Then, they can plan for the future. 

 

The Importance of Understanding History

 

This book is about the way the world came to operate as it does now.  It starts with the very earliest events about which we have evidence:  the beginning of the solar system.  It proceeds to the era that you will recognize, because you are living in it now.  

We have tools that can help us understand all of these things.  For example, space-based telescopes like the Web allow us to actually watch as planets are being formed:  we can see how it happens.   We can determine when the earth formed (scientists have a very good idea when this happened) and when the first solid ‘rocks’ were formed in the hot liquid that collected to form this planet.  We can locate fossils of the thing we call ‘life’ on earth and date them, to determine when they likely first came to exist on this world.  We can identify the early life forms, find currently living life forms that look the same and appear to have the same function, then sequence their DNA to get a good idea of the complexity level of these early beings.  We can then go through the fossil record and date and sequence the series of animals that existed in the past to trace a pattern of evolution. 

We can then trace changes life forms to the first mammals, which came about 74 million years ago.  We can follow them through the great extinction event of 65 million years ago that wiped out the less adaptable animals and left mammals (our ancestors) as the most advanced beings.  We can trace mammal evolution to the pan genus, our most recent evolutionary ancestors that still survive, taking us back about 6.7 million years.  Since the pans still exist, we can study the way their societies work. We will see very great similarities between the societies of the pans and the societies of humans.   (Many researchers have been accused of altering their observational data to make it appear that the societies of these apes, the pans, are more like the societies of modern humans than they could possibly actually be.  We will see that independent analysis has shown that these similarities are very real and nothing was exaggerated.)  

We can then go through the many links between the descendants of the members of the pan genus that take us, eventually, to homo sapiens denisovan (denisovan man), homo sapiens neanderthalis (neanderthal man), and finally early people with the same species and subspecies names as modern humans (homo sapiens sapiens).  We can determine when, where, and how these evolving beings reached important milestones in their development, including the ability to engineer and manufacture complex tools, the ability to use fire for lighting, cooking, and heating, and the ability make clothing, blankets, and tent coverings that would allow them to travel into areas with harsh climates.  We can go through charts of brain cavity measurements and comparative MRI scans to show what lobes developed over time and how they corresponded to the improving mental abilities of these beings. 

We can figure out how early humans lived.  For most of history, people didn’t really have any idea how old artifacts they found really were.  Recent tools have shown that their guesses were often off by fantastic amounts:  artifacts that were thought to be a few hundred years old have been shown to be millions of years old, and artifacts that were thought to be millions of years old have been shown to be fakes, created by pranksters a few weeks before they were ‘discovered.’ 

We have tools that allow us to reconstruct the past.  We can determine migration patterns by sequencing DNA, both in modern populations and in ancient artifacts.  We can analyze food residue found on ancient cooking implements to determine whether these were natural foods or had been created intentionally through cross breeding of domestic crops or domesticated animals.  This can allow us to determine the level of technology of people who have been gone for hundreds of thousands of years.  

This book undertakes this kind of analysis, but it is not simply for random knowledge.  It focuses on the specific events in our past that can help us understand the reason that the societies we have in the world today exist, the way they came into existence, and the way they evolved into their current form.  This isn’t random curiosity.  It is about the path that we, living on this tiny blue speck of a world in this vast universe, came to be on; it is about the place in this path we are now on and the forces that have pushed us down this path to our current point in time.  If we want to understand what may lie in front of us on this path, we have to understand where we are on this path and how we got here. 

We need to be objective and be willing to accept whatever we find.  We can’t understand a way forward if we are so afraid we might find out something bad about ourselves that we are going to select only the bits of history that paint us (no matter how you define this term) in a good light, and pretend the rest of the evidence doesn’t even exist. 

We need to look at history as a scientist would, concentrating on evidence and facts. 

That is what this book is designed to do. 

8:  A Transition between Eras

 

 

From the very beginning of humankind, the human race was split into two divisions.  The people who lived in these divisions were entirely different culturally, economically, socially, and spiritually.  They had societies built on entirely different foundational principles. 

One of these types of societies evolved in response to evolutionary forces that forced them to adapt a certain way.  All beings must adapt to the realities of their environment or they will perish.  For lower animals (all animals without the ability to think and plan on a conscious level), a clear rule applies:  If a parcel of land is rich and productive enough that it can be monopolized, it must be monopolized.  Beings that live on that land that can be monopolized who don’t take active steps to monopolize it will be driven from that land by others who do take these steps.  The animals that enforce monopoly rights to land are enforcing sovereignty over a piece of territory. 

These societies are built on the principle of territorial sovereignty. 

Both humans and lower animals can have societies built on this principle.  Some of the members of our closest group of relatives, the pans, developed under conditions that pushed them to divide the land into individuals parcels which they would then form into groups (troops) to fight over.  They didn’t work this out logically, go over the different kinds of societies they could have, and decide on this one.  They were not capable of the kinds of analysis needed for this.  This system was forced on them by nature. 

The other type of society developed in other areas.  Some areas can't be monopolized.  To monopolize an area, the beings in them must be able to defend their homeland all the time.  They can't do this if they have to leave, because the land they want to claim can’t support them perpetually, without them ever having to leave for any reason.  If they have to leave, they can't expect the land to be ‘theirs’ when they return.  They will have to fight for it as if they had never had possession of it at all. 

In the areas where the inhabitants couldn’t monopolize land, they couldn't form territorial sovereignty societies.  They had to form other types of societies.  Practical realities forced them to be tolerant and try to get along with others.  They couldn’t spend all their time fighting because they needed to work hard to meet their needs.  They had to be able to form trusting relationships with others who aren’t part of their immediate social groups.  They had to be able to do this quickly.  Non-territorial pans, the bonobos, established these relationships by having intimate relations with the others they encountered.  We don't have a lot of information about the way the early humans in these societies acted, but we know a lot about others who had these same kinds of societies very recently, the native people who lived in the Americas before and during the early phase of the conquest.  (Before they were affected by the conquest so dramatically that they could no longer practice their way of life.)  We will see that many of the groups of humans in these societies did the same things as the non-territorial pans (the bonobos).  They wanted to get along.  Nothing was more important to them and used intimacy to demonstrate and establish trust.  This and other behaviors that we will examine when we get to the point where we have detailed information about the way these societies operated allowed them to live in the areas where they lived. 

The people in the non-territorial societies didn’t have the intense need to organize massive industries to build weapons to fight their enemies.  They didn’t have the need to treat the Earth around them as a storehouse full of resources to be plundered.   We all have affection for the beautiful world.  Unless we are compelled to rape it to accomplish some higher goal (in territorial sovereignty societies, protection of the sovereignty is higher than everything else), we want to show our affection and protect this world.  As these people evolved and gained intellectual capabilities, they found ways to put their feelings about the land and other people on the planet into words.  Here is a sample:

 

We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.

We know that the white man does not understand our ways.  One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father's grave behind, and he does not care.  He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father's grave, and his children's birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the Earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert. 

This we know; the Earth does not belong to man; man belongs to the Earth. This we know. All things are connected like the blood which unites one family. Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

 

The ways of life of people who lived in these two different kinds of societies were as different as night is from day.  We will see that even when people with these two societies life right next to each other they don’t seem able to grasp the basic idea that there are other ways to live.  But there clearly are.  We can live other ways. 

Let’s take a look at the way these two kinds of societies operated in the early part of human history, the period between roughly 70,000 BP and 6,000 BP.  Then, we will look at changes that happened around 6,000 BP that altered the realities of existence on one of the landmasses of Earth (Afro Eurasia), and would eventually lead to expansion for territorial sovereignty societies that allowed this kind of society to take over the entire continent and either subjugate, assimilate, or exterminate all members of the other kind of society.  

 

Territorial Sovereignty Societies

 

Let’s start our analysis of territorial sovereignty societies before humans evolved, back in the ancient times in Africa when the pans were the most intelligent beings on the continent.  

Some of the pans lived in areas close to oil deposits.  The oil was under great pressure and, in places, it would seep to the surface and form pools and tar pits.  These oil pools and tar pits would catch fire and burn for very long periods of time.  The pans that lived around these perpetual fires were smart. 

They figured out uses for fire. 

Fire is incredibly useful.  Those that had more capable minds (because of random chance:  we all have different genes) were more likely to figure it out.  They had great advantages over others with less capable minds.  They were more likely to survive long enough to reproduce.  The smarter pans produced more offspring than the less-smart pans.  The average intelligence of the pans that lived under these conditions (those near fire) increased over time.  Our minds are able to adapt to greater complexity.  The new neurons needed space and the brain sizes increased.  The impact was so great that, after several millions of years, the brains of those that had adapted to fire were double the size of the brains of those who had not done so. 

These large-brained beings were so different that they were no longer in the same category as their ape ancestors.  Later when scientists examined the remains and artifacts and classified them, they classified the new beings in a different genus, the ‘homos.’  They were in the genus that includes you and me. 

Some of these members of this new genus lived in territorial societies.  Territorial sovereignty societies are built around conflict.  The species divides itself into teams, each of which takes control of a territory and defends it by force.  The new members of the homo genus who evolved from the territorial apes (the chimpanzees) didn’t invent territorial sovereignty societies.  They were born into them.  They had gained mental skills slowly over a period of millions of years.  They descended from a long line of ancestors who had lived in these societies going back fantastic amounts of time.  It was all they knew.   Over the generations, those who weren’t mentally suited for this way of life were not able to meet their needs as well as those who were mentally suited.  Those who were aggressive, violent, loyal, and easy to anger found a place in the system and those with very strong features became leaders.  Those that were passive, tolerant, considerate, and had empathy to all members of their species, even those their teams were trying to kill, did not fit in.  They were less likely to have offspring and these genes weakened.  (They didn’t disappear entirely.   Even the most aggressive people in the world today have some members who refuse to participate in the organized mass murder events.)   But the basic realities of territorial sovereignty societies encouraged certain ways of thinking and ways of acting. 

These instincts pushed them form into tight and loyal clans, the type of clans that we now call ‘countries.’  Their instincts told them it was correct to be loyal to their clans and show respect and deference to those in positions of authority, even if they had intense personal dislike for the individuals in authority.  If their leaders decided war was necessary to protect the territory of the clans, the others followed and helped the war effort, regardless of their personal feelings for the leaders.  They may not have loved their leaders, but they have instincts they interpreted as ‘love for their country.’  It was a part of their cultural and genetic heritage. 

Their instincts (again, interpreted as feelings) told them there were people they were supposed to hate and fear.  Those members of their species who were not members of their clans lived outside the borders.  They were dangerous, unpredictable, and capable of using great trickery.  At any time, they could attack them and, if their guard was down, wipe them out.  Their logic may have told them that the people outside were no different than the people inside.  But their instincts told them to not trust their logic in this matter. The stakes were too high. 

Their instincts/feelings told them there was only one way to deal with the outsiders:  destroy them.  As they gained greater control of fire and other complex tools, the brains grew larger and their intellectual capability grew.  They used their new intellectual power to help them create new and better ways to do the things their feelings/instincts told them to do. 

They gained control over the environment around them.  Predators were killing their children.  At some point, starting about 70,000 BP, they had the intellectual capability to deal with this problem.  They organized in some way that allowed them to wipe these predators from the face of the Earth.  (We may not know the details of the way they did this, but we know it happened.)  

Other animals were taking the food that humans wanted.  Sometimes, humans experienced great hunger and famine because of these other animals.  They were capable of dealing with this too.  Again, we don’t know exactly how they did it, we just know they did. 

They eliminated the two most important checks that nature uses to control animal population.  These checks on population were now gone.  The human population could grow. 

The people inside the walls had very limited food supplies.  They walls were enormous and they couldn’t move them to increase their land.  When the population grew above the number the food could support, there was hunger.  Since they couldn’t move the walls out, the only real solution was to create a new colony.  They sent ‘colonists’ out into the world to find new land that could produce enough to support clones of their system.  They built new walls and the colonies began to sprout wherever the land produced enough to support them. 

At some point, there was no more colonizable land in many areas.  The people couldn’t build new colonies.  They needed more land so they could grow more food.  But there was no more land (at least none that met the requirements for colonization) around.  So, they had only one choice:  they had to take land away from some other country.  Of course, the people in the other country weren’t going to let this happen if they could help it.  They would fight too.  They had great pressure to be smart:  the better weapons and tactics they had, the greater the chance of survival.  They used their great intellectual capabilities to find better ways to kill.  They got very, very good at organizing mass murder events.  It was, in many ways, their greatest skill. 

This is still true today. 

 

The Other Society

 

The great bulk of Afro Eurasia isn't productive enough to support a dense network states.  Some places, mainly valleys along river, could support a few of the states.  But most of the land didn’t produce enough to be monopolizable.  People could live in these other areas.  But they couldn’t monopolize them.  They had to share them.  They had to be tolerant and accommodating.  They couldn't organize themselves around violent conflict.  They couldn’t simply force the world to comply with their absolute and totally unyielding requirements.  (Sovereignty is an absolute concept.)  They had to be flexible and comprising. 

You may compare these two societies to the societies of the chimps and the soc of the bonobos.  The chimps had territorial sovereignty societies with hard borders that were defended by organized troops and murderous violence.  The people with territorial sovereignty societies lived like this.  The most aggressive of these societies were in Europe.  The people in these societies had both cultural and genetic forces pressing them to be territorial and violent.  Their genes came mainly from Neanderthals, the human ancestors who had descended from the territorial chimps.  Over thousands of generations, individuals who had refused to comply with the standards of these societies had been outcasts. 

 

If you are born into a system where war is constant and loyalty is highly valued, and have genes that make you question the idea of patriotism and give you feelings that organized mass murder is not a good idea, you won’t be very popular.  You will have a harder time finding a mate and finding a way to fit into the economy so you can make a living.  You be less likely to breed than a hard-line patriot who screams for war at every opportunity. 

The difference may be tiny and many pacifist people and non-nationalists may still have children and raise them.  But in territorial sovereignty societies these genes will give a disadvantage to the people that have them.  In natural law societies, which are more inclined to tolerance and peace anyway, these same genes will be beneficial.

Over a long period of time, the genes of these two groups of people will diverge.  The divergence probably won't be enough to prevent them from breeding with each other, but they will be enough to create two entirely different personality types.  The people in territorial sovereignty societies will tend to be fiercely loyal to the entity they call their ‘country,’ and easy to incite to violence.  The people in natural law societies will be more like the hippie apes, the bonobos:  tolerant, empathetic, and open to discussion.

 

The Old Way of Life (Pre 6,000 BP)

 

By 50,000 BP, humans gained enough intellectual capability to become the dominant species, at last in Afro Eurasia.   If you could go back to sometime before 6,000 BP (when another change, discussed in this chapter, altered them forever), you would find people that could think about and discuss complex concepts, in much the way they can.  I picked the year 18,000 BP for the previous chapter, but this was an arbitrary choice.  I only wanted something long enough after the Pleistocene Extinction Period for the changed conditions to have become universal that was before 6,000 BP, the period discussed here. 

If you went back to 18,000 BP, you would have found city-states that were a lot like Faiyum in many places.  In Europe, these city-states would be fairly close together with little or no space between them.  In other parts of the world, like along the Nile, they would be laid out in a line, wherever the rich land is located.  In places where rich lands were scattered, the city states would be scattered, with great distances between them. 

Since most of the land on Earth wouldn’t have been suitable for territorial sovereignty societies at that time, we would expect most of the land to contain people who live in the non-territorial natural law societies.  At this time, the humans had wiped out all their major predators and all major competitors for food.  The two main natural checks on population growth would be gone.  Without these natural checks, populations would have to grow until they reached some other barrier.  The only reasonable barrier I could think of is the food supply.   The population would grow to the carrying capacity of the land, given the production methods in use at the time.

The people in the city states would use fairly sophisticated technology.  They would feel totally safe inside their protected territory.  They could plant grain without fear that bandits will arrive and steal their crop just before the harvest.  They could invest in technologies to drive up their yields, like fertilizing the crops, leveling the land, and irrigation.  Their city states would protect the property rights of individuals, so individuals could justify investing their time and skills into machine shops and other facilities to build equipment.  The land in the city states would produce extremely high yields.

The people outside wouldn’t be able to take these same steps.  They wouldn’t invest the time and effort into leveling land, fertilizing crops, or irrigation systems.  Their land was not protected.  They couldn’t be sure that others would not simply force them off of any land they had improved.  They wouldn’t have incentives to invest in improvements.  They could raise some crops, but agriculture wouldn’t have been nearly as important to them as it would to the people in the city states.  They would be more likely to live by following animals, hunting, or herding. 

Prior to the innovations and changes that happened about 6,000 years ago in Afro Eurasia (discussed below), these societies didn’t come into any real conflict for the same reason that the societies of the chimps and bonobos didn’t come into any real conflict for millions of years:  they existed in different ‘habitats.’  The territorial sovereignty societies existed only in areas that had rich patches of land that were ‘colonizable’ (or ‘monopolizable.’)  The people in these areas needed land that was productive enough to fight over. 

The people in the territorial sovereignty societies had weapons and advanced military tactics.  There was a lot of land around them that was not particularly productive and had people with natural law societies living on it.  They could have ‘conquered’ this land if they wanted.  They didn’t do this though, because they couldn’t have their particular type of society on this land. 

They ‘let’ the people who lived outside the walls have the great bulk of the planet’s land.  Not because they are generous, but because this land didn’t produce the surpluses that were needed to support their preferred ways of life. 

The people who lived outside the walls were used to freedom.  They could travel wherever they wanted, as long as they didn’t try to go into the city states without getting the proper permissions.  The city states required everyone to pay for the right to simply be alive in some way.  (At the very least, everyone had to make contributions to the defense of their ‘country.’  In territorial sovereignty societies that had money, this meant paying taxes.  In societies without money, it meant turning over a share of whatever they made to use for common defense and agreeing to be part of the military themselves for some period of time.)  

The people with the natural law societies didn’t have to pay anyone just to stay alive.  They could sleep in their tents along the rivers.  They could eat the fish, eggs, birds, venison, berries, roots, nuts, seeds, and other things nature provided.   If they didn’t like the weather where they were they didn’t have to put up with it:  they could pack up and head somewhere nicer.  (Many people in our 21^st century world want this, but they can’t afford all the things they have to bring with them to bring their way of life in their travels; a fully-equipped recreational vehicle can cost more than many people in the 21^st century make in ten years.)  

The people with the natural law societies wouldn’t have any real conflict with the people with the territorial sovereignty societies.  The main reason is that they didn’t want to live the way these people lived.  They were free.  The people in the cities were not.  They could smell clean air and flowers.  The people in the cities smelled the stench of human offal.  They could listen to the birds singing and water flowing down the stream.  The people in the city heard only mindless din.  As we will see in later chapters, when the conquest of the Americas started, a very large percentage of the people with natural law societies committed suicide when they realized they couldn’t maintain their ways of life anymore.  The conquerors wanted to ‘assimilate’ them into their societies.  The people raised the other way didn’t consider life in the other societies to be living.  As Seattle writes: 

 

The white man does not seem to notice the air he breathes. Like a man dying for many days he is numb to the stench.  When the buffalo are all slaughtered, the wild horses are tamed, the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills blotted by talking wires, that is the end of living and the beginning of survival.

 

Two entirely different cultures existed on earth during the early era of modern humans (which started with the developments discussed in the previous chapter, the new brain components that turned humans into the dominant species on Earth).  But these two cultures weren’t in any real conflict for most of this time because their ways of life were so different that neither actually wanted anything the other had. 

Then something changed. 

As long as people had to fight and transport goods on foot, the practical realities of warfare limited the size of the states to a relatively small size.  You can find the old footprints of these states all over Afro Eurasia.  They tended to be about five square miles in size with borders of about 15 miles.  (I have lived in places like this where the walls are still there.  It takes me about an hour to walk from the wall on one side to the wall on the other side.)   About 6,000 BP (6,000 years ago) this changed and the conditions of life for the human race underwent a dramatic transition. 

 

An Amazing New Technology (In 6,000 BP):  Horses That Could Be Ridden And Could Be Trained To Pull Wagons And Other Equipment

 

All horse-like animals are in the zoological taxonomy of Perissodactyla and the zoological family of Equidae.  This family has thousands of different individual members, all of which are unique genetically.  

America had a great many members of the family  Equidae until the pleistocene extinction events.  This landmass had ‘horse like animals.’  But all members of this genus that existed when humans first arrived disappeared in the extinction events. 

Most members of this animal family also perished in Afro Eurasia when modern humans arrived.  But a few of them continued to exist.  We don’t know the exact reason that these animals were spared, but it probably has something to do with milk.  All mammals produce milk to feed their young (this is how the species is defined).  Milk is an extremely important food for migratory people.  There are still migratory people in Tibet, Mongolia, Siberia, and Northern Canada that rely on dairy products for a large part of their nutritional needs.  In many of these areas, horses or horse-like animals provide the milk.  (You can buy horse diary products in stores in these areas.) 

Migratory people can bring milk, cream, and butter with them, in endless quantities, by bringing horses or horse-like animals.  If you have horses that you can milk, you don’t need a refrigerator:  you can go directly from the horse into your mouth and have food that is germ-free and totally healthy. 

We know the early humans in parts of Afro Eurasia spared some horse-like animals, even though the humans in the Americas wiped them all out.  We don’t know the exact reason, but it seems logical that they kept them because they gave milk.  Whatever the reason, however, we know they did spare these animals in Afro Eurasia. 

In the early days (going back 7,000 to 70,000 years ago) the horse-like animals were not suitable for the things we use horses for now.  However, over long periods of time, the people who kept the horse-like animals would have bred them to create new varieties that were suitable for different uses.  This was not an easy task and took a very long time:   Scientists have identified 273 different precursor horse-like animals in the genetic mix of modern horses.  Breeders worked with different animals to create animals capable of doing the things they wanted done.  Early hose-like animals were generally quite small.  But herders of these animals would selectively breed them to make them bigger and stronger. 

About 6,000 years ago, they succeeded in creating breeds that were capable of carrying adults on their backs and capable of pulling heavy wagons and other equipment. 

Ridable horses must have seemed like marvels to the first people who saw them. 

 

Where did these innovations take place? 

There is a lot of controversy about this. 

The people of three areas (Spain, the Ukraine, and Arabia) all claim these changes took place in their area and their people are the ones who figured out how to make this happen.  This is a dangerous topic to bring up in areas where people have great affection to horses, because many people who tend to drink a lot of alcohol have very strong opinions about it and get violent when people dispute their claims. 

 

As soon as people saw them, they wanted them.  They could change the life of the person who got it.  they are fantastically useful in war, so military leaders wanted them very badly.  They could carry troops at 10 times the former speed and they could haul wagons with hundreds of times more cargo than humans could carry on their backs.  Migratory people wanted them too:  they didn’t want to have to carry their things when they traveled. 

A healthy mare (female horse) can produce a foal (a baby horse) every year.  She can therefore produce two new horses, enough to replace herself and her stud (the male) every two years, and produce four new horses (enough to replace herself and her stud two times over) each four years.  If human breeders want to produce horses as rapidly as possible, they can double the population in 4 years.  If you started with 10 horses and went through 10 doublings (this would take about 40 years), you would have 10,240 horses.  In another 40 years it will double 10 more times and you would have more than 10 million animals. 

Once people had bred useable animals in enough numbers to create a viable gene pool, horse populations explodes.  Within a few centuries, horses would be common everywhere in the Afro-Eurasian continent. 

We don’t know the details about the spread of early horses in Afro Eurasia.  We do know what happened, however, in the Americas.  The first horses were brought to the Americas by Spaniards about the year 1500.  (Horses went extinct in the Americas Pleistocene extinction events and there were none before the Europeans brought them.)   Horses are very hard to transport so they didn’t bring a great many.  But they breed very rapidly and by 1900, a mere 4 centuries after the first horses arrived, there were more than 20 million domestic horses in the part of America now called the ‘United States’ alone. 

 

 

The Advantages Of The Horse

 

          This quote is from Britannica: 

 

When Cortés sailed for the coast of Yucatán on February 18, 1519, he had 11 ships, 508 soldiers, about 100 sailors, and—most important—16 horses

 

The writers on Britannica think the most important cargo on the ships were the horses.  If you read books about the conquest you will understand the importance.  (I recommend the wonderful and extremely well researched book ‘The Conquest of Mexico’ by William Prescott, which is available in the references section of the PossibleSocieties.com website.)   The horses were the key to Cortez and his small contingent of solders conquering what many scholars today think was the most populous valley in the world, the great valley of Mexico, with more than 30 million people with a dozen different cultures, all in a period of less than two years. 

This is from another Britannica article:

 

In 1531 Francisco Pizarro’s expedition of 180 men and 37 horses sailed to the Inca empire in Peru.  A Spanish priest met with the Inca emperor Atahuallpa, exhorting him to accept Christianity and Charles V.  After Atahuallpa refused, Pizarro’s forces attacked, captured, and later executed Atahuallpa, enabling Pizarro to occupy Cuzco, effectively conquering the empire. 

 

Again, if you read accounts of the conquest by people who were there, you will see that this conquest (this time of about 12 million people, also according to Britannica) would not have been possible without horses. 

Horse made enormous difference in war. 

The horse changed the dynamics of Afro-Eurasia in many ways.  Of course, it made it possible for a well-organized military to conquer and hold vast amounts of territory.  But it also made it possible for the sedentary and stationary lifestyle that was common in the city-states to expand into large new areas. 

With a few horses and some equipment, a family could plant and harvest hundreds of acres of land.  They could go out to work in the morning (after having eaten a hearty breakfast of eggs from their henhouses and pancakes made of flour from stored grains, and bacon from their pigs) and come home and sleep in the same bed each night.  They could live just like they lived in the city

A lot of people lived in cramped quarters in city-states. 

They would have liked to have had more space.  But they couldn’t move outside the walls because they couldn’t live the same way there.  They couldn’t be defended.  They couldn’t keep homes and sleep in the same beds.  They couldn’t go to stores.  Horses changed all this.  Mounted soldiers could protect farmers living outside the gates, at least most of the time.  (Watch TV westerns and you will be able to get at least some idea how this happened.  The farmers are threatened by either ‘Indians’ or bad whites.  The sheriff can usually find a solution.  If not, they call in the cavalry.)   

With horses to haul in supplies, they could have their luxuries:  Glass for their windows, pot-belly stoves to keep them warm, jars and pots to put up fruits in the summer; clothes made in mills that may be hundreds of miles away

If a town with stores is 10 miles away, people without horses can’t go there more than once every few months.  With horses, they can ride to town every day if they want.  They can enjoy almost all of the benefits of living in town, but still have plenty of space to move. 

 

The Conquest of Afro-Eurasia by States

 

We know a lot about the conquest of the Americas by European states.  This happened between 1492 and about the year 1890. 

 

The conquest actually began November of 1493, when Columbus returned to what he thought were islands in the Indian Ocean (actually islands in the Caribbean sea) with armies to conquer them.  It proceeded very rapidly, with Mexico conquered in 1521 and South America brought under the control of conquistadors by the end of the 1530s.  Plagues were spread that wiped out most of the native people in North America, but the area was not brought under control of European powers right away, allowing their populations to increase.  The second phase of the conquest involved taking the remainder of the lands.  The final event of the conquest is often considered to be the Wounded Knee Massacre.  It happened on December 30, 1890.

 

We know a lot about this because it happened recently, a large number of records were kept, many writers wrote accounts of the period from various different perspectives.  We will go over this information when we get to that point in history.  We don’t know much about the period that started about 6,000 years ago when the entities called ‘states’ expanded from their walled enclosures to take over the land outside.  But we do know that the states expanded very quickly outside of their walls once the people in the states had horses.  By the time that we have written historical records, states with governments were dominant in all areas that the records cover.  

 

The oldest written records we have found so far go back to 4200 BP.  Again, this means 4,200 years before the present, or 4,200 years ago; this would make the date about 3200 BC, if you prefer the Christian dating method.  

 

We don’t know much about the details of the conquest of this part of the world by territorial sovereignty societies.  We do know that there are still nomadic and traveling people in many parts of Afro Eurasia.  Until recently, it was thought that these people, originally called ‘Gypsies’ and now called ‘Romani,’ all came from the same place, somewhere in India, in ancient times, and them spread throughout Afro Eurasia by about the sixth century.  The stories of their history since the sixth century are similar to the stories of the history of the ‘Indians’ in America during the late stages of the conquest, with numerous attempts to wipe them out. 

New tools are making it possible to go deeper into their Backgrounds.  The following illustration is from a 2005 study: A newly discovered founder population: the Roma/Gypsies.  It shows that the genetic heritage is literally all over the map.   They didn’t originate from India, specifically, they originated from everywhere, with genes from all over Afro Eurasia.  This is what we would expect if they had natural law societies with no fixed homes.  They traveled.  In their travels, they met other bands.  There is a taboo in natural law societies in general against having relations with members of your own band.  (This is considered to be incest.  It was the highest taboo in pre-conquest American societies, as discussed by Ancient Society by Lewis Morgan.)  The genes naturally mix. 

 

 

Before the military use of the horse, most of the land of Afro-Eurasian was not in any country (city state) at all.  It was free land, unowned and no one had any more rights to it than anyone else.  But the states grew fairly quickly.  Within a thousand years, the states had conquered much of this land.  In some places, all of the unowned land was conquered and, after the conquests, the states were touching each other, with the border of one the border of its neighbor. 

The people who ran the militaries of the states now had a lot more to fear than they had before, when there was space between them and their enemies.  Their enemies were right there, on the other side of their borders.  In most cases, the borders were not the very high and well fortified walls that had been the borders of the city states.  It was not practical to build these massive structures over distances of hundreds or even thousands of miles. 

 

Some people tried.  You can find some ruins of these walls in various places.  But once a thousand mile long wall is breached, the entire wall becomes less than useless.  The enemy can simply move down the wall and remove the defenders.  The wall actually helps the attackers because they control both sides of it and they have significantly more freedom of movement than the former defenders. 

These great walls were built but they became useless quickly and the borders were no longer located along the walls.  Eventually, most people (those who were reasonable and logical) stopped trying.  A few continue to this day. 

 

The borders between countries were now very long and very hard to defend.  In the old days, when the countries were separated by large distances, the people really didn’t have much to fear from other countries.  Both countries had about the same kinds of weapons.  Both had massive walls that were well fortified.  Attackers would have had to breach the walls, all in plain sight of the defenders, who could pour down arrows, spears, and burning tar on the attackers from safe places behind parapet walls. 

But times changed.  The countries grew larger and their borders much longer.  The new long borders were much harder to defend and there was less and less open space (that didn’t belong to any country at all) between them.  Eventually, the countries were one against the other.  The old defenses would not work anymore.  They needed new ways to protect their monopoly rights to the land that they claimed. 

Until this time, weapons were quite primitive.  They used the same basic weapons as Neanderthals had used hundreds of thousands of years earlier:  bows and arrows, javelins, and slings.  All the states had the same weapons.  To gain advantages, they would need something new. 

 

The Bronze Age

 

People had had some metals for a long time.  Lead, copper, zinc, and tin can all be ‘smelted’ (removed from ore using a combination of smoke and melting) in an ordinary wood fire.  But none of these metals was remotely as hard as the rocks they used for their knives and arrowheads.  They were all very soft and weak metals, not really useful in war. 

But it is possible to make very hard, strong, and useful metals by mixing some of these soft metals and heating to melt them together.  These mixtures are called alloys

Modern bronze is a mixture of 88% copper, 7% tin, and 5% lead.  You can make bronze yourself if you want, in a fire pit in your yard.  You can watch internet videos that show you how to do it.  The first to make bronze didn’t hit on this ratio right away.  They found mixing two metals made the result stronger and harder.  They experimented.  Eventually they hit on the ratio above, which is the ratio we still use today. 

Bronze is extremely hard.  You can find bronze items in many museums.  Most of the bronze items I have seen are weapons.  Bronze can be cast into any shape desired.  If it cast into a sword, the edge can then be sharpened by rubbing it on a stone.  You can make it as sharp as a razor.  It will cut off enemy’s hand or head with a single stroke. 

Armies with bronze daggers, battleaxes, swords, halyards, pikes, and with arrows and spears with bronze tips can easily defeat armies that only had tools made of rocks and sticks.  If you run a state and have bronze weapons, while your enemies only have weapons made of rocks and sticks, you are going to be able to defeat them. 

Bronze items have been found and dated to as far back as 2775 BCE. 

 

 BCE means ‘before current era.’  It is the replacement term for BC, which meant ‘before Christ.’  It means the same thing, so 2775 BCE is the same year as 2775 BC.  To get the date BP, which means before the present, add the year number by the Christian calendar.  If it is the year 2025, the year BP is 4800 BP.  I am sorry for having to use these confusing terms, but they reflect the standards of the time and reflect dates you will find from other sources. 

 

However, bronze tarnishes over time, in the same way that steel rusts an most analysts I found seem to think that bronze was being made up to 825 years before that, or starting about 3,500 BCE (or about 5,525 BP, see text box above). 

Bronze weapons provided great military advantages to those who had them.  Other states had to figure out how to make bronze themselves or they would almost certainly be defeated.  If they were defeated, the victors would bring the new technology to the area.  Either way, the technology spread quickly. 

 

Iron and Steel

Bronze is a very useful military metal.  But steel is much, much better.  A steel sword will slice right through bronze armor.  A steel arrowhead can cut through the thickest leather to kill the solder underneath. 

I want to explain the process of making steel, because you really need to understand its incredible difficulty in order to understand the social changes that will take place in systems that produce steel.  Steel is an industrial product.  It is extremely hard to make (as you will see shortly), requires a great many workers, all of whom have to be very skilled.  The next transition will take us to an industrial society, the type that dominates the world now.  Industry requires a great many complex structures that are not necessary in non-industrial systems.  It needs money, for example; it needs courts and rules to protect private property rights, it needs massive roads and other infrastructures, and it needs an investment system that allows large amounts of ‘capital’ to be raised and dedicated to the project.  All industrial societies are necessarily extremely complex.  I don’t think you can really appreciate the changes that will happen next, in the historical account, without understanding how difficult it is to make steel. 

If you want to make steel, you need to start with iron.  Iron is one of the most abundant elements on the earth.  But it is not found in metal form.  It is found mixed with oxygen, as ‘iron oxide,’ also known as ‘rust.’  To get metal, you need to remove the oxygen.  The process of removing the oxygen is called ‘smelting.’

 

The term smelting is a combination of  the word ‘smoke’ and ‘melting.’  It uses smoke to get metal to melt. 
     The smoke is needed because smoke contains carbon monoxide.  This gas has a very strong affinity to oxygen:  each molecule of carbon monoxide wants to grab another oxygen atom from somewhere to form carbon dioxide, with is a very stable material with extremely strong bonds.  You generate the carbon monoxide by building a fire.  You put the ore into the fire (this is described below).  As the ore heats, the chemical bond between the oxygen and ore gets weaker and weaker.  At some point, the bond is so weak that the carbon monoxides attraction is stronger, and the oxygen flies out of the ore and into the smoke.  At this point, the  metal instantly melts.  It will drip through the fire to the ash below.  You can wait until the ash is cool and sift through it to find the bits of metal. 
     The process is the same for al metals.  But the temperature needed for smelting is different for each metal.  The softer metals smelt at relatively low temperatures.  You can smelt them with a wood fire.  This is not true for iron

 

To smelt iron, you need an extremely hot fire.  Wood doesn’t burn hot enough for this.  Natural gas doesn’t burn hot enough.  Coal doesn’t burn hot enough.  Oil doesn’t burn hot enough.  The only natural fuel that burns hot enough to smelt iron is pure carbon.  The only common source for pure carbon is charcoal. 

If you want to smelt iron, you need charcoal.  You will need a lot of it, as you will see.  (One of the main justifications for the exploration to the new world in the 1400s was a search for wood.  The forests in Europe had all been cut down to make charcoal, mainly to use to make steel.  The mills had all shut down for a lack of fuel.  One of the first things that Columbus did when he began conquest of Haiti was begin cutting down the forests there to make charcoal.  This was the ‘black gold’ of his day.)  The text box below explains how to make charcoal:

 

Wood to charcoal: 
     Wood is made of hydrocarbons, which are molecules with both hydrogen and carbon.  To get pure carbon (charcoal) you need to get rid of the hydrogen.  You do this by heating the wood to a very high temperature under conditions that prevent it from catching on fire.  To prevent this, you need to make sure that no oxygen (from the air) is in contact with the wood
     If you want to do this, you need to build a kind of igloo out of clay blocks, large enough for you to sit inside.  It needs a chimney on the top at least 6 feet high and an opening at ground level big enough to crawl through with loads of wood for the fire inside.  You then pile the wood you will turn into charcoal over the igloo  to a depth of about 5 feet.  You then cover the entire thing with about a foot of dirt.  Then build a fire in the igloo.  (The air for the fire will come through the opening you walk through to carry the wood.)  Keep it very very hot for about 2 days.  You will have to work furiously this entire time to make sure there is enough wood in the igloo to keep the fire inside at the right temperature. 
     Then let it cool for a few days and remove the dirt.  You have charcoal. 
     It takes about three tons of wood to make a ton of charcoal this way.  You put a ton and a half of wood on the igloo to start.  You burn the other ton and a half.  After the process is over, the charcoal will be 2/3 as heavy as the wood originally used to create it.  It is very unpleasant work and requires a lot of skill.  You have to understand a lot of things to do it right, and you have to do them all well.  But all this is necessary to make steel. 

 

Once you have charcoal, you need to make the smelting furnace and the bellows.  You can make the smelter out of clay.  It needs to be a certain shape with a chimney and a hole in the bottom for the bellows.  People used to make the bellows out leather that is fastened to two large boards. 

Once you have this set up, you can start smelting iron.  You start by building  a fire in the furnace using charcoal.  Then you need several people who will rotate with each other to pump the bellows as rapidly as they can.  This bellows blows air (which contains oxygen that the charcoal needs to burn) through the pulverized fuel, causing it to burn more rapidly and making it hotter.  If you watch this being done, you will see that even the strongest workers can’t last much longer than 10 minutes on the bellows at the required pace.  This means you will need to rotate people onto this task.  You will probably need at least 6 people for this; that gives them one 10 minute shift every hour. 

You also need a large number of people pouring of pulverized charcoal down the chimney and into the furnace.  As you do this, the fire gets hotter and hotter.  At a certain point, it is hot enough.  (You will need someone who has done this before to tell you when you are at this point.)  Now you can start mixing tiny bits of iron ore into charcoal.  Keep pouring the ore and fuel mixture into the chimney for about 18 hours.  You need massive amounts of fuel for this.  All this time, your helpers must be pumping the bellows furiously:  if they slow down for even a few seconds, the furnace will become too cool and all effort so far will be wasted:  you will have no iron. 

If you do this right, after 18 hours there will be iron metal in the furnace.  The metal turns into a liquid as soon as it loses its oxygen.  It then drips out of the mixture and flows to the bottom.  You will want to put a mold on the bottom to catch the iron.  It will harden to the shape of the mold.  The standard mold looks like a mother pig nursing her piglets.  Because of this, the iron in this form is called ‘pig iron.’ 

If you are very skilled and good at cutting your costs, you will be able to smelt about 2 pounds of pig iron with the three tons of wood you started with

 

Steel

For weapons, nothing beats steel.  Because steel is so strong, a thin and light steel sword will be much stronger than a heavy and awkward bronze sword.  The person with the lighter and stronger sword will have a great advantage over someone with a heavier but weaker weapon. 

You have to do a lot of hard work to turn iron into steel.  You can find many descriptions on the internet, but here is a quick one:  Take the pig iron and hold it with tongs.  Put it into a very hot charcoal fire.  Leave it there until it glows white hot.  Then take it out and hammer it into a thin sheet.  Then fold the sheet in half and hammer the halves into a new thin sheet, heating as necessary.  Keep doing this.  You will have more and more sheets, each of which will get thinner and thinner. 

The difference between iron and steel is carbon.  Steel has between 1% and 3% carbon.  The carbon comes from the smoke of the charcoal fire.  You need to literally beat it into the metal.  The more carbon the metal has, the harder the steel.  The 1% steel is considered ‘soft’ steel.  It is still much harder than iron and has many uses, so a lot is made.  The 3% steel is very hard, suitable for tools and swords.  There is a television show called ‘forged in fire’ where people compete to make steel knives using this method.  They have machines to do the hammering, so they can make good steel in a few days.  But if you did the hamming by and, you would take several months to make a good knife or sword.  Back when the work was done by hand, officers would often pay more than a full year’s salary to get a high quality sword. 

Steel is a fantastic product.  It now holds together skyscrapers that are thousands of feet high; it forms the hulls of submarines that travel thousands of feet below the ocean, it is the shell for bombs and rockets, and almost all useful tools are made at least partly of steel. 

As of the 21^st century, nearly all military weapons are made of steel; for most military uses, nothing superior has been found in spite of 4,000 years of searching

In 2000, archeologists found the oldest steel weapon to be discovered to date at the Kaman-Kalehöyük archeological site in Turkey.  Here is an excerpt from the press release:

 

A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site is about 4,000 years old, making it the world’s oldest steel, Japanese archaeologists said on Thursday.  Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the 5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000.  The ironware piece is believed to be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 BC, according to them
     An analysis at the Iwate Prefectural Museum in Morioka showed that the ironware piece was about 200 years older than one that was excavated from the same site in 1994 and was believed to be the oldest steel so far made in 20th-18th centuries BC.  The ironware is highly likely to have been produced near the Kaman-Kalehoyuk site as a 2-cm-diameter slag and two iron-containing stones have also been excavated, Kyodo news agency quoted the archaeologists as saying. 

 

Industrial Evolution   

 

Before the steel age began, states didn’t have to be very big or well organized.  Most of  the city states probably looked a lot like Faiyum looks today, as seen in the image above:  rich farmlands surrounded by a convoluted collection of paths that go around the mud huts where people live and operate little kiosks that sell the things they can’t make themselves. 

This isn’t going to work for a city with heavy industry.  To support heavy industry, you absolutely need a highly organized economy.  This would not be a simple task for the people who lived in 5,500 BP (before present).  They didn’t have any idea how an industrial system worked.  They would have to figure it out themselves, basically with trial and error.  They would need a lot of things that we take for granted now and think we understand (because we use them every day) but aren’t really intuitive or easy to figure. 

Consider the thing we call ‘money.’  The early city states didn’t really need money.  In Faiyum, people produced mostly rice.  If you aren’t a rice farmer but keep chickens for their eggs, you can trade your eggs for rice, both to feed your chickens and meet your own needs.  Others may fish or make hats out of rice straw and trade these items for things that they need.  The government can collect taxes in rice, which can then be used to feed the troops.  Barter can meet the needs of the pre-industrial system.  But it is hard to imagine putting together the resources needed to build and operate an industrial system without money.  Even today, no one seems to have attempted it; I can’t imagine anyone trying and succeeding 5,500 years ago. 

This seems simple enough at first.  If you need money, create it.  Governments print it and then tell people ‘this is money’ and they start using it, right?  But if you had never seen money and a government told you these little pieces of paper were able to buy anything in the sate, you would probably laugh.  Even today, economists argue about what money is, how it works, and why people continue to accept it.  There must be some reason.  If you wanted to build a steel mill 5,500 years ago, you would have to figure out how to make money and how to get people to accept it. 

The industrial state will also need infrastructure.  You need a lot of charcoal to make steel.  You can’t have people strapping piles of twigs to their horses and then traveling from the forests (which get farther away as the closer trees are removed) to the charcoal plant, and expect to keep a large steel mill operating.  You need roads that are big enough for heavy wagons.  They have to be good roads:  if the wagons can’t make it through, the steel production stops. 

You will need a lot of workers.  These people will have to devote their lives to dangerous, extremely unpleasant, and very difficult work.  This work must be done right so they must be well educated and they must be able to remain motivated and keep working year after year, as many hours as you can get them to work.  They need to be motivated as children just to get them to take the time to go to school and learn the skills.  The schools must exist and have funding. 

At first, these states won’t be very good at these things.  Even today, 5,500 years into the industrial period, states seem to be struggling to figure out the next step.  But they have to try.  They were born into a system where people have fantastically strong genetic and cultural tendencies to identify them with a group of people, in this case a state, and to use the resources of that group to fight other groups to gain territory for their group.  This may not make much sense but it is reality:  we can all see the fanatical people who operate current states doing everything they can to fan hatred and fear to make their people fight harder.  Once people understand how to make steel, they know their enemies can have it and may use it to destroy them.  They need more than the enemies.  They may not know exactly how to organize an industrial economy to make it happen.  But they have to try to figure it out

 

It may seem that this particular discussion is being presented in the wrong time period.  You may be thinking:    ‘Aren’t industrial economies very recent things?  Didn’t all important industrial innovations take place in the last 200 years?  How could this be relevant to a discussion of events 5,500 years ago?’
     As we will see shortly, this isn’t true. 
     There are people that think we can never have sound societies if industry exists and want to ‘disappear’ it (to use George Orwell’s term for ‘make it appear it never existed’).  We will look at two of these events in the next few chapters.  The most notable was started by Emperor Constantine in the year 322 AD.  (Note: AD is the same as the politically more correct term CE, for current era.  It is the date under the Christian Calendar.)    At the time, the European area was well into the industrial age with numerous large plants producing enormous amounts of both steel and cement.  (You can read about the steel in works of Homer written in circa 880 BC, in Herodotus "History" circa 446 BC and in Aristotle’s ‘Physics’ circa 350BC.  You can see the cement work with your own eyes in Europe where massive edifies built of concrete built 2000-3500 years ago are pretty much everywhere.)
     Although many such attempts have been made, the most successful was that of Emperor Constantine, which started in the year 322 AD.  All books were burned, all schools closed, all corporations shut down with their assets turned over to the church, a new book that Constantine ordered written, called ‘The Bible,’ was composed in Latin and only vetted priests were allowed to learn to read Latin.  The result was a ‘dark age’ that lasted more than a thousand years and resulted in a decline estimated to be 50% of the population.  (Without technology, only primitive techniques could be used and production collapsed.)   We will look at the events that led to this and the reason it happened in later chapters. 
     Yes, most of what we know now about running an industrial economy is new.  But we aren’t learning it the first time, we are relearning this information.  If you watch the news, you will see that many people want to try the same thing again.  They want to send us back to the dark age (again).  We have been here before and we are making the exact same mistakes we made before. 

 

 

The Principle of Group Augmentation

 

The purpose of this book is to reconstruct the past events that put the human race onto the path we are now on.  This path leads to ever increasing problems that will take us, if we stay on this path long enough, in our extinction.  If we want to find a way to get onto a path that leads somewhere else, we have to understand the forces that put us on this path.  We also have to understand the forces that are pushing us forward toward the end. 

One of these forces is the evolutionary force called ‘group augmentation.’  

Evolution works by competition.  Animals compete as individuals.  The fittest individuals survive these competitions and pass their genes on to future generations. 

Groups also compete.  The fittest groups (where ‘fittest’ means ‘best at getting the group what it needs’) survive.  Group augmentation works by dividing the animals into individual groups and pitting the groups against each other in battles for territory.  (‘states’ are different competing groups).  Group augmentation works wherever the ability of a large group of individuals to work together matters.  It works on bees, ants, and other eusocial species.  Our ability to act together as states, and the larger collections we call ‘nations’ matters:  the states that are best at conquering and holding territory get the highest quality territory.  They can eat when people from states that don’t work as well are defeated and lose the land that once fed them. 

Bees and ants and other eusocial animals without the ability to think and plan on a conscious level have no choice but to continue to compete.  If they competition gets to a point where it threatens to wipe out their entire species, they can’t stop competing:  they don’t have the ability to take this into consideration. 

We are different.  If we find ourselves under the influence of forces that threaten to wipe us out, we can organize a plan to get out from under that influence.  This is possible.  Other books in the Possible Societies series explain how to do this. 

But before we can take any plan to make changes seriously, we need to recognize that these forces really do exist.  We have to understand that we are on a path through time.  We have to understand how we lived in the past, going as far back as possible.  We need to understand that there is a process that causes animals to change and evolve according to certain rules.  We need to understand that this same process works for us.  We need to understand that this process is not necessarily benevolent.  It may not move us where we want to go.  If it is moving somewhere we don’t want to go, we need to understand what we must to do to break away from the path it has put us on and get us onto another path

Until about 570 BC, there is no historical evidence that anyone made any serious attempt to bring the idea of intelligent design into analysis of society.  This should not be surprising:  we don’t have much real evidence of the thoughts of anyone that goes back more than 2,600 years, because very few written documents remain of the earlier period.  The next chapter resumes the history in 570 BC. 

Bear in mind that when we get to this period, we are not starting with cave men who hit girls over the head with clubs and drag them into caves for sex.  We are starting at a time when people know how to make both steel and concrete (the most important outputs of heavy industry) and have been making these things for centuries.  It is very, very hard to find an efficient way to organize industrial states to make them good at war.  They don’t have it all figured out as of 570 BC.  (We don’t really have it figured out now, as you can tell by watching the news.)  But they have been trying various different things for a long time.  Evolution has been operating this entire time.  States better at organizing themselves for war have advantages in war.  States that are not good at this get conquered.  They are taken over by better states, who then move their organizational structures (the ones that were better at making them better at war) to the conquered areas.  Over long periods of time, society has been evolving in ways that gradually eliminate any features that may make the states weak, passive, concessionary, liberal, or non-confrontational.  Evolution reinforces any characteristics that make the states more cohesive (those that promote patriotism and nationalism), more aggressive, more willing to sacrifice. 

Many people could see that these things are not working to promote what we might call a ‘sound society’ (one that can advance the interests of the human race as whole over the long term).  By the year 570 BC, many people could clearly see that the competitive, territorial, aggressive societies that were in place at the time could not meet the long term needs of the human race as a whole.  We needed something else.  Many people tried to figure out what else was possible. 

4  CHAPTER 4 Troublemakers

Today, we think of Pythagoras entirely differently than people did in his time.  In his time, he was a traitor and outlaw.  For most of his life, he was a wanted man.  He had to travel incognito and meet with others in secret to avoid being caught.

Eventually, the authorities caught up with him.  He was executed by a particularly brutal method:  He had traveled to the town of Croton, in southern Italy and was meeting people for a lecture.  The authorities considered him and everyone he associated with him to be dangerous. They decided to get rid of them all. They blocked the doors and windows to the building where the meeting was taking place and set it on fire, killing everyone inside. This included the man that may have been the greatest thinker the world has ever seen.

This is the way Pythagoras died.

It is the same Pythagoras you learned about in school.  His achievements are all over the map and in nearly every field of human endeavor.

If you focused your studies on hard sciences, or math, you learned he was responsible for basically all initial work that formed the foundation of these fields.  It was his idea to build mathematics on something we now call the ‘number line’ and to visualize numbers as lengths on this line.  He also was responsible for showing the difference between ‘rational numbers’ and ‘irrational numbers,’ meaning he essentially showed us what a ‘number’ was.  He was the one who proved the number line was infinitely dense (a key finding that forms the foundation for all higher math), and for proving that irrational numbers were real numbers (they really existed and their values could be calculated).

All engineers and designers in the world use the theorem named after him almost daily.  But this is only one of the proven theorems he gave us that form the foundation of virtually the entire field of engineering today.  He is noted for the beauty of his geometric proofs:  he proved his most famous theorem (that the area of a square drawn on the hypotenuse of a right triangle is exactly equal to the sum of the areas of squares drawn on the other two sides) using nothing but a pencil, ruler, and geometricians compass.

His many, many proofs provide the foundation for the field of logic:  He explained what conditions would have  to be met to show that a premise has been ‘proven.’   He also explained what common fallacies appear to show proof, but actually don't.  (If you listen to politicians, you will see endless examples of these fallacies:  they claim they are saying something that makes sense, but their arguments really don’t prove anything. Most people haven’t studied Pythagorean analysis and don’t realize they are being tricked.)

If you were more into the liberal arts, you probably learned about Pythagoras in music class  He invented the ‘Pythagorean interval,’ also called the ‘perfect fifth.’  He showed why it is ‘perfect,’ with the frequency of  the tones having a perfect mathematical relationship to each other. He created the ‘circle of fifths’ that gives us the 13 note ‘chromatic scale.’  This is the foundation for all western music.  (The 13 notes are the 13 black and white keys of the piano.)   He also showed that there is a simpler 8 note ‘octave’ scale that lies inside of the more complex 13 note scale.  (The 8 notes of the key of ‘C’ are the white keys of the piano.)  He invented the idea of a musical ‘key’ and showed how to make different ‘chords,’ (major, minor, diminished, ect.) in different keys that created different moods and feelings in listeners.  The great majority of the musical instruments in use now were designed using the mathematical relationships between the notes that he presented to the world more than 2,500 years ago.  If you like any (western) music, and it lifts your spirits or brings you closer to nature, you owe a debt of gratitude to Pythagoras.

His musical studies led to the findings of a field called ‘harmonics,’ which study the interactions between various waves. (Sound is waves of moving air; these waves interact to create peaks and valleys; our ears recognize so many sounds, even when mixed together, by identifying the harmonic relationships.)  The harmonic relationships he explained are important in optics and the studies of lasers and other high-energy beams.  The field of quantum mechanics is built on the wave theories that come from Pythagoras. (Look up ‘The physics of music’ on the internet for many illustrations of his contributions.)

This is what we remember Pythagoras for today.

In his own time, he was notorious for his anti-establishment views.  He felt the society he lived in was unsound.  It was dangerous, violent, aggressive, destructive and totally illogical. Anyone could see that this type of society wasn’t capable of meeting the needs of the human race as a whole.

Of course, they can be forgiven for this:  they were not intended to advance the interests of the human race as a whole. They were intended to help the people who ran specific countries organize them so that they could give better for the people of that country.

But Pythagoras noted that they couldn’t even really do this:  Most of the time, the endless wars and competition didn’t do anything but impoverish the people on both sides and create misery and hardship.  Then as now, the great majority of the people (the proverbial ‘99%) lived lives of drudgery and servitude, often getting up before they were fully awake and then working until they were too tired to work anymore, for barely enough to keep them alive.  The world is bountiful and there is plenty everywhere.  The rich get richer and the governments of the world waste enough money to make everyone prosperous on war every year.  These systems not only don’t benefit the human race as a whole, they don’t even benefit the people that they are supposed to benefit.

Pythagoras claimed something better was possible.

But it couldn’t be built on the same foundation that supports the system he lived in.  To have a better system, we would have to accept that that a lot of the beliefs we were raised to accept about the way society works and the wonderfulness of the type of society we have, were not true. We have to realize that the quality we call ‘patriotism’ is not a virtue that can make the world better, it is a toxin that poisons any attempt to solve the most dangerous problems of the world. We have to accept that the entities called ‘countries’ are only not worth destroying the world over, they are not even real things:  if we stopped believing in them. They would stop existing:  they are therefore only figments of our imaginations.  If we want sound societies, we have to understand that the people who we are trusting to run our systems are not on our side. They don’t want better societies. We have to accept that the system that elevates these people to positions of power is flawed.  We have to find ways to get around their authority and work to build a better world ourselves.

Pythagoras made sense.

This made him dangerous. People listened to him and stopped respecting the people they were told their entire lives they were supposed to respect.  They stopped thinking of the rules that required them to hate the enemy of the day (whoever the people who called themselves the ‘leaders of country’ decided to fight) were nonsense and dangerous.  Pythagoras was a threat.  Not just to the leaders of the country where he was born or where he was physically located at any given time (he traveled a great deal), he was a threat everyone who depended on respect for the establishment for the things they wanted.

Pythagoreans

When the authorities killed Pythagoras, they hoped to kill is ideas too.  But this didn’t happen.  Pythagoras had realized that the authorities didn’t want the things he said to be heard.  He kept his discussions away from the public eye.  He traveled a lot.  In each area, he had a group of like minded people. They wanted something better. They discussed what had to be done.  But they didn’t advertise or use the public forums for this.  They kept their discussions private, among people that they knew would be tolerant before they let them join.  The group was active in many parts of Europe, Asia, and North Africa; Pythagoras spent time in many places and talked  to a lot of people.

We don’t know a lot about this organization.  We just know it was large and had a lot of members.  It lasted a long time.  (Some say it is still around, active in the anti-establishmentarian movements that you find in the graffiti marked parts of major cities around the world.)   We know it had rituals that members could use to identify other members as they traveled.  We know it used symbols, the most common of which was the geometrician’s compass (to reflect the greatest achievements of Pythagoras, which involved his geometric proofs).  We know it inspired Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great:  The emblem of the Pythagoreans was carved above the doors on Plato’s Academy, Aristotle’s Lyceum, and above the doors of the libraries that Alexander the Great built all around Persia, North Africa, Asia, and the parts of Europe closest to Macedonia, where Alexander was born.  (All of these3 buildings and all the documents they contained were destroyed, intentionally, in the book burnings and attempts to destroy knowledge that followed over the next 600 years;   We will look at the reasons this was done later.)

We know  that the work of Pythagoras inspired Socrates and most of the information we have about the ideas Pythagoras had about world came to the world through Socrates.

Socrates

Socrates was born one century after Pythagoras, in the year 470 bce.  He was raised by his grandfather.  We don’t know much about him, we only know that he was a Pythagorean. Socrates grandfather had visitors who talked about the ideas of the great thinker.  I can imagine Socrates falling to sleep listening to these discussions.

Socrates grew up a believer.  Better societies were possible. But there are some things we don’t talk about in public. People wouldn’t understand.  They loved their countries.  They expected everyone to feel the same love.  They hated the people they had been raised to believe where their enemies.  They expected everyone to feel the same hate.  They focused their lives on these feelings.  People who didn’t feel the same were dangerous. They didn’t know what think about them.  If they don’t hate the enemies, maybe they sympathize with the enemies.  Maybe they wanted the enemies to win and crush the wonderful systems their leaders and teachers represented.  When they started to feel this way, they might report them to the authorities and have them investigated.  Sometimes, the authorities are more afraid than the people themselves.  They don’t want to take chances with security risks.  They remove them from society, often by removing them from life itself.

There are some things that cautious people don’t talk about.

But a lot of time had passed since Pythagoras had been put  to death.  Socrates felt that the world had changed.  They were foolish and ignorant back in the olden days (a century before Socrates had been born).  Now, they had sciences and did research.  They weren’t perfect.  But they were a lot smarter than a century ago.  Pythagoras was ahead of his time.  But that was a long time ago.  Times had changed.  Socrates thought that they were ready now.  He wanted to bring these ideas to the world.

Most of the ideas in the books of the Possible Societies series come from the arguments presented as direct quotes from Socrates in the socratic dialogues.  Although all of his own personal writings were destroyed after he was executed for sedition (‘corrupting’ the minds of  young people with his ideas) and treason (not feeling the love he was supposed to feel for his country and the other things he was supposed to love and not feeling the hatred h e was supposed to feel for the people his leaders called ‘enemies’), his ideas were reconstructed by Pythagoreans and we have enough to understand what was important to him.  , including Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander of Macedon (also known as Alexander the Great, discussed in later chapters).

Before I describe this message, I want to take a little detour to show how it was received and how, exactly, the name of Socrates came to be such an important one in history.

Socrates Arrest

Socrates told people that the leaders, experts, and other people who ran society didn’t have any idea how to build a sound society.

They didn’t even have any interest in this.

They knew about and cared about war.

War is organized and planned mass murder and destruction.  It wasn’t a logical thing.  It could not be a foundational element of a sane, sound, and logical society where people take the best advantage of the skills and talents of other people and work with them.  If we want a sound society (one with δικαιοσύνη, to use his term) we need to start with some other foundation.

Socrates is famous for the depth of his arguments.  (Law schools call the method of correctly arguing cases ‘the socratic method.’  It is based on his method of arguing and, to this day, is still considered the best way to get a point across.)  He makes sense.  It is hard to go over his arguments and NOT see his point.

The people who listened to him started to lose their faith in the great system around them that is often called ‘the establishment’ today.  It was not a good thing.  It was not on their side.  His ideas had a particular attraction for young people.  If the system didn’t work for them, didn’t work for the world, didn’t work for the human race, and didn’t even really benefit the thing they were raised to worship called a ‘country,’ why devote  their lives to serving this beast?  After talking to Socrates, they didn’t want to play a part in the system anymore.

These young people talked to their teachers, t heir parents, their advisors, the people who were planning their lives for them.  These people represented the system that they no longer respected.  They wanted the young people to step forward, get a good job, make lots of money, maybe even go into government, become rulers, and run the wars themselves. After talking to Socrates, they didn’t want to do these things.  They had other goals, but they were goals that their advisors teachers, and even their parents couldn’t really identify with.  They didn’t want to play a part in the system, they wanted to study it, identify the way it worked, find ways to create a better system, and help put it into place.

The parents, teachers, and advisors thought it was bad for the young people to think this way. They wanted them to stop listening to Socrates.  But, well, you know how young people are:  tell them not to do something and they will only want to do it more.  They couldn’t stop the message without stopping the messenger.  They filed complaints with the authorities.

The authorities decided to have a talk with Socrates.

We don’t know who said what.  But we know that the two sides didn’t get along.  Socrates told them he wasn’t going to stop.   He had not harmed anyone.  He had not violated any laws or rules.  He would not stop.

The authorities decided to up the stakes.  They said that they could charge him with the crimes of heresy (not accepting doctrine that people were required to accept) and ‘corrupting youth.’ Socrates thought it was nonsense. His country had freedom of speech. He was protected by the law and had done nothing wrong  No jury would convict him.

The authorities wanted Socrates to take the threat seriously.  A war was on.  The enemy was the most dangerous enemy anyone has ever faced.  (When wars start, all enemies are depicted this way; some people believe it every time..)  They could tell the jury that his ideas hurt the morale of youth and therefore harmed the war effort.  They said that if he made them take him to court, they would have a very good chance of winning and, if they won, they would seek the death penalty.

The Trial

The trial was held in public. A jury was empanelled with 501 members.  The trial would last one day.  A majority would be required to conflict and impose sentence.

One of Socrates followers, Plato, was in the audience.  He took notes of the trial and published them under the title ‘The Apology.’

Socrates arguments were pretty simple.  He told the jury he had done no harm to anyone.  In fact, no one had claimed he had.  He was not on trial for doing anything wrong, he was there because he had shown the people of Athens that their leaders were fools and didn’t know what they were doing.  He had embarrassed them.  They were putting him on trial for making them look foolish.

He says:

I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed him—his name I need not mention; he was a politician whom I selected for examination—and the result was as follows:

When I began to talk with him, I could not help thinking that he was not really wise, although he was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself; and thereupon I tried to explain to him that he thought himself wise, but was not really wise; and the consequence was that he hated me, and his enmity was shared by several who were present and heard me.

Then I went to another who had still higher pretensions to wisdom.  My conclusion was exactly the same.  Whereupon I made another enemy of him, and of many others besides him.   Then I went to one man after another, being not unconscious of the enmity which I provoked, and I lamented and feared this.

But necessity was laid upon me and I swear to you, Athenians, by the dog I swear!—for I must tell you the truth—the result of my mission was just this: I found that the men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that others less esteemed were really wiser and better.

There is another thing:

Young men of the richer classes, who have not much to do, come about me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined, and they often imitate me, and proceed to examine others; there are plenty of persons, as they quickly discover, who think that they know something, but really know little or nothing; and then those who are examined by them instead of being angry with themselves are angry with me: This confounded Socrates, they say; this villainous misleader of youth!

And if somebody asks them, Why, what evil does he practice or teach? they do not know, and cannot tell; but in order that they may not appear to be at a loss, they repeat the ready-made charges about teaching things up in the clouds and under the earth, and having no gods, and making the worse appear the better cause; for they do not like to confess that their pretence of knowledge has been detected.

These people are numerous and ambitious and energetic, and are drawn up in battle array and have persuasive tongues, they have filled your ears with their loud and inveterate accusations.  And this is the reason why my three accusers, Mellitus and Anytus and Lycon, have set upon me; Meletus, who has a quarrel with me on behalf of the poets; Anytus, on behalf of the craftsmen and politicians; Lycon, on behalf of the rhetoricians.

And this, O men of Athens, is the truth and the whole truth; I have concealed nothing, I have dissembled nothing.

Then the prosecutors had their turn.

They appealed to the jury’s patriotism.

Their country was at war. It was the most important war in all of history.  (All wars are portrayed this way at the time they are being waged.)   We can’t afford to lose it.  We must think of our boys in the trenches first.  They must fight and kill until all the enemies are dead or their leaders surrender and throw themselves on our mercy.

Our enemies are monsters. If they win, they will storm the city, desecrate our art, rape our wives and daughters, kill our mothers, enslave our sons, and (if the worst of the fear mongers are right) eat our babies.

Socrates might be allowed to say what he wants to say after the war is over and all threats are gone. But the time is not right.  The war is the only important thing now. Nothing that harms the war effort can be tolerated.  Socrates has to stop.

If we have to put him to death to stop him—and he has made it clear this will be necessary—we have no choice:  it must be done.  You—all the members of the jury—owe it to your country, to your gods, and to your loved ones to make sure this happens.

Fear is a powerful motivator.  Hatred can always be called forward in time of war.  People had lost loved ones.  They wanted someone to suffer for it.  Here was a heretic (this was one of this charges) who didn’t believe in the war effort. Socrates was convicted, sentenced to death, and executed.

The Socratic Dialogues

After Socrates was gone, the authorities collected all his papers and destroyed them.  His thoughts and ideas were dangerous.  They wanted to protect their people from these dangers and had to be careful.  If they left the papers, they might fall into the wrong hands and corrupt young people, making them anti-war and anti-establishment.  As far as we know, they were successful and not a single word from Socrates own hand survives.

But the ideas they considered so dangerous were not really Socrates own personal ideas.  They had come to him through the Pythagoreans and originated with the great geometrician himself.  All that Socrates was trying to do was to open a mental door, in as many people as he could talk to.  He wanted to let them know that they should not be afraid to think about these things. Their minds belonged to them. The authorities wanted them to think a certain way.  But their minds belonged to them.  They had the right to use it any way they wanted.

The Pythagorean movement was widespread.  We don’t know exactly how widespread because these people knew the authorities didn’t like their message, so they met and interacted in private.  If you look on the internet, you will see a wide range of opinions including everything from claims that it was just a small group of mathematicians who got together to discuss the ideas behind irrational numbers (which Pythagoras had discovered and which were considered to be the result of witchcraft for thousands of years after their discovery), to the idea that all subsequent anti-establishment secret societies originated with the Pythagoreans.

After Socrates was dead, many members of this movement came to Athens to meet with the ‘young men of the richer classes’ that Socrates had ‘corrupted’ with his ideas about society. They decided that Socrates ideas should not die with him.  They wanted to recreate his most important arguments.  They worked on several books that are now called ‘socratic dialogues.’ They recreate Socrates ideas.

Many attempts have been made to destroy these ideas or to distort them to make it appear that Socrates was trying to say something he wasn’t trying to say.

In some ways they were successful.  Almost all of the socratic dialogue Critias was destroyed.  This is important because Critias was his version of the title book of this series, Possible Societies:  it explains different societies and shows how they work.  The book Timaeus is very clearly a tiny part of a much larger work. (Socrates speaks only a few times in this book and his comments are short sentenes that all take the form: ‘but I told you in our previous discussions that is not how the world works.’)

But we do have enough information to put together his basic ideas.  The fundimental arguments are in the book called ‘πολιτεία (‘politikas’) which explains how societies that divide the world into individual territorial units that have sovereignty operate and shows why they can never meet the needs of the human race (never have ‘δικαιοσύνη’).

Πολιτεία

In the set of dialogues called ‘Πολιτική’ (Policia, again, the name Socrates uses to represent ‘societies that divide the world into countries’) he works out the basic principles of societies that work this way:

First, he points out that war is an inherent part of societies built on this premise.  The following quotes are all from the book ‘Πολιτεία.’:

Socrates:  Then a slice of our neighbors’ land will be wanted by us for pasture and tillage, and they will want a slice of ours?

Glaucon.  That, Socrates, will be inevitable.

Socrates: And so we shall go to war, Glaucon. Shall we not?

Glaucon.  Most certainly, he replied.

Socrates: Then without determining as yet whether war does good or harm, thus much we may affirm, that now we have discovered war to be derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in nations, private as well as public.

Glaucon.  Undoubtedly.

Even in Socrates’ time, people realized that war brought economic benefits.  It created jobs, it stimulated economic activity, and it stimulated invention and discovery.

Even today, there is great dispute over whether the benefits war brings outweigh the costs.  In other words, it isn’t clear whether war is a good thing or a bad thing.

Socrates clearly doesn’t want to get into this issue.  He isn’t trying to say war is bad and should stop.  He is only trying to show that war is an inevitable consequence of the foundational operations of societies that divide the world into sovereign territorial entities.

After having shown this relationships, Socrates goes on to work out the natural consequences of war and the things that must happen in any society built on principles that lead naturally to war.

Indoctrination

To have war, a large number of people must spend their lives cutting down forests to make charcoal, digging through the ground for ore, smelting, and doing things that cause immense harm to the world.  Some people will have to devote their lives to soldiering: they will have to go to schools where they will learn how to kill without remorse or constraint; they will have to practice stabbing human-shaped dummies with knives, spears, or pikes until they can do it mechanically, without even thinking.  They will have to learn to follow orders without even the slightest hesitation: if ordered to cut off the head of the man on the right of them, they must not think first, they must act.  (This kind of order is often used to test the fitness of soldiers.)

Then, when the war comes, they must actually kill real people.  Idealistic soldiers often are shocked when they get to a war and find that most of the people they will have to kill are women, children, and old people who don’t pose any threat to anything.  People must kill and kill and kill, while other people are trying their very best to kill them.  They must do these things in horrible conditions, often living in trenches with fetid, rotting corpses for weeks on end, knowing each time they go to sleep they may not wake up again.

People are not normally drawn to these conditions.

They would not do them unless their minds had been prepared to make them think that these conditions were necessary, and that their fighting, killing, and risking death day after day brought about some greater good.

Logic and reason would tell us that there is no greater good.

As Socrates pointed out in his first argument above, the war is not about making the world a better place. It is the natural consequence of the structural realities of societies that are built on certain foundations. War will happen.  Once we know that war will happen, we need to make sure our people are indoctrinated. These things go together.  Have one thing and you must have the other.

They must be indoctrinated.

Socrates then provides some basic information about the specific way the indoctrination must happen.  It must start with the most gullible and naïve adults by singling them out and intentionally lying to them. Then it must be made sure that only those who believe these lies are allowed access to the children in that society.   It must be made sure that the truth never gets into any book that the children might read; they can only hear the lies. They must hear them over and over again until they come to believe they are the truth.

Socrates: We begin by telling children stories which, though not wholly destitute of truth, are in the main fictitious; and these stories are told them when they are not of an age to learn more complex ideas.

Adeimantus:  Quite right.

Socrates:  You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken.

Adeimantus:  Quite true.

Socrates:  And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

Adeimantus:  We cannot.

Socrates:  Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers.

 

The first thing that is necessary to make people willing to accept the reality of societies divided into nations (territorial sovereignty societies) is to make sure that the people can’t get objective information.  We have to ‘establish a censorship of the writers.’ 

This is particularly critical for children.  If we want children to grow up to be willing to fight in and make other sacrifices for the wars, we must make sure that we regulate the things they ‘receive into their minds.’  We want to make sure that they can only receive into their minds the exact thoughts that ‘we should wish them to have when they are grown up.’ 

Socrates goes into very great detail about the specific aim of such indoctrination: it has to be used to train people to override their moral restraint and personal views of right and wrong so they will follow orders to commit the atrocities that are a part of war.  It is to turn them into monsters with no regard for anything but the orders they are given:

 

Socrates: As we were saying, the members of the warrior class were to be dogs, and to hear the voice of the rulers, who are their shepherds.  The young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is doing wrong; and that even if he chastises his father when he does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

 

Socrates and Adeimantus then discuss intricate details of the indoctrination process.   For example, they note children are extremely susceptible to the power of music.  Music can tell them the way they are supposed to think about various matters. For example, do you want them to believe mass murder is a good thing?  Create a song that associates the most horrible murders with the most beautiful music your musicians can create. 

I went to my first two years of school in France and learned the Marseilles as my national anthem.  We sang it regularly in class and before every important event.  It has one of the most euphoric, happiest melodies ever written, a melody associated with these words:  ‘They come right to our arms to slit the throats of our sons and our friends’ and ‘after we fill the furrows of our fields with blood, the day of glory will have finally arrived.’  

You will find similar messages in the songs that young children are required to sing in other militant countries.  These songs associate the most wonderful and uplifting melodies with stories of tools that strike without warning and blow children into tiny pieces. 

The education systems couldn’t get people to accept these things if they started with adults who could study the issue logically.  The adults would argue with them and never accept them.  But if you start when children are very young, and use tools like music and poetry to create neural pathways that associate the acts you want them to do with beauty and happiness, you can make the associations in their minds, without them even realizing they are being manipulated. 

Socrates and Adeimantus then discuss various other tools needed to manipulate the way children think in societies that are built on this foundation. This includes the need to distort history to glorify both the war and the winner and turn war into some sort of wonderful cloth that wipes away evil and leaves only good.  You can’t make them think this by presenting truthful, accurate, objective information, so you have to lie.

 

Alexander and Aristotle

At his trial, Socrates made reference to the ‘young men of the upper classes who have not much to do and come to me of their own accord; they like to hear the pretenders examined.’ 

Plato was one of these ‘young men of the upper classes who liked to hear the pretenders examined.’

Plato’s family was extremely rich.

In the year 388 BC, when Plato was 30 years old, he inherited some property from a distant relative.  A former ruler of Athens had developed this property into a private resort and spa.  (The ruler was Hipparchus, son of Peisistratos; he ruled Athens from 528 BC to 527 BC.  History books call him ‘the tyrant of Athens.’)  It had a large gymnasium, several heated pools for soaking and swimming, luxurious accommodations, and about 3.5 acres of park-like land with olive trees. Hipparchos named this resort after Akademos, an Athenian military hero of the ancient past; he called it Ἀκαδημία, which would be pronounced ‘Academy’ in English.  This resort had been passed down from generation to generation for 150 years and, in 388BC, it went to Plato.

At the time, the word ‘academy’ didn’t mean ‘a place of intensive study;’ it was the name that Hipparchos had given to the resort.

Hipparchos took security very seriously.  He had made a lot of enemies when he took over Athens. He didn’t want them or their hired assassins to get anywhere near him.  He built 30ft high walls all around the retreat with guard towers to watch the walls and make sure no one was trying to climb them.  There was one way in, through a guarded gate.  It was an extremely secure facility.

The Academy was outside of the main city walls, so it was not officially a part of Athens.  It was out of sight and out of the minds of authorities.  People could come and go without going through the customs at the gates to the city-state.  Plato turned it into a place where people with open minds could gather talk about matters that might get them in trouble if they talked about these ideas in public view.  The retreat was to become a meeting place for intellectuals.

People there could discuss anything they wanted.  If they thought the established system was flawed, they could analyze it and study the flaws, without having to watch over their shoulders for people coming to arrest them for treason or sedition (as happened for Socrates).  If they thought better societies were possible, they would be able to talk about the changes needed to make this reality without having to worry about inciting lynch mobs to kill them (as happened to Pythagoras).  At the Academy, people could talk about anything they wanted to talk about.

Plato was not only very rich, he was also politically connected. His family had been one of the leading political families of Athens.  He made sure that the Academy kept a low profile and, as long as he did, the authorities left him alone.

Aristotle

The Academy attracted many prominent intellectuals from all over Mediterranean Europe, Africa, and Persia (now called the ‘middle east.’).  Its most noted resident, Aristotle, came to the Academy as a student.  He stayed on to become its most famous teacher.

Aristotle was born in Stagira, a city-state in the region of , Macedonia, about 350 miles north of Athens.  Aristotle was 17 years old when he arrived.  At that time, Plato was 60 years old.  I can imagine the eager teenager questioning the wise Plato about the ideas of Pythagoras, his memories of Socrates making ‘inquiries’ of the ‘pretenders to wisdom,’ the idea of a sound society (one with δικαιοσύνη), and the tools that practical people might be able to use to create a system capable of meeting the needs of the human race.

Plato passed away at the age of 80 in the year 347 BC.

As long as Plato was alive, the Academy was a safe place. Plato could make sure the authorities didn’t bother people there.  The intellectuals gathered there weren’t sure of what was going to happen after Plato was gone however.

At this time, many prominent scholars left.  Aristotle was one of them.  One of his colleagues at the Academy, Xenocrates, was from the city-state of Assos, in what is now the country of Turkey.  He wanted Aristotle to see this area and meet his people. Aristotle went to Assos.  (There is some controversy over the details.  I found the name of this city-state listed variously as Assos, Atarneus, Atemeus, and Atarneus in different books.   I then went to Aristotle’s descriptions and searched for the city with the closest match on Google Maps.  I found the city called ‘Mutlu, Turkey, which I believe is the place they went.)

They stayed at the household of a friend of Xenocrates named Hermias.  Hermias and Aristotle became very close friends.  There is a great deal of controversy over how Hermias gained his position of authority over the city state, but all scholars agree that he had a very high position of authority and, shortly before Aristotle arrived, he was the highest official in the city state.  (Something like the ‘president.’)  Most scholars indicate that, before Aristotle came into his life, Hermias was a brutal tyrant.  That may or may not be true.  But all agree that, after spending time with Aristotle, Hermias became a devoted follower of the principles Socrates described in the book ‘Πολιτική’ (often translated, I believe incorrectly, as ‘the Republic.’)

The result was a massive and sudden increase in the wealth and welfare of the city state he controlled.  Soon after that, a large amount of surrounding territory made political decisions that put them under the authority of Hermias.  (Again, there is a lot of controversy over the details, but no controversy over the result:  all scholars I read agreed about the increase in prosperity and the enormous expansion of the area of his political influence.  Some say he ‘conquered’ this land, but others contend that people simply wanted whatever he was providing to his people, removed their own leaders, and joined Hermias.)

This was a prelude to what was to happen in a few decades under Alexander.  Unfortunately, to the destruction of records that took places later, we don’t have many actual details.  I suspect that this kind of success would be important for the story, if it happened, because it would give Aristotle confidence.  Socrates had claimed that better societies were possible.  The events in Assos, if they played out as historians claim, would have provide a kind of proof that Socrates was right.

Unfortunately, the experiment was short lived.

One of the leaders who lost his land in the expansion was a ruler (who historians today claim was been despotic and brutal) named Artaxerxes III.  He hired mercenaries kidnap Hermias and have him brought to Artaxerxes who, reportedly, had him tortured to death.  This is thought to have happened in 341 or 342 BC.  The power structure in Assos immediately changed and it was no longer safe there for Aristotle.  He and the rest of Hermias household left Turkey for the island of Lesbos, in Greece.

Hermias and Aristotle had been very close.  He had considered himself a part of the family. He may have considered himself to be partly responsible for what happened to Hermias:  if he had not tried the steps Aristotle had recommended, his political domain would not have grown and he wouldn’t have been a threat. On Lesbos, Aristotle married his friend’s only daughter, Pythias.

Alexander

Aristotle wrote prolifically.  When I read his words today, I am in awe of his brilliance. He wrote on a wide variety of topics, but he always brought the same insight to them.  He starts with an analysis of objective evidence that could be verified scientifically.

He asked himself ‘What do we know for sure?’

He didn’t start by going over the different opinions about why things worked as they did, analyzing the reputations of the people who had various opinions to determine which was most likely to be right.  He started at the beginning, as if no other work had ever been done on the topic.  He then worked out what must be happening in botany, biology, anatomy, physics, chemistry, geometry, politics, economics, or sociology for the things we could see with our own eyes to be happening.  In each case, he used logic and reason to get from the most basic principles to the conclusions.

Aristotle’s works became the gold standard for every subject he wrote about.  For thousands of years thereafter, Aristotle was revered as the great knower.  He was the one who understood everything.  For an incredible period of time, if people wanted to know how something worked, they would go to Aristotle’s work.  It was definitive on almost every topic.

King Phillip of Macedonia was looking for a tutor for his son Alexander.  His advisors told him that, if he wanted the best, he had to get Aristotle.  He sent messengers to Lesbos to talk to him and offer him a job.

Aristotle politely declined.

Phillip was a tyrant.  Aristotle would not work for a tyrant.

Aristotle didn’t actually say ‘no’ directly.

He came up with conditions that he knew that Phillip would never meet.  He said he would take the job, but only if Phillip made the changes he laid out. He made extreme demands that the thought Phillip would laugh at.  That way, he could decline without having to say ‘no.’  One of these conditions involved slavery, which Aristotle believed was inconsistent with a sound society.  Phillip would have to free all slaves in areas under his control. Aristotle wouldn’t allow him to do this by decree however.  This would essentially be stealing from the owners of the slaves, who had purchased them in good faith and whose rights should be respected.  He would have to buy all the slaves from their owners. If the slaves been removed from their homes or had their property destroyed when they were first enslaved, Phillip would have to return what had been taken and rebuild what had been destroyed.

Aristotle presented a long list of demands, including this one. He wanted numerous reforms to be made, along with the reforms that Hermias had made in Turkey.   I don’t think he thought there was any real chance Phillip would actually accept. But Phillip really wanted Aristotle.  I can’t think of a more powerful argument for Aristotle’s reputation than the fact that Phillip accepted all his terms.

A deal was made.

In 340 BC, Aristotle headed for Naoussa, the location of his new job tutoring Alexander.  When he arrived, Aristotle was 41 and Alexander was 13.

The school at Naoussa

The school where Aristotle taught Alexander, and the stone benches in the shady olive groves where they planned the new society, are still standing.  I visited the school and sat on the benches a long time ago, before I knew anything about society, before I had written anything, before I even had any idea who Alexander and Aristotle were.

My father had retired from the military and lived in Athens.  I had never really known him.  He and my mother hated each other and had stayed together for the kids. ‘Stayed together’ means ‘stayed legally married.’  They were like water and oil, too different to even see each other’s point of view, let alone get along.

My mother was raised in what even Montanans call ‘the sticks,’ in a tiny cabin along a creek in mountains local people call the ‘Crazy Lady Mountains.’  My father was raised in a 7th floor apartment in midtown Manhattan. They met at a USO dance in Denver where my father was in training in the Air Force.  My mother had left the misery and poverty of postwar rural Montana to find a husband.  She was very pretty and had no problem.

Three months after she met my father they married and seven months after that my sister was born. The math tells me that my mother had had a plan and it had worked perfectly.

My father’s official job title was ‘photo specialist,’ but in reality, he was a spy.  He operated the sensitive cameras in the high-altitude planes that flew mostly over Russia, but also over China, Indochina, Korea, and any other place that our government thought of as a threat.  The flying work was clandestine and dangerous.  The government denied that the flights were taking place. The people on the flights were given cyanide (a silver dollar that was hollowed out had the cyanide; a pin went into it; take out the pin and scratch your skin and you are dead within seconds). He was under orders to use the cyanide in case he got shot down, so the enemy couldn’t present him as proof of spying. The Russians and Chinese were trying to shoot these planes down.  My father relied on faith in the superiority of United States technology (which later turned out to be misplaced) and good luck to keep him alive.

Photo specialists could either take the photographs or make prints from the negatives and work with intelligence experts to analyze the prints.  The analysts worked in the states.  After a tour overseas he was supposed to get an equal length of time in the states, which he could spend with his family.  But whenever he was with us, life was a nightmare.  When he and my mother got into the same room, I could feel the hatred and resentment.  When they got close enough, they would start screaming at each other at the top of their lungs.

My mother was an idealist. She was married.  After ‘and they got married’ in all the fairytales came ‘and they lived happily ever after.’ She had gotten to ‘got married.’ Where was her ‘happily ever after?’ This was my father’s job to provide.  He could not do this, and this made him defective and worthy of infinite wrath.  The hell would last a few days or weeks.

My father would give up and put in for another overseas assignment.  They needed him over there.  We would take him to the airport, and he would disappear for another year.

He wasn’t allowed to tell us where he was.  We wrote to him at an APO address in the states, which is a mail forwarding system that the military has set up to get mail to military personnel without their dependents (and therefore possibly enemies) knowing where they are.  After he died, I inherited his papers.  I found he spent most of his time in Pakistan, Thailand, and other countries that were within flying distance of the USSR and communist China.  Presumably he was taking pictures of missile installations to help military planners figure out where to target nuclear bombs when war broke out.

He was actually a very nice guy if he wasn’t near my mother.  But I never knew him growing up.  When he retired, he had moved to Athens.  I never knew why.  He must have thought it would be a good idea to get to know his oldest son and invited me to come spend the summer with him.

I hated Athens.  I guess I hate big cities in general.  I convinced him to let his apartment go and take me on an extended road trip through northern Greece.  We had a VW microbus set up as a camper.  I convinced him to let things flow.  We would go where the road took us.

We spent most of our time in little villages.  I liked life there.  The Greeks like to drink a wine called ‘retsina.’ It has a bit of wood resin in it as a preservative and has a resiny taste that a lot of people find unpleasant the first time they try it.  But it grows on you.  After a while, it is the only wine you want.  Each little mountain village had its own wineries and the wines were all different.  Each had its bakeries and the breads were all different.  The restaurants are outside, shaded by trees and usually along some sort of creek or stream.  Like restaurants in most of Europe, they just assume you want wine when you sit down.  They bring a carafe of retsina, a basket of fresh local bread, and a bowl of olive oil with feta cheese floating in it to dip the bread into.  For the meal, you get meat cooked over a charcoal fire, vegetables cooked in olive oil, and a salad with tomatoes, cucumbers, and black olives dripping with freshly pressed oil and covered with feta cheese.  The dollar was strong and the drachma was weak, so everything was very cheap.

The guidebook said that Naoussa was an important place in history.  I thought it was worth a few days.  I sat on the stone benches where Aristotle and Alexander had sat.  I bought retsina and drank it on the benches. A few weeks before, in Athens, we had had dinner with some friends of my father’s.  In Naoussa, I got to thinking about something they had said: the world was in terrible shape.  Their generation had messed it up for us and now they were too old to do anything about it. It was up to the next generation to fix its problems.  They had been looking at me when they said it.  They had been talking about me.

There is a lot in northern Greece that I remember.  I remember the cool dry nights and the stars, the white wine, and a pretty teenage Greek girl who wanted to do things I did not understand and could not discuss with her, because we did not share a language.  I remember that the air smelled like flowers and the restaurants smelled like charcoal and olive oil.  I remember that the peasant men always seemed to be sitting around playing cards and drinking retsina, while their wives, who looked like they had lived very hard lives, always seemed to be working.  I remember that the pace was very slow and there was time to think things through.

It was a place made for thinking.

I watched local people make charcoal, piling sticks into a mound, covering it with dirt, and then building a fire inside the mound.  This must have been the way they made charcoal in Aristotle’s time.  They used wooden presses to squeeze the olive oil, probably also unchanged from thousands of years ago.  The young Greek girls milked the goats and made feta cheese in their homes.  Local grain was ground in stone mills alongside rivers and baked into local bread.  Every village had its own wineries, and wine was sold by the carafe out of wooden barrels.

It is easy to imagine that nothing was different in the time of Aristotle.  Perhaps he ate at local restaurants that had been in the same place along the same streams where I sat.  Perhaps he saw the same sights and smelled the same smells as he made his trip from Athens to northern Greece, on his way to teach a 13 brat (he was the son of a king:  what else could he be?) for more money than he had ever made before in his life.

Perhaps he was wondering if he had sold out and should just send a letter to Phillip.  He could say that he had some sort of emergency back home and would have to decline the position and return to Lesbos.

But he decided to give it a try.

He sat on the benches of the olive groves in the fragrant Greek air and worked out the future of the world with Alexander.  When I read Aristotle’s words, I am still in awe of his brilliance.  The young Alexander must have found it impossible to believe his luck: the smartest man who had ever lived was teaching him.

Unfortunately, most records of this era were lost in the book burnings that followed.  The censors couldn’t locate every book that Aristotle had written, but they got a lot of them, and they appear to have seized and destroyed most of the little, important documents that would have helped us understand the details of what he and Alexander were doing.  Journals, personal letters, and other such things have been lost to history.

We don’t know exactly what was said.  I have had to work out what they must have discussed from the surviving works of Aristotle and from what Alexander did after his lessons with Aristotle were completed.  Almost certainly, they spent most of their time discussing the nature of societies, the problems that Socrates had identified, and potential ways to create new types of societies, built on some premise other than that of dividing the people into teams to fight other teams over territory.

What We Know And Don’t Know

Alexander did the seemingly impossible.  He united more than 500 million people in a new kind of society that stretched over more than 2 million square miles.  This included hundreds of ethnic groups with dozens of different languages and cultural backgrounds.  He built more highways than had ever been built before in history, including most of the highways that are still in use today in the lands that were a part of his new society.

He built the largest and most complete libraries that had ever existed.

He founded dozens of universities, built around the idea a free and open exchange of ideas, the basic principle of Plato’s Academy.

He introduced new kinds of capital markets.

He created banking and credit systems.

He built 20 master-planned cities from scratch.

The changes he made led to massive increases in production, creating great prosperity which appeared to have brought opportunities to all members of society.  In the new system he created, cast and class distinctions weren’t so important as in the system it replaced.  People could start with nothing and, taking advantage of the information in the open libraries, the intellectual resources of the universities, and the funding opportunities of the new banking systems, they could make something for themselves.

The changes that Alexander made were unprecedented.

The world had never seen anything like it.  If we put it into realistic perspective, we would have to say that nothing like it has taken place since.  Alexander did more to advance the human condition than anyone had ever had done and, today, he is one of the few men who are remembered as truly great.

And he did this all in less than 13 years.

He was in a position to alter important variables in the world for exactly 4,753 days.

How did he do it?

It is very unfortunate that the enemies of change are so vigorous and vigilant.  There were many, many attempts to destroy the records of the period over the next few centuries and the people behind these activities had a great deal of success.  Almost all of the details were lost.  All we have left are a few scattered records that weren’t destroyed because they weren’t considered important enough, some that couldn’t be located because they were buried and have since been found, and the remains of the structures he built and devised that were so well made that they couldn’t be destroyed.

We do know this: Alexander didn’t just make a few modifications in the details of the society he was born into.  Working with Aristotle, he analyzed the societies that were in place at that time (the same type of society that Socrates had claimed could never be healthy or workable).  They examined their structural elements and worked out changes that would cause these structures to operate differently.

Socrates had claimed that the very foundation of Πολιτεία societies (principle of called ‘group territoriality’ when referring to apes and that I call ‘territorial sovereignty’ when it applies to humans) was flawed; you can’t start with that foundation and build something sound.

If you want something sound, you will have to accept that humans are capable of living other ways. You will have to do a scientific analysis of the different possible foundations that can support societies, and find something else.

The societies in the east were built on different foundations.  If you look at a map of the area that embraced Alexander’s system, and then switch to satellite view, you will see a lot of brown.  These are not rich areas.  They are places where little rain falls.  A patch of land is not monopolizable (to use Jane Goodall’s term) unless it can produce enough to support a surplus population.  In other words, it must produce enough to support both the producers and provide food to the people who are not able to produce because the city-state can’t be defended unless these people devote their lives to building and maintaining the defensive barriers, smelting iron and making steel for weapons, or other activities that have nothing to do with food production.

They had different kinds of societies.

I want to put off a discussion of these ‘other kinds of societies’ until later in the book, when we can get into a situation to understand them better, because we have more evidence about how they worked.  But the basic difference between them involves the idea of ‘property.’ The western societies are ‘property based’ societies.  Property is another word for ‘a possession.’  Land can be something people posses.  It can be owned.  The owner determines what happens to it.  These societies make very intricate laws that dictate the relationships that people have to specific parcels of land.

The other societies are built more on social relationships.  People who live in areas where land can’t practically be owned (because it doesn’t produce enough to feed both the people who collect its production and an army to defend it) must be able to find a way to share the wealth the land produces with others, without getting into constant fights over it. Over long periods of time, the people who live in these areas figure out ways to make this work.

Aristotle and Alexander discussed the meeting of these two cultures.  Each had something to offer.  The west was innovative, efficient, and extremely productive.  It rewarded activities that led to progress and growth.  The east showed us that humans don’t have to be competing all the time to survive.

We could get along.

The world is bountiful. It is possible to set up a system where the people of the world share at least some part of the enormous wealth the world provides for us. We don’t have to share it all. But if we share some of it, we can have a tool that we (the entire human race) can use to meet our common needs. We have something that ties us together into a community, rather than just a bunch of people who happened to have been born onto the same planet at the same time.

If Alexander determined that society as a whole would function better in a certain area if a city were there, he would build a city there.  It didn’t matter if the specific ‘state’ where that land was located had enough income from other sources to pay the cost of building the city.  Other areas had surplus wealth.  The basic principle of the chimpanzee society is the monopolization of resources within the group that hold that territory. That is also the basic standard of the western societies.  But we don’t have to live like chimpanzees.  We can use logic and reason and find systems that work other ways. We can build societies that aren’t intended to benefit one specific team at the expense of the human race as a whole. We can build something where the teams work together for the benefit of the human race.

Creating A Sound Society

For more than 2,000 years, military analysts have tried to figure out how Alexander could possibly have gained control of the massive amounts of land he came to control in such a short time.  In 13 years, he gained control over 2 million square miles, which is about the area of the lower 48 United States.  This land had 500 million inhabitants, significantly more than the current population of the United States.

What kind of military genius could conquer this vast area in a mere 13 years?

Qqq map of alexander’s empire  page 206

 

To see how difficult this task is, consider one tiny part of the land that became a part of Alexander’s community of nations: the rugged and mountainous area now called the county of ‘Afghanistan.’

United States, the largest military power in the world, tried to conquer Afghanistan for more than 20 years.  I watched the opening rounds of this war on television.  The United States was sending in Abrams tanks that thundered across the desert with their massive guns and uranium based armor plating designed to withstand the largest amour piercing shells the Russians had.  The Afghans had horses and flintlock muskets.   I remember the TV commentators trying to suppress their laughter.  The Afghans could never last. It was a joke.  Twenty ears later, United States was forced to admit defeat.  It couldn’t conquer this country.  Shortly before, the USSR had tried the same thing with the same result. Before that India had tried, and before that the Persians and Ottomans had tried, Even the massive Holy Roman Empire had no success.

The only successful annexation I could find in Afghan history was to Alexander’s empire.  He annexed it in passing.  This annexation took so little time and effort that historians didn’t even bother to record the events; they weren’t interesting, there were no battles and there was no resistance.

How could this be?

We can find some clues in some of the few documents that survived.  Most of the areas where his empire existed used paper for documents. Paper degrades quickly.  But some areas used a different system, called ‘cuneiform’ for documents.  Cuneiform documents start with a little pancake shaped piece of clay.  The author would write with a special stick that represented words as marks in the clay.  They would be signed by impressing a metal seal that was unique to the author in the clay.  Once finished, it would be baked and become hard.  Paleoarcheologists have found large quantities of these documents in various places in Turkey, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Iran, Iraq, and other areas that were within Alexander’s empire.  People found them.  but they didn’t know what they said or how old they were until very recently.

Translation technology has advanced by light years in the last decade.  In the early 2020s, programmers built AI machines that would allow people to scan in a picture of the cuneiform tablet and translate the text into any language it the database.  This, together with dating tools that allowed us to determine when the tablets were written, allows us to pin down at least some of the reasons for Alexander’s success.

I will provide a list of references in the resources section for those that are interested in the details. Most of the analysis I have found comes from academic papers and they are pretty hard reading, but this quote will give you a general idea:

When Alexander the Great conquered the Persian empire, he permitted the cities to live according to their own traditions.  This was true not only for Greek cities but also for oriental cities.  About Sardis (a city in India) it is said that Alexander allowed it to live according to its own Lydian customs.

There were, of course, royal laws which were valid in the entire empire.  These laws were mostly concerned financial matters.  From the cuneiform sources we now that a diagrama (royal regulation), and ‘edict which the king established’ concerning leasing of a property a ‘royal law concerning depos’ and a ‘law of the king concerning a tax.’  These laws encroached on the autonomy of the cities.

But in the cases which were not affected by these royal laws were administered by local authorities and local laws.  In Babylon, the board of the dean and the council of the temple decided in questions concerning property. (From Land Ownership in Babylonian Cuneiform Documents, available in references.)

Large numbers of the cuneiform documents are being excavated at this time and scholars are sorting them out and translating them.  The technology needed for this is brand new so this will obviously take a long time to work out.  We only have a few pieces of information that come directly from these documents and they indicate, as the quotes above note, that Alexander didn’t conquer the lands that he untied in the traditional sense.  He didn’t come in, remove all authority, take all property, and impose his own system on the people.  He built a kind of union of people and cultures in a way that allowed them to work together.  There were a few overriding laws that were put in place that affected foundational elements of the system, but the superficial parts of the system, and the local laws and rules that affected the normal lives of the people, remained in place.

A few of the cuneiform documents indicate that Alexander introduced some aspects of western cultures into the eastern areas where they were foreign.  For example, the Babylonian didn’t have any kind of land ownership at all.  (In this way, they were probably a lot like the majority of the pre-conquest American people.)   Alexander didn’t impose ownership on them, claim he was the owner, or claim that the land had recently been sold and now belonged to corporations (as conquerors in north America did when they moved into area controlled by natives that didn’t accept ownership).  He showed them that they could use ownership as a tool, if they wanted, to help them create prosperity and investment (if people have ownership rights, they have much stronger motivations to improve and invest than non-owners).  He clearly understood (as the documents show) that there are different kinds of ownership, including the idea of selling only the right to use the land for a certain purpose for a certain length of time in exchange for fixed payments (called ‘leasehold ownership.’).  As the study on cuneiform documents shows, only a small number of the documents that have been found pertain specifically to changes of ownership in the very brief time that Alexander’s rules were in effect, so we don’t have a great many details.  But we do have enough information to know that Alexander did not simply move into areas, attack and subjugate the people there, and take their land and wealth for himself.

The Anabasis of Alexander

We have only one document that was written in paper and has survived the book burnings over the centuries that can help us understand what happened.  This book was not written at the time of Alexander. It was written 400 years after Alexander was history.  However, during the time this book was written, some texts had survived relating to the Alexander and this book, called ‘The Anabasis of Alexander,’ references its information to these other documents.

Most historians discount this book as unreliable because, they say, it contains ‘hagiography and apologia.’  Basically it means they think this book was not written to describe actual events, but to glorify Alexander and rationalize the horrible things that they (the modern historians) think Alexander must have done by providing a counterpoint.

The standard model historians work with holds that conquest involves brutal subjugation.  Since Alexander conquered land, he must have been brutal and must have subjugated the people.  Modern historians look at examples of conquest, including the conquest of the Americas by Europeans, and see such massive brutality that they can’t imagine anyone doing anything that changes a culture or in any way alters a society for the better without wiping out most of the people and subjugating the rest.  When they see a book that tells of the creation of a vast empire that doesn’t involve these activities, they think it must be a lie.  Arrian says Alexander didn’t gain control of land by fighting thousands of different rulers and defeating them all.  He wasn’t trying to take over the land and put it under his personal control.  He was trying, as his lest will and testament said, to ‘unite the European culture with the eastern one to create a culture that could be embraced by all.’ 

The different political entities he met didn’t fight him, lose, and submit themselves to his control. They met with him, saw that he had something better to offer, and joined him.

The Anabasis contains decryptions of a few battles.  There were a few battles.  Sometimes, the people in an area wanted to join him, but their governments didn’t want this.

When Alexander encountered places like this, he occasionally had to do battle with government troops in order to help the people gain control of the variables he wanted them to control.  The Anabasis describes these battles.  None of them appeared to have been very vigorous—at least not by Arrian’s descriptions—and Alexander prevailed quite quickly.  You might expect this:  if the people want the change, and a massive army is there to help them force their government to accept, the government won’t last very long.

Modern historians seem to want to think that the things Arrian described are impossible and should therefore be considered nonsense.  Since there are no other books (all of the rest, including all of his reverences, appear to have been lost in the book burnings) they can claim that they have to be right because the only evidence that conflicts with their claims that Alexander was a cruel and brutal conflict comes from a biased source.

I submit that Alexander was able to add Afghanistan to his empire in passing because he didn’t try to do the same things these other conquerors tried to do.  He didn’t try to add the resources of Afghanistan to the resources base under his control.  He didn’t approach them with an ultimatum like ‘do what we tell you or we will destroy you.’  His success only makes sense if we accept that he was not trying to do what Ngogo chimps tried to do, or what Russia, England, and the United States tried to do, and subjugate the people of Afghanistan.  He had had the good fortune to work with some of the greatest minds the world has ever seen and benefit from centuries of research about the way human societies worked.

They had found a way to get onto a path to better societies.

He was on that path.

As he passed by, he invited the Afghans to join him.

We can only really understand Alexander’s accomplishments unless we look at them in their proper context.  Many historians put Alexander at the top of the list of conquerors.  I think this misrepresents him totally.  He really belongs at the top of the list of progressive humanitarian reformers.  This one person came closer to changing the realities of human existence, and putting us on a path to sustainable, peaceful, non-destructive societies, than anyone else either before or after him.

I want to present a few quotes from the Anabasis so you can get an idea of the discussions that traditional historians had such problems with:

On the fourth day Alexander arrived at Ephesus, where he recalled from exile all the men who had been banished from the city on account of their adherence to him; and having broken up the oligarchy, he established a democratical form of government there. When the people of Ephesus were relieved of their dread of the oligarchs, they rushed headlong to kill the men who had brought Memnon into the city.  They also led Syrphax, and his son Pelagon, and the sons of Syrphax’s brothers out of the temple and stoned them to death. But Alexander prevented them making any further quest of the rest of the oligarchs for the purpose of wreaking their vengeance upon them; for he knew that if the people were not checked, they would kill the innocent along with the guilty, some from hatred, and others for the sake of seizing their property. At this time Alexander gained great popularity both by his general course of action and especially by what he did at Ephesus.

He also sent Lysimachus, son of Agathocles,150 with an equal force to the Aeolic cities, and to as many of the Ionic cities1 as were still under the Persians. He was ordered to break up the oligarchies everywhere, to set up the democratical form of government, to restore their own laws to each of the cities.

He granted the Solians the privilege of a democratical constitution; and then marched away to Tarsus, dispatching the cavalry under Philotas to march through the Aleian plain to the river Pyramus.

Here, Arrian discusses they way Alexander treats defeated enemies:

When Alexander heard that Meroës was bringing Porus to him, he rode in front of the line with a few of the Companions to meet Porus.  He was also surprised that he did not seem to be cowed in spirit, but advanced to meet him as one brave man would meet another brave man, after having gallantly struggled in defense of his own kingdom against another king.

Then indeed Alexander was the first to speak, bidding him say what treatment he would like to receive. The report goes that Porus replied:

“Treat me, O Alexander, in a kingly way!”

Alexander being pleased at the expression, said: “For my own sake, O Porus, thou shalt be thus treated; but for thy own sake do thou demand what is pleasing to thee!” But Porus said that everything was included in that. Alexander, being still more pleased at this remark, not only granted him the rule over his own Indians [Porus was the ruler of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, built around the city state of Jalalpur] but also added another country to that which he had before, of larger extent than the former.  Thus he treated the brave man in a kingly way, and from that time found him faithful in all things. Such was the result of Alexander’s battle with Porus and the Indians living beyond the river Hydaspes, which was fought in the in the month Munychion (18 April to 18 May, 326 B.C.).

Obviously, the interactions between Alexander and Porus involved a great deal more than Arrian describes.  Arrian is telling readers that Alexander was not like normal conquerors.  He didn’t want to take over land for himself to pillage it or force the people to live as he wanted them to live.  Porus was a talented administrator.  He could continue doing what he did well.  He would have to adopt some ground rules and join in the community of humankind that Alexander was trying to build.

Most likely, Alexander’s interactions with Porus were a lot like Aristotle’s interactions with Hermias. At first, Hermias was simply another who had inherited power and was bent on extending it.  But Aristotle showed him that he could use his position to make the world a better place.  Hermias realized that his own personal power was nothing compared to the good he could do for the human race.  Alexander clearly didn’t defeat Porus simply to put him into a position of control over a far larger state then he controlled before, just because he was impressed by Porus’ bearing.  The two talked.  Alexander convinced him and, from then on, ‘found him faithful in all things.’

The End of An Empire

The ‘Anabasis of Alexander’ ends with a discussion of Alexander’s last few days.

Alexander died in the hundred and fourteenth Olympiad, in the archonship of Hegesias at Athens. According to the statement of Aristobulus, he lived thirty-two years, and had reached the eighth month of his thirty-third year.  He had reigned twelve years and these eight months.

Arrian presents a long quote from the Royal Diaries which discusses his last 8 days.  Modern scholars have gone over it in detail and determined that it describes a man dying of arsenic poisoning.

Arrian discusses the ‘rumors’ that Alexander had been poisoned, from the documents that were available to him and that are not available to us (he lists Cf. Curtius, x. 31; Diodorus, xvii. 117, 118; Justin, xii. 13.  They all seem to accept that Alexander was assassinated, with differences involving only the way it was carried out.

The Rest of the Story

Alexander did not have time to name a successor.

His only son was then unborn; his wife gave birth two months after Alexander died.  Siculus discusses Alexander’s instructions about how his wealth should be divided:

 

When he was quitting life in Babylon and at his last breath was asked by his friends to whom he was leaving the kingdom, he said, “To the best man; for I foresee that a great combat of my friends will be my funeral games.” And this actually happened; for after the death of Alexander the foremost of his friends quarreled about the primacy and joined in many great combats.

 

If something that would be wonderful if it happened has never happened (say the entire known world getting unified in a way that created a true democracy and ended the threat of war), and the people who run the system don’t want the people under them to ever think it might happen, it is easy to convince them that it is impossible.

They can point out that their system is the most advanced that has ever existed (all leaders of systems claim this at all times).  It is benevolent, kind, loving, and built on truth, liberty, freedom, and justice. (Again, they all claim this.) The smartest people who ever lived fought for it and were victorious over their evil enemies.  (They also all claim this.)  If these wonderful people, who are acting under the guidance of a divine creator, couldn’t build it, it can’t possibly exist.

If any claim it can, they can be labeled ‘pie-in-the-sky idealists’ or ‘utopian dreamers.’  They can be told there is no time to worry about useless and impossible things.  We have a lot of real problems that are urgent and that we must do everything we can to solve before we can worry about this nonsense.  The enemies are just outside the borders.  Some appear to be needy civilians, but many of them are spies, trying to cross to find weaknesses and corrupt our perfect system from within.  Others don’t hide the fact that they are building enormous armies which are intended to overcome our defenses and destroy us.  There are ‘false patriotism’ among us; these people do not really love their country and will use any weakness or vacillation on the part of the people to destroy it.  If people think better societies are possible, they may stop contributing what is needed to defense (resist taxes), so any who promote weakness must be rooted out and destroyed. (This is the reason Pythagoras and Socrates were taken out.)

If it has never existed, these arguments make sense.  People accept them.  It can’t happen.  We must forget about it.

But what if it has happened?

Then this argument doesn’t work.  People now a better system is possible.  They will try to make it happen again.  If it has happened, the people who want to prevent it from happening again must alter history.  They must make it appear that it didn’t actually happen.  To use the word George Orwell coned, they must ‘disappear’ a part of the past, wipe it from people’s minds and then from the past.  In the book 1984, Orwell gives an example of ‘disappearing’ a part of the past:

The Party said that Oceania had never been in alliance with Eurasia. He, Winston Smith, knew that Oceania had been in alliance with Eurasia as short a time as four years ago.  (Oceania is Orwell’s term to represent the British Empire and its colonial progeny; Eurasia is his term for Russia and its allies.  Before 1945, England and its colonial progeny were allied with Russia.  That year, England and its progeny switched enemies, turning the ones that they had been fighting before into friends and making Russia the enemy.  The propaganda department—which Orwell was a part of—was tasked with changing the story to make it appear that England had never really been enemies with Europe, they had only had a disagreement with two European leaders which had since been resolved.  They had never really been allied with Russia at all, its leaders were always evil and England had simply found a few decent people who had helped it resolve the disagreement in Europe.)

But where did that knowledge exist?

Only in his own consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

Time will do part of the work.  If a bad system existed for a time, then a good system existed for a time, then the bad system came back, people will eventually forget the good system.  Parents will tell their children about the ‘good old days’ but the children will think of this as just another fairy tale.  People will forget.  But if there are books and detailed records, these are very dangerous. They need to be destroyed.

Shortly after Alexander was dead, the book burnings began.  Poets tell sad tales of these events.  In port cities, every ship that docked had to turn over books—on any topic and in any language—to copiers when they arrived.  The copiers would make two copies of each book, then return the originals.  One of the copies would go to the local library.  The other would go to the great library in Alexandria, which was intended to hold a copy of every book in existence.  The universities were dangerous.  Their entire purpose was to encourage open minded discussion.  The universities, including the Academy, were ‘disappeared.’ The academy would probably still be classified as a myth if its foundation had not been discovered.

One of the saddest things about destruction of knowledge is that we don’t really know how much was known before.  There are great mysteries of the world.  How were the great pyramids built?  Almost certainly, the original drawings and engineering specifications were on file at the Library in Alexandria.  Now, we have no idea how they did it.  How much was known about astronomy and geography?  (Plato claims there were regular voyages between ancient Egyptians and a continent on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.  Did these voyages happen, or is this a myth?  What happened during the first 45,000 years of human habitation in Europe, North Africa, and Asia?  There are accounts of scholars evicted from the libraries before the torch was set to the stacks of books.  They wept. It is hard for us not to weep now too. They almost certainly had insights about the world that we have yet to rediscover.

The purpose of this particular destruction of knowledge appears to have been to wipe out hope. Alexander had (at least apparently) done something wonderful.  He appears to have been well on his way to creating a truly egalitarian and democratic system, one without a class of ‘workers’ who must turn themselves into economic slaves and cannon fodder for the benefit of a tiny minority of rulers and wealthy.

The book ‘Possible Societies’ shows that such a system is possible.

The evidence we have, presented above, makes me believe that Alexander was well on his way to creating one when he was assassinated.  If they books still existed, we could figure out if this happened, and, if so, how we may be able to make it happen again.  Perhaps we will be lucky and some of the cuneiform documents that have been dug up but not analyzed, or are yet to be found, will fill in the gaps.  But now we just have a few pieces of the puzzle and all can really do is put them together as best as we can and try to figure out what the fished puzzle look like.

10: Two Roman Empires

The Roman Era is divided into two profoundly different periods.  They are so dramatically different that it wouldn’t be right to say there was just one Roman Empire.  They were two that worked entirely different ways.

The first starts the year 48BC and extends until 322 AD.  During this period, a highly industrialized production-based economy built up from a base of virtually nothing.  It had massive corporations that produced millions of tons of products that went into making modern cities.  The industrial Roman empire worked a lot like industrialized countries work today.  It had massive mines, cement plants, steel mills, foundries, factories, warehouses, organized transport companies, and retail distribution centers providing many kinds of goods for all classes of consumers and provided employment for millions of people, most of whom lived in cities.

The digital map from this link (Link to digital map) overlays known structures of the industrial Roman empire as a series of overlays on Goggle Maps. You can select the specific features you want to see and not see from the menu on the left.  It shows thousands of industrial facilities, residential housing developments, shopping malls, theaters, and other facilities.

The second period started the year 322AD and marks the period of the ‘Holy Roman Empire.’  That year, emperor Constantine ordered all industrial activity to cease.  All corporations were shut down.  All schools were closed.  People had to turn in all their books to be burned, on pain of death.  Teaching the old skills was banned and the authorities were particularly brutal toward any who tried to teach reading.

When the corporations and industrial facilities were shut down, production collapsed.  The economy, built on the same structures that support industrial economies today, stopped functioning.  Most of the people in the cities no longer had incomes and, even if they could get money it would not do them any good:  nothing was being produced and shipped to markets.  Many of them starved to death.  Since record keeping also stopped, we don’t have exact figures and can’t tell how many.  But forensic analysis later showed that, after an initial drastic fall, population eventually increased to about half what it had been in the industrial period. Most likely, at its low point, it was only about ¼ of the industrial peak, meaning that perhaps ¾ of the people died.  This period is often called the ‘the dark ages.’  It lasted for roughly a thousand years.  The Roman Empire still existed during this time, but people kept chipping away at its foundational structures, and, eventually, they couldn’t keep the bans on knowledge in place.  By the early 1400s, the imperial institutions no longer had enough power to prevent people from learning to read and exchanging information in writing. By the mid 1400s, schools began to open, research began, and industry began to revive.   This revival is called the ‘Renaissance.’  The second era of the roman empire starts in 322 AD and ends with the renaissance, which started about 1400 AD.

This chapter is about both of  these Roman Empires.

We can learn a lot of lessons about this sequence of events.  I think one of the most important of these lessons is in the often heard parable:  ‘those who do not learn the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them.’

The Industrial Roman Empire

Alexander’s empire did not overlap the Roman Empire in any significant way.  His empire centered on the wide expenses of fairly unproductive land that stretched from what is now Kazakhstan, through Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, and eastern Greece.  If you look at satellite images of this part of the world, you will see a lot of very desolate country.

It isn’t totally empty, but you will be struck by the color:  brown, particularly if you contrast it with the area that was the Roman Empire, which is dark green.  The land in the areas that became part of Alexander’s empire doesn’t get consistent moisture.  It doesn’t grow much food, at least not consistently.  People can live there.  But they have organize their existence differently than in the rich areas of what became the Roman Empire.

Modern scholars have analyzed the DNA of people who live in the areas which were the Roman Empire. They have found strong markers for the proto-humans called the ‘neanderthals.’  The neanderthals are known to have organized themselves much like the aggressive, territorial, possessive, and violent simians who live in equatorial Africa today.  It is highly likely that they descended from these particular simians.  They kept some of the instincts.  The chimps (aggressive simians) manifested a special kind of territoriality that researchers call ‘group territoriality.’  They seemed to want to do what was best for the group (in regard to getting and keeping territory) even if this was not in their own personal best  interests (they would die for their group) or in the interests of their loved ones (who they would allow to die for the group).  The identities of the members of the group change all the time, as old members die and young members take their place.  But the group continues to function the same way: trying to protect the land their ancestors claimed, even if this harmed or killed large numbers of the individuals in the group.   If they lived the same way the chimps in the Ngogo reserve act today, they have such strong ties to the land that they will die to the very last individual rather than give up the land their ancestors have claimed.

The first humans to travel to Europe were almost certainly the more mild-mannered, tolerant, and less territorial denisovans.  They descended from migratory simians.  Both their genetic and cultural heritage pushed them to avoid fights if possible. They didn’t have the fanatical bond to a specific piece of land that the chimps had.  The land they lived in could not support them year around. They had to travel.  They were used to it, like the Lakota and Sioux people of the Americas before conquest.  The land where they lived produced enough to feed a certain density of migratory people.  If their population grew above this limit, they would not have any problem spreading out. They would have reached Europe, at least in some numbers, hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Of course, they would have been attracted to the rich valleys. But eventually, more aggressive homo sapiens would arrive.  The neanderthals had different genetic ancestors.  They had different mental wiring.  They had different instincts.  They had instincts that told them to form groups that conquer land and then, once the have it, defend it for the benefit of their group from then until the end of time (or until they are removed by a more powerful force).

Perhaps the more tolerant, less violent, less possessive, and less territorial denisovans were the first.  But the DNA analysis shows that the neanderthals that arrived later either killed them all off or kept them alive but didn’t interbreed with them in ways that would have left denisovans markers.  This is not speculation. We know it is true because virtually all modern people with heritage from the area that used to be the Roman Empire have the DNA markers that tell us it is true.

Once these groups had taken possession of a piece of monopolizable land, they patrolled the borders just as chimps did to prevent any from sharing their exclusive rights to this land.  Chimps don’t know how to build walls.   We (humans) do.  The practical realities of defense kept these defended areas fairly small.  They were about the size of the entities that that modern people call ‘cities.’ Historians call them ‘city states.’ If you could go back to before 4,000 BC, you might expect to find thousands of these city states.

Some city states allowed private property.  The book ‘Possible Societies,’ a part of this series, shows that societies that allow individuals to own certain rights to land they have extremely strong incentives that encourage them to invest their time, skills, talent, resources, money, and anything else that they have into improving the property.   These incentives matter:  they encourage people to improve.  You don’t really need any scientific analysis to understand this, we see it all the time:  drive through a neighborhood and you can tell which homes are occupied by renters and by owners.  The owners take care of their homes.  They keep things working, they make investments, they improve, and they are outside when the weather is nice working on their property.  The renters, well, they don’t take good care of the places where they are living.  If the owners aren’t diligent and working hard to fix problems, their properties fall apart rather quickly.

City states like this would have advantages in war over city states that didn’t allow private property. People who are defending their own homes and their own land will fight harder than people who are being asked to fight to protect land that they are just renting, leasing, or are working as employees or slaves.  The principle of group augmentation is an evolutionary principle.  It selects groups to inhabit the most productive land by a brutal method:  it pits them against each other in war. The group that is best at war gets the land.  If all other things are equal, people will fight harder to protect land if they have an equity stake (an ownership interest) in that land.  We would therefore expect private property to have been common in the pre-imperial city states.

Many people wanted to live outside of the walls, but also have their own piece of land.  They would have wanted, perhaps, to farm some of the land outside the walls and send their produce to markets in the city to sell along with insiders.  At first, this would have been impossible:  The armies inside the walls barely had the ability to protect the interior.  They didn’t have enough resources to protect the outsiders, even those just outside the gates.

However, as technology advanced, they found they could protect some land outside the walls. The new technologies that came into existence 4,000 BC, including the use of the horse and steel, increased their capability to protect land outside the walls.  The armies inside the city states could build networks of forts outside the walls.  They could station mounted and armed soldiers there with some sort of communication system to signal the city of they needed reinforcements.  These forts would be similar to the forts the people of European ancestry built in the Americas to protect settlers along their frontiers.  They couldn’t provide total protection.  But they could provide some.  The administrators in the city states should mark off certain pieces of land outside the gates and sell rights to this land.  The buyers would know that life outside the walls was dangerous and they wouldn’t have the protection they would have if they stayed inside.  But if they could deal with the greater risks, they would be able to sell whatever they produced for the same prices as the insiders. The land outside the walls would sell for far less than the land inside the walls.  Some people would think it worth the risk.

As horses became more widely available, people would be willing to buy land that wouldn’t even be worth owning if there were no horses.  If it took 50 acres to raise enough to support a family, people wouldn’t want to buy it because a single farmer can’t work 50 acres by hand. However, with a horse, plow, and wagon, a farmer could work 100 acres easily, producing enough for a family and plenty to sell in markets in the city.

We called the tiny walled areas ‘city-states.’  We may use the term ‘states’ to refer to larger units, that include the city and the surrounding land.  By 48 BC, there were thousands of these states in what was to become the Roman Empire.

War

Most of the rulers of the states would have found ways to interact with neighboring states without being actively at war.  But states are, by their nature, confrontational.  They are built on the same foundations as the defended areas of chimpanzees:  Individuals formed into groups and identified with the group.  They would probably give the group a name, like a team name. They would be fighting to protect territory.  But not for themselves personally.  They would be fighting to protect their team’s territory.  (In other words, for the territory of France, Andorra, or Liechtenstein.)

The instincts that these people inherited from their evolutionary ancestors would push them to act this way.  The principle of group augmentation would also have formed a culture that encouraged this kind of behavior.  (For example, children may be taught songs of love for their state, told stories about the great  heroes who died for their state, and told that the greatest honor they could have themselves is to be given the right to die for the wonderful state that gave them freedom, liberty and justice for all.)

Rational self interest also pushed for war.  The rulers of the states would see that most of the lands of neighboring states was outside of walled areas and therefore couldn’t be defended as well as the areas inside the walls.  They could send armies into these areas and take control.  They could, and probably usually did, leave the people who lived in these areas unmolested.  But the taxes from this area that had gone to the former state would go to the state that had conquered the land.  If the state that claimed this ‘outside of city walls’ land didn’t have any ability to retaliate militarily (perhaps due to conflicts in other areas that took its troops away), neighboring states may take advantage of this and attack.

The leaders of the states would have to make sure their militaries were very strong.  In addition to the armies, they would have to support a large weapons industry.  With thousands of states, each using a large part of the wealth its land produced to support the military, total military expenses were massive.  No state could really afford to let down its guard and cut its military budget, because that would make it vulnerable to attack.

The Simple Solution

It seems simple to us because we know about it and we know it can work:  States can unite to form ‘united groups of states.’  These ‘united groups of states’ can set up a kind of artificial battlefield where the states can do battle with each other in a non-violent way.  They can create the governmental body that we now call a ‘senate.’  Each state can have an equal position in this artificial battlefield, with the same number of senators.  These senators can compete for benefits for their states in a forum with rules.  They will decide which benefits their states get in this artificial battlefield.

When they are forming this union, they will make up the rules for these battles.  One key reason that states that are not united have to spend as much as they can afford on the military, is that there is no way to enforce agreements.  Two states may dispute an area and come to an agreement to resolve this dispute. But without outside enforcement, the parties don’t have any way to make sure the other parties will keep their word. This means that agreements are basically worthless and most state leaders will realize they are only symbolic: they will have no effect unless they have the military power to force the other parties to honor their obligations.

If they unite, they can create a system to enforce agreements that have been made between states. The enforcement army can be far larger than any armies any of the states may field individually.  All of the states that unite can pay part of the costs of the enforcements.  All can agree to honor and respect their agreements with other sates.

This seems so simple today because we have seen it working.  But if we look closely, we will see it takes an enormous amount of effort and skill to keep this system working.  Even today, we see arguments between groups that want more power for the states fighting with people that want the united entity (the ‘nation’) to have more authority to enforce its edicts on the sates.  These fights often break into internal wars.  We often see disagreements between states that are so deep that the mechanisms of the union are not able to deal with them.  This can cause groups of states to split off from a larger group of states and form their own union of states.  At times, these unions of states collapse entirely, for various reasons, and the result is chaos while local entities fight to gain control of as much territory as they can.

We know it is not easy, even today, but we know it is possible.  Knowing something is possible allows us to mentally slide over the difficulties.  Then, when we think about situations like pre-imperial Europe, we don’t wonder why they formed unions of states, we wonder why it took so long for them to form these unions.

Traditional Views of the First Roman Empire

Traditional history books all agree on the starting year of the Roman empire: 48BC.  But, as we will see, in the year 322AD, the entire system was dismantled and all books and records of the era that were within the area of control of the empire were destroyed.  We have almost no first-person about the events.  The few documents we do have are of ‘disputed reliability,’ meaning that some historians think they reflect what actually happened, but others think they are simply stories, made up by people who had no real reason to understand what was going on.

The most notable is the book by Suetonius called Twelve Caesars, which appears to be the most often cited source of information about the period.   This book seems to focus on sex scandals involving the top officials in the government, and the sex lives of the highest officials.   Come claim the book was written after the fact to sell sex stories as if they were history, and the author—whoever it was—simply claimed to have been in a position to know what happened then.  In other words, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus may have been a made up person.

In any case, the book is clearly not written as an actual history.  It scatters and mixes what are claimed to be facts with rumors and innuendo. Large and very important periods are simply omitted.  In any case, it is hard to consider this book to be a reliable historical text. This appears to be the best reference traditional historians can find to describe the era.

We can recreate the era other ways.  The first period of the Roman empire had massive industrial facilities that churned out millions of tons of cement a year.  We know this because the facilities built with this cement still exist: you can travel all over the area that was this empire and see them everywhere.  Archeologists can go through evidence to locate the places where these facilities are.  Large industrial facilities leave evidence of their existence.  (If our empire were to collapse and enter a dark age, scientists would be able to locate the places where major industrial facilities existed, even if the dark age lasted more than a thousand years.)

I think it is a mistake to mix what we know to be evidence (the facilities themselves, which we can study) with things that we have no reason to believe are anything other than dime store fiction, and try to fit it all together. The best way to understand what happened is to examine the evidence objectively.  We have all seen the stories on TV about the lives of the emperors. This prejudices us to believe that we understand what happened then, at least in a general outline.  We are therefore tempted to think that, if other information conflicts with the mental picture, the other information is wrong.

The traditional view holds that the industrial Roman Empire began in 48BC, when Gaius Julius Caesar organized a coup to take over the Roman government.  It spread, somehow (by some method that traditional historians don’t seem interested in discussing) to include 2 million square miles of territory, including almost all of the land that is now considered to be ‘Europe.’

The traditional historians claim the spread was the result of conquest.  Caesar conquered large areas in the four years between the beginning of the empire in 48 BC and his assassination in 44 BC.  He did this, somehow, without leaving Rome for more than short periods.  While he was conquering the land, he built a massive administrative complex that was able to run this vast industrial empire.  Suetonius notes that he actually devoted most of this time to his sexual affairs, which are prominent features in the movies, television shows, and fiction books that are claimed to be ‘based on actual events’ that discuss the era.  But, other than Suetonius book, there is no real evidence that any of these things actually happened.

There is a gap in leadership between 44BC to 27BC.  Suetonius fills this gap with stories of sexual intrigue between a lot of people. I won’t repeat the stories here: you can find them all, with great elaborations, in traditional history books, fiction books that are claimed to be ‘based on facts,’ and television shows purported to be about the period. If Suetonius could get royalties for the people who were to use his work, he would have been one of the richest men in history.

The leadership gap ends, according to Suetonius, in 27BC when Octavian (Caesar’s heir, who Suetonius tells us was made heir because of sexual favors he performed for Caesar as a child) became emperor.  He took the name Augustus and began annexing massive areas to the empire, including Egypt, Dalmatia, Pannonia, Noricum, and Raetia, and Hispania.  There are no details about how he did this, why his armies were so successful, or how the administration of this land worked. After Augustus came Caligula, who was probably one of the most sexually depraved characters to ever appear on the pages of any book.  After him came a series of crazies culminating in Nero, who played his fiddle while Rome burned.  We don’t know how any of these people were able to operate this immense, diverse, and fantastically productive empire.  But this doesn’t seem to be very interesting to the people who claim to be historians.  Their books sell because they tell stories about sex.  It is repeated over and over and has been for more than a thousand years. If people tell the same story of history over and over, it becomes the standard version.  It is accepted as fact.  Any new information must fit with it, or it can’t be a part of history.

We, the members of the human race, are in a very serious mess.  We live in a world divided into nations that fight each other over ‘territory’ (just as our simian ancestors did) with weapons that can destroy the world. We are on a path to extinction. We can’t hope to find another path unless we can understand how we got onto this one.  We need a real understanding of history.

The first Roman empire expanded from a tiny state on the Rubicon River in what is now Italy into a massive industrial empire that rivaled the industrial nations that exist in the 21^st century.  Then, it suddenly disappeared.  We need to understand this.  Since the destruction of records was so thorough, we need to look other places for information.

The scientific method starts with observation.  We look at what happened. We then come up with theories that help us understand how what we observed could have happened.   A theory is an educated guess.  We look for evidence that may help us verify the theory.  The more evidence we have, the more confidence we have in the theory.

What we observe is this: In the period between 48BC and 27AD, a large number of areas throughout Europe joined a network of states that were allies.  They were part of a common market.  The states had individual armies at the beginning but, after they joined the alliances, they did away with their state armies.   Internal conflicts more or less stopped.

The only reasonable way to explain this, in my opinion, is to accept that people had been trying to work out the details of uniting groups of states for a very long time before 48 BC.  In 27 AD, the people behind this movement were able to institute changes that altered the way the government worked.  That year, the most powerful administrative system became the senate. The idea of a ‘senate’ has lasted a very long time and it works the same basic way today as it most likely worked two thousand years ago.  It is a kind of artificial battleground where the organizations called ‘states’ fight each other for advantages over other states.  They argue and, eventually, come to some agreement.  When the union of states is formed, the senators agree on rules about how these agreements are to be enforced.  They create a legislative system to interpret the agreements (with the provision that the senate can override the legislature by passing additional laws that make legislative decisions moot).  The senators, as representatives of the sates, are authorized by the state leadership to negotiate these agreements.

One of their agreements involves enforcement.

Before an effective union of states can take place, they have to have some sort of system to enforce their agreements.   We might expect them to set up a common military force.  This force will protect all states from any military threats from outside the union.  It will also be used, if necessary, to enforce the agreements made by the representatives of the states.

How did the industrial Roman empire come to exist?

The above theory appears to fit the observations.  It had to have been a union of states.  Once the union was formed, the senate may decide it is in the best interests of the union to expand its reach and to try to persuade neighboring states (which are still independent) to join the union.  Sometimes, they can get these other states to join by making concessions or agreements.  (For example, the leaders of the Republic of Hawaii were willing to let this strategically important state join the union, but only if they got a monopoly on sugar sales within the union.  The senate passed laws that made this happen and Hawaii become the 50^th state.) At other times, the senate may authorize force to be used to expand the union.  (On May 13, 1846, the senate passed a law declaring war on Mexico to force it to turn over these sates to the United States.)

It seems impossible to account for the massive and sudden expansion of the empire by adopting the view of Suetonious and those who quote him, and claiming that Caesar created an army strong enough to take over thousands of independent states, each of which had been able to resist conquest for thousands of years, somehow removing or subjugating the people there, then replacing them with administrators from Rome who were reliable and would do whatever the (depraved) emperors wanted them to do.  It just isn’t reasonable to look at history as if it was one unending sets of military battles that determined everything.  We can only really explain what happened over the 370 years the industrial empire existed by accepting that the people had figured out ways for the entities called ‘states’ to work together.

Logic tells us this would not have been easy project.  A lot of details have to be worked out.  But they did get worked out.  Most likely, the movement of organizing into united groups of states was already in place long before 48BC.  The events that Suetonius described, if they happened at all, were not directly related to anything important that happened in the empire.  My theory about the rise of the industrial Roman empire is only that, a theory, and I want to present it as such.  However, regardless of the way it happened, we know that the Roman Empire grew into  a massive collection of states that included most of what is now Europe and a large part of Mediterranean Africa.

Qqq map of Roman Empire 2023 here.

Corporations

Traditional historians want to present history as a series of events, each of which indicates progress.  We are smarter and better than our parents.  They are smarter and better than their parents were. The generation before was, therefore, stupider than we are now.  As you go back in time, you get to more and more stupid people.  People who lived thousands of years ago were therefore, by assumption, very, very stupid.

They couldn’t have known how to build complex business structures.  When archeologists find evidence to the contrary, traditional historians seem astounded.  If you read some of the many articles about finds uncovered at the archeological site in Kanesh Turkey, you will find constant references to this totally unexpected island of advanced trading that is indicated by the more than 23,000 documents from about 2,000 BC that are still being translated and studied.  These people were not stupid.  They traded the same way we trade today.  They negotiated prices and terms.  They created letters of credit so that people could verify they had been pre-approved for loans by powerful banking houses before they set out on a business trip to buy products from remote locations.  One of the facts that traditional historians seem to be most astounding is that women were involved in business and carried out trades that were every bit as significant as those orchestrated by men.

The majority of the documents themselves are being held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.  You can find photographs of the documents and their translations in the three volume set ‘Cuneiform Texts in The Metropolitan Museum of Art.’ (Copies of the texts are available in the references section of the PossibleSocieties.com website.)

The majority of these are business documents.  They describe complex trading agreements, loans, and partnership agreements; they discuss pricing and negotiate payments and discuss interest rates and other terms of repayment.  These documents make it very clear that complex business agreements are not unique to this age.

These texts tell us that partnerships were quite common 4,000 years ago.  It is simple to make a partnership:  just find a partner and make a deal.  People can build fairly large businesses with partnerships.

But if you want an extremely large business, you need to go a step beyond partnerships.  You need the kind of entity that we now call a ‘corporation.’  There is an important reason that partnerships don’t work for extremely large businesses:   People are mortal.  We all will die.  If a project depends on the input of any specific person, and can’t go on if that person dies, the project just won’t make sense to investors.  If the key person dies, the project stops and everyone loses their investment.  If you want a project that can attract enormous sums of money, and continue to function no matter how dies, you need to create an organization that has an independent existence.  It is a kind of artificial person, one that is created by decree of a government and can do the same things that real living persons can do, including enter into contracts, hire and fire workers, borrow money, and interact with government entities, both within the jurisdiction that created the entity and ‘foreign’ governments.

The first evidence we have for a modern corporation comes from the New Testament of the Bible.  As we will see, this is the only book that was known to have been written in the Roman Empire during its industrial age that was not subject to the law requiring all knowledge be destroyed.  It is the only official record that we have of the events during this period and it discusses corporations, which the Romans called ‘publicans,’ 21 times.  We know the Romans had these entities.

What are Corporations?

Before we discuss the Roman era, let’s take a general look at the issue of corporations.  In our 21^st century world, corporations are very important institutions. They have started wars and dragged countries into the wars.  (Few people know that the war called the ‘French and Indian War’ was started by a corporation controlled by George Washington called the Ohio Company of Virginia, fighting against a French corporation called the ‘Company of on hundred associates.’  Very few history books even discuss the many corporations that Washington was involved with.)  Their lobbies are highly influential in governments around the world.  Corporations have overthrown countries.  (O’Henry created the term ‘banana republics’ to refer to countries that had been taken over by United States fruit companies.)

The largest corporations in the world in the 21^st century are far, far larger, control more wealth, and have more impact on human events than the great majority of the entities we call ‘countries.’ Yet historians seem to ignore them almost entirely.  They don’t explain where they came from or how they came to have the power and control they have now.  It should not be surprising that their histories aren’t able to help us solve any real problems.  These are key institutions in the world around us.  Yet we don’t understand where they came from, how they started, how they grew or even, what they are.

We need this information.

Now let’s look at what corporations are:

If a project depends on the input of any specific person, and can’t go on if that person dies, the project just won’t make sense to investors if it is just a partnership.  If the key person dies, the project stops and everyone loses their investment.  If people want to undertake a project that will last a long time, and needs to keep going no matter who dies, they need to form corporations.

That is what they are for.

To see why this is important, imagine that you have a wonderful idea to do something that will take a lot of money.  Let’s go back to the 1970s and look at someone with such an idea, Steve Jobs. Steve was in an electronics club and the Intel corporation had just come out with a new chip, the 80286.  This wasn’t designed for computers.  In fact , at the time, there was no such thing as a ‘personal computer.’  All computers were enormous, room size devices that used custom made circuits. Steve realized that this little and very inexpensive ‘chip’ could be used as the processor to make a tiny computer that people could keep on their desks.  Working with another person at the electronic club, Steve Wozniac, he designed the circuits that would be needed and built a prototype.  He had the worlds first ‘personal computer.’

He want to an electronic store and asked if they might be able to sell it. The manager said he would be able to sell as many as they could make.  They negotiated a price. Steve realized he could easily make 50% of the amount he could wholesale the device for as profit.  He could sell as many as he could make.    He just needed some money to buy the parts to fill the first order.  He talked to some investors about the money.

They laughed at him.  It is a great idea.  But it is all in his head.  If he got hit by a bus, the money would be gone and they couldn’t get it back.  He could get the money.  But he would have to have a corporation.  The corporation would make the computers, not Steve.  If Steve got hit by a bus, the corporation would continue to operate. He had to figure out how to build a corporation.

He did.  The company is now the largest corporation in the world, worth more than the total GDP of most of the world’s nations.

To build the corporation, he had to start with a business plan.  It had to be in writing. It explained how the company would operate and how it would make money.  He then had to hire several people called ‘directors.’  These people would be hired to carry out the business plan. They wouldn’t do any actual work or make any computers, but they would hire the people who would do the work and make sure they did it.  He could be one of the directors himself if he wanted.  But he had to have a written plan in place so that other people who were still alive could replace him, if he should get hit by a bus.  He could then go to the investors.  They would review the plan and see if it was a good idea. If they thought this, they would make an offer for the amount of money they would put up in exchange for what share of the company.  If they came to terms, he would have to file some documents with the state to get a ‘certificate of incorporation.’

Once he got the certificate of incorporation, he could take it to a bank and open an account in the name of the corporation.   His investors could contribute by depositing the money in the account.  He could then have the treasurer write checks on the account to buy supplies. When he delivered the computers, the buyers would pay the corporation, not Steve.

The company was extremely successful.  In 1983, Steve decided to hire a seasoned professional corporate manager to run it.  In 1983, he hired John Scully, one of the highest paid professional corporate managers in the world, away from the giant conglomerate Pepsi.  Skully had his own ideas of management.  They conflicted with Steve’s ideas.  Technically, Skully, as the president of the company, was Steve’s boss.  After one particularly bitter argument, Skully gave Steve a pink slip:   He fired the founder of the company.

The point:  in a corporation, no one is indispensable.  The corporation continues to function no matter who leaves, dies, gets fired, gets tired, or quits.  Investors know this.  That is why they are willing to put such massive amounts of money into corporations. (As I write this in 2024, the 5,000 corporations that make up the Wilshire 5000 index have a market value of about $46 trillion;  Link to source.   By comparison, the United States government debt—the amount that has been invested in the government—is about $32 trillion.)

Because investors know that the corporations/publicans will be around for a very long time, they can justify investing large amounts of money into them.  They generally won’t have to worry about getting this money back if they need it: they can simply find someone that wants to take over their ownership position in the corporation and sell their share to that other person.  (People have more confidence in corporations and are willing to invest more if there is a vibrant market.  Governments globally work to make sure there are markets where people can get their money back by selling shares.)

Corporations don’t appear by chance.  They need a very complex legal framework to exist.  This framework has to custom designed.  Then, a government must pass laws to allow corporations to exist.

Small governments wouldn’t be able to make this happen, if the framework doesn’t already exist.  To create this framework, the government needs to control an extremely large market area.  The first place we find the right conditions for corporations to exist is in the industrial Roman empire.  Again, we know corporations did exist in that empire.  Only one book was allowed to escape the flames when the empire ended and this book discusses corporations—called ‘publicans,’ in 21 separate instances.

New Inventions

Many of the inventions that school children today are told are modern inventions were actually invented by the Romans, and then abandoned (during the dark ages, described shortly).

One example is the building material now called ‘hydraulic cement,’ often called by its patented trade name, ‘Portland Cement.’    This product is a bonding adhesive that has special chemical properties.  It starts as a dry powder.  Mix it with water, and you get a ‘slurry,’ which can be poured into any mold.  The water  ‘activates’ a chemical process that turns it into a solid as hard as granite. Normally, cement is mixed with rocks, gravel and sand together, to create a product called ‘concrete.’  But it sticks to a large number of materials and, once stuck, can’t be removed without a chisel.  (After it is totally hard, you won’t even be able to get it off with a chisel.)

Once  the cement is hard, water doesn’t degrade it a bit.  It can be outside for thousands of years (as many cement items the Romans built have been) and keep its strength.  It can be used, therefore, to make water pipes (most large water pipes are made of cement), aqueducts, bridge footings, roofs and walls for buildings, and is the primary material used to make roads.

The history books that I was taught from claim this product was first discovered by Joseph Aspdin in 1824.  But if you go to Rome, or any part of Europe that was a part of the Roman Empire today, you can see for yourself that this couldn’t have been true: millions of structures all around the empire were made of hydraulic cement and are still standing today.  (Aspdin rediscovered it and patented it as ‘Portland Cement.’)

You can understand the importance of corporations/publicans if you understand how much it costs to build a cement plant.  The amount you would need to the smallest practical cement plant would be $60 million. (Link to source.)   These plants normally take many years to build and we wouldn’t expect many of them to exist if corporations didn’t exist.

Individuals won’t invest this much money in a project if they know that the death of key people (who might get hit by busses at any time) will stop the project.  Even if they know for sure key people are safe, it wouldn’t make sense to invest this because the plant won’t make enough to repay the investment for many decades. By the time the investors get their money back, they may be dead themselves.  If the plant is a corporation, they don’t have to worry about getting their money back.  They can get returns on their money as long as the plant operates and get their initial investment back by selling their shares.

We don’t have records on the amount of cement that the Roman empire produced from records because all records were destroyed. But you don’t need records to tell that the empire produced millions of tons of concrete because you can see it for yourself just about anywhere you go in Europe.

Once corporations exist, people are willing to put massive amounts of money into ideas.  The corporation owns the idea.  They buy a share.  If the idea works out, they can get very rich.  (If you had put $1 into Apple stock in 1981, you would have gotten 10 shares; you would have collected $456.30 in dividends since then and the 10 shares would now be worth $2,000.)  The result is progress and advances in technology.

The Romans knew how to make a great many other products that are very useful.  In his book, The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World, Paul T. Craddock discusses the very advanced methods used by the Romans.  He puts the output of iron at about 85,000 tons per year.  They made a lot of machines.  (Cement which lasts thousands of years but most of the items the Romans built degraded.  Most metals, including iron and steel, need to be protected from air or they oxidize and turn into dust within a few decades.)

Pompey

We don’t have records and documents that explain the way the industrial Roman empire worked.  But we have a kind of ‘snapshot’ that can give us some idea what life was like for ordinary people.

This is from wikipedia:

Pompeii (/pɒmˈpeɪ(i)/, pom-PAY-(ee), Latin: [pɔmˈpei̯.iː]) was an ancient city located in what is now the comune of Pompei near Naples in the Campania region of Italy. Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many villas in the surrounding area (e.g. at Boscoreale, Stabiae), was buried under 4 to 6 m (13 to 20 ft) of volcanic ash and pumice in the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.

Largely preserved under the ash, the excavated city offers a unique snapshot of Roman life, frozen at the moment it was buried,[1] although much of the detailed evidence of the everyday life of its inhabitants was lost in the excavations.[2] It was a wealthy town, with a population of ca. 11,000 in AD 79,[3] enjoying many fine public buildings and luxurious private houses with lavish decorations, furnishings and works of art which were the main attractions for the early excavators. Organic remains, including wooden objects and human bodies, were interred in the ash. Over time, they decayed, leaving voids that archaeologists found could be used as moulds to make plaster casts of unique, and often gruesome, figures in their final moments of life. The numerous graffiti carved on the walls and inside rooms provide a wealth of examples of the largely lost Vulgar Latin spoken colloquially at the time, contrasting with the formal language of the classical writers.

Pompeii is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is one of the most popular tourist attractions in Italy, with approximately 2.5 million visitors annually.[4]

After many excavations prior to 1960 that had uncovered most of the city but left it in decay,[5] further major excavations were banned or limited to targeted, prioritised areas. In 2018, these led to new discoveries in some previously unexplored areas of the city.[6][7][8][9]  (To access footnotes, go to original wikipedia article.)

This link takes you to a virtual tour of the city.   You can also get a good idea what it was like by looking at the hundreds of thousands of photographs posted on the internet.  (Link.)  The main reason I want to include this information here is that I want you get a mental picture of life in this era.  I want you to see that this era was not much different in its main respects from the era we are now in.  They had homes of different sizes and different standards of comfort for people with different wealth levels.  They had public water supplies,  public baths, spas, and swimming pools.  They had bakeries, butcher shops, clothing stores, shoe stores, restaurants, bars, and little corner connivance stores.  They had public buildings including a courthouse, administrative centers, and an office devoted to weights and measures, so people could calibrate their scales and other measuring devices.

We have a snapshot in time.  Life wasn’t perfect then.  But it isn’t perfect now either.  I think if you could slip back and forth, between 21^st century Pompeii and the city of 78AD (just before the volcano blew), you would probably adjust pretty easily.  You would meet people and talk, you would get invited to dinner and take people out to dinner and, after a little wine, you would probably occasionally lose track of which of the two time periods you are in.

The Problems of Industrial Sovereignties

In 322AD, Constantine destroyed the industrial system intentionally.  I will present my theory about why he did this shortly.  But this can only be a theory; we can’t know for sure why he did it.

We just know he did.

Whatever the reason was, we can be sure of this:  The corporate-industrial system he ruled over had problems.  These problems were very serious.  They were so serious that many people, including Constantine, thought that even the most radical change that could be made wouldn’t make things any worse.

Many people today have the same thoughts about the world around us.  Many people today openly advocate the same steps that Constantine took:  Shut it all down.  Take us back to the stone age.  Make us all work the soil with our hands to grow our food.  Then, we will appreciate what we have.  We will live a real life, in tune with nature and the needs of the people around us.  Adjustment will be hard.  A lot of people will resist.  But, with enough force, it can happen.  People are forming armies as you read this to try to force this change.

Again, the saying that has become a cliché:  those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are destined to repeat them.

To talk about the problems that faced the people of Constantine time, we don’t really have to do a lot of speculation.  Industrial systems evolve in very predictable ways. The problems that they had are the same general problems we have.  Unemployment, poverty, crime, inequity in distribution of wealth, inflation, deflation, depression, and corruption are pervasive in our world today.  The same basic problems would have existed in the industrial Roman empire.  I want to take a little detour to go over the basic forces at work so you can understand why they would have had the same problems that we have now:

As industry grows, people move from the country to the cities to take industrial jobs.  The industrial tools make it possible to for individual farmers to work more land and farm sizes grow.  Incomes go up for everyone.

People start spending their earnings on housing, fuel, transportation, medical care, and other things that most of the people who lived in the pre-industrial systems couldn’t afford.  Businesses open to supply the demand.  They hire more people. They must compete with other employers for this.  This competition drives wages up.

When people have enough income to feed their families, afford fuel to keep warm in the winter, and afford medicine to keep them healthy, more of the children born are able to live long enough to grow up and have children of their own.  The population will grow.  If there is no birth control, people will often have large families.  This means that the population can grow very rapidly.  If an average of four children per couple survive long enough to have children of their own, the population will double every generation, or roughly every 25 years.  The industrial system provided enough prosperity for enough people to allow the population to grow at a very rapid rate.

If the number of jobs doesn’t increase as rapidly as the population of the working class,this system has some very serious problems.

If there aren’t as many jobs as there are people who need jobs, the unemployed will have to compete against people who have jobs and try to take the jobs away from people who have them.  (They don’t have the option of simply not working; if they can’t get jobs, they die.) The only effective way to compete over the long run is to offer to work for less money than the people who are already working.  The employers will take advantage of this and hire the people willing to work for less. This will cause total wage rates to fall.

The Roman system operated like the system we have now in several important ways.  Both are clearly ‘class based systems.’  We will see that not all societies divide the population into ‘working class’ and ‘not working class’ people.  But the societies we have today and the Roman industrial system both do this. The working class is the group that has to work ‘for a living.’  They work or they have no income.  If they have no income, they can’t get food and will die.

If the population of the working class grows faster than the number of jobs, the problem of ‘unemployment’ arises.  There are people who need jobs to make a living (stay alive) but can’t get them, because they don’t exist.

The unemployed will compete with workers to take away their jobs by offering to work for less. Wages will fall.  Now we have two problems that compound each other: Fewer people are working (those who lost the competition for the jobs by holding out for higher pay are now unemployed) and those who do work have lower wages.  The total amount the working class has available to spend falls dramatically.

The factory owners can’t sell everything they produce.  They can’t afford to make things they can’t sell, so they cut back.  They lay off workers.  Now the problem is even worse.  Stores start closing.  They lay off their workers.  People who used to go out to eat or drink can’t afford it.  The restaurants, bars, and other service industries start to lay off their people too.   At some point, the owners of corporations will start to feel fear that the market is going to collapse.  They will want to sell as quickly as they can to get out before the collapse. This creates a self fulfilling prophecy:  if they panic and sell, the market will collapse.  People who had been wealthy industrialists will lose everything.  They will stop investing.  This event is called a ‘recession.’  When government analysts see one coming, they realize they must do something quickly or the entire system will collapse.  But what can they do?

They have to do one or two things:

1.  Create jobs

2.  Cut the number of people entering the job market.

What kind of public project does these things?

There is one thing that always does both of them:  start a war.

When wars start, governments immediately take large numbers of men who are just entering the work force off of the market by making them soldiers.  They are no longer competing for jobs.  As competition stops, wages can stabilize.  The government also starts buying large quantities of weapons and other tools of war.  The industrial companies that make the weapons and the raw materials and fuels needed for weapons, have to hire.  They have to compete for workers.  But even before this starts, the supply and demand for workers has stabilized.  To hire, they need to take workers away from existing jobs.  They have to pay them more than they were paid before.  Wages have to go up.  As wages rise, people have more to spend.  Spending goes up.  Demand goes up.  Stores open to fill the demand. The stock market starts going up. The rich get richer and start spending. The economy stabilizes.  The ‘recession’ ends.

depressions

War meets a basic need of industrial sovereignty societies.  Orwell summarizes this idea in his book 1984:

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.  War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way.

In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them.  But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society.  What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war.

It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly.  All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.

As much as economic planners may want to keep wars going forever, this isn’t always possible. Things can happen to cause wars to end. Sometimes, something that was totally anticipated takes place that throws a wrench into the planning and causes a disaster.  The war that was providing jobs for hundreds of millions of people ends.

These people return and compete for jobs.  But the main industries during the war, the weapons industries, are not hiring . they lay off their workers.  These workers join the unemployment lines.   As unemployment grows, spending falls.  You can’t spend money you don’t have.  This causes greater unemployment, further declines in wages, and further declines in spending.

At a certain point, wages will fall so much that even people who have jobs won’t be able to afford to buy the necessities of life for their families.  Demand for even the most essential products—like food—will collapse.

We all have at least heard of ‘the great depression.’  The farmers couldn’t run their farms because they couldn’t get enough selling it to cover the costs of moving it to markets.  People in the cities had no money:  the factories were closed.  The great majority of the farmers owed at least some money and everyone had to pay property taxes.  If you have no income, you can’t pay.  If you can’t pay, you ‘lose your farm.’  It gets taken away from you.  If there is no one to buy it, it will just sit there.  The soil that used to be held in place by crops will blow away. During the depression, massive dust clouds circled the globe for several years.

The stock market collapsed, losing more than 85% of its value.  Homes, stores, factories, and other real estate declined just as much. People couldn’t afford taxes or mortgages.  They lost their homes. Homeless were everywhere.  Some were willing to go anywhere to get jobs. But there was no place to go.  It was a global event.

Certain politicians told their people they had a plan.  They would pull their countries out of the depression by starting an even bigger war. Their arguments were hate filled and antagonistic.  They were monsters and weren’t afraid to show it:  they knew the people were desperate . If it took monsters to get them out of the depression, they wanted monsters.  If it took the biggest war in history, even larger than the ‘war to end all wars’ that had just ended, they would embrace the biggest war in history. The politicians words were full of hate.  The crowds ate it up.  It couldn’t be wrong to go along with the crowd. Their ancient instincts, inherited from the territorial apes, told them it was the right thing to do.  Hate is good.  We are in pain.  We need to spread that pain to as many of the outsiders as we can.  They weren’t dragged into World War Two kicking and screaming.  They embraced it.

Roman Depression

There eventually came a time when the Roman legions had secured all land up to impassible natural barriers, like the great Atlantic Ocean, the Sahara Desert  to the south, the North Sea to the north, and the Himalayan Mountains to the east.

The wars were ‘won.’

The few frontiers left led to steppes and tundra’s that weren’t worth fighting over.

As the wars wound down, the commanders didn’t have to buy as many guns, bombs, uniforms, bandages, bullets, tents, and other supplies.  The factories that had made these things didn’t have to buy parts, and materials and the foundries and mines closed down.  They laid off their workers.  Soldiers lost their jobs and people who had hoped to get jobs as soldiers when they graduated from school found that the recruiters didn’t have slots available to take them in.  Unemployment increased.  Spending slowed.  Consumer demand disappeared, so consumer businesses had to close also.  People began to see that war has its limit: it can’t go on forever.  If the wars didn’t come back, the economy would not come back either.

The decline of military operations led to one of the most serious problems industrial sovereignties face: overproduction.

This type of society can produce much more than people have money to buy.  Wars balance supply with demand by destroying vast amounts of production (weapons, ammunition, and other materials of war are ‘production’ too). As long as the war continues, the economy can keep the supply and demand in balance.  They can monitor the relationship between supply and demand and, when the supply of goods gets too high, start a major campaign to destroy warehouses full of goods in a few days.  They can keep the goods from accumulating, keep prices from collapsing, and allow the economy to continue to function.

But with no war-related destruction to deplete inventories, goods piled up in warehouses.  This multiplied the effects of the consumer-related collapse many times: it meant that the businesses could not even reopen even if the government could find a way to create demand, because the high inventories would have to be depleted before anyone could hope to make a profit making more.

The business owners who had lived off their profits no longer had incomes.  They had to compete with the starving masses of job seekers for non-existent jobs.  Investors began to realize that the economy wouldn’t recover and stopped investing. Why invest if all you are going to do is lose all your money?  They realized their investments no longer produced free cash flows and were essentially worthless.  Investors, the only sub-group of society that might have been able to supply funds to get the economy going again, lost everything.

The (Truly) Great Depression

Industrial systems that are built on group territoriality are necessarily extremely complex.  They need many people to keep track of the many owners, and to protect the rights that owners get.  They need courts to litigate disputes, armies of bureaucrats to administer the programs that help farmers and other owners improve their properties, and armies of regulators and police to keep people from reacting to the incentives this system produces to harm others.

If governments don’t have enough revenue to pay these people to do their jobs, this society can’t function. Order disappears.  Any services that governments once provided will cease. The Roman cities depended on water supplies piped in from distant rivers, sewage systems to remove the waste, roads and other infrastructure to bring in food and supplies.

When infrastructure fails, when police stop showing up for work because they aren’t being paid, when jailers realize their prisoners because they can’t feed them and don’t want to let them starve to death, when no one has money (because there are no jobs) and there is nothing to buy anyway (because the factories and other productive facilities have stopped production and the farmers have abandoned their fields) life in the industrial systems turns into hell.

Armed men, mostly soldiers who now have no work, form gangs to steal what they can from whomever they can. These desperate men have weapons and have killed so much before that they are immune to moral restraint.  The gangs fight for territory, without regard for the welfare of civilians.

Private property rights had been protected by the administration and litigated by courts.  But without police and courts, these rights become meaningless.  (If the government that granted the deed to your home no longer exists and the courts and police that protected your property rights are gone, do you really ‘own’ the house?  You might believe in your heart you do but, if the people around you have guns and say you don’t, your beliefs aren’t going to mean very much.)

If the criminals want your property and they feel they want some legal justification for taking it, they will kidnap and torture you until you sign the title over to them.  In parts of our world that are disintegrating the most rapidly today (Russia, Mexico, and Africa) this is an extremely common problem: people who own any amount of property can’t go anywhere without bodyguards to protect them from kidnappers.

When these societies go into decline due to high unemployment, no one is safe anymore. No one knows who to trust.  The economy doesn’t function at all.  The government doesn’t function at all.  The entire system simply collapses.

The Unholy Roman Empire Becomes the Holy Roman Empire

This was the devastated society that the final Roman emperor, Constantine, inherited when he came to power.  Constantine must have looked at this and concluded anything had to be better.  He had to change the society to something else.  He didn’t know what, but it had to be something.

Constantine was well-educated.  He had read Socrates’ words in the books that Plato had written.  (Constantine was the one who ordered the book burnings.  The books were still around until he had them destroyed.)   He clearly felt that the industrial system was corrupt and could not work.  He must have decided he really had one choice: to create a theocracy and force the people to accept a religion similar to the one that Socrates had described in Πολιτική.

He ordered all schools closed.  All teaching was to cease forever.  All the old knowledge was to die.  Anyone found trying to pass on knowledge was to be put to death.  All books were burned.  People caught hiding books, records, or any durable documents were burned along with the documents they had tried to save.  By imperial decree, the old system was to die.

Constantine hired the best writers in the empire and brought them together in an event that is now referred to as the ‘First Ecumenical Council.’  Their job was to write a new book, The Book, the only book that would be allowed to exist in the theocratic feudalism that Constantine intended to create.

No one was to ever be in a position to doubt or dispute anything The Book said.  Once it was completed, all records that may have verified its truth, contradicted its tenants, or provided food for analysis or criticism, were destroyed.  Once this had been done, there was no way to tell if everything The Book said was absolutely true, or if the entire thing had been made up.

To make sure no objective people could look too closely at the tenets of The Book, Constantine prohibited it from ever being printed in any language other than Latin. Only select people would be allowed to learn Latin: members of the priesthood.  To be admitted into this priesthood, people would have to pass several rigorous tests verifying their absolute faith.  No one without the necessary faith would be allowed to learn Latin.  They wouldn’t be able to contradict The Book because they wouldn’t be able to read it.

Constantine wrote laws that required everyone to accept the new religion on penalty of death.  He formed a body called the ‘Inquisition’ to make ‘inquiries’ into the faith of those who had expressed doubt.  Their classic method of inquiry was called ‘trial by fire.’  People suspected of not believing would have their faith tested by burning them alive.  If they never stopped professing their faith while flames consumed their bodies, they had passed the test.  Their ashes would get a Christian burial and the families of the victims would be told that their loved ones had been granted the greatest possible honor, the right to spend eternity at the right hand of God.

If they didn’t show the truest and purest faith while dying, this was proof they were non-believers, and this made their friends and families suspect.  The Inquisition would then test the faith of family and friends by the same method.

As you might imagine, people didn’t want to have to take this test.  They went to great lengths to avoid saying or doing anything that might make them appear anything less than the truest of believers.  Even more importantly, they didn’t want their loved ones to have to take this test.  Anyone who went to the executions could witness these people loudly and vehemently professing their faith in the glory of Jehovah in their last minutes while they withered in pain from the flames.  Many tell stories of watching happy souls float to heaven on the smoke from the pyres.  Soon, not a person could be found who wasn’t an ardent and true believer in the new faith.

Constantine dismantled the entire mechanism of the empire.  He disbanded any parts of the government that would no longer be necessary and turned the rest over to the church.  The great Roman Empire would become the Holy Roman Empire.

For all practical purposes, the war-driven empire started by Caesar some 400 years earlier ceased to exist. Its institutions either faded away or were purposely destroyed.  It was as if time had turned backward.  The entire empire turned back into a feudal sovereignty, with its basic structures enforced by an all-powerful church.

Why Did Constantine Impose Christianity on the Roman Empire?

We can’t know the exact reason Constantine did what he did.  We don’t have any tools that allow us to read the internal contents of people’s minds.  We can’t even do this with living people.  Constantine has been dead for more than 1,600 years.  But we can speculate based on the things that we do know:

Constantine never took the rites of the new church himself.

On his deathbed, priests came to him and told him it would look bad, for the future of the church, if he didn’t at least allow himself to be baptized before he died.  But he still refused.

Christian historians would very much have preferred that Constantine had become a Christian.  This would have allowed them to claim that he forced this religion on the millions of other people because he believed it was true.  Since he didn’t take the rites, he clearly had some other reason for forcing it on the people.

What was this reason?

Historians and religious scholars have debated this for centuries.  Some claim his motivations were political.  His grip on power was fading as his dysfunctional society crumbled. He wanted to maintain his hold on power by finding something for his people to believe in.  It is also possible he was trying to do the only thing he thought could create a better society.  He may have been simply following Plato’s advice about the only way to create a sound system by forcing people to accept a religion that preached afterlife judgment and paradise for those who were righteous.  Personally, I think he thought he was doing the only thing possible.  He read the book Πολιτική and took the suggestions in the final pages to heart. He thought he was doing the best thing.

The measures he took causes a total collapse of the industrial system.  All industrial production ceased for more than a thousand years. People were thrown back in time, not centuries, but millennia.  We don’t know how many died, we only know that the population collapsed.  It is hard to imagine how life must have been for those who were living in cities when it ended.

12:  Gunpowder and Gold

 

A crystal grows in caves with a great many bats and therefore a great deal of bat manure. 

This same crystal grows in cool, damp areas where a great deal of feces accumulates, including stables and human outhouses.  This crystal can be ground up; it yields a very fine white powder that chemists call ‘saltpeter.’

Zeng Gongliang was a chemist.  Zeng was mixing different materials with saltpeter to see what would happen.  At one point, he ground up charcoal into a fine powder, mixed it with the fine saltpeter, and then set it on fire. 

The mixture exploded. 

He tested various mixtures to see which one gave the most powerful explosion.  His published findings indicated that the largest explosion came with a mixture of 3/4 saltpeter and 1/4 charcoal. 

 

Many videos on YouTube show people creating the same explosive mixture and setting it off, if you want to see this done.  Look for ‘homemade gunpowder.’  Please don’t try this yourself: it may be fun to some people watching strangers blow off their own hands, but it is not so fun if it happens to you

 

He tried different things with this mixture.  At one point, he rolled up some powder inside of a paper and put it into a fire.  The tube exploded with an extremely loud noise and a very bright light. Zeng had invented firecrackers

 

Modern chemists know why a mixture of saltpeter and charcoal explodes:

Normally, charcoal burns slowly because it needs to get oxygen from the air to burn. Only a small amount of air can get to the charcoal every second, so the charcoal can’t burn very rapidly. Saltpeter, with the chemical name ‘potassium nitrate’ (KNO₃), has a large amount of oxygen in a solid form.  The spark causes all of the charcoal to get enough oxygen to burn and it all burns at once.  The reaction releases the same amount of energy it would if the charcoal burned slowly, but the energy release takes place in a fraction of a second rather than over a period of hours.  The result is an explosion of energy. 

 

In 1044, Zeng and his colleagues Ding Du and Yang Weide published their findings about the exploding powder in the book Wujing Zongyao (武经总要 ). 

 

Qqq gunpowder book  page 240

 

Military Uses

 

At first, Chinese doctors used the new technology mainly for medical purposes.  Chinese doctors believed that infections were caused by evil ‘humors’ or spirits that got into people’s bodies.  They believed that the humors were sensitive to noise and could be frightened out of the body by loud and sudden noises.  They found they could make very loud noises with firecrackers. 

Over the next few decades, various researchers looked for other uses for the new product.  They eventually found that a slight modification in the formula that Zeng and his colleagues reported could create an even more powerful explosion. 

The new formula was 75% saltpeter, 15% charcoal, and 10% sulfur. This mixture of chemicals is now called ‘gunpowder.’

Military researchers found they could use this powder to make weapons. If they put the powder into a small closed metal container, drilled a hole in the container, put a piece of paper with a little bit of the powder on it into the hole, then set fire to the paper, the device would explode with incredible force, sending shards of metal in all directions with enough power to tear any person nearby to shreds.  They had invented the device now called a ‘grenade.’

If they did the same thing with a much larger container, they could get a device that would explode with enough force to destroy a building.  They had invented a ‘bomb.’

They then found that they could coat the inside of a tube with the powder by packing the tube first with powder and drilling out the middle, leaving only a thin coating of powder on the inside of the tube.  If they blocked one side of the tube and set fire to the other, the tube would fly wherever it was pointing at a very great speed.  This kind of device is called a ‘rocket.’

They eventually found that if they built the rocket big enough, it could carry a grenade a long distance; when it arrived at its destination, the grenade would explode, killing everyone nearby. 

This invention is still an important tool of warfare; it is called a rocket propelled grenade (RPG). 

The next invention involving gunpowder became the most important of all. They found that if they had an extremely strong tube that was closed at one end, with a tiny hole for the fuse, they could put powder in the tube and pack it down.  They could then put some sort of bullet, rocks, or a metal ball in against the powder, then light the mixture through the tiny hole.  The explosion would send the projectile flying through the air in the direction the tube was pointing.  They had invented the devices that we now call ‘guns’ and ‘cannon.’ 

The earliest recorded information we have about these new weapons comes from The History of the Song Dynasty (宋史 , pronounced Song Shur), published in 1232 AD. 

This book does much more than describe the weapons.  It explains how to build all of them, with specific instructions about the different mixtures of ingredients to make the perfect powder for each type of weapon. 

Here is one description of a bomb detonation from 宋史 (Song Shur):

 

He lit it and a clap of thunder was heard, the walls crumbled, and smoke covered the sky.  Many soldiers outside died of fright.  When the fire went out, they went inside and failed to find even the ashes of the 250 defenders; they had disappeared without trace. 

 

 

The Spread of Gunpowder and Advanced Weapons

 

At that time, the Khans of China were at war with the Sultans of the Moslem world.  The Chinese brought in the new weapons.  The Sultans realized they couldn’t compete without having weapons themselves.  How would they ever be able to figure out how to make them? 

In this case, it wasn’t hard: Moslems could read.  The Chinese had published the information about how to make these devices. 

Many people in the 21^st century world see that areas under the control of Islam tend to be far more repressive with information than areas under the control of Christianity.  This wasn’t always the case.  The two religions have switched back and forth in this regard over the centuries, each taking turns at its era of repression.  As of the mid-1200s, Christianity was a far more repressive religion.  Only a tiny percentage of the people were allowed to learn to read and the only things they could read were religious books.

The Islamic world had schools and libraries.  When the sultans of the Moslem world realized the Chinese had these new weapons, they sent researchers to China and they came back with copies of books about the product, including the 宋史.  They began to build their own gunpowder plants and make their own bombs, grenades, rockets, and guns. 

In the year 1260, the Moslems used cannon, bombs, grenades, and other gunpowder-based weapons against the Chinese Khans in the Battle of Ain Jalut. Link to source. 

The 1270 Book of Military Horsemanship and Ingenious War Devices (كتابالفروسيةالعسكريةوالحيلالحرب), Kitab Al-Furusiyyah Wa Al-Manasib Al-Harbiyyah, published the same basic descriptions of gunpowder-based devices as the earlier Chinese book, Song Shur (宋史).  It explains how to build grenades, rockets, bombs, cannon, and guns; it explains how to make the powder for each of these different products. The 1270 book gives a total of 172 formulations of gunpowder for various uses. 

 

The Absolute Need To Allow People

To Use Their Minds

At the time, the Moslem and Christian worlds were involved in a series of wars that had been ongoing for more than a hundred years.  These wars were over possession of a certain parcel of land in the eastern Mediterranean that the leaders of both religions considered to belong to their religions, due to statements in the scriptures that both religions shared. 

 

Three religions on earth are called the ‘Abrahamic religions.’  These three religions, Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, are all built on principles established in Book one of the Pentateuch (first five books of the Torah).  The passage below is common to all three of the religions: 

In that day LORD JEHOVAH established a covenant with Abram and said to him: “To thy seed I shall give this land from the river of Egypt and unto the great river Euphrates

According to date calculations made by modern scholars, ‘That day’ was in the year 1896 BC. To this day (more than 3,000 years later) the three religions above have been fighting each other to gain control of this land.  They all dispute the meaning of the above phrase. 

Abram had 17 male children. 

This was his ‘seed.’ 

How should the land be distributed among them? 

Under Moslem law, the first born son inherits all.  The first born was Ishmael, who was an ancestor of the founder of the Moslem religion, Muhammad.  This means the only people who could possibly have claims to this land are the descendents of Ishmael, which means that Muhammad and all other ancestors of the Islamic religious leaders inherited it and it belongs to them and their people.  No one else has any right to it.

Christians claim that Ishmael didn’t have any inheritance rights because he was illegitimate.  He was the son of Abram, butt not by his wife:  his mother was one of Abrams female slaves.  Under Christian law, the child of a male owner and his female slave is also a slave.  (Thomas Jefferson had several children by his female slaves.  All were considered slaves and sold for profit.)   Slaves can’t own property at all, let alone inherit.  According to Christians, Moslems have no rights to this land.  The first legitimate son of Abraham was Isaac.  Isaac was the ancestor of Jesus Christ and all other early Christians.  Christian leaders have claimed from the earliest days of the religion that the covenant meant the land belonged to them, by order of their deity.  It is Christian land.  Under the mandate given to the first man, Adam, by the creator, they have an obligation to hold dominion over it (to establish control by force) and to subdue it (alter it to meet their needs). 

After Isaac, Abraham had 12 more sons.  (They all appear to have been illegitimate; their status is not noted.)  These sons went on to become the founders of the 12 tribes of Israel and the ancestors of all Jewish people.  Jews claim that standard inheritance laws don’t matter because the document states they are the chosen ones, which they interpret to mean ‘chosen to get this land.’ 

This dispute has been going on for more than a thousand years.  The first record we have specifically of Christians and Moslems fighting is the ‘First Crusade,’ announced at the Council of Clermont by Pope Urban II in the year 1195. 

In various forms, these wars have continued to this very day.  Today, and every other day for more than a thousand years, people who believe their religion is right, are collecting money from their people (as taxes, tithes, and other contributions) to raise armies and build weapons to enforce their claims.  The powers in the area officially spend more than $100 billion a year on their militaries and numerous other superpowers that are backing up the local powers spend hundreds of billions more.  Many people I know believe that if the end of the world comes, it will be a result of this battle

 

Before the Moslems began to use gunpowder, the Christians had been doing fairly well in the crusades.  By 1269, they had gained total control of the Kingdom of Jerusalem (the center of the disputed are) and all surrounding land.  They had held this land long enough to erect massive fortifications. The Moslems had been doing their best to take this land back, but as long as they were using nothing but swords, arrows, crossbows, and other simple weapons against fortified walls, they couldn’t make any progress. 

In 1270, the Moslems attacked with rockets, grenades, cannons, and rocket-propelled grenades.  The Christians had no chance at all.  They were thrown out of Jerusalem in a matter of weeks.  They put up as much resistance as they could but were pushed back and back.  In 1291 the Christians lost their last bases in the disputed territory with fall of Tripoli and Acre.  They Moslems pressed their advantage and, by 1303, they had removed the Christians entirely from North Africa. 

The Sultans saw an opportunity.  They considered Christianity to be a heretic religion based on false beliefs.  They could wipe Christianity off the face of the Earth.  They attacked southern Europe and took land very quickly. 

 

A Forced Renaissance

People high in the Catholic church hierarchy realized that they to change. The Moslems had weapons that were far more effective than any they had.  Constantine had ended research, learning, reading, education, and all but the simplest technology.  The corporations that once built magnificent structures and machines, in the ‘pre-holy empire’ days, were gone; the financial structures that had supported these corporations no longer existed.  Only a very tiny percentage of the people could read, and these people couldn’t read anything other than the Bible, because all books other than the Bible were banned.  All this would have to change or Christianity would be wiped from the face of the Earth. 

By the mid 1300s, reformist Cardinals controlled the conclave that selected the Pope.  On November 6, 1362, the conclave selected Guillaume de Grimoard of France to the post.  He took the name Pope Urban V. 

Urban was extremely progressive.  His first act as Pope was to change the Roman constitution to allow open study of fields other than religion.  He spent most of the rest of his term in office opening new schools.  This is from the New Advent Christian Encyclopedia:

 

He founded universities at Cracow (by a Bull of 1364) and at Vienna (by a Bull of 1365), and the University of Orange; he revised the statutes of the University of Orléans; and gave great assistance to the universities of Avignon and Toulouse.  At Bologna he supported the great college founded by Albornoz and paid the expenses of many poor students whom he sent thither. 

 

Of course, the people in charge realized that education was dangerous. They didn’t want people to know too much.  Educated people threaten religious power structures: they will eventually figure out scientific explanations for things that the religions claim had supernatural causes.  They will expose flaws in the belief system leading people to begin to doubt the beliefs.  But the church had no choice.  It had to allow research and begin to build the new weapons or it would be wiped out. 

Schools opened all over the empire.  These schools taught reading, writing, and the system of writing numbers and performing mathematical calculations called the ‘Arabic numbers.’

 

The Rediscovery of the Existence of the Rest of the World

In 1416, a businessman named Henrique de Avis opened a navigation school in the city of Sangres, Portugal.  In 1419 Henrique became governor of the province of the Algarve in Portugal.  He wanted his province to become a leader in what he thought would be a critical industry for the future: shipping.  He got funding for the first large shipyards that had existed since the time of Constantine.  These shipyards, built in Tome, Portugal, were capable of building ocean-going ships. 

The people didn’t have the necessary skills. Henrique opened a school to develop and teach the skills.  The school’s library began to collect as many of texts on ship building, navigation, or anything to do with this topic as the librarians could find. 

Henrique de Avis was nicknamed ‘Henry the Navigator.’ He was the driving force behind the shipyards at Tome and the navigation school at Sangres. 

Some of the ancient maps that the librarian was able to acquire showed an archipelago of islands about 900 miles to the west of Portugal, deep in the Atlantic.  The Romans had discovered these islands and populated them; they called them the ‘Fortunate Islands.’ Henry sent more than a hundred different expeditions to try to find these islands.  Finally, in 1427 Diogo de Silves rediscovered this island chain.  The Romans had built some structures there, and people had lived on the islands at various times in the past, but when de Silves rediscovered the island chain, no one lived there.

Henry claimed these islands for Portugal, and as the ‘discoverer’ had naming rights, so he called them the name they now bear: the ‘Azores.’

The Azores were an important discovery because they were clear proof that Atlantic coast was not the end of land on Earth, something that had been accepted for centuries.  There was land to the west.  Some zealous map makers began to piece together information from old Roman texts that led them to believe there were continents to the west of the Atlantic. 

We will get to that story shortly

 

Africa, India and China

India and China produced many very valuable things that became incredibly difficult for Europeans to get after the Christians/Europeans lost their land in the Middle East.  This included silk, some extremely important  medicines (people will pay anything to get their loved ones well), and spices that were worth many times their weight in gold. 

When the Christians had a presence in the Middle East, they could get these things because both the Persian Gulf and Red Sea are accessible to the Arabian Sea, which joins with the Indian Ocean.  Traders came up these waterways bringing goods from India and China and sold them in the Middle East. 

But the Europeans/Christians had lost all their land in the Middle East by 1300. 

Only a few people in Europe were rich enough to be able to afford to buy goods from India and China.  But some of these people were incredibly wealthy, with the cash flows from millions of acres of land going into their treasuries each year.  They were willing to pay such incredible sums for items from India and China that people would go to fantastic lengths to get them.  After the Christians lost their land in the Middle East, the only route to China was a 4,000-mile trek over some of the most rugged terrain on Earth.  A few people made the trip, but not many.  They brought some items, and whatever they brought was worth far more than its weight in gold. 

By the mid 1400s, Henry’s school of navigation had discovered a great many pre-Constantine Roman navigation charts.  The northern part of the coast of west Africa is the western part of the great Sahara Desert.  The coast is barren and empty, with no fresh water, no towns, and no human habitation. During the Dark Ages, the only vessels involved in trade were small boats that had to stay close to shore. Since the shore had nothing for more than a thousand miles, the traders had no reason to travel down the coast. The Portuguese found charts that indicated that the Romans had found very rich ports for trading quite far south on the coast of Africa.  Portuguese ships made it to some of these ports, reaching Senegal and Cape Verde in the year 1445.  They found the very rich lands around the Gulf of Guinea in 1462. 

In 1469 King Alfonso V granted the monopoly of trade in part of the Gulf of Guinea to merchant Fernão Gomes.  As part of the terms of his contract, he had to explore 100 leagues (about 300 miles) of the coast each year.  In 1471, Gomes’ explorers reached Elmina on the Gold Coast (present day Ghana), and discovered a thriving gold trade between the natives and visiting Arab and Berber traders.  Gomes established his own trading post there, which became known as ‘A Mina’ (‘The Mine’).  In 1482, Diogo Cão discovered the Congo River.  In 1486, Cão continued to Cape Cross, in present-day Namibia, near the Tropic of Capricorn

The areas these people visited had an enormous population.  They could talk to these people and find out what was further south.  In 1488, Bartolomé Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope on the southern tip of Africa. From there, he could talk to people who lived on the east coast of Africa.  Dias found these people traded with India and China. 

The Portuguese would eventually make it to India and begin trading with people there over the long, long route down the coast of Africa, around the Cape of Good Hope, up the east cost, and across the Indian Ocean.  But this would not happen until 1497.  By then, another explorer would have tried to get to India by an entirely different route. 

 

the Shortcut to India

Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli was an author, researcher, and map maker. He lived in Florence.  His friends knew him as ‘Paul the Physician’ Paul the Physician was a member of a group of intellectuals who searched for and studied Greek, Egyptian, Roman, and other pre-Constantine works. 

 

We have Columbus’ copy in Spanish translation from the historian Bartolomé de las Casas, in his book Historia De Las Indies.  Columbus had ordered in his will that all of his papers and documents be handed over to Las Casas, who was writing a book about ‘The Indies.’  Las Casas reproduces many of Columbus’ papers in his book, including Toscanelli’s letter.  Except the salutation, it is the same as the letter sent to Martins.

 

Other members of the group were Marsilio Ficino (writer, philosopher), Leon Battista, Alberti (mathematician, writer), the Pope Nicholas V, (religious leader) and Nicholas of Cusa (religious leader)

Toscanelli’s library in Florence was said to have had the largest collection of pre-Constantine books that existed anywhere in Europe at the time, exceeding that of even the library of Henry the Navigator. 

On the 25^th of June, 1474 Toscanelli wrote a letter to his friend Fernão Martins, a priest at the Lisbon Cathedral.  This letter explained that Paul the Physician and his colleagues had discovered from the Roman texts that the world was a sphere.  This meant it was possible to get to the east by going west.  The original letter, written in Latin, is currently part of the historical documents collection at the Seville Library in Spain.

A sailor who lived in Palos, Spain, heard of this letter.  The sailor’s name was ‘Columbus.’ Columbus wrote to Toscanelli for more information.  Toscanelli sent Columbus a copy of the same letter he had sent to Martins, with another copy of the map. 

Here are some excerpts from the letter:

 

To Christopher Columbus, Paul the Physician wishes health. 

I perceive your noble and earnest desire to sail to those parts where the spice is produced, and therefore, in answer to a letter of yours, I send you another letter which, some days since, I wrote to a friend of mine, a servant of the King of Portugal before the wars of Castile, in answer to another that he wrote me by his highness’s order, upon this same account. And I also send you another sea-chart, like the one I sent to him, which will satisfy your demands. 

This is a copy of the letter:

I have very often discoursed concerning the short way there is from hence to the Indies, where the spice is produced, by sea (which I look upon to be shorter than that you take by the coast of Guinea), yet you now tell me that his highness would have me make out and demonstrate it, so that it may be understood and put in practice

Therefore, though I could better show it to him with a globe in my hand, and make him sensible of the figure of the world, yet I have resolved, to make it more easy and intelligible, to show the way on a chart, such as is used in navigation, and therefore I send one to his majesty, made and drawn with my own hand, wherein is set down the utmost bounds of the earth, from Ireland in the west to the farthest parts of Guinea, with all the islands that lie in the way; opposite to which western coast is described the beginning of the Indies, with the islands and places whither you may go, and how far you may bend from the North Pole towards the Equinoctial, and for how long a time--that is, how many leagues you may sail before you come to those places most fruitful in spices, jewels, and precious stones

Do not wonder if I term that country where the spice grows, West, that product being generally ascribed to the East, because those who sail westward will always find those countries in the west, and those who travel by land eastward will always find those countries in the east! The straight lines that lie lengthways in the chart show the distance there is from west to east; the others, which cross them, show the distance from north to south.  I have also marked down in the chart several places in India where ships might put in, upon any storms or contrary winds, or other unforeseen accident

From Lisbon directly westward there are in the chart twenty-six spaces, each of which contains two hundred and fifty miles, to the most noble and vast city of Quinsai [the city now called Hangzhou, slightly south of Shanghai, used to be called Quinsai] which is one hundred miles in compass—that is, thirty-five leagues.  In it there are ten marble bridges.  The name signifies a heavenly city, of which wonderful things are reported, as to the ingenuity of the people, the buildings, and the revenues

From the island of Antilla, which you call the Island of the Seven Cities, and whereof you have some knowledge, to the most noble island of Cipango are ten spaces, which make two thousand five hundred miles.  This island abounds in gold, pearls, and precious stones; and, you must understand, they cover their temples and palaces with plates of pure gold; so that, for want of knowing the way, all these things are concealed and hidden--and yet may be gone to with safety. 

 

The original maps have not been found.  However, various historians have reproduced them based on information in the letter and Toscanelli’s other maps.  The most common reproduction is shown below, with Toscanelli’s land masses in dark gray, the latitude and longitude lines in black, and the actual land that we know now exists shaded in light gray:

 

Toscanelli map Qqq map here  250

 

Toscanelli said that each rectangle is 250 miles wide by 350 miles high. You can determine distances by counting the squares and multiplying.  The distance from Portugal to Cipango (Japan) is shown on the map to be 5,000 miles, with mainland China another 1,500 miles to the west.  The island of Atlantis is shown to be about in the middle.  Atlantis is drawn at about 20 x 150 miles, so explorers could easily miss it. 

The shortest route across the Atlantic to the closest island in the Indian Ocean would go from Spain to the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, then across on an almost even latitude for about 4,000 miles due west. 

Shortly after Columbus got this map, he began making attempts to get funding for a voyage to the west.  On April 17, 1492, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain signed a document called the ‘The Capitulations of Santa Fe’ which stated the terms that the royal couple and Columbus had agreed to for the voyage. 

This document granted Columbus the right to explore in the west.  If he found any land, he would be made the ‘Governor, Admiral, and Vice-Roy’ of the lands he discovered. 

Here are some excerpts from the text of the Capitulations:

 

Qqq caputulations   page 250

 

For as much of you, Christopher Columbus, are going by our command, with some of our vessels and men, to discover and subdue some Islands and Continent in the ocean, and it is hoped that by God’s assistance, some of the said Islands and Continent in the ocean will be discovered and conquered by your means and conduct, therefore it is but just and reasonable, that since you expose yourself to such danger to serve us, you should be rewarded for it.  And we being willing to honour and favour You for the reasons aforesaid:

Our will is, That you, Christopher Columbus, after discovering and conquering the said Islands and Continent in the said ocean, or any of them, shall be our Admiral of the said Islands and Continent you shall so discover and conquer; and that you be our Admiral, Vice-Roy, and Governor in them, and that for the future, you may call and stile yourself, D.  Christopher Columbus, and that your sons and successors in the said employment, may call themselves Dons, Admirals, Vice-Roys, and Governors of them

 

Columbus

Columbus left Cadiz, Spain on August 3, 1492 with three ships.  The first stop was the Canary Islands, which are just off the coast of Africa about 1,250 miles southwest of his starting port. Columbus and his crew spent a month on the Canaries, getting the ships ready for the long voyage to the west. They set sail to the west on September 6, 1492 and made an average of about 100 miles a day for the next month.

On October 12, a sentry saw the first land they had seen since leaving the Canaries.  This is from the ship’s logs:

 

The land was first seen by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana, although the Admiral at ten o’clock that evening standing on the quarter-deck saw a light, but so small a body that he could not affirm it to be land. 

At two o’clock in the morning the land was discovered, at two leagues’ distance; they took in sail and remained under the square-sail lying to till day, which was Friday, when they found themselves near a small island, one of the Lucayos, called in the Indian language ‘Guanahani.’ 

 

On October 13 they landed.  Here is the log entry for that date:

 

The Admiral landed in the boat, which was armed, along with Martin Alonzo Pinzon, and Vincent Yanez his brother, captain of the Nina.  The Admiral called upon the two Captains, and the rest of the crew who landed, as also to Rodrigo de Escovedo notary of the fleet, and Rodrigo Sanchez, of Segovia, to bear witness that he before all others took possession (as in fact he did) of that island for the King and Queen his sovereigns, making the requisite declarations, which are more at large set down here in writing. 

 

Later, in his personal logs, Columbus writes

 

The Indians then came to the ship in canoes, made of a single trunk of a tree, wrought in a wonderful manner considering the country; some of them large enough to contain forty or forty-five men, others of different sizes down to those fitted to hold but a single person.  They came loaded with balls of cotton, parrots, javelins, and other things too numerous to mention; these they exchanged for whatever we chose to give them. 

I was very attentive to them, and strove to learn if they had any gold. Seeing some of them with little bits of this metal hanging at their noses, I gathered from them by signs that by going southward or steering round the island in that direction, there would be found a king who possessed large vessels of gold, and in great quantities. I endeavored to procure them to lead the way thither, but found they were unacquainted with the route. 

 

The next day (October 13), he had more interactions with these people and described them this way:

 

Weapons they have none, nor are acquainted with them, for I showed them swords which they grasped by the blades, and cut themselves through ignorance. They are all of a good size and stature, and handsomely formed.  It appears to me that the people are ingenious, and they very quickly learn such words as are spoken to them. 

They are very gentile and without knowledge of what is evil, nor do they murder or steal.  Your highness may believe that in all the world there can be no better or gentler people.  All the people show the most singular loving behavior and they speak pleasantly.  I assure Your Highnesses that I believe than in all the world there is no better people nor better country.  They love their neighbors as themselves and they have the sweetest talking the world and are gentle and always laughing. 

 

Later that day, his log entry included the following sentence:

 

I could conquer the whole of them with fifty men, and govern them as I pleased. 

 

Why People Care So Much about Gold

Columbus goes on and on about something Columbus clearly cares deeply about: gold.  He notes in passing that this land appeared to be the ‘terrestrial paradise’ (the Garden of Eden), that the land was densely inhabited with people who were prosperous, kind, generous, and peaceful, and that the land was fertile and the natives raised a great many wonderful food crops Europe didn’t have.  He mentioned the immense beauty of the land, the amazing diversity of the forests, and the incredible friendliness, generosity, and kindness of the people there.  He mentions the virtual absence of crime, the unbelievable honesty and amazing order of their societies. 

He mentions all of these things in passing, as if they are minor details.

There is one thing that he goes on and on about, as if it is the most important thing in the world: the metal gold. 

He, and thousands of people who followed him, would later commit atrocities that are so incredible they defy description to get this metal.  He would destroy the beautiful forests to make charcoal to make weapons to conquer people and take even more gold away from them, before destroying them and their civilizations so they could sell the land for—you guessed it—more gold. 

Why would this metal be so incredibly important to him?  Why would anyone care about it at all?

We need to know the answer to this question before we can understand the events of the next 200 years, which largely focused on attempts by people from the Eastern Hemisphere to get this metal.  People were willing to do incredible things to get this metal back then and are willing to do the same things today

Why? 

Gold isn’t a particularly useful metal.  It can’t be hardened to make tools, as can many extremely common metals.  It has some special abilities to conduct electricity that other metals don’t have, but these didn’t matter before the discovery of electricity.  It can be used for jewelry, but so can a lot of other metals which are a great deal more common. 

Why would anyone care about it? 

To really understand this, you have to understand the basic relationship between gold and the right to buy and own the streams of value that come from land. After Julius Caesar took over Rome, he intended to expand his area of control as much as he could.  He needed to buy as many weapons and other supplies as he could get.  The people that made these items needed some sort of tool to use as currency so they could make trades.  Gold and silver only existed in limited quantities and couldn’t be counterfeited.

Gold had the qualities they needed to use the metal as a currency. If sovereigns had grain and wanted to trade it for weapons, but the weapon makers had no need for wagon loads of grain, the sovereigns could offer to give them gold in exchange for the weapons, with a promise to then redeem the gold for grain later, to anyone who tendered it.  The weapon makers could pay their workers and suppliers with gold.  The workers and suppliers could then use the gold to buy food. 

If the weapons makers got more gold for their weapons than they needed to pay their workers and suppliers, they could use the extra gold to hire servants.  The servants would accept the gold because they knew they could always trade it for food. 

The gold will eventually find its way back to the kings or other rulers who control the grain.  After this happens, the sovereigns have essentially traded their grain for weapons. The gold was only involved as a medium of exchange. 

When Julius Caesar conquered land, he sold large parts of it to both individual farmers and corporations (publicans).  He needed to get paid for the land in a currency he could use to pay his troops (so they could buy food) and buy weapons (so he could hold his land and conquer more). 

He needed whatever currency the weapon makers accepted. 

They accepted gold, so he needed gold when he sold the land. Because sellers of parts of the world accepted gold, people who wanted to buy parts of the world could buy it if they could get gold. 

In sovereignties and other societies that accept that parts of the world can be owned, people who don’t own land don’t have any income unless they work.  No income means no food. It means death.  If you live in such a society and don’t own income-producing land, you are a kind of economic slave.  You will have masters (your employers) and have to do whatever they tell you to do or you will be punished by being fired from your job and this means death. Gold could buy an income because it could be traded for income-producing land. 

If you bought land that generated an income, you essentially bought your way out of slavery.  This means that gold meant freedom.  The more gold you got, the more security you had in your freedom. 

 

Territorial sovereignty Societies

To understand the events of the next few centuries, we need names to refer to the each of the two different cultures (types of societies) that came into conflict when Europeans made contact with the people of the western hemisphere. 

We have already discussed one of these systems.  It is possible for a group of people who are in a position to form any kind of society they want to start with the premise that each part of the world naturally belongs to whatever group is able to conquer it and hold it.  That part of the planet then belongs to the group.  I will use the term ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ to refer to societies that divide the world into individual territories and assign ownership of each part of the world to a specific group of people and their heirs.  The term ‘sovereignty’ means they intend to monopolize that part of the world; they will consider it to be theirs, exclusively and not allow any to share in any wealth or benefits that part of the world provides. 

You may remember that others in our evolutionary past formed this kind of society.  The Ngogo chimpanzees divided the richest parts of the forest into ‘monopolizable patches’ (to use Jane Goodall’s term).  They then ‘assigned’ each monopolizable patch to a specific troop.  They used a brutal method to determine the assignments: they fought wars.  The troops went to battle and fought until every last member of one of the teams was dead.  The winner got the land. 

These ‘territorial sovereignty societies’ are the types of societies that dominate the entire earth in the 21^st century.  They started out as tiny city-states, created in the most productive parts of Afro-Eurasia shortly after humans arrived there.  The continent of Europe had large amounts of highly productive land and appears to have had most of the world’s early city-states. 

 

Nearly all of Europe has very high degrees of neanderthal ancestry and few if any denisovans markers.  Neanderthals where highly aggressive, territorial, and possessive, with individual groups living in the same spots for many generations.  This seems to indicate that they have some ancestry of the more violent and aggressive simians. 

 

After they got the use of horses and the benefits of heavy industry, the rulers of the city states were able to expand their holdings to make them regular states.  These different states competed with each other in war.  The rulers better at organizing their states for war gained territory and their states grew; those that were not as good lost territory and their states shrank.  From time to time, some of the states would split, as the people in one area realized they could ‘declare independence’ and become a new state.  In other areas, conquerors would totally wipe out states and they would disappear.  The names and identities of the states of Europe changed over time, but the society in place did not change. 

The European societies, as of the 1400s, were clearly built on the principle of territorial sovereignty.  They divided the land into individual territories, each of which was considered to be monopolized by the people in a certain group (usually non-slaves born inside the borders of the state), who had sovereignty over it. 

In order to discuss the next period of history, I need a name for the two cultures that would be in conflict for the next four centuries.  The first will be called ‘territorial sovereignty Societies.’  

 

Natural law societies

What about the Americas? 

These continents has very high populations.  They were true human beings (homo-sapiens), the exact same species as the Europeans. 

What kind of societies did they have? 

In the period between 1493 and 1900, the people of societies built on the principle of territorial sovereignty conquered virtually all land in the Americas and put it all in one or another of the world’s countries.  Groups of conquerors took over land, brought their culture, and either removed or subjugated the people who already lived on this landmass to make them part of territorial sovereignty societies.  They are parts of territorial sovereignty societies now.  But what kind of societies did they have before? 

The pre-conquest American societies were not all the same.  Some were highly advanced and progressive, with well-built, densely populated cities that had vibrant economies and advanced sciences.  Others were primitive groups of hunter gatherers who followed migratory animals to hunt and followed rains to gather grains and roots that grew after.  Their conquerors didn’t seem to differentiate.  They gave them all a single name, calling them ‘Indians.’

The best analysis of these societies I could find is in the book Ancient Societies by Lewis Morgan.  He claimed that a few of the areas had societies that resembled the societies of the conquering cultures in certain ways.  The Aztecs, for example, had city-states that were walled off or protected by defensible entries and exhibited the same warlike behavior that had been common in the European societies in their early stages.  (The Aztecs had never had horses or heavy industry, so they didn’t really have anything akin to the European states, but, according to Morgan, some had reached the early stages of development on a path to the kinds of systems that existed in Europe.)  But the great majority of the land in the Americas had land that was fairly unproductive and wasn’t suitable for societies built on territorial sovereignty, given the technology available to the people before the Europeans arrived. 

None of the people of the Americas had any significant neanderthal markers.  (There are some, indicting a slight mixing, but the great bulk of the DNA is non-neanderthal.)  They had migrated across from Siberia, which is about as far from the neanderthal areas as it is possible to get.  Both culturally and genetically, they were closer to the ‘hippie apes’ than to the violent and aggressive chimps.  We see this clearly in the way they reacted when faced with aggressors who wanted their land.  Even when they vastly outnumbered the newcomers (which was the case at first) they didn’t seem inclined to adopt the aggressive tactics of the invaders.  They wanted the more productive lands, of course.  (Land in the eastern part of North America is just as productive as land in Europe.)  But they didn’t have a formal system of claiming and protecting land.  They seemed to have had different instincts and feelings than the newcomers.  The newcomers believed they had a right to any land they could conquer.  It belonged to them.  The natives felt the land didn’t belong to them.  They wanted it, but not bad enough to fight for it. They would make deals and move on.

I want a name for the societies of the great bulk of the Americas before conquest, the ones that had no states or countries, did not claim to own and did not have any structures that would allow them to cerate ‘states’ and monopolize land. 

I will call these societies ‘natural law societies.’  

I will use this term because of numerous references made by the American people during the period of their conquest to their primary belief systems: They believed that humans don’t own and can’t own the world around us.  We are not the masters of nature, we are the servants of nature.  We depend on nature and the natural world for everything we get. Our lives depend on our ability to understand and follow the edicts of nature.  Humans, like all other animals, must respect nature or it will destroy us.

The primary characteristic of natural law societies, and the primary difference between natural law societies and territorial sovereignty societies, involves the way the people in them interact with the land they live on. The people of territorial sovereignty societies interact with land as owners.  They form into groups, mark off land, and treat it as if the group is the owner. 

 

The group is not a specific group of individuals, it is an ever changing group that considers the land its founding members have claimed to be an entity in itself—a country.  The land defined by the borders of the ‘country’ is treated as if it belongs to the currently-living members of the group.  Don’t thy to over think this:  remember that chimps have had this kind of society for millions of years.  It is not something built on logic but on instincts or feelings.  :   

 

Natural law societies build their institutions on the premise that there are laws of nature that are above the laws of man.  We must figure out these laws and obey them or we perish. Many people with this system were superstitious.  (People everywhere are superstitious.)  They believed that nature enforced its laws.  If they witnessed catastrophic weather events like hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, volcanoes, droughts, floods, or expanding glaciers, they thought nature was punishing them for violating its laws. 

They didn’t want to offend nature.  What is the most offensive thing that someone can do to nature? They can claim it is not in charge. They can claim that the events on a certain part of the world depend on the will of the human owners, not nature. As a practical matter, natural law societies can be defined as ‘societies that don’t accept humans can own parts of planets.’

This doesn’t just mean that individual humans can’t own parts of planets.  It means that humans can’t own parts of planets at all. If a group of people claim that a part of the world is a ‘country’ and belongs to the group, this is just as offensive to nature as an individual claiming a part of the world belongs to that individual. 

 

Natural Law Societies And Gold

Natural law societies don’t accept that people can buy and own parts of the world.  People can’t buy the rights to the bounty the land produces for any price, payable in gold or anything else. 

The land produces wealth

No one owns the land, so no one owns the wealth it produces. 

The people have meetings and make decisions.  They decide what happens to the wealth.  They think of it as a gift from nature, not as something they have an absolute right to have.  Who deserves gifts?  By definition, no one deserves to get a gift:  if you get something you deserve, you are getting a payment not a gift. The people in natural law societies consider the wealth the land produces to be a gift from the land to its inhabitants.  As thedominant species, we have first claim on this gift. We can therefore use it for our benefit if we wish.  But we don’t own it. 

If people can’t own land, they can’t buy it or sell it. 

The idea of trading a part of the planet for a pile of metal would seem insane to people like this.  (Jefferson bought the Louisiana purchase for  6,000 tons of gold.) 

People can only own ‘such things as can be carried with them.’  (From the Autobiography of Black Hawk, available in references on the PossibleSocieties.com website.)   None of the things they buy are so valuable that they need something that can store massive amounts of value for trade.

They don’t need to use gold for money.  They had far simpler kinds of money.  (In the book ‘Travels And Adventures’ Alexander Henry gives prices when trading with ‘Indians’ either in beaver skins or bags of rice, both of which were currencies.  You can find a copy of this book in the references section of the PossibleSocieties.com  website.)

The people in the natural law societies in the Western Hemisphere didn’t particularly care about gold.  To them, it was just another metal

 

The Value of Gold

In the Eastern Hemisphere, people had used gold as money since long before the time of Alexander.  The cuneiform texts found in Turkey (discussed above) from 2990BC discussed terms of trade in metals, with small transactions in shekels of copper, medium in shekels of silver, and large transactions in shekels of gold.  These three metals were clearly all used many thousands of years ago.  Gold was far more rare than the others, so it wound up having a larger exchange value. People who wanted to buy large quantities of supplies (say generals equipping an army) would negotiate the prices in gold.  Payment could be made either in gold or any other currency acceptable to both buyer and seller, at exchange rates in effect at the time. 

Gold was very valuable when Columbus traveled to America.  This is a link to a website that shows prices in medieval times in England in pounds, shillings, and pence.  Each pound sterling is 1/2 of an ounce of gold, so a pence (d in the chart) is 1/480^th of an ounce of gold.  (In other words, an ounce of gold trades for 480d.) Wages in England for laborers were listed as never more than 2 pounds sterling, or one try ounce of gold, per year. (This amount of gold is now worth about $2,000.)  The streams and rivers of Haiti and other islands in the Caribbean had tiny amounts of gold mixed in with the sand.  People could remove it by using a metal pan and water: the gold is very heavy and sinks to the bottom.  Spin the water to suspend the sand, shake it, and the gold dust falls to the bottom of the pan.  Wash off the sand and you are left with gold. 

There is only a tiny bit of gold in the sand, but gold is so incredibly valuable that even a tiny bit of gold will buy a great deal of freedom. We will see later that most of the land in North America was sold to corporations that paid in gold, at the rate that works out to about 4/1000^th of a gram of gold per acre of land.  (An acre of farmland is about the amount needed to support one person.) 

 

Grams of gold per acre of land:

We will look at a great many sales that took place later in the book, when we see what happens to the land that was conquered in America.  Here is one example:

In 1794, the governor of Georgia sold 40 million acres of land (the current states of Alabama and Mississippi) for $500,000 in gold, or 1.25¢ per acre.  At the time, each dollar was slightly less than 0.4 grams of gold.  Each dollar would buy 80 acres of land, so 0.4 grams of gold would buy 80 acres, and 1 gram of gold would buy 200 acres of land. 

 

The streams of the island that Columbus called ‘Hispaniola’ and that the natives called ‘Haiti’ had never been panned for gold.  They were virgins. 

Columbus did some test pannings and found that a man could get enough gold in a day to buy an entire estate back in Spain. 

From time to time, natives would bring him large items, some weighing several pounds, and trade them for manufactured goods.  This seemed to indicate that the island had more than just the gold dust in the streams.  It had gold mines where people could remove immense amounts of this incredibly valuable metal. 

 

The Hasty Return to Spain

Where was the gold-rich land?  Columbus didn’t know.  It was somewhere.  Columbus decided it was incredibly important that he find it first, before any of his men could find it.  He was particularly worried about the two men he had hired to be captains of the two smaller ships, Martin and Vincente Pinzón.

One day, Martin Pinzón came to him and told him that he had found out from natives that there was a gold mine on the north end of the island.  He wanted to make a voyage to the north to check it out.

Columbus was worried that Pinzón would possibly find the mine and hide it.  But he had a greater fear. He was afraid that Pinzón would go to the north, find the gold mine, claim it for himself, then return to Spain and try to cut Columbus out of the picture entirely. 

Columbus ordered him to remain.  He refused permission for Martin Pinzón to travel to the north of the island. 

The next day, Martin Pinzón was gone.  Pinzón returned a few days later: he had gone to the north side of the island. When he returned, he claimed he had not found the gold mine.  Columbus didn’t believe him.  He began to be very suspicious of Martin Pinzón. 

On the morning of January 12, Columbus’ sentry woke him up early to tell him that Martin Pinzón’s ship was gone.  The local people told him that it had hoisted sails and departed in the middle of the night. 

Columbus thought that Martin Pinzón had decided to head back to Spain and claim the discovery of the gold-bearing islands for himself. Columbus decided he had to get back so he could defend his rights and left the next day. 

Columbus had been in the Western Hemisphere for 92 days.  He had found many things that the people back in the Eastern Hemisphere didn’t even know existed.  A few days or weeks more, and he would have discovered much more. The return voyage was perilous. He didn’t know if he could make it back at all.  (In fact, his ship was badly damaged in a storm and he almost didn’t make it back.)

A whole new world was there to be explored.  Millions of people lived in this new world, with an entirely different way of life than the people of Europe.  Columbus himself described the land as a terrestrial paradise. 

The people lived in harmony with the land around them and with each other, without war, without crime, without hardship and want.  But none of this mattered to Columbus.  He had his priorities.  The land contained many grams of gold.  In Europe, a gram of gold could buy freedom forever from want, by buying a large amount of bountiful land. 

He was taking a big risk to make a panicked run back home. 

But he tried it anyway. 

This tells us his priorities. 

The gold was his highest priority.  Everything else was secondary. 

Columbus made it back and was able to keep his rights to the gold (see text box below for more information).  He had not found any mainlands and had not discovered the continents now named America.  He had landed on several islands; he had taken great care to claim all of these islands for Spain. 

 

The Murder of Martin Pinzón:

It turned out that Martin Pinzón had done exactly what Columbus thought he had done: he came back on his own to try to take credit for the discovery.  Columbus came back a few days after Pinzón and, since Columbus had worked out the deal and had all of his rights in writing, he got the credit. 

Columbus and Martin Pinzón both lived in the same town, Palos.  Columbus sent a message to Pinzón.  He said that he had no hard feelings and wanted to be friends. He invited Pinzón to dinner. Pinzón ate and then got sick; a few hours later, he died.  He was the only one at the dinner party who got sick at all. 

Many historians claim that Pinzón’s sudden death after eating a meal that Columbus prepared was no accident.  They point to at least four similar cases where people who had disagreements with Columbus were invited to dinner at his house, ate, and died hours later.  They claim that Columbus killed them with ‘cantarella, a poison commonly used at the time.  Others claim that these were just coincidences. 

 

The Papal Bull

Isabella of Castille was the queen of Spain.  She had great connections: her brother-in-law was Rodregio DeBorgia, also known as Pope Alexander VI.  He was the most powerful leader in Europe.  As we will see shortly, Europe had an income tax: the people all had to pay 10% of their incomes to the church.  The Pope got this money.  He was the one with all the gold and, in the society in place at the time, the one with the gold made the rules. 

On May 4, 1493, the Pope issued a formal proclamation known as ‘The Bull Inter Caetera.’

The people in Europe didn’t know whether the land Columbus had landed on was in the Indian Ocean or in some other sea.  It didn’t matter.  The Pope, acting on behalf of God Himself (as the bull notes) had decided to draw a line from the ‘Arctic Pole’ to the ‘Antarctic Pole’ that ran through the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.  Everything west of this line that was not already claimed by a Christian king would belong to his sister-in-law and her husband for the rest of time.  Here are some excerpts from the document:

 

We have indeed learned that you, who for a long time had intended to seek out and discover certain islands and mainlands remote and unknown and not hitherto discovered by others and you, with the wish to fulfill your desire, chose our beloved son, Christopher Columbus, to make diligent quest for these remote and unknown mainlands and islands through the sea; and they at length discovered certain very remote islands and even mainlands that hitherto had not been discovered by others; wherein dwell very many peoples living in peace, and, as reported, going unclothed, and not eating flesh. 

In the islands and countries already discovered are found gold, spices, and very many other precious things of divers kinds and qualities.  We, by the authority of Almighty God which we hold on earth, do by tenor of these presents; we give, grant, and assign to you and your heirs and successors, kings of Castile and Leon, forever, together with all their dominions, cities, camps, places, and villages, and all rights, jurisdictions, and appurtenances, all islands and mainlands found and to be found, discovered and to be discovered towards the west and south, by drawing and establishing a line from the Arctic pole, namely the north, to the Antarctic pole, namely the south, no matter whether the said mainlands and islands are found and to be found in the direction of India or towards any other quarter, the said line to be distant one hundred leagues towards the west and south from any of the islands commonly known as the Azores. 

 

Columbus immediately began outfitting for his second voyage.  He equipped a total of 17 ships and over 1,000 men, most of whom assumed the title that implied their mission: Conquistadors. 

They were going to conquer the lands that the creator of existence had just given to their bosses, the King and Queen of Spain.

 

The Most Important Priorities of Discovery

Under the terms of the Capitulations of Santa Fe, Columbus was made ‘Admiral, Vice-Roy, and Governor’ of the new discoveries.  After he returned, he began laying out his priorities. Here is what he considers important to the King and Queen:

 

Most High and Mighty Sovereigns,

In obedience to your Highnesses’ commands, and with submission to superior judgment, I will say whatever occurs to me in reference to the colonization and commerce of the Island of Espanola.  In the said island there shall be founded three or four towns, situated in the most convenient places.  For the better and more speedy colonization of the said island, no one shall have liberty to collect gold in it except those who have taken out colonists’ papers.  None of the colonists shall go to seek gold without a license from the governor or Mayor of the town where he lives; and that he must first take oath to return to the place whence he sets out, for the purpose of registering faithfully all the gold he may have found, and to return once a month, or once a week, as the time may have been set for him, to render account and show the quantity of said gold; and that this shall be written down by the notary before the Mayor

That all the gold thus brought in shall be smelted immediately, and stamped with some mark that shall distinguish each town; and that the portion which belongs to your Highnesses shall be weighed, and given and consigned to each Mayor in his own town, and registered by the above-mentioned priest or friar, so that it shall not pass through the hands of only one person, and there shall be no opportunity to conceal the truth. 

That all gold that may be found without the mark of one of the said towns in the possession of any one who has once registered in accordance with the above order shall be taken as forfeited, and that the accuser shall have one portion of it and your Highnesses the other

As regards the division of the gold, and the share that ought to be reserved for your Highnesses, this, in my opinion, must be left to the aforesaid governor and treasurer, because it will have to be greater or less according to the quantity of gold that may be found.  Or, should it seem preferable, your Highnesses might, for the space of one year, take one half, and the collector the other, and a better arrangement for the division be made afterward

As, in the eagerness to get gold, every one will wish, naturally, to engage in its search in preference to any other employment, it seems to me that the privilege of going to look for gold ought to be withheld during some portion of each year, that there may be opportunity to have the other business necessary for the island performed. 

 

It goes on and on about the details of the security of this metal and ends:

 

I beg your Highnesses to hold me in your protection; and I remain, praying our Lord God for your Highnesses’ lives and the increase of much greater States

 

This letter really illustrates the point made above. 

In societies that are built around the idea of ownability of parts of the world, people can gain virtually unlimited wealth if they can buy parts of the world.  (The land produces value indefinitely; any flow of value extended forever is an unlimited amount of wealth.) To become the owner of a part of the world, they need to get something that people who conquer the land will accept in exchange for the land.  The conquerors of land need something they can trade for weapons so they can hold their land and conquer more.  The weapon makers accept gold.  The conquerors therefore accept gold.  If you have enough gold, you can buy a part of the planet.  You give the owner/conqueror of the land a little bag of gold dust.  In return, a part of the planet belongs to you forever

The Western Hemisphere had a great many things of value.  However, as the letter above shows, none of them mattered compared to the really important thing: gold.