The Masters

I have been reading a book lately, Before the Dawn by Nicholas Wade, about human prehistory. It is a fascinating book, and while I wonder about some of what he says, everything is well supported and well thought out. It brings up for me, however, a major issue. I have maintained for years that our society took a bad turn with the Neolithic Revolution. (I suppose that makes me an ultra ultra conservative.) That is where we changed from a largely egalitarian mobile society, to a hierarchical settled one.

It is fairly obvious that such a shift calls for a different kind of organization, more complex, farther reaching, but our solution to this need was that we started having masters, and people who desperately wanted to be our masters, and coincidentally, many people who preferred being slaves. Most of our subsequent recorded history has been the struggles of those masters to gain even more power. Much of the social development since then has been the struggle of the rest of us to keep that power in check.

Gorge Orwell said, "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." Those who would be our masters are after exactly that, except that eventually the face would no longer be human, because humans cannot stay human without hope. For those of us who would be free, this is the struggle. To keep the would-be masters in check. To create for our future an egalitarian society despite them and despite the need for responsiveness to a complex ever-changing world.