Kootenay Crust

Ba-aa-ah…

When I was about 19 I wrote a simple poem, probably in anthropology 101, that began, “We are born on Earth, a human birth, but we are sheep, we follow.”

As 1984 was only a few years away, the ‘sheep’ metaphor worked for me. Little did I know how historically accurate that metaphor really is.

You see, there came a wonk in human evolution about 5,500 years ago. It was the evolution wonk that created ‘civilization.’

It is the point in time when humans went from being mostly hunter/gatherers to mostly agrarian. It’s when we began to discover the joys of excess.

Some people enjoyed excess more than others and they began to discover ways to stockpile and with those stockpiles, trade for other valuable commodities. Soon those people had ‘wealth’ and those without wealth began to depend on the wealthy for sustenance.

At the same time, as humans were just a few generations removed from being forest-rummaging monkeys sucking marrow from the bones of the weakest, we maintained savage dispositions.

The same savage disposition that motivated the users and rulers (let’s refer to them as the ‘one per cent’), kept most young men on their toes and in the hunt.

It was either stay home and farm yourself to death so your family could live in basic squalor while the one per cent partied and feasted at the top of the hill, or take the one per cent up on marching to the neighbouring kingdom to do a little warring, or take up arms to defend your one percenter’s grazing fields, and gain your master’s approval (which led to a crust being thrown from the table now and then).

It didn’t take a prehistoric Einstein to figure out angry young men could be extremely valuable.

Indeed, angry young men remain the most valuable commodity of every one percenter’s kingdom.

If they are left to their own devices they are fatuous and dangerous and that is why warlords, kings and queens and governments these past six millennia have used them in wars.

It’s been a simple and true recipe for success for the one per cent. Their plan isn’t genius; it’s simply follow through on the luck of soul placement and keeping the whip cracking.

Nothing has changed. The philosophy remains true and on target. We haven’t changed an iota in 5,500 years, even though we think we’re ‘modern.’

What else explains the U.S. Senate rejecting bipartisan legislation to tighten restrictions on the sale of firearms April 17? Even though, as President Barack Obama said, “90% of Americans support this.”

Ba-aa-ah. Duped again. The dogs are snickering in the background while the sheep shiver in fear from recent terror in Boston. There’s danger everywhere; stay armed my friends!

Angry young men must be kept angry, or else they’re no use to the one per cent. Angry young men power the terror machine that keeps the sheep huddled under the ‘protective embrace’ of their masters and shepherds. Semi-controlled chaos is good for business when it is sufficiently cloaked in the drive for excess.

Spend a little time reading about history – from its earliest messages on cave walls to yesterday – and you will see a clear picture why we are where we are. And it’s all farming’s fault!

Agriculture and all its domestication and resulting linearity, allowed ‘civilization’ to be born. As a result, the world’s population exploded.

The proclivity for humans to flock together and be herded stretches back about 5,500-6,000 years – to Mesopotamia – over the fertile flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

Before then, humans had been living as hunter/gatherers, in bands and tribes and interactions were as they are now; friendly when there was mutual gain (trade, exchange of genetic code etc.) and unfriendly; a reaction to unwelcomed intrusion.

Every kingdom that rose from the gatherings of agrarian development underwent the exact same developments that we are facing today. Granted, some had to deal with massive global changes from volcanism that led to their doom but still.

Leaders have always used angry young men to their advantage; and if a bunch of them died in the process, all the better because that decreased the odds of someone in the kingdom rising up and knocking a leader off.

Those same leaders and kingdoms designed our societies and wrote our histories, crafted laws to favour their stead and with strings and wire and plenty of cold hard cash (cattle, horses, slaves, land, gold, status etc.) or whatever else would encourage fealty, subservience and loyalty, they established social classes, beginning with their ‘second in command’ (the shepherds) down to their guard dogs and further down still to the sheep. It has always been vital for the one per cent to have eternally hopeful guard dogs in place to watch the sheep.

Once the ‘dogs are in place,’ they can rampage because they have enough power to do their bidding for them.

And so marches history – arf, arf, arf – until a sheep discovers that if it is mad enough and kicks good and hard, it can make a dog yelp and run away.

History’s passage has clearly visible high water marks that note times when the sheep rose up, finally spent from being nipped at (being screwed over by a corporation or government or political party or special interest group – you get the picture).

Think of the Roman Empire. It is hard to pinpoint a single event that brought it to its knees. It was too expansive and diverse; had too many sheep and untrustworthy dogs. But it fell apart in a big nasty way – right into the Dark Ages.

America, the bastion of the most one percenters in the world, should heed history’s echoes. Romans knew to the core of their beings that the people were Rome. The emperors and senate kept them penned by distracting them and the angry young men were marched off to the corners of the empire to deal with ‘threats.’ In reality, they were the occupying force and were the ‘threat.’

Now, people may be sheep, but they aren’t all droolingly stupid. Eventually enough of them catch on and a revolution forms.

Think of the American Revolution (1775-1783) and French Revolution (1789-1799) as the most recent ‘big time’ moments where the masses stood up as one and told tyranny (see also: the one per cent) to ‘sit down and shut up or we’ll eat you.’ These come across as the most recent high-water marks when the sheep breached their pastures and trampled the dogs and masters. The Russian Revolution was nonsense; merely one pack of repressors knocking others off.

History is lousy with moments where nations or tribes rose up to defeat enemies, but most wars and battles have been fought by the 99% on behalf of the one per cent.

The 99% are told by the one percent that they must die for their nation and off go the angry young men, oscillating with rage steeped in the narcotic haze of jingoism.

Along with that haze, there is the brilliant central gem of the current prevarication being swallowed: we think we are free and the masters of our own destiny, but our current society, formed with the principles of democracy (demos/people and kratos/power), merely controls us on a giant grinding rat wheel in which we the people are the fuel that powers it along. Our labour and efforts and sacrifices are the dredged oil that powers the fortunes of the one per cent.

You may be sitting there thinking, “I own my own business/have a great paying job and do my own thing and I’m alright Jack.” And you may be and I hope it is always that way for you. What I am saying is that there are 99 angry searchers, besotted with fatigue and despair for every single ‘I’m alright Jack’ in Canada or the USA. What do you think the ratio is in most of Asia, Africa or South America?

I know I am not alone in thinking we are heading toward another high water mark. It’s clear that we are all living our lives within a well-maintained illusion, but the world is shrinking too quickly and it is playing havoc on our massively distracted sheep brains.

The Internet and social media are the Silk Road carrying new thoughts and ideas to the far corners of the globe, bypassing the control centres of government – television, Hollywood etc. And with each passing day, the concept of being a willing participant in a charade of democracy, let alone adding things up to realize we could quickly become victims of tyranny (which much of the world’s population remains), will molt from the collective mien.

With each painfully transparent using and abusing of the masses, with each obvious lie, with every puppet show completed, the one per cent drill closer to the dry tinder.

And social media will carry a spark that will ignite it. It may even have come close last week in Boston.

How the next revolution unfolds is beyond me, though my wild and rambling imagination toys with a plethora of possible scenarios – none immediately good for 100% of humans.

There will be new enemies created to rile the angry young men; new wars to fight.

Ironically, as our world’s population continues to rocket out of control, fewer people are engaged in agriculture and still we drift ever farther away from our hunter/gatherer roots. Control over who and what we are continues unabated.

Humankind is coming to the point where our evolution is going to hit the wall, when the terribly disproportionate balance that is halting our evolution topples.

Either that, or we head back into the meadows, sated with new promises of excess and another generation of angry young men is fed to the machinations of new grand elaboration.

Ba-aa-ah…

Ian Cobb/e-KNOW 

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