Could Classical Civilization do anything But Die?

What would have happened if the classical civilization continued? Some SciFi writers conjectured the dark ages and the Church set civilization back 1000 years, and if classical civilization continued, we'd now have space ships and humanoid robots like in Star Trek.

I don't think so. Classical civilization probably did all it could ever do. To me, cultures look a whole lot like ecosystems and all the elements therein co-evolve to a stable form within an unstable dynamic environment.

There might not be a path from classical Rome or Greece to the sort of technological society we have now just as a bird is on a different evolutionary path than a mammal.

Our civilization also seems to be stuck in a rut of developing technology as the means of transformation, or seeing technology as the only meaningful product of work or human life.

Choosing Between Two Sides When Reality is Fractal

History classes in primary and secondary education, and even in college, seek to present a clear concise narrative of cause and effect. If you zoom in on any era, though, especially when primary source materials are available, that simplistic story fades away almost immediately.

In real life, even the smartest, most "logical" person is rife with contradictions. Human beings are a composite animal. Our very brains are layered in construction. Our languages are limited in vocabulary, speed of expression and by the design of our mouth, we can only say things in a serial fashion, while the world of sensation streams into our minds all at once. There's really no such thing as cognitive dissonance. Our understanding of the world is not axiomatic or logical. It's perfectly normal for people two hold completely contradictory concepts in their head at the same time.

When you read about the relationships between the native tribespeople of the Americas and the European Settlers, you'll find every possible permutation of relationship. Some white Europeans admired the Indians and went to live with them and adopted their ways. Some Indians joined the communities of the Europeans.

The Gnadenhutten Massacre is a sort of set piece of this complexity. Settlers sought retribution against a group of people who had nothing to do with violence against their "side" in conflict. To their credit some settlers refused to partake in the injustice.

Stress--probably the physiological response to stress--tends to force people to simplify concepts. Complexity and alternatives to taking sides are often cast as crimes or traitorous. It seems the defining characteristic of the good, or of the good man is to refuse to abandon reality for the sake of politics and safety from his fellow men.

The Settlement of Ohio and the Oligarchy Problem

Most of the history of Europe has been punctuated by horror show incidents on various scales. Rapacious, murderous thugs, i.e. "the aristocracy" fought non stop for control of land and people for centuries. From the point of view of an average person, the aristocrats were at best domineering control freaks, and at worst lunatic mafiosi of the worst kind. Their behavior is paralleled today by the action of Mexican drug cartels.

The violent behavior of the aristocracy was only possible because it was supported by cooperation, productive pursuits, and productive people. This is one of the great paradoxes of the human condition--small bands of the worst can take from large numbers of the best. It's as if the productive and cooperative people do not have any immunity to a virus in their midst.

Two events in the history of Ohio show how this "works". In recent years, a small coalition of people tried to pass a referendum to "legalize" marijuana in the state. The legalization was to create an oligopoly in the currently "illegal" $2B/year marijuana business so a few hands would control the market. People voted the referendum down. Pot is only illegal in Ohio since it can't be controlled by the "right" families and their cronies.

During the founding of Ohio, the United States government prevented settlers from starting farms in the state in an ad hoc fashion. Instead, once it had claim to the land from the British, and then from Indian "tribes" (i.e. the tribal leaders that agreed and were paid to make treaties), it sold the land first to Companies (which were organized by Freemasons for what it's worth) at wholesale prices, and then to individuals. The sales helped finance the United States revolutionary war debts.

It's an interesting thought experiment to imagine what would have happened had individuals struck deals with Indian Tribes rather than through the US government. The tribes could have worked with the European powers toward that end, however the European powers were too greedy to make that work, or the settlers and the Indians could have worked that out on their own to create a truly "free country".

There's little doubt the United States deal with the common man was a huge improvement with the deal European aristocrats cut with the common man, but the oligarchs were active in the US basically from day one, and the country has been getting more and more European-ish since.

Making Deals with the Great Satan

Battle of Fallen Timbers

It's hard to read about the settlement of the United States and not feel a lot of sympathy for the native American population. A rule of thumb you can deduce from their deals with the United States or European powers is one should never enter into a collective agreement. Entrusting the livelihood of a mass of people, like an Indian Tribe, to a handful of people--their chiefs--is always going to look like a class action lawsuit--the attorneys get rich, and the group gets a Hardees Discount coupon for their trouble.

The white people who were settling the frontier, for the most part, lost their collective battles with the Great Satan maybe hundreds or a thousand years prior. The citizen labors under piles of treaties struck by sociopaths and psychopaths long ago.

Northeast Ohio History as a Microcosm of Civilization

Indians in the Old Northwest were stuck in the classic rock & hardplace scenario. Their way of life couldn't work with the agricultural methods and methods of organizing society that new settlers engaged in, but they had no chance of military victory against the new United States. In spite of that, they repeatedly sought relief through alliances with European "allies".

The European powers couldn't actually help them, and would only use them as pawns the same way dumb religious zealot mercenaries are used in the Middle East today. In retrospect, it's obvious that engaging with the United States as collectives (tribes) rather than as individuals--citizens--made it much easier to undermine and destroy them as a people. (Black people in the United States have followed the same flawed strategy since emancipation.)

The problem the Indians faced in the Ohio Territory is similar to the problem everyone in the Western World faces today. The Indians confronted a system but could only see people. Lashing out at individual families brought the Indians more grief and hastened their demise and expulsion from their lands.

Likewise, today, we might see "the problem" as Oligarchy, but Oligarchs are really just cogs in the system the same way some poor bastard working in an Amazon warehouse is.

Indians and Pioneers in Northeast Ohio around 1800; Clash of Systems

Northeast Ohio was once known as "The Connecticut Western Reserve". The area was opened to settlers from the east coast around 1800. While the United States was a brand new country then, European settlements in North America were long established. The first white settlers moved into Northeast Ohio 171 years after the Massachusetts Bay Colony was founded.

The stories that are recorded about the pioneers of Northeast Ohio were captured on paper one or two generations after the fact through interviews with the families who still remained in the area. A number of compilations of the stories were made over the years. One is Memorial to the Pioneer Women of the Western Reserve.

The book recounts the stories of the handful of local families that moved to the new counties of Northeast Ohio when the area was first opened for settlement after the Revolutionary War (but before the War of 1812). The people who moved to the area were from New England. Many of those who did make the move were from well established families in well established towns and cities in New England. When they moved to Ohio, they set out immediately to recreate their old way of life.

Consider how some simple aspect of day-to-day life gets solved: like "Where do I get some bread for toast?" For us today, hundreds, maybe thousands of people participate in solving that problem. In the pioneer days, fewer people were involved, but they set out to solve that problem in a similar way--by building a whole system to do it, rather than solving the problem directly. They cleared land to grow wheat, set up mills to grind flour, and built the roads and transportation networks to move the flour around, and built shops to sell the flour.

All this severely clashed with the way of life of the native peoples, of course. In spite of that clash, and in spite of the fear the pioneers had of the Indians, most of the stories recorded in the Memorial are about positive, happy interactions. For example:

The Memorial also records a number of murders of white settlers by Indians and vice versa. During that time, the native people were allied with the British Empire against the new country of the USA. The resulting conflicts often included horrific violence between Indians and settlers of "The Old Northwest".

Within a given society cooperation among neighbors is possible and common, but when two different peoples clash, competition and violence seems to be common. In a lot of ways, the poor relations between the natives and the white settlers was a huge missed opportunity by both sides.

For example, the haste with which the land in Northeast Ohio was developed was very unfortunate and resulted in degraded farm soil and obliterated wildlife populations. In only 30 years, every mammal bigger than a squirrel was eradicated and nearly every single tree was cut down. Similarly, obviously, the Indians could have benefited from the technology and methods of organizing society that the Europeans enjoyed.

Social Media as a Mechanism for Fracturing People

Human beings live a significant amount of their life in isolation. Our inner thoughts are only sometimes shared with some people. For most, sexuality is a private matter. The public face of a man is generally a part that is played within a given context. The man who works in an office might hide his peculiar political or religious beliefs, for example.

Social media is a mechanism for taking some element of a person's being and making a space for it online. It's a community of shadows.

What's the end result of people teleporting that element of their self into another hidden dimension?

Growth Society/Totally Managed Society

Industrial society is about 200 years old, and technological society is only about 70 years old. After all that time, nobody has devised good substitutes for fuels like coal, oil, and natural gas that can scale up rapidly to replace the fossil fuel infrastructure. If fossil fuels are really limited, then the debt/growth and central banking oligarchy model stops working. The central bank model enables oligarchs to extract wealth from nations through money creation and usury. In a shrinking economy, that stops working. The new debt is less than worthless.

Instead, you go back to either direct robbery, confiscation and slavery scheme like in the middle ages, or a per-transaction fee. Additionally, it's necessary to totally manage the society in an attempt to prioritize projects and to determine who gets a piece of the pie.

Why is There Only One Transportation Network?

Ohio Erie Canal

European people have been living in Northeast Ohio since 1800 (give or take a few years). That era of life in the United States has been one of non-stop technological and industrial change. The past is piled up around the area like many carelessly discarded toys. The remnants of the Ohio Erie Canal, which was in operation from about 1830-1913 (though it massively declined after it began to compete with railroads) are still apparent as ruins, or are preserved in the local park systems.

Similarly, the leftovers of the rail systems in our area are scattered all over the region. Most notably, bridges and bridge abutments from the interurban railways from the early 20th century are visible from the roadside, or from trails around the area and the former railbeds are bike paths.

In Ohio, it wasn't possible to maintain multiple transportation networks. The canal system is particularly interesting. In its heyday, the canals were operated by the State. In its decline it was maintained by private companies. It limped along for three decades or so until a flood finally destroyed much of the infrastructure of the canal system. None of the operators were able to repair it, so it finally officially "closed".

It's interesting that these different modes of transportation couldn't really coexist in any significant way, especially as passenger systems. I have no idea if it's an issue of "cost" per passenger/mile. The road system today, and the person per car commuting that we all do all the time today is hella expensive. It might be many more times the expense per mile compared to the Interurbans, which covered the same geographical area that people commute through today.

The dominance of any one system might arise from human behavior patterns rather than economic explanations about resources or money. That is, there's only one dominant way of life possible within a given region at a time. People only have so much time in a day to think about how to get from point A to point B. If there's a solution that works they'll use it.

Back to the Campfire

The current widely accepted guess is humans lived a pastoral, hunter gatherer life for most of the time humans have been on earth. Agriculture and settled life are relatively recent inventions, and industrial civilization is a blink of an eye in proportional terms.

"Civilization" is the set of solutions for a group of human beings to get what they need to live on earth. A point made in several previous posts is you can look at civilization as a meta-animal. As a meta-animal it has several of the characteristics of an actual animal. One key function is storage, transmission, and operation on information.

Over time, information has flowed through and been stored by civilization in a variety of ways. The very oldest way is campfire stories. Human beings spent much of their existence sitting around campfires shooting the shit.

The Internet is really like a new campfire. It allows for informal interchange of news and opinions and dispenses with channeling, checking, or editing them.

Religious Concept of Linear History and Interpretation of Europe's Conversion to Christianity

Lots of historians have tried to describe how and why the pagan people of Europe converted to Christianity in the early middle ages. I think the question is generally framed in Christian Linear History terms, which views the arrival of the messiah on Earth as a epoch making event where everything changed.

A more worldly interpretation is that Christianity was political useful for would be Empire builders. The tribal, traditional religions of local people was supplanted with a new tradition. We tend to think of Christianity in its contemporary role, confined almost totally to the realm of the spiritual. For the Europeans, religion was tied into every aspect of life.

The confrontation between the native Indians in the new United States was probably similar. Their whole way of life could not be harmonized with the way of life of the European settlers; a pastoral lifestyle, for example, can't really coexist (easily) with a farming lifestyle based on property, contracts, laws, and debts. It seems pretty likely that the tribal lives of European people couldn't coexist with the attempts to create kingdoms in the early middle ages, either.

Break With Oligarchy

The United States break with the British Empire might be the only time a group of European people successfully broke away from inbred aristocrats and greasy oligarchs, and even that break was a short lived and mixed experiment. The free US existed about 100 years until it was pulled back into the Empire game (around 1900).

The people of the 19th century US were conscious of their special status. In William Atherton's memoir he contrasts the haughty hard hearted British Officers with the enlisted men, for example. He was quite conscious that Empire Britain was the enemy not only of himself but of everyone who wished to be free.

By the entry of the United States into WWI, the institutions of the country had been compromised, and by 1947 and the creation of the CIA, the United States had been totally swamped by oligarchs.

Modern corporate nations are by their very nature easy to corrupt and control via the mechanisms that were meant to keep them to task and limit their authority. It's easy to corrupt and blackmail the officials that are supposed to represent the interests of the people and for the public resources to be put in service of private gain.

The main problem seems to be that the common people easily forget their own interests, and get lazy about guarding their liberty. Their liberty really isn't that dear to them in all its constituent parts. Consider the TSA as an example of how this works. A couple swindlers stood to make millions or billions of shekels on the creation of that agency, while it only costs the average person a few hours of standing in line over their lifetime.

Poverty Will Kill You Too

I'm not a fan of fear porn. As the alt-media grew in the mid 2000's, I spent a couple of years reading about economic collapse scenarios and watched youtube videos about the vicous plans of the elite to cull humanity. However, I came to the conclusion that the biggest enemy of man is man. It is unfortunate that we participate in systems where a few psychopaths can exploit millions, but if we did manage to eliminate that scourge we'd have countless other issues to contend with.

Poverty is one major problem. Lots of people in the world live in absolute squalor on the periphery of developed areas. Cheerleaders of western civilization often see poverty as a genetic problem--for example they offer up population IQ tests that show those poor people are no good. Critics of western civilization tend to see poverty as a result of exploitation.My take is poor people are "poor" mainly because they lack methods of organizing their people to create an order that leads to the type of wealth that causes clean streets and clean water.

Dirty conditions are a reliable breeding ground for new diseases. The good hearted people who attempt to help alleviate poverty by providing medical care could actually be helping to create the "perfect storm" scenario. By providing inadequate treatment of diseases with antibiotics in really terrible living conditions, health care workers could actually be breeding antibiotic resistant bacteria.

The United States is a Corrupt Shithole

It seems like the scumbags of Hollywood have enough reach to hassle Rose McGowan in Virginia. So there's enough corruption in Virginia to make that happen.

The Reformation Was Extremely Complicated

Martin Luther Throwing Gang Signs

The 500th anniversary of Luther's 95 Theses was yesterday. There are countless articles on it. So I'll throw one more into the  mix.

People like to have a nice tidy comic book story to explain huge events like the Reformation. Reality, of course, isn't really even amenable to condensing into a narrative with characters and cause-and-effect explanations. The christian's religion is this type of story. "The world used to be evil, Jesus was born, now it's cool."

First off, Christianity is not native to Europe. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Europeans belonged to a bunch of different tribal societies and each had a  shamanic religion with roots that were possibly thousands of years old. Christianity was imposed on them in an attempt to form the next Empire. (Islam is identical in this regard.) Tribal religions persisted in Europe until at least 900 AD.

Catholic Christianity was never the sole brand of Christianity even in Western Europe. The Arians and the Catholics had "how many angels can fit on a pin" debates at the very beginning, then throughout the history of the Catholic Church there were "heresies". There was a proto reformation around 1100 AD. There were various strains of gnostic Christianity (e.g. the Bogomils or the Cathars).

By the 1500s, the western European medieval system was pretty long in the tooth and its entrenched political and religious institutions were holding people back. The Catholic Church was embedded in every aspect of life, and the institutions of life, e.g. the Guild System, relied on the Catholic Church. A good parallel today is how Hollywood--what looks to be a bunch of Jewish Mobsters--are connected to the government, the democratic party, and east coast finance. There's really no rational reason for it, but there it is.

The Renaissance and the re-emergence of classical learning in the West is the start of the fracture and breakup of the medieval world (which persisted into the 20th century!).

In retrospect Martin Luther looks like a Deray figure, that is, an agent of corporate forces with really banal goals, rather than an organic revolutionary. Entities like Henry VIII's  England were at odds with the Catholic Church for a long list of reasons, e.g. a desire to get in on the Age of Sail games (games like Rape Murder Pillage for Opium, Coffee, Tobacco, or Spices). Rival Banking families were pinched by the Church's cronies.

Just as it was expedient for Clovis I to be baptized as a Catholic, and for the Catholic Church to  baptize Clovis, it was expedient for the emerging powers of Europe to support the Reformation.