How I Think It All Began

[NOTE: These posts are an ongoing presentation, meant to be read beginning with the earliest and ending with the most recent. If not read in that order, there is a potential loss for the reader in an overall understanding of what is being presented. You have been warned.]

A long, long time ago in a place and time beyond memory, for whatever reasons people began to create systems by which everyone was expected to live their lives. This probably developed because they discovered that there was safety in numbers, but numbers dictated close proximity and interaction. So a call goes out to organize. I’ve always thought that a great explanation of what happened “back then” was presented by Lenny Bruce. If you have never listened to any of his routines, you’d do well to lend an ear. He had a very clear, logical way of cutting through to the meat of issues such as religion, the economy, and, of course, the legal/judicial system with which he was so personally familiar.

As I recall Lenny’s take on the origins of the law and law enforcement, I have to chuckle as I realize that I know chronologically-aged adults who would be offended, even today, by some of the words that Lenny used. For instance, he would say that one of the early systemic agreements presented to people was that everyone would sleep in area A, eat in area B, and throw a crap in area C. Wait a minute, did he just say “crap?” If that bothers you, let me tell you a quick story.

I was visiting an online chat group once when a new person joined the conversation. In a very short time he was able to upset quite a few of the regular participants by some of the things that he said. I mean they were calling for his immediate expulsion from the group. Yet his contributions were very intelligent, though sometimes forceful. Finally one day he said, “why are you people so upset? It is only words on a screen.”

Same thing with Lenny. It’s only words, but each of us has the choice of whether or not we will feel offended by those words. The words have no power. The power is in our choices. If it is more important to us to feel offended, rather than to possibly become enlightened, well, the choice is ours and ours alone. Own it, but please don’t complain to me about it.

Anyway, as Lenny’s story continued, one day someone woke up with a face full of crap. This resulted in the creation of laws and law enforcement and penalties, including incarceration and torture, and that whole complex legal arcanery continues to expand to this very day. The same thing has happened to sex and relationships, to business and to the economy. The more time that humanity has to tinker with a system, the more complex it seem to become.

For thousands of years most people didn’t know about the other people on the planet. Often what little they did hear about the rest of the world came in stories told by merchants. These stories often included tales of monsters and sea dragons. That may have been a deliberate attempt at keeping potential competitors from venturing into the unknown.

The merchants traveled widely in search of goods that they might sell to profit themselves and their financial backers. Over time, some of these merchants and their backers became very wealthy. Through ownership of land and ships and goods and the ability to distribute them, many of the more astute among this small extremely wealthy group discovered that one of the greatest protections for them and for their wealth was anonymity. Unfortunately, over the centuries this has resulted in many of them becoming so insulated from the rest of the world that they have lost touch with understanding what the rest of the world is like. They are out of touch with the changes that have taken place within the growth of the human family.

It’s like the concept of royalty. What the hell is that? The idea that someone, by mere happenstance of birth, is better than everyone else and born to “rule” over others. The reason people believe unrealistic ideas such as that is because their parents believed and taught it to them and so the royals are brought up to believe that they are better and the rest of the population is generally brought up to believe that the royals are right. Now pause a minute to digest what I am saying. This whole concept of royalty exists because people believe in it. Dr. Fred Alan Wolf has said that “reality is nothing more than a whole lot of agreement.” Don’t forget that, because we’re going to be looking at it again.

With wealth comes power and some are seduced by the dark side to wield that power over others, thereby dominating them with their power. A gap between the haves and the have-nots developed and has fueled battles for thousands of years. Although these conflicts have contributed greatly to the gruesomeness of the death of billions of people, there has, nevertheless, been sort of an indirect upside to this organized human conflagration. That upside has come in the new inventions and new discoveries that are fueled with the advent of war. That’s right, for thousands of years, most of the advances in human civilization owe their development to being the result of preparation for, and the practice of, war.

The root cause behind this anomaly, where destruction sparks new growth, has largely been due to the laziness of humankind. Now, that’s not a very fair thing to say, for most human beings are far from lazy, at least in the sense of doing what they need to do. But that is precisely where the line is drawn; what needs to be done versus what could be done. Bucky Fuller defined this phenomenon as “emergence through emergency.” In other words, when forced to, we will usually rise to the occasion. In the meantime, we do whatever is necessary to maintain the status quo.

This has been one of the problems between the dominators and the liberators of whom I spoke earlier. Liberators somehow appear not to have the drive necessary to do what it takes to manifest their dreams when those dreams exceed the status quo. Dominators, on the other hand, will do whatever it takes to make their dreams reality, no matter the cost. It’s obvious, therefore, that the dominators will usually win. Get this straight, friends, liberators don’t liberate anyone other than themselves without running the risk of slipping into domination. So we’re locked in an ongoing battle of trying hard not to have to do battle in order to achieve our liberation. And our opponents in this battle are only so happy to do battle with us.

Does that make sense? It’s like everyone works for a small group of bosses. The bosses would like to keep things the way they are with the employees being employees. They are therefore concerned that too much competition could either bump them from their lofty position or create too many bosses, thereby leading to infighting. So what do they do? They see to it that the workers, the overwhelming majority, gets just enough to keep them complacent. Don’t want too many people to get too hungry or they might upset the apple cart. This is why the “middle class” is currently being championed, so that they will rally for the right to remain middle class and not challenge the more privileged in our society.

So life has slowly evolved with the elite few always having the best of what’s available while the vast majority of those remaining scramble for a piece of whatever is left over. The quality and quantity of what is “left over” has slowly improved, but it has always remained far behind what could be.

When I spoke earlier of the merchants being the only real world savvy people, I find myself returning to the term that Bucky Fuller used in referring to these people. He called them “The Great Pirates.” This was because they traveled the world seeking resources and products that they could exploit and then did everything that they possibly could to obtain these goods, even if it required theft, deception and bloodshed. They were often the agents of royalty and therefore would even precipitate wars and other conflicts if it served their purposes. Bucky’s book, “Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth” is an excellent introduction to the Great Pirate story. The movie “Burn,” starring Marlon Brando, does a very good job of exploring the behind-the-scenes gyrations that make these events come into being.

The Great Pirates essentially ruled the world for thousands of years. The wealth that was generated through their activities was based upon ownership of land and goods. And this design served them well for many centuries.

Then in the later half of the last millennia a number of brilliant individuals began making discoveries through observation and experimentation that slowly compounded to lay the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. An excellent resource for who did what and when is Isaac Asimov’s “Biographical Encyclopedia of Science And Technology.” It covers 1510 scientists/inventors/discoverers from ancient times (3,000 BC) to the late 20th Century. One can start with any entry and by following all of the links, ultimately digest the entire book, because the path of discovery and growth is one that connects the entire human family.

Up until the advent of the Industrial Revolution, goods were items, objects, that could be created, or produced, by a single individual. These individuals who made things were known as craftsmen. Great organizations, or guilds, have grown up over time as an organized means of protecting and passing the knowledge, techniques and tools that allowed one to produce a good on to the next generations of craft people.

As new discoveries of more complex products precipitated breaking their creation process into separate components, each of which could still be accomplished by a single individual, the results of this “group” effort in creating a product began a huge transition into the manufacturing model that evolved into the Industrial Age. This was a period that has evolved into extremely complex modes of construction. For example, an airplane is constructed of millions of parts. To keep track of the design and construction of one single plane requires the work of thousands of people. This could not have even have been imagined as little as a hundred years ago. Yet today it is second nature.

But this was merely the beginning of humanity’s discovery of its possibilities. What happened next was so phenomenal that, to this day, very few people are aware of what transpired and the impact that it has had upon the entire world.