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?