Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

With all the hype and hysteria surrounding various social engineering theories being promoted by "less than candid about their real motives" special interest groups, I believe we have lost sight of the real issues. We've become distracted and confused by all the politically correct new age psychobabble - soft meaningless words expressly created to make it impossible to discuss meaningful issues.

The media is full of "social issues" - isolated situations taken out of their larger context and manipulated to appear to support the political agenda of one or more established power bases. But making decisions based on such a limited perspective is practically guaranteed to result in disaster. What we're really talking about is the nature and purpose of civilization.

Civilization starts when a group of cooperating individuals generate sufficient surplus life support that not all of the group's human potential needs to be expended just staying alive. That amount of human potential freed from focusing solely on basic life support is then in theory available to improve the quality of life for the rest of the group - primarily through advancements in the arts and sciences.

The ability to grow food in excess of the cultivator's direct needs through the practice of "intentional agriculture" (perhaps best exemplified by the development and use of the plow) is arguably the key factor in setting the stage for the rise of civilizations. Unfortunately, while they all start out the same (surplus food), few civilizations have progressed along what in retrospect would be considered logical and reasonable directions.

Perhaps a couple of definitions would be in order. The quantity of a civilization is the amount of human potential a socioeconomic system can support in excess of that needed to produce the basic necessities of life for the entire group. The quality of a civilization is the quality of life experienced by the average participant, attained by the application of that excess human potential. There is a big difference between quantity and quality.

Just what is the real purpose of civilization? Is the real purpose the aggrandizement and enrichment of a transitory ruling elite? Is it the building of monuments to the imaginings of revisionist historians? Or perhaps the ever popular domination, exploitation, and suppression of competing cultures?

It appears to me that the primary purpose of nearly every "great" civilization of the past was to divert the available creative energies of its population into massive "makework" rock piling and hole filing projects. Granted, some "civilizations" piled their rocks with great precision and care, and filled their holes in the ground with finely crafted treasures that showed remarkable artistry and effort. Granted also that the display of rock piles and excavated treasure today provides the distant ancestors of these ancient civilizations a modest source of revenue in the modern world.

However, I believe it is safe to assume that the current uses of their artifacts were not what these ancient peoples had in mind back when they were sweating and struggling to build them. I also believe that if these ancient peoples could look back on their efforts with the perspective of the ages, they would not find that their sacrifice and creativity were put to the best possible effect.

Another major flaw in the popular historical perspective is the lack of recognition that most of the major civilizations of the past gained their pre-eminence through the violent subjugation of more productive and arguably more advanced neighboring civilizations. The Roman Empire is a prime example. Most recent revisions of the past would have us believe that the glories of Rome represent a golden age in human history. In reality, the sole Roman claim to fame is that they elevated gangsterism into a "respectable" political philosophy.

As the paramount criminal organization of the ancient world, Rome dominated because it concentrated all of its creative efforts into developing more effective means of violating its neighbors - while its victims foolishly focused on creating civilization. With some or all of their available creative resources focused in positive directions, the victims of the Roman war machine were unable to match the Roman total investment in applied death and destruction. After killing or enslaving their more productive and enlightened neighbors, the Romans hauled the spoils of their "glorious military campaigns" back to their capital city - attempting to create the illusion that Rome had some cultural significance or importance other than being the world's largest repository of stolen property.

It has become popular for revisionist historians to ruminate on the seeming contradiction between the Romans who brought the ancient world a "golden age", and the Romans who were so immersed in violent blood sports for entertainment. I submit that the senseless death and destruction of the gladiatorial arena represents the true mentality of the Romans. All of the magnificent accomplishments in civil engineering, the arts, and other sciences attributed to the Romans were the work of the enslaved victims of the Empire. And while the exploited peoples may have accomplished a great deal under the Roman lash, they would have advanced civilization a great deal further if they had been free of the organized destructive violence that was the hallmark of the Roman Empire.

Of course, no exploitive ruling elite that based its underlying economic structure on the continued availability of other people's assets has ever found a way to get past the problem of running out of new victims. The Roman Empire collapsed after it had exhausted the potential of its accessible victims, and was unable to find more "easy pickings" within the effective range of its military. Unable to meet, with their own neglected and undeveloped productive potential, the gluttonous demands of a citizenry grown fat and lazy on the stolen fruits of other people's labors, the Romans turned on each other and consumed themselves.

As Rome disintegrated, the full impact of its greatest crimes against humanity came crashing down on both perpetrators and victims alike. Knowing that they offered nothing of value in return for the assets they forcibly extracted from their victims, the Romans aggressively suppressed any alternatives to their power structure. When the "official" structure fell apart, the knowledge and ability to reconstruct those social and civil structures that Rome had suppressed were already lost. With nothing to take its place, what had been the Roman Empire fell into the dark ages, dragging even those who had successfully resisted subjugation by the Roman legions, along with it.

I submit that the true measure of a civilization is not the number and size of the monuments it leaves behind, the volume of buried treasure it abandons, or the legends and folk tales that evolve as reality fades from living memory. The true measure of a civilization is the quality of life it provides to its participants. And since children join the pool of participants as the aged expire, a civilization must also be judged over the span of generations.

Modern technological civilization has brought an unprecedented level of quality to those humans who live within it. The popular media endlessly lambastes the quality of modern technological civilization, feeding an illusion that "the good old days" were somehow better. I will grant that there are a lot of things wrong with the world today, but the average participant in our current technology based civilization is infinitely better off than the most privileged citizen of any previous - or current - civilization.

As a personal qualitative measure of modern technological civilization, being in my mid-forties, modern life expectancies indicate that I have lived only a little over half my statically expected life span. In any previous "golden age", I'd already be well past maximum life expectancy. While it is possible to live a life so wretched and painful that a quick end is a blessing, the majority of people alive today live well enough to want to go on living. I can say without reservation that even with all my trials and tribulations, I wouldn't trade my current situation for that of even the most exulted despot of old who died younger than I am now...

Industrialized agriculture and manufacturing currently supports a larger human population than at any previous time in human existence. It is said there are more people alive today than have died throughout all of human history.

The typical superficial view of our current world attributes the vast material wealth of Western Europeans and North Americans to something vaguely referred to as the industrial revolution - without any understanding of the why and how this so call industrial revolution happened. It is especially politically incorrect to question why the industrial revolution didn't happen in other times and other places.

Biologically modern humans have been living on the earth for at least hundreds of thousands of years. At any point in all that time, humans were biologically capable of building our current civilization. The commonly held politically correct concept is that man lacked the critical components of knowledge and technology necessary to create our world, and that gaining those basic building blocks took humanity until just recently to acquire.

Those components popularly identified as necessary for modern technological civilization (agriculture, metal working, organized social structures, written language, mathematics, calendar, etc.) were all present in various ancient civilizations, but the industrial revolution didn't happen. There was a far more important factor missing that it has become extremely politically incorrect to mention: effective individual self defense, and the personal dignity and power that grows from it.

I believe that a true understanding of our current world requires a deeper understanding of the unique circumstances present in Europe and America that made possible the industrial revolution. Scrape away the thin false veneer of respectability - erected by the perpetrators to conceal the reality of their crimes against humanity - and nearly all of human history becomes a sordid tale of the triumph of base brutish violence over those higher aspects of our nature most important in the ascendancy of our species - intelligence, creativity, and productivity. In this usage, productivity refers to making a positive contribution to civilization, and can refer to a wide rage of activities - from the obvious example of producing a beneficial product, to the currently underappreciated necessity of providing effective parenting so that children grow up to also be positively contributing adults.

The official view of history pays homage to the power, glory, - and sometimes even "honor" - of an endless chain of nobles, Royals, emperors, kings, generals, and various other self proclaimed gods on earth. The official account would have us believe that these historical figures were the true fulcrum on which turned the great events of their time.

Another view of these "great" figures of history is that they represented the worst aspects of human nature and are directly responsible for holding back the advancement of the human condition until their power was broken by technology. Until very recently in historical terms, humanity suffered from a paradox between productivity, offense and defense. Exploiting this paradox is what formed the power base of every ruling elite, and has been the chief factor retarding human progress down through the ages.

The most obvious factor productivity contributes to the paradox is that one only attracts the avarice of others if one produces something desired by others in sufficient quantity that it becomes worth the effort to acquire it. The less obvious aspect is that being productive has generally meant concentrating so much time, effort, and attention on being productive, that little resource is left for other demanding pursuits.

Ever since man first learned how to wield a club, both violent aggression and effective self defense have largely been a factor of weapons technology. The paradox begins to appear when you consider the state of weapons technology until just before the start of the industrial revolution. A great deal of training and constant practice were necessary to skillfully use any of the traditional weapons (sword, bow and arrow, spear, etc.). Because doing either even moderately well pretty much consumed all available time and effort, being both productive and skillful with weapons became a very hard combination to maintain.

The paradox tightens because if you worked hard enough to produce something of value, you weren't likely to be powerful enough to defend it from any gang of thugs who wanted to take it away from you. If you were good enough a fighting to defend your self and your possessions, you were too busy practicing with your weapons to produce anything worth defending. And even the most skillful individual could usually be overcome by a larger number of less skillful adversaries. As a result, the largest and most violent gangs of thugs were able to seize power because the only way to oppose them was to assemble an even larger - or at least more effective - gang of thugs. You were forced to become your enemy in order to fight him, inevitably destroying the very thing you sought to protect even before the first blow was struck.

There were two contradictory indirect results from the basic production-offense-defense paradox. First of all, if the extortion efforts of the "skillful with weapons ruling elite" were effective, the parasitic population grew and the demands for production on that part of the population unable to defend itself increased. If it fed too well, the parasitic ruling class grew to consume any resources it could extract from the population - eventually strangling even the most productive subject population. There was also the added danger that if the parasitic ruling class accumulated too much extracted wealth, they attracted the undesirable attention of even more violently destructive want-to-be gangs of exploiters. The only hope for long term survival a productive population had was to starve out the ruling class as much as possible. Too often starving out the ruling class required starving themselves as well.

In order to keep the producers from raising a citizen army to overthrow their oppressors, the ruling classes periodically mustered up all the able bodied malcontents and marched them off to be slaughtered in population reducing and politically distracting "makework" wars.

The second - and perhaps most damaging to human progress - factor resulting from the production-offense-defense paradox was the response of the productive population when faced with the forcible confiscation of their output. Since accumulating anything of value attracted the attention of the parasites, the population attempted to move as close as possible to a decentralized just in time basis - living a hand to mouth subsistence existence to avoid assembling attractive stockpiles of seizable assets or significant wealth. Dispersing what little wealth the population possessed as widely as possible made the entire group less likely to be attacked.

Technological developments could often be more of a curse than a blessing. Technology that resulted in increased wealth would inevitably attract some group wanting to take it away. Wealth to a group that wasn't militarily powerful was an invitation to disaster. Most of the famous battlefields of the ancient world were first places where the original inhabitants had unwisely assembled more assets than their enemies believed they could effectively defend. The Chinese learned early that nearly all change brought undesirable side effects to a defenseless peasant population - hence the ancient Chinese curse of "may you live in interesting times". This well justified aversion to change also explains why the Chinese discovered but made no meaningful use of so many technologies that played critical roles in the industrial revolution (gunpowder, printing, metallurgy, etc.).

The production-offense-defense paradox dominated the human condition until it was shattered by a revolutionary breakthrough in weapons technology - the personal firearm. The body counts of history adequately document the mostly negative direct tangible effects firearms have had on various human populations. But the intangible positive effects of wide spread possession of firearms on human civilization have been far more profound - and nearly completely undocumented.

The iron grip of the old order and the pre-eminence of physical violence as the primary factor in human history were shattered with the development of reliable and effective personal firearms. For the first time in human experience, a weapon was available to the average person that with minimal training and practice would allow him to effectively defend life and property against substantial numbers of would-be parasites and exploiters.

It's no accident that the first product of the revolutionary new "mass production of identical interchangeable parts" technology so critical to our modern world was a rifle. The industrial revolution would have quickly sputtered to a halt if it had not first produced the means for its participants to defend themselves and their production. It's also no accident that America - the nation that for over a century has been the primary driving force behind the global industrial civilization - has both the highest level of personal freedom, and also one of the highest per-capita rates of personal firearm ownership. History endlessly repeats the lesson that you can't have something unless you're willing to defend it.

Only after it became possible for the producer to cost effectively defend and retain the fruits of his labor did meaningful technological progress become possible - and practical. And as a direct result of this shift in the availability and control of "intentional violence" away from organized groups and into the hands of individuals, making it possible for an ambitious individual to be both productive and effectively protect the benefits of his efforts from even the most aggressively violent parasites, an explosion of progress occurred. In effect, the industrial revolution was inevitable once technology had provided enough motivated individuals with sufficient personal power to change the - until then - brutally simple rules of group dynamics.

After enough generations for the harsh reality of the paradox to be forgotten, we have gotten complacent and forgotten what is truly important and why. Gun control has become an increasingly popular topic in the media. The liberal dominated congress recently managed to ban a number of personal firearms they falsely labeled as assault weapons, claiming that these particular weapons needed to be banned in the name of crime prevention. The FBI uniform crime report (the government's own most reliable source of such statistics) indicates that these firearms are actually used in less than 3/10 of 1% of crimes committed using firearms. Hardly a valid justification for denying lawful citizens the right to own these firearms. After all, a valid case simply cannot be made that assault weapons themselves are the cause of violent behavior in humans.

The citizens of the most stable, law abiding nation in the world - the Swiss - require every able bodied male between 18 and 45 to possess a true fully automatic assault weapon in their home and available for use on short notice. Those citizens not issued an assault weapon and supplies of ammunition by the government as part of the national defense citizen militia are encouraged to privately purchase and maintain in operable condition fully automatic military weapons. The only regulations relate to privately owned antitank and antiaircraft guns - a critical component of the firing mechanism must be removed and stored separate from the gun. In spite of the near universal private possession of far more effective weapons than American citizens are allowed to possess, Switzerland never suffers the level of violent crime that is rampant in the USA.

The real reason the government wanted to ban these particular weapons becomes obvious when you consider the design parameters of the firearms in question. Weapons like the AK-47 fire a medium power rifle cartridge in semiautomatic mode (one round per trigger pull) with magazine capacities of up to 30 rounds between magazine changes. Many of the other banned weapons fire standard pistol cartridges. The weapons are also designed to operate reliably under primitive conditions with minimal maintenance. None of the banned weapons are capable of full automatic fire - which is the true definition of an assault rifle. Fully automatic assault rifles as well as all machine guns, explosive devices, rifles and shotguns shorter than a specific length, pistols with shoulder stocks, etc. have been banned in the USA since the 1930's.

While according to the FBI's own statistics the banned firearms are actually almost never used in crime, they are exactly the weapons of choice for serious self defense against multiple armed and hostile adversaries. Considering the ongoing aggressive government assault on our rights and liberties, it also comes to mind that these are exactly the firearms an oppressive government would worry most about in the hands of an organized citizen resistance.

A poisonous residue of the old order remains in our modern world. There are individuals and groups who believe they are the rightful heirs to power over the rest of us lessor beings. These would-be ruling elites believe that a return to the old Roman model of unquestioning subservience to the dictates of the state is the proper mind-set for the nameless faceless hordes of unwashed humanity.

An even more alarming trend among the masses is a growing acceptance that the state should both provide for, protect, and actively control its citizens in their everyday lives. There is a growing conviction among these people that the individual should surrender all individuality and personal power to the state, and commit himself to the dictates of the state. Has the destruction of the education system so completely erased all knowledge and understanding of humanity's past mistakes? Will our generation willingly relinquish our rights and freedoms and allow the paradox to be restored?

Unless destroyed by external aggression, all past attempts at building a long duration republic have followed the same failure pattern. After a few generations their populations grow complacent and surrender their political power to a ruling elite. Sometimes a brief period of prosperity follows, but inevitably the ruling elite becomes abusive and destroys the civilization.

Are humans so incapable of maintaining a citizen controlled republic that, even with the wisdom of the ages gained at such terrible cost, we are forever doomed to repeat the endless cycle of brief periods of progress followed by long periods of darkness? With the number of nuclear weapons in the world today, will the human species survive the next collapse of civilization? Have we finally crested the learning curve, or are we our own doomsday device?