Analysis of Religious and Cultural Changes in History:

Seeing Humans, from Shamanism, to primitive "Wicca," to Polytheism/Paganism, to Monotheism intertwined with the social and political systems they chose to adopt and why.

by Guardians of Darkness (All information in this essay, including the charts, are copyright by Tani Jantsang, 1990)

Below are images of two charts taken from the article, "Tree of Destruction: a synthetic analysis of human societal problems since the agrarian age."

The charts are necessary to explain, in a very crunched manner, the progression of human society. But first, let's go back in time.

Some five million years or so ago, what were to become hominids and another primate split from an ancestor. Where it happened can be argued about, but it doesn't matter. Where they went, how they developed and evolved from that point doesn't matter either and there are more viewpoints, with attendant proofs, than just the "Out of Africa" scenario.

The point is, no matter how it happened, about 25 thousand years ago you had Homo sapiens all over the place and they didn't all look exactly the same, but they lived pretty much in the same manner. These people were just like us.

While these early humans struggled to survive, they related to the forces of nature in ways that would make sense to them. Things in nature, other living things, animals, trees, etc., were thought to have a spirit, or manitu, a kind of consciousness or animating force within them. They saw other animals as "people too," just different, with their own kinds of culture or ways of living, e.g., wolf ways, bird ways, etc. This was natural. Things like forces of nature that were frightening, like thunder storms, or things like the sun, would more or less be seen as "gods" but not nearly in the way we mean the word "gods" today. In other words, the sun wasn't like people or other animals or even like trees. It was always there, up there in the sky, untouchable. Storms weren't like people or other animals and trees. Storms came swiftly and subsided, you couldn't touch them either. Earth, air, fire and water were also not like animals or trees - there was something different about earth, air, fire and water.

These humans communicated with nature on their own terms, often speaking through members of their tribe that seemed, for instance, to be better at predicting rain, or better at finding food or picking a safe settlement, or better at knowing which herbs to use to heal an injury or alleviate pain, or better at "communicating" with other animals.

Eventually, these people, who were better at doing these things, were chosen to be Shamans - they mediated between the people and the environment - the whole environment. These very early Shamans were females who were hyper intuitive. The other women gathered food and kept the hearth for the most part, providing the most food. The males hunted and sometimes caught meat, and helped to protect the "safe place" from other animals. This was the Age of Shamanism. These people were either hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads that followed the animals around. These people roamed around and never stayed in one place too long.

Next, perhaps about 10 thousand years ago, give or take (and not all at the same time), as these early humans discovered some rudimentary agriculture, which necessitated them staying on one plot of land, the societies changed a bit. It is our opinion that during this time, these Shaman women became more established, more adept at using the herbs they constantly saw - and what they were like would be more akin to what one might call Witches. The knowledge became a craft, just as knowing how and what to plant became a craft. Wise Women's Craft. Witchcraft. Women did this work along with other planting and harvesting, while males still hunted and protected the home-plot from wild animals. This could be called the Age of Witchcraft and there was division of labor due to the work each member of the society did. However, when you change the nature of plants to eat them, they change YOUR nature. This age didn't last too long. As humans changed the foods they planted, grew, bred and ate, the plants changed humans - like co-evolution - it works both ways, one affects the other, which in turn affects the other, on and on.

The question is, why did they continue to do this and not stop? Perhaps they lost the ability to "reason," which would have told them to STOP, STOP, STOP! Perhaps they were incapable of stopping due to a real internal change caused by some parasite or neurovirus. (Discovery August, 2000 "Do parasites rule the world?" and Science News, August 12, 2000, p 109 "Parasite deludes rats into liking cats." "Wasp redesigns web of doomed spider"). Or, perhaps they couldn't stop due to the next progression that took place.

As Chart One will show, due to such stationary agrarian living, the numbers in the group increased dramatically and the people living there needed more land. Now, other people that are not living that way might be on land that this stationary group needs. Now the males take on a new role: warriors. It is during this time, due to this form of living and the need for more land, that males became active warriors of this type. It is also during this time that the males took over these societies, more or less, and also took over some of the duties that only women had in the past, including, in some cases, the job of being Shaman. Large communities, growing larger by the decade, formed stable cities. They eventually had nations.

Some trade developed with other similar nations that formed. People living in these civilizations became blind to the very real but unseen influences around them (and within them!). They didn't realize that they were ruining the land, for one thing! Perhaps they didn't even realize they were now killing other humans - not just animals out to eat them and not just for hunted food. Their nature changed.

They began to think about superfluous things and moved further away from nature, and thereby lost their harmony with nature. The knowledge of the real "psychic forces" around them in nature became diluted and incoherent. Now, bonafide belief in Gods and literal Spirits and such filled the gaps created by the loss of natural knowledge. Instead of looking inward for divinity or strength or inspiration, they looked outward! This could be called the Age of Pagan Gods or, more precisely, the Age of Polytheism. There were Big Pagan Gods, big statues of them and people worshiping them as if they were real and not man-made. What would you think if you saw someone bowing down and worshiping, praying to, talking to, a telephone pole or a piece of large rock or a statue? In this sense, this age and kind of religion was very different from the previous Shamanism or Witchcraft. Modern people in the Pagan/Wiccan community might object to that definition, but consider that this definition of a "pagan" (pagan noun; 1. a member of a group professing a polytheistic religion or any religion other than Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. [ETYMOLOGY: 14th Century: from Church Latin paganus, civilian (hence, not a soldier of Christ), from Latin: countryman, villager, from pagus village] was a label given to these remnants of real Polytheistic Religions, by the Church. I.e., Zeus or Aphrodite may well have been a mere "village (pagan) god" at this time, but that is not what Zeus or Aphrodite used to be.

These large Polytheistic/Pagan nation states eventually became pretty big empires that dominated other people. They rose and fell. All of these civilizations forgot the source of these Gods they made up, which were once based on something concrete. Instead, they deified their metaphors!

Next comes Monotheism, in our opinion, the worst age for humans. This is where we are now.

This diagram, Chart One, needs to be viewed as a tree that's growing, with branches, from Bottom Root to the top to show how it all started at the root and developed.

CHART ONE - VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM UP

This next diagram, Chart Two, shows what has happened in the world for so long right up to now. It happened over and over again from one place to the next. Again, view this from the bottom on up, like a growing tree.

CHART TWO - VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM UP

Both of these charts should be seen as a growing, interactive dynamic that existed with real people, in real places.

There is a definite, in-built, hard-wired, overall-genetic or ancestral predisposition for these evolved behaviors, whether these are hunter-gatherer behaviors that are utterly twisted into something monstrous, or whether they developed due to interaction with the societies the people lived in and the work they did to survive. Scientists studying this seem to focus on "the males" adapting to conditions in society, as if there are no females or children. It seems as if males were warped the most by all of it. Males, if anything, respond to the females and what's best for the offspring, since this is not a case of "survival of the lone hominid or lone guy," but survival of the GROUP. Without children, there is no future for the group. These people produced garbage cultures, no matter how "great" people inside the paradigm think they were, because they didn't produce "MOSTLY JOY" in life for the majority of people who worked in and lived in those societies. Look what we have today: massive overpopulation with MAN threatening to wreck his own entire habitat. Perhaps they can not stop - perhaps something urges man to destroy himself and his own habitat. What would benefit from that? Well! Quite a lot of animals would benefit from it! Dinosaurs perished where once, for millions of years, they ruled the world. As a direct result of that, primates rose up - including man. Man benefited from their extinction!

What accounts for religion? How shamanism developed into non-shamanism, we feel is explained above. But today, in the modern world - what is religion? Is it extreme repression due to a split in thinking and emotional input, with the resulting disassociative state becoming insanity when the repression breaks lose? Perhaps it is Borna virus, a heritable neurovirus? One thing we do know about religion that's not a theory or negative proclaimation: religion definitely binds people together as a group with rules and laws that must be obeyed. The terms "homogenous nation" or "monoculture" come to mind. The fact is, it is the way things progressed, like a snow ball unable to stop rolling. How many slaves had to starve, suffer, die to make a tomb for a crazed Pharaoh? And what for? So he could "rise" from the dead? Wherefrom in nature would any normal human get the notion that a dead thing could wake up and walk around again? These are delusions of the insane. They would not get such irrational ideas from seeing people sleep, as some idiots have suggested. Primitives and even monkeys would also have seen people (or other monkeys) "sleeping," and then, not so long after they look asleep, see and smell them starting to rot. They'd have a clear understanding of death. They, like any other animal, would come to accept death as a normal part of life. They'd know that the dead aren't going to get up and walk around again! THAT is rational! And it is based on pure, empirical observation!

Is there a biological evolutionary explanation for such behavior? The fact is, other animals are not genetically predisposed to this or that static or fixed social system at all. They also can not be accused of having priests, morals, ethics or books with rules in them or written laws! But other animals do try various social systems - with rules, laws, and ways, "dos and don'ts;" and these social systems they try out are themselves subject to natural selection. The fact is, 99% of all species that ever existed have perished! We are part of 1%, and we've not been here long enough for anyone to determine if we "survived yet" or not. Other animals also conform to, are molded by, the work the members do in order to survive in the area they are in. The strategies that work best in the environmental niche they are in, are they ones they keep. That goes for humans, too. Those would be the strategies that become "as-given" or considered "the norm." Hardly anyone would question the status quo - it would be "the way it is."

Here are three example with other Primates, things that would be called culture if they were speaking of humans. In fact, some experts do call these things culture, now that they've learned a lot more. The cultures are handed down, no different from the way humans do it.

1. Put any primate in an ecological niche where there is scarcity and you'll end up, guaranteed, with alpha dominant male structure as social strategy (culture) where they take the most and the best, and where no one can stop them except a more brutal stronger male challenger; you'll get females that do not band together in unity unless they are close family members; you'll get weaker males and all females being lorded over or even terrorized by the strongest brutes (whether they wield fist, club or atomic bomb....). Most ape species have this social strategy, including many chimps. Sorry to say that this primate idea is the one that many human males believe is "true, THE truth, the only truth."

2. Put any primate in an ecological niche where there is abundance, but not of the long-lasting or permanent type, and you'll end up with cliques of all females dominating the foraging areas and a kind of bartering between males and females for food/favors. If males try to get out of hand, the females put a stop to it fast. The females rule. Bonobo chimps have this social strategy (culture). Note that they are the same species as other chimps, they are cross-fertile. The Bonobo is genetically the closest to humans but one doesn't need "knowledge of their genes" to be able to know what an animal will do if you set up this or that condition in their society.

3. Put any primate in an ecological niche where there is abundance and it lasts long or is renewable or permanent (whether that be vegetation that doesn't rot fast, lots and various kinds of eatable fruits, easily hunted animals to eat, or refrigerators to store TV dinners and easy-access supermarkets with cheap food and lots of it) and you'll end up with equalitarian social strategies (at least within each tribe or nation) or a tendency to want to make that in the society; you'll have no gender-specific work duties and all-around harmony, or at least a tendency to strive for that. Some monkeys have this. I know of no ape species that has this. Some humans have it - I doubt they want to give it up.

No one ever questioned the "as given norms" in the West until the Western countries got comfortable, had a lot to go around for the people in them and had a lot of leisure time and joy. Only then did we see "women's rights" and other such things. But from whom do the women ask for rights? From the men? Yup. That's who the rulers were, with the power to give them these rights!

The trick is to have a balance of people and resources and never let it get unbalanced, have enough to go around, and have the kind of stuff that is always in abundance and easily renewed. Right now, the mega-rich can have all of this within any society out there - while there is abject starvation and horror all around them. This is a new kind of hunter-gatherer. They hunt for resources and riches - and they gather them to themselves; they gather even way more than they could possibly need, and they wall themselves off from the rest of the world!

The whole imperialist, theocratic, patriarchal (woman hating, woman fearing), story of history, since the age of nation state, agrarian-based patriarchy, is one long stream of horrible occurrences that made life miserable for most people living in these places. You don't get to hear about the "most people;" you get to hear about some rulers and their immediate families. Ultimately, the nation-states needed armies of "the strongest" to "protect" the rest of the people there, including women and children, from "the others, out there," and I'm sure the women wanted this comfort and protection without realizing that armies of strong men doing such work eventually become bullies that do not go away. They are in the prime position to demand more than their own share of what used to be shared equally! They turn against those they were assigned to protect in the first place. You end up with the military state. That's how it happens, simple as that. Next, these bullies elect their Ruler, or "God King" as of old, and this Ruler has his army and his Priests backing him (usually). Altar and throne! Later on, Altar and Throne in cahoots with the military and corporations!

ALL of these societies went patriarchal, and the oldest ones of this type, those formerly long standing and "Great Civilizations," are all now called the "backward Third World," with the worst anti-woman, outright sadism, practiced as the norm. One should draw the line when half the people, the female gender, get tortured and mutilated and even crippled for the sex pleasures of men - with this practice backed up by Priests holding their Holy Writs.

For a few million years we were a hunter gathering species that had to work about three hours a day for ALL our needs. Everyone shared. Obviously, the instinct to hunt for food is twisted when humans hunt for other humans to use as slaves to do work for them! But it's a clue: these humans are getting out of the drudgery and stress of work they were never evolved to do. Since money is the means to survival now, we hunt for ways to get it and gather it to save it. We seldom care how we get it! You might balk at that statement. You might have a nice, honest job, say, at McDonald's. Yes, getting paid to help sell super high cholesterol foods to children when there is a nation-wide health problem with this. Working at a nice honest job with a computer, parts made of plastic, a petroleum product. (Yes, this is typed on a computer, and yes, fossil fuels are being burned to keep the electricity needed to run it and the internet). There is no way around it - no one cares how they get the money.

Experts need to take biological evolution, genetics, including epigenetics and norms of reaction, (these are not genetic but seem like they are) and merge that with neurology (see Antonio Damasio especially: "Descartes' Error") and merge that with neurovirology and parasitology, intrauterine environment (embryology), metabolism (i.e., the ENTIRE environment in a big sense) and then merge that with the above. In other words, they need to understand, from way back, the public health and environmental disaster (not advance, DISASTER) that agricultural living brought on; they need to grasp the back-breaking and even crippling work people had to endure (there is forensic proof of all of this), they need to grasp the overpopulation way out of balance with resources that happened, even back then, and come to the RIGHT conclusion.

For one thing, the dogmatic types of woman-hating patriarchy and religion we have had since then is not a normal thing at all. Someone needs to understand what some "esoteric" doctrines have been saying - which is spelled out in Wilhelm Reich's works - and merge that with Antonio Damasio's work. It seems that E. O. Wilson, an expert entomologist and now a sociobiologist, is suggesting this too. He has done a lot of it already or at least hinted at some of it in a book, "Conciliance," - BUT - Wilson has failed to mention the public health disaster brought on by agrarian life; he has failed to reason what humans would become and what they'd "think up" when they felt pain all day long from back-breaking agrarian work, when their lives became constant drudgery; or what some of those people would do to get out of the drudgery - at the expense of all others. E.O. Wilson has failed to reason what bottled up instinct can do, or what upbringing designed to bury instinct and condition the child to ignore the 5 senses, sensual impacts, somatic markers can do. Wilson has failed to conclude that such a human is NOT CAPABLE of logic - but neurologists could explain it to him - Damasio has already explained it: they are anosognosic - alexithymic. Wilson has failed to factor in the fact that we are DOOMING ourselves and there is NOTHING "animal" about this - nothing "normal" about it - it's insane. Humans are SUPPOSED TO have logic and the ability to STOP DOING such things to themselves and each other. Do they have logic? Can they stop? They have not stopped since that first agrarian nation state!

Ask how the Third World BECAME the Third World. Through imperial empires that became simultaneously more patriarchal, more anti-woman and theocratic, with a closed-unit kind of theocratic self-help rule, at first with an army (male warriors) to defend the realm.

To understand all of this, to really understand it without blaming this or that group, takes long thinking and understanding of a large and conflicting group of conditions and a multifaceted situation; it takes a lot to figure out how the world got so messed up. You can't start from the industrial revolution onwards. You have to go to the root of the mess. Theories aren't going to solve it nor are political ideas, which merely predict or legislate behavior. Our remote ancestors, prior to agriculture, had no cops and no jails. They had behaviors or, to be exact: workable social strategies. The problem is that humans, being human, see immediate problems that are in their faces. They don't see or FEEL for the long term problems at all, even if they understand them cerebrally. They react and DO, based on what they FEEL. Any foresight humans have is solely based on their old strategies, for hoarding things they know they'll need, storing it for future use, and so forth. These are still totally up front, in-the face, immediate and slightly long-term strategies. They are never grandiose, despite some egg-heads speaking words to the contrary.

Take the current political feeling on the rise (2001, USA). Right-wing republican methods, like similar methods used long ago by others, are simple but IMMEDIATE solutions to problems they see and FEEL plaguing them RIGHT NOW; the problem is that they utterly lack real foresight, they have simple, immediate "long-term" ideas. But then, that's human.

Three examples that one can find cropping up in any casual conversation with strangers!

1. People want simple jobs, for example. They manage to see foreign speaking people taking the jobs, mostly Hispanic illegal aliens at this time. People don't care if Big Companies bring them here as slave-wage workers; that's too abstract and they can't see an immediate way to stop Big Companies from doing this, and Big Company is just a building. They fail to see this especially if these American companies aren't IN the USA, though they will speak about it. They know this cerebrally. But in the gut-feeling realm the story is different. They see these illegal aliens, and these people WILL NOT learn English and more, they are making demands these days about language, getting "free" care if they are sick (tax payer funded care). This makes the right-wing grow in numbers daily and it also ticks off other, formerly liberal ethnics who DID learn English and who did NOT get "free English classes," or classes taught to them in their native languages at the taxpayer's expense or anything else free from the public dole. This is what they see and, more immediately and importantly, what they FEEL: "He takes the jobs from me and also wants me to speak his language?" "These people are predatory leeches," "Kick them all out," "Shoot them at the border."

2. They see crime, black inner cities, black-on-white terror and bullying, percentages of which group commits the most crime and/or is in jail, and their solution is to build more jails and lock more up - throw out the key. They are reacting to a situation that is NOW, right NOW. What happens when taxpaying workers don't want to pay for prison inmate upkeep anymore? The prisoners will find Big Companies building plants near the jails - where they'll "work" for their upkeep. That's slavery all over again, sort of. However, it sounds like a reasonable or fair idea to a lot of people, even most people. But it will definitely lead to the need for "more criminals" (super cheap labor). Heh. That, plus people out of jail no longer have the right to vote in elections!

3. These right wingers see gays as a poison in society (despite the lack of gay crime and abundance of hard working gays who pay large chunks of taxes). They FEEL that what gays do is sick. They don't care about hormonal influences in the uterus. That's cerebral knowledge for doctors. They know what they FEEL. Right now, they have leaders speaking to them about what they feel!

As for the current large and organized group of Christian Coalitionists, they see non-Christians as anti-Christ and they know what their Holy Book says about them. That's it. They can be seen with happy, smiling faces in their churches, where they feel camaraderie, security, and safety. Those three things are extremely important to human beings - it's in human nature to want those things. No use arguing with them! It's a waste of time. Oh, you might get them to SAY that they are more open-minded about all of this stuff, or spew out the usual Politically Correct line on it, but what do they DO? What they DO is real.

On the other hand, some other more permanent solution could be arrived at, which eliminates the "ones on their shit list, 'THOSE OTHERS' that they just want gone altogether" and "solves the overpopulation problem" at the same time. It would be presented as "moral" to the American dupes. The seriously ignorant that want only their contentment (and do not want to have to do all that thinking about this stuff), the ones that need and want a "head to think for them," might even believe that this new solution is Biblical prophecy. In fact, even the secular minded might go for it if it's presented in a scientific way, say, as eugenically sound. The solution? Genocide.

Most readers by now, right now, are shaking their heads, "oh no, no never." And that is where YOU stop thinking about this possibility, despite the history lessons! Do you know how EASY it is to GET humans to go and do such a thing? Well, of course no one would call it "genocide." They'd package it as something else. Don't they always? Ethnic cleansing? No, they'd not use that one. How about MORAL cleansing? That sounds peachy, right? Better - GOD's laws! "We can no longer tolerate the damned, the sinners." ?? How about "It's good for the human species?" Understand something, we might be using words like ignorant and dupes for these people - but no, make no mistake about it - they are HUMAN. Very typically human!

We already have, hard-wired into our GENES, the tribal instinct - and it IS a bonafide instinct! It's not just a tribal thing - it's also an instinct toward conformity and order. The only thing stopping this from happening faster is some moral injunction that halts what people feel, the "civilized veneer" and in the West the "politically correct vineer" that can vanish in a second - just let the going get REALLY tough and see. This bracing and pausing to "feel guilty about such thoughts" - pents people up if conditions in society exist that stress people out enough. Eventually, pent-up dams break. If you don't believe this, then you are a pipe-dreaming, wishful thinker living in fantasyland who knows NOTHING of human nature (or RECENT HISTORY). How could the most civilized country, the country of Beethoven, Marx and Hegel, fall for "nice moral reasons" to do what they did? Easy. Really easy!

The Left has never really dealt with this reality. The Left doesn't notably like including "instinct" as a crucial factor, either. It's too spooky for some folks. It doesn't matter what big fancy and complex "economic reasons" existed. On the gut level, people FELT what they felt - and they acted on it without knowing or caring about the complexities of economic theories. They weren't evil or even oddballs. They were - HUMAN. They were very ordinary!

Humans were evolved to respond to a situation or threat, perceived or real, IMMEDIATELY, and history shows they do it in a predictable way: they get the strongest men to be their warriors, they get the warriors to hunt and kill or exile "the others" and then, if they succeed in doing this and holding their own for a good length of time, they end up with a patriarchy with repressive laws and anti-female theocracies to back up the men. If this happened in the USA, the USA would be on the sure road to being just one more Third World country. After all, those male warriors "fought and died" FOR the women and their children. That's how the men see this or, more importantly, it's how the men FEEL about it! Then, this would still be just one more Third World patriarchal hell-hole - with defacto gender war. On the other hand, it could also end up being National Socialism in a homogenous nation, at least immediately, for a short while. But how long would that last before it became a repressive anti-female theocracy? No one knows.

What one must grasp is this, and religion definitely ties into it, even if the religion sounds like "science" and is called an ideology: MOST human beings can't think and/or will not bother or desire to think about non-immediate "causes" of things that distress them - either in history or in far off places where they can't directly see these things, where they didn't somatically experience these things first hand. When their emotions get in a boil against an IMMEDIATE THING that they can concretely see, especially if the flames are fanned, they react to that immediate cause of their distress. All it takes is for the religious leaders to go along with it, present some "prediction" or "prophecy" to fan the flames. Anything, or anyone that can solve the problem, relieve the stress, FIX IT so that they are once again, safe and comfortable and happy, is who they are for and would stand behind.

These are the kinds of strategies that enabled hominids to evolve and become modern man! These strategies WORK. They aren't abnormal, or inferior and they certainly aren't "subhuman." They are entirely human. We have heard other egg heads out there questioning why people are religious, or why they can't think. Well, we are also egg heads and we know the answers to that question! If anyone wants to deal with this, for real, they'll have to fully understand Human Nature - the real thing, not the idealized fantasy.

Sure, everyone knows that this "mess" goes on because the modern First World has been exploiting (and still is exploiting) the hell out of that Third World "out there, over there"! But people tend to get selective amnesia about such technicalities. Sure they do - those technicalities are far away, in the past, not immediate or in their faces! They tune that statement out and override it with their "might makes right" rhetoric, or what might even become, "We are Good battling Evil" rhetoric. They are also unable to see that these now large groups of dissatisfied ethnics, having been exploited, are becoming a might. Some of their Third World countries even have nuclear bombs now. Doesn't their might make right, too? Guess no one thought of that. Nope. "THEY are Evil. We are Good!" We think people will eventually start hearing that kind of talk in mainline religion, maybe even in politics! Then again, perhaps we are being paranoid. But I don't think it's paranoid. I expect it!

To reiterate:

Chart One shows this progression:

1. Stationary settlers, who used to be roaming hunter-gatherers, start farming on a patch of land.
2. This naturally leads to changes in work that these people did when they were roaming hunter-gatherers. They adapt to new forms of work and specific chores. This is more or less a division of labor. At this point, the bounty of the harvests and hunts are shared equally. But agrarian living is hard work and leads to overpopulation and the need for more workers to feed more mouths.
3. Now they are really settled down, they need walls around their area to protect it, and people with the ability to do that kind of thing. First, they needed protection from wild animals but, later on, they'd need protection from people when they need more land and expand. They'd need more land because the agrarian form of living requires a lot of work and leads directly to overpopulation and, in turn, a need for more people to work that land, more mouths to feed.
4. Eventually, you have a nation state and a bonafide warrior class and a bonafide planting class and so forth.
5. This stage is where there are now caste systems and people vying against each other for more to eat, more things, better lodgings. Those that are perceived as being "more important," like warriors, are always given more and given the best. They are no longer sharing their bounty equally. Warriors also have the physical ability to take more and keep it.
6. Eventually a Priestly caste supports military practices and serves to pacify the people.
7. They need more room, and a powerful army can make war and take more and hold onto what they have. They are the heroes of the society, now. The people who till the land and make all the food are considered a much lower caste. Or class.
8. What right do they have to just push other people out and take their land? Well, they have the might to do it, therefore it is right. That's what they think, feel and believe. There is no reason for them to believe or think otherwise.
9. Eventually, you have "Manifest Destiny," which states that you have all of these things, and can take it from others, because God wills it. After all, if God did not will it, you'd not be able to do it. It's a circular argument. Such societies often proclaim that their King is put there by the will of God.
10. Empires. Imperialism. Finally they get to colonialism, which is a bigger way to take and exploit from those they have the might to do it to.

Chart Two shows the progression from this point on, the colonialist stage. This scenario makes up most of recorded history.

1. The incoming settlers take over a country, by any means. They eliminate or enslave indigenous populations of others. Then, spreading out further than they used to spread, they run into people that markedly look different. Now everyone in their own nation, regardless of caste, is considered a class. The people that look different fall into a caste system with the conquerors of all classes on the top.
2. Different castes are assigned to different chores. The castes, who look different, get categorized not just as another caste, but sometimes they are seen as another race and treated the way you'd treat another species. "Scientific racism" was born around this time. The oppressed make everything, but it is the oppressors and those in these oppressor nations that benefit from it all. Also, mental labor is now valued over all physical labor. So the thinkers, priests of science or religion, are a higher class in the society than are the manual laborers and farmers.
3. Now the walls around the protected land are just agreed-upon lines drawn in dirt, and what they protect are profits.
4. Unequal ownership reigns supreme, but unlike in the past, the ones doing all the actual work and making most of the things are the ones who actually have the least.
5. Other ruling nations unite, create things like NATO.
6. Priestly class and ruling class support military efforts and continue to pacify everyone else, and rouse the military to go fight for them in wars.
7. They need more and more resources. Armies fight in wars for these rulers and take more resources.
8. Manifest Destiny type thinking is still there. These rulers create dictatorships in small developing countries not as advanced as theirs. These dictatorships are disguised with words like "protecting democracy." They incite racism, nationalism, and conflict.
9. "Might is right" thinking is still there. They protect their profits at any cost, by any means and demonize any threat by either getting the Priests to do it for them, or using religious type or rousing inflammatory type talk in secular language.
10. Socialism in isolation arises when workers, no matter what they look like or what caste they are in, unite in these oppressed nations. Workers also unite within these imperialist states.
11. With workers united, socialism tries its hand against these empires and against imperialism, but workers are bought off. If the nation can exploit workers far away, in far off places, or exploit people that look so different, and then placate the workers within the nation that are considered "the same race," then these workers are easily bought off.

The stage we are at today would require a new chart! This is the age of Transnational and Multinational corporations, where entire corporations have the rights of individuals in the ruling nations, but in fact have more power than any single person could have. They have the power to pay off Presidents of countries! These corporations do not have to abide by the same restrictions that individuals abide by anymore. They leave the nation, they go abroad where exploited nations were, or where nations not as developed and advanced are, and they hire these others to work as cheap labor. But this time it's different. It's no longer exploitation or slavery. The low wages these others get paid amounts to a lot of money within the nations in which they live! It's not like the past where they were being exploited or enslaved at all. They are more than happy to work for these wages - very high to them, but unlivable to anyone within First World nation. Corporations also promote people from these nations coming into the ruling nation to do "jobs no one in the nation wants to do," oddly enough, it's mostly agricultural work! However, it is fast becoming a situation where they are doing jobs that Americans not only want to do, but used to do and make a good wage at doing. All of this is at the expense of the worker in the ruling nation, who is made obsolete. The worker no longer has to be bought off. He can hold a labor strike, but even that won't work anymore because the company can simply move out. He can now be ignored.

This is the New World Order, the Global Plantation. This is, in fact, man at his worst - but no one living within the ruling nation that has comfort and a content life is going to actually DO anything except write about it and let others read it. After all, poor people in undeveloped countries or even in the nation, do not own computers! I am typing this on a computer with internet access! What's going to break this trend and stop the snowball from rolling even further? Fossil fuels running out will force things to change.

Wouldn't it be nice if the Earth had Gene Roddenberry's dream of a Star Trek society as he conceived of the Earth, people living on the Earth, in that time period? An ideal society, a true paradise on earth. Wouldn't it be nice (to break this down to the naked reality), if humans eating and overpopulating out of balance and making human waste didn't cause such strife and trouble? Wouldn't it be great to have a non fossil fuel energy source that doesn't poison anything or leave poisonous residue? Humans will have that pretty soon, we'll have to. Fossil fuels won't last too much longer! Wouldn't it be nice to have another source for food that doesn't erode the land?

It would be very nice; but society as it is now would have to be turned back RIGHT-SIDE UP; the "house" has been upside-down for far too long. We can't go back to primitive living - what would we do without computers and TV and modern appliances? :-O Many modern-day Pagans, Wiccans and other alternate non-monotheistic types have this idea in mind - but they are not united, their Wills are not focused. How many Wiccans or Pagans ever heard of the Ballard fuel cell? The Leftist idea of "workers of the world uniting" has been made into a pipe dream, since 3rd world workers have no reason to unite with workers in the 1st World anymore. Then again, perhaps we can't make this a reality with things the way they presently are, with humans being the way they are now. Keep in mind, in the Star Trek series, before humans got true wisdom and fixed the world to make it nice, a real paradise, there was a world war that wiped out about 90% of the human race. If Roddenberry wrote that, then he pretty much expected it.

Science may well be the new Shamanism, if we get to have a future. Imagine it - people on the street saying, "That's because of Electrons!" Or, "That's Photons!" Those are names for some of the forces underlying Nature!

Suggested sites:

NEANDERTHIN or [www.Neanderthin.com] as of 2022

Tree of Destruction

Return to main index.