Escaping Natural Necessity through Enslaving Others

The previous post was about Cain/Abel, Prometheus/Epimetheus, and the Romulus/Remus characters in mythology. I think the most complete mythology on the topics covered by those characters is in the Prometheus/Epimetheus stories. The Cain/Abel and Romulus/Remus stories are more mangled and omit many key elements found in the Pro/Epimetheus stories.

The stories are about human use of technology and artifice to try to escape natural necessity. In each case, the attempt ends in mixed results or outright failure. For example, Prometheus is punished for giving fire to man, and Cain toils and obtains nothing from his labor. If you ever build anything, even some simple thing like a fence or a woodshed, you will get a taste of the same type of punishment. Your infrastructure eventually falls apart, maybe at an inopportune time, and requires constant repair and vigilance for critical things.

Technology initially looks like a means of escape from the toil and difficulty of life in the natural world, but it isn't.

Inevitably, some men attempted to repair this defect of technology and artifice by enslaving others to do the toil. The masters then imagined they were able to live the life of their "god" characters in myths, while those enslaved were reduced to life beneath that of animals. Of course that's not really what happened at all.

The "masters" are those enslaved to the system of slavery, whatever kind of slavery, be it physical oppression and control of human bodies, or scamming people into working for fake money. Today, the executives and managers of corporations are the people who make the paper corporate egregore function. They serve the corporation and the system itself.

"Technology" Demons; Cain and Prometheus

I was in Los Angeles for work (network tech stuff) last week. Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are a vast almost totally man made area. I've been through LAX before to make connecting flights overseas, but last week was the first time I was on the ground for several days. The vast scope of the artifice of LA is striking when you see it from the air, then see it up close from the ground. It's not hard to imagine that sprawling man-made structure as a disease or fungus. The whole experience got me thinking of the futility of technology from the days of Prometheus and Fire until now.

Even Bronze Age humans knew that cities and "technology" were at best a double edged sword. The basic problem with tech is it's not alive and outside the solar power cycles of earth, and therefore derives its energy from human labor.

That notion shows up in a handful of myths that are passed down to us today. Prometheus from Greek myths and Cain from the Cain and Abel story are certainly based on a nexus of the same archetypal characters and possibly related to the fallen "angels" in the book of Enoch. (Enoch was the Son of Cain) It seems likely to me that the Prometheus character and story is the original, and that the Cain and Romulus and Remus stories are knock-offs.

Many people are familiar with the Cain and Abel story from the Bible. Fewer are aware of Greek mythology because Jewish priests declared it "fiction" and insisted their myths are superlative historical fiction at worst or really are history.

Anyway, as a result of that propaganda, few people are aware Prometheus had a brother Epimetheus. The stories of Cain and Abel and Prometheus and Epimetheus are both about a change in human fortunes. Cain and Abel are linked with Adam and Eve, and that story of course includes the forbidden fruit concept, and the idea that women are somehow problematic to humanity. Many of the same themes pervade the Prometheus/Epimetheus stories. Epimetheus opens Pandora's box, for example, which is another original sin/problem with women story. That same theme is in the epic of Gilgamesh story, too--Enkidu enters the city after having sex with a temple prostitute.

Both of the stories also include a curse/ongoing punishment for the Cain and Prometheus characters. As far as I know, only the Cain and Abel story includes the fratricide angle that is central to the Cain and Abel story, and that's also present in the Romulus and Remus story as well. Enkidu also dies in the Epic of Gilgamesh story.

The Prometheus and Cain stories include the concepts of sacrifice. Cain and Abel's sacrifices are central to the story. Prometheus changes the terms of sacrifice to Zeus by tricking him. The Cain and Abel story is probably a mangled version of the Prometheus story because key elements of it are elided and the overall Cain/Abel sacrifice story makes no sense. The notion that Prometheus tricked Zeus with his sacrifice, and therefore Zeus was enraged is missing from the Cain and Abel story. The Jew Zeus doesn't like Cain's sacrifice for no apparent reason.

The characteristics of the brothers run through the both sets of stories. Prometheus is clever, defied the gods and was punished. Epimetheus was foolish. Abel pleases the gods and is perhaps "simple" and is murdered by his brother.

Prometheus is literally "cast out" of Olympus/Greek heaven and is a Titan rather than one of the Olympian gods. Cain is born from cast out parents and is marked for killing his brother and ultimately founds a city. The same elements of fratricide and founding a city is present in the Romulus and Remus story.

The theme I've interpolated from these stories is the characters of Cain and Prometheus attempt to escape natural necessity. Their brothers personify the natural order of things. The Enkidu character from the epic of Gilgamesh literally goes from being a wild man who's at one with Nature to a city man. The Abel and Epimetheus characters are variations on that theme. Prometheus ends up chained to a rock and punished daily. Cain must toil and his labors bear no fruit. In other words, human endeavor to escape nature is all vanity, and human cleverness is an illusion.

Government Chips: Feds "Invest" in Moribund Tech Company

Back in the late 1800's through the early 1900s the US railroad industry and government basically "merged".  Railroad pensions, for example, are some government hybrid plan like Social Security. The railroads and early era of industrialization was a huge economic growth engine in the US and other developed countries, but it was well into the era of diminishing/negative returns by the turn of the 20th century.

A similar thing is happening in "tech" and the dot com companies that survived the early 2000s. It's just all out of gas. Now the feds are throwing money at Intel to build foundries in the US... Why does Intel need taxpayer money for that? If they had a profitable business model for the new chip plants they could easily get private cash for it. Instead the US and other governments around the world are throwing buckets of tax cash at private businesses.

Eventually Amazon will be getting federal money too... they probably already do.