Reply #5: Reconceiving the world is the first step

[starroute]

For most of human history, everybody was basically equal. Some might acquire more strength or knowledge or personal charisma, but there was nobody who was defined from birth as innately superior or inferior.

All that changed with the rise of civilization between about 4500 and 3000 BC. For reasons that must have seemed valid at the time, the human race divided itself into aristocrats and peasants, patricians and plebeians -- where the former had all the power and wealth and the latter got to grovel and do the scut work.

That division probably made it possible for the human race to exploit itself in order to produce surpluses, which in turn made possible the rise of a leisure class that could cultivate strange new arts like writing and metallurgy and more complex forms of social organization.

However, in order to create and perpetuate this division, it was necessary to radically distort most people's understanding of their own nature and their relationship to the cosmos. For example, societies in which anyone could seek guidance from the spirits through a vision quest gave way to societies in which the gods would speak only to kings and high priests -- and where temples took the form of vast courtyards where the masses shuffled their feet while their superiors consulted their deities within a tiny and veiled-off inner sanctum.

That extreme degree of division crashed out in many places at the end of the Bronze Age, and the societies which followed -- like that of Classical Greece -- often enjoyed a greater degree of equality, democracy, and (in the form of mystery cults) access to initiatory wisdom. However, the basic division between aristocrats and peasants hadn't vanished -- people just weren't having their noses rubbed in it as strongly.

But even that degree of change was threatening enough to the old aristocratic order that Plato and his successors were led to conceive of a new method of social control, one in which the rulers were to be instructed in the true nature of things while the masses were to be kept in a state of ignorance and superstition.

Fast forward through the next two thousand years and we witness an ongoing tug of war between the Platonic system of control and an emerging egalitarian ideal of universal enlightenment. Christianity, for example, was thoroughly populist until it got co-opted by the Roman empire and ended up in the same old arrangement, where priests got to do the interesting stuff in a specially fenced-off area while the masses stood and watched.

But then that system began to break down. The Protestant Reformation. Guns and printing presses. The rise of science. The decline of the old feudal order based on hereditary ownership of land and the rise of a money-based economy in its place. By the time of the American and French Revolutions, ordinary people no longer believed that kings and nobles were in any way superior -- and they also had the necessary tools to educate themselves and fight off royal armies.

In the wake of those two revolutions, though, there was a profound conservative reaction. If there could no longer be lords and peasants, there could at least be haves and have-nots -- and the invention of the modern, eternal corporation once again made it as easy to pass along inherited wealth as it had been in the days of feudalism.

That old Platonic scheme of keeping the masses ignorant and superstitious also enjoyed a great resurgence. In the early 1800's, upper class folk were boldly speculating among themselves that the old religions might not be literally true, that even the rationalized religion of the Enlightenment might be susceptible to radical challenge -- but at the same time, they were making sure to keep these dangerous notions out of the hoi polloi, even going to far as to arrest and imprison booksellers who attempted to spread unsettling notions about too freely.

The standard lowest-common-denominator religion of the early 1800's was given to sentimentality and conventional piety. By the end of the 1800's, with fresh challenges from Darwin and other areas of science, fundamentalism had to be devised as an even stronger barrier against radical thought. But the basic method is no different -- and even today the dirty secret of the Neocon followers of Leo Strauss is that they still believe there should be a special form of privileged knowledge for themselves (though in their case, it is more a form of cynical nihilism than Plato's original mysticism) and carefully cultivated ignorance for everyone else.

This is what we have to contend with. Americans, in particular, are ignorant by design -- ignorant of their own history, tied to some of the stupidest possible modes of religion, told that their ignorance is a good and natural thing and that anybody who aspires to something better is a dangerous "elitist" to be feared and shunned.

Meanwhile, the genuine elites are laughing and looking down at those they so easily dominate.

More than anything else, the history of the 20th century is the history of a battle by the wealthy and powerful to retain the idea of hereditary privilege. The Nazis supported that idea, which is why they and their racist ideology were acceptable to the American elite. The Communists threatened it, which is why the second half of the last century was one extended paroxysm of fanatical anti-communism, whose final aftershocks have not yet died out.

Before we can do anything else, we have to throw off those mental chains of self-satisfied mediocrity which have been imposed on us over the last 200 years. In particular, we have to reject the perverted, faux-democratic myth of the late 20th century, that we're all ordinary slobs -- you, your neighbor, and the rich guy up the hill, who may have scads more money but is otherwise just like you and me -- and reclaim our birthright of universal aristocracy.

Because that is what we have lost. Fifty thousand years ago, we all enjoyed the same access to whatever power and wealth and knowledge and freedom our society offered. These days, only the richest among us actually enjoy those things. But they have trained the rest of us not to think in those terms, not to aspire to anything better, and above all not to look behind the curtain and find out that the world is run very differently than we have been led to imagine.