How Tribal Evolution Brought Present Masochism

Ancient Mental Structures From Tribalism Foster Present Day Masochism Imposed By The Wealthy:

Humanity is fundamentally tribal. A tribe is a number of humans, say fifty. Enough to scare off, and kill, a sufficient numbers of predators. Not enough to tax the land so much, one could live off it.

Predation is something hard to imagine nowadays (and yet, ironically enough we are becoming victims of it again!) For tenths of millions of years of human evolution, before an alliance could be made with wolves, human beings were in a constant war with super predators. The notion of super predator is the stuff of legend. Why? Because humans eliminated most of therm in the last 50,000 years (around the date when Neanderthals exterminated the giant European Cave Bear).

California Scene, 15,000 Years Ago: Smilodon Not Smiling For 4 meter Tall, One Ton Arctodus

Eurasia and the Americas enjoyed their respective lions, at least 25% larger than today’s largest African lions. Homotherium (Eurasia), and Smilodon (America) were saber tooth cats, the latter was huge. The path into America was probably barred by the extremely carnivorous, lion faced Short Faced Bear, Arctodus Simus, represented above, who probably ran down bisons and horses (it was made for running). Standing, Arctodus reached four meters tall. Smilodons hunted in packs, and where altruistic (they fed their crippled brethren). California also enjoyed the American Lion, and its own heavy, non-hibernating version of the grizzly bear.

Giant hyenas and giant baboons prowled in Africa. A super giant, three meter tall sort of gorilla in Asia. And so on. The jungle, forest, taiga and tundra was incomparably more dangerous than now. For millions of years.

Human beings evolved in fear, finding safety only in numbers and military discipline. Fascist obedience behind rulers was a life-saver during millions of years. Those life-saving psychological charascteristics probably evolved into an instinct (a natural neurological pattern for human beings).

I call this the fascist instinct. Religions, superstitious or not, the madness of crowds, hyper nationalism, blind obedience to orders, lynching, all come from this natural human tendency to mob the enemy.

In particular, there is in human being a natural tendency to be subjugated, scared, so as to all unite in the terror of the moment.  Politicians exploit it. This tendency is no doubt at work in the rise of the present plutocracy, and the revered myth that we don’t have the means to serve our Lords, except if we engage in more austerity, and subjugation to the laws of the market (that is, the laws of those who had the capital to start with, often obtained by hook and by crook).

We live in strange times, when the real issues are blocked by a mess of red herrings and other irrelevant stuff. Contemplate the so-called “gluten allergy” (disclaimer: I have myself celiac disease). Gluten, a catch-all word for a number of proteins, is the major constituent of wheat, barley, and rye.  It is formed by the interaction of gliadin and glutenin proteins. Corn also contains related proteins called “corn gluten”. These proteins enabled civilizations, starting in the Middle East where they evolved by natural and artificial selection, and in Mesoamerica, where corn was literally created by human genetic engineering.

Now we are told those proteins, at the root of civilization, well tolerated for 500 generations, are poisonous. And people worry about this, frantically… Instead of the poisons and general denutrition agro-alimentary plutocracy has found convenient to stuff food with. People need enemies to feel united, but they are careful to not take plutocracy itself head-on. Just as prehistoric man could not take Arctodus head on, in the beginning.

Ultimately, Arctodus, having blocked the Americas for three million years, was defeated.

We don’t have that kind of time.

Patrice Ayme’

PLUTOCRACY IMPLIES SLAVERY

Plutocracy tends to install SLAVERY FOR 99%… Or maybe it’s 98% (the percentage of non-Nobles in the European Middle Ages). Plutocracy, as a concept is much more general than considering the color of the skin, or other origins, as the primary value of an individual. Generally the interpretation of “plutocracy” is the rule of the wealthy (from associating Pluto to wealth, and kratia as power). So plutocracy is usually interpreted as a society where money can buy anything and everything… from power, to freedom, health and happiness.

Obama and others have woken up to the fact that “300 years of slavery” have left a mark in the USA. “The legacy of slavery… discrimination in almost every institution of our lives… casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on,” the president said… “We’re not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.”

Yes, indeed. It goes much further than that, all the way to the root of human ethology. Slavery itself has roots in the organization of English AMERICAN society. It appeared there exactly in 1619. Slavery had been unlawful in Europe, per Frankish law which was nearly a thousand year old… in 1619!

The mentality of masters and slaves is all over the USA. To this day. This is why the USA is different from Europe.

Road Not Taken: New France Failed Out Of Goodness

Road not taken: New France was supposed to offer civilization to the Natives. What for? said the Masters. And the Masters proceeded to exterminate all those who could not master them, including the French.

Yes, masters and slaves were all over Europe too, and a war was fought about that from April 1792 (general attack by all European plutocrats against the French Constitutional Monarchy) until June 1815 (Waterloo). Superficially the plutocrats won. But there were a number of revolutions in the Nineteenth Century, and the French Republic got re-established. In the end, anti-plutocratic principles of 1789 came to rule the United Nations after 1944.

So what is the Plutocratic Principle?

That the best way to organize society is for the haves to rule, and exploit, no holds barred, and sky is the limit.

The idea that Plutocratic Rule is best, is already found in Aristotle. Thanks to his intimacy with the world’s mightiest men, that’s how Aristotle destroyed democracy. Aristotle thought monarchy was the best organizing principle of society. He conveyed that idea authoritatively to a number of very close friends and students. Among them the Macedonians Antipater, Alexander and Craterus, who were like family.

As a result, Direct Democracy has been buried for 23 centuries, and counting.

The liberty for the haves to exploit was optimal for the quick conquest of the Americas. It’s a success story. Who can argue with success? Philosophers? Deep thought? That’s why they are not welcome, in Plutocratic quarters.

The conquest of the Americas, fundamentally, was a military operation.

The French tried to make it into something else, an ethical operation, helped with a bit of fair trade. This moral calling arose from the discovery of Canada by Jacques Cartier. The next attitude the French explorer and commander found, to his dismay, was that many American Natives were actually hostile to the invasion of their land by Frenchmen. So it was decided, and it became a tradition, to use a light touch for the colonization of North America by France: it had to be made with the approval of the Natives, in particular the Hurons.

It worked splendidly.

The Hurons got civilized, Christianized, they built farms, grew and prospered. French “Coureurs de Bois” established fair trade all over Canada and the West, to Colorado, and beyond. They fraternized with the Natives, married them, had children.

It worked splendidly, until English plutocrats showed up, the “West Country Men“.

Those investors (including the English King) had refined the Plutocratic Principle in Ireland. It involved lining up roads with human skulls, to enlighten the Natives about what resistance untailed.

Against the Plutocratic Principle, Civilization contend in vain, if it does not go to war.

The French state insisted that only individuals of the highest morality be allowed to visit Canada. And that was with a return trip in mind. Women were carefully interrogated and inspected to make sure that they would not use their charms liberally.

The English plutocrats and their agents (the Iroquois) defeated the French, and annihilated the Iroquois.

Even before this, it became clear that Native Americans and Africans made excellent robots to help conquer the land, so, propped by the Plutocratic Principle, they introduced slavery. And soon there were much more slaves in some states than white masters.

Slavery was defeated by Lincoln.

But its root has not been. It has not even been detected, let alone condemned.

The Plutocratic Principle is better at war. To win a war, an army, a country, needs to act as one large body with just one brain. This is why the Fascist Instinct is crucial to a world conquering primate such as the genus Homo: E Pluribus Unum. The Plutocratic Principle is a generalization, to society, of the Fascist Instinct.

At some point, the human tendency to over-exploit the land has to be kept in check: thus the Dark Side. In the Americas, as anywhere in the world, this involved massacring people, to keep the numbers down.

But genocide is still something else: it reduces cultural diversity.

The Interest of the Dark Side has been, ultimately, sustainability. There is goodness in the Dark Side, on the level of the genus Homo. It protects against termination of the genus.

However, nowadays, the technological powers at our disposal are so great, that one cannot give free rein to the Dark Side. Let’s suppose that American Natives had nuclear bombs instead of horse and tomahawks: trying to massacre them may have been counter-productive to the English Colony.

Similarly, all out war against the biosphere through “climate change” and acid ocean, will turn out just as good as it did for the dinosaurs.

The Dark Side, the very success of the Plutocratic Principle in the USA, are leading us to a collision course with reality. We are now at war with physics.

Thus the Plutocratic Principle has to be jettisoned now. That means that the USA should strive to be more like Europe, and less like its old exploitative self. In turn, that may teach some emerging superpowers, such as China, that the Plutocratic Principle is counterproductive.

Patrice Ayme’

Don’t Feed the Bear: All Putin Needs Is Comfy War

YOU WANT PEACE? MAKE WAR COSTLY

The French and German leaders are meeting again with Putin to make him recover reason: it reminds me of Munich, 1938, when the French and British leaders were trying to make Hitler reasonable.

France and Germany together have a slightly larger population than Russia, but three and a half time the GDP. (By the way, what happened to Britain? Well London is full of Russian plutocrats and banking institutions keen to make Assad and Putin possible; hence the British discretion.)

An Ukrainian in the street interviewed by German TV said it was out of the question to give territory to Putin: if one gives him a finger, he will take the entire arm.

Putin Wants “The Big Country” Back, & Its Prospect of Endless War

In the West, cowardly pacifists say: do not provoke Putin, do as he says, he has nukes and will attack, if lethal defensive weapons are sent to Ukraine. That makes them collaborators of evil.

This is rather curious that pacifists use a fundamentally bellicose argument: don’t try to stop the mad man, he may get offended, and kill everybody.

Indeed, a mad man’s madness with criminal insanity overtones, makes the case for the greatest severity. So the essence of the pacifist whining call for the greatest severity to be applied on Putin, right away.

Because what are pacifists saying? Putin is the most dangerous Leader, ever. So let’s be nice to him.

It is now known that, had the USA and Britain be as firm as France against Hitler in the 1930s, Hitler’s own generals would have made a coup against him.

But, instead, Britain and the USA made concession after concession to Hitler. So Hitler flew from success to success, undermining any mood critical of him. How can one criticize a winner? Clearly, it was unpatriotic. It made the top German generals and marshals who thought that the dictator was completely crazy, and a danger to Germany look like traitors.

Something similar is developing with Putin. As he occupied and annexed territory in Georgia, Moldavia, and now Ukraine, and the West proved incapable to stop him, he looks ever more like a winner. Putin’s avowed goal is to bring back what he calls the “New Russia” (half of Ukraine) and the “Big Country” (the USSR). Pacifists say that the fundamental strategic interest of Russia is at play, so . di, Putin flies from success to success.

So where does Putin stop? This is what pacifists have to know, if they do not want to be simple collaborators of evil.

But of course, they don’t know.

Should we then keep our fingers cross, and hope for the best?

Why?

Because Putin killed only 100,000 in Chechnya? Because Catherine the Great stopped 80 kilometers from Berlin? Not a safe bet: Catherine did not have nukes.

Behaving now as nothing will stop Putin, but for the application of overwhelming force is not safe, but it is the safest strategy. If Putin is completely crazy, overwhelming force won’t stop him. But nothing will anyway, especially after he has fully armed himself, as he is presently doing, Hitler-like.

If Putin is not completely crazy, the threat of overwhelming force will stop him.

Not trying to stop him, if he is not completely crazy, will certainly make Putin completely crazy. Be it completely crazy with greed.

As I tried to explain, Putin, like Hitler before him, and Napoleon, and many (not all) conquerors before him, has discovered that war unites the People behind him, and make all the People think as one, and the name of that one, is Putin. This is what I call the fascist instinct. It is crucial to enable a (relatively) weak primate, far from any tree, to conquer the Savannah and Steppe, heretofore ruled by formidable predators.

Putin’s rule has been a disaster. Thus he needs to activate the fascist instinct in the Russian People. Thus he needs war.

Thus, if pacifists give him Ukraine, Putin will be deeply unhappy: he did not want Ukraine. He wanted war. War gives him fascism, thus the ability to rule. In this light, the reign of Louis XIV of France can be better understood.

After millions of Protestants had left France, and France has lost considerable territory in continuous wars, Louis XIV of France, the self-described “Sun-King” (“Roi-Soleil”) feebly bleated that his advisers had poorly advised him about Protestants: it had not been a good idea to have harassed, despoiled, and submit them to “Dragonades” (occupation of Protestant households by elite troops called “Dragons”).

However, Louis XIV, a dedicated fascist, hater of the “Republic”, lied (as fascists are wont to). Louis XIV had continual wars, and particularly against innocent civilians, because he needed continual wars, because that justified his fascist, personal rule.

Louis XIV was not afraid of war, he was afraid of peace, because peace meant the Parliament may want to re-establish the Republic again (which is what the “Fronde” was all about).

Napoleon faithfully executed the same scheme (because De Sade, one of the Revolution’s principals, had criticized the aggressive, expansionist war making, Napoleon put him in a mental asylum).

The same exact mechanism caused the First World War, with the Kaiser playing the role of Louis XIV. The Jews played the role of the Protestants under Louis XIV.

Soon Stalin would institute continual internal war, to justify the dictatorship of the Politburo which he headed. Hitler repeated the method.

So are we condemned to repeat history? Not so, if we learn how it works.

Putin got his 85% approval rating, from his activation of the fascist instinct.

However, the very latest polls show that the Russian People is getting wary of Putin’s protest of innocence about the war: 70 percent stated that Russia was assisting the breakaway rebels of Donetsk and Luhansk. Good. However, the same polling show that now most Russians think that establishing “Novorossia” (“New Russia”) is a good idea.

In other words, Russians are turning t the Dark Side: they know their dictator is making war in a foreign nation, but they are starting to approve the invasion of that nation, and its annexation.

Why?

Same story as what happened in the German collective psyche after Hitler annexed the Republic of Austria. Then the Germans became favorable to other annexations (Czechoslovakia, some Baltic states, much of Poland, etc.) Because Hitler had proven to be a winner.

As far as the Russians are concerned, Putin is a winner, so he has got to be right. Not right on the facts, but morally right: Ukraine, like Georgia or Moldova, is Russian property.

Want to turn Putin into a loser? Do it on the battlefield. And do like him: play dirty, send efficient weapons stealthily first.

Patrice

Black Hole INEQUALITY

Krugman rightly denounces “toxic inequality“. One can say much more. Inequality has poisoned civilizations, before. Now it’s even poisoning the planet itself. And much worse will come if corrective measures are not applied.

Inequality is not just a political problem, it’s also a mathematical problem, with dynamics similar to the mathematics of Black Holes. If one falls too deep into it, there is no coming back. Contrarily to what obsolete philosophies said.

Black Hole Plutocracy?

Here are the three ingredients of this mathematical situation:

a) the fascist instinct. The group pulls together as one mind once the group is under attack. That instinct is more than 50 million years old. It turned primate troops into effective superorganisms able to hold off predators, armed with war minds rather than dangerous bodies.

b) the plutocratic phenomenon. The exponentiation of capital plays a crucial role: the more capital one has, the easier it’s to get more, everything else being equivalent.

Rousseau observed: “Everywhere one looks, man is in chains“. Yet, total democracy is the natural state of man. Indeed, groups in nature are not under attack every day. Thus the fascist state (everybody goose-stepping behind the chief, and thinking, and feeling what the mind of the chief does) ought to be rare, as they ought to appear only in unnatural situations.
Hence, monarchies, tyrannies, aristocracies, theocracies, all types of plutocracies, are not natural states. So how come they keep on appearing? When the Roman Republic grew, it was continually at war, for centuries. Why? because it was fighting to death all sorts of plutocracies surrounding it. Not just Carthage and Hellenistic kingdoms.

When Rome was sacked by Gallic invaders in 387 BCE, the chiefs of that Celtic army were on a giant kleptocratic adventure; Rome struck them as a rich agricultural and herding area, ripe for plunder. Kleptocracy is also a form of plutocracy.

(After Rome paid a huge ransom, the Gallic invaders, were defeated and later annihilated, by the dictator Camillus.)

Plutocracies kept on appearing within civilizations, in the last 7,000 years, from an abuse of the fascist instinct and plutocratic phenomenon out of control. Both fascism and plutocracy are exponential phenomenon. Moreover, they are entangled: plutocrats discover readily enough that fascism is their friend, and that they can foster it with a state of perpetual war. A recent demonstration of this is the Bush’s Patriot Act. The instauration of this state of siege corresponds to rising inequality in the USA.

(In 1979 the income of the top 0.01% was 1.5% of all income in the USA; now it is 5.5%. This means that the wealth of the top .01% in income has been multiplied by a factor of 3.67. In the same period the income of the top 1% went from 9% of all income to 23% of all income. Hence the top 1% are 2.55 times richer. This is all paid by having the lower classes poorer than they used to be.)

The most successful societies were aware of the preceding pitfall, that deadly exponential of wealth and fascism. Thus the Roman Republic put an absolute limit on wealth. It’s no accident that the same Camillus above who defeated the Gallic plutocrats allowed the passage in 376 BCE of the Lex Licinia Sextia that put a limit on the public land (held by the army) that could be acquired by one individual (to a measly 1.3 square kilometer). There was cheating, though, by major plutocrats, and things came to a head under Tiberius Gracchus in 134 BCE. Basically, plutocracy was not lawful in the Republic, and the Gracchi tried to make it so. They failed, and the result was 2,000 years of plutocracy.

However, We The People, when ruled by the few, tend to revolt: see the American and French revolutions. Both succeeded, though, because their oppressors were too civilized. Lack of civilization has allowed the oppression to perdure more in the Orient, all the more as it is entangled there with theocracy. (In the West the break with theocracy occurred when the Roman army of the franks took control in 486 CE: it was a Pagan army!)

So indeed, to keep control, enters:
c) The Dark Side. The oligarchs, threatened by revolution, react by doing whatever it takes to stay in control. No brutality is high enough. See Syria. At that point, “plutocracy” takes its full meaning, as the rule of the worst, the rule of Pluto in all its splendor, the rule of the liar and the invisible, as the Greeks had it, and the astutely vicious as the French had it.

The USA is early in this general degeneracy. However, it is a massive society, and a model. Its faltering is thus of great consequence.

Faced with the infamy of the Dark Side Unchained, the people used to revolt. No tyranny ruled a Greek polis for more than three generations. then it was back to revolution, democracy, etc.

Polybius spoke of this cycling, 22 centuries ago, going through seven stages, as if the mathematics of psychohistory were rigorous. However, History does not always repeat itself. Polybius ought to have known this.

After the well named Macedonian fascist Antipater took control of Greece, Macedonian rule went on until the Roman legions defeated the Macedonian phalanx. Twice. So Greece did not self-liberate (although Greek armies helped the Romans). And indeed Polybius himself was taken hostage by the Romans (before he became friends with the .001% there!)

When plutocrats took control of the Roman republic, they were anxious to keep a republican façade. It would take more than eighteen centuries for constitutional democracy to return (in 1789 CE, simultaneously in France and the USA, the entangled revolutions; yes, no, Britain is NOT the “closest ally” of the USA).

Another example of non cyclicality is what happened to Egypt; after rabid men in black, the Christian monks ravaged Egypt around 400 CE, and burned the world’s largest library, Egypt, which had been a creator of civilization for 3,000 years, never recovered.

Passed a point, the Dark Side overwhelms all. This is what happened in Syria. Syria, fundamentally was just a very bloody hereditary plutocracy. Yet, offered the possibility of fleeing, and enjoying billions stashed away, as Tunisia’s ex-dictator Ben Ali does in Saudi Arabia, Assad chose to escalate the ferocity, well beyond what his father already did.

The same stickiness of horror happened during the Spanish Civil war, originally just a revolt by the Spanish army in the Canaries and Morocco (then leveraged by Hitler, Mussolini, Texaco, and countless American corporations).

After millions were killed, the return to normal in Spain was enforced by a decapitation of the fascist regime by assassination (when ETA executed admiral Carrero Blanco in Operation Ogro, the partial launch into orbit of the dictator), plus an incorporation in the European Union, under severe conditions (a similar scheme, a combination of force and negotiation, could be extended further around the Mediterranean to many a horrendous regime).

Nevertheless we have to keep in sight that the Dark Side, like Black Holes, cannot just suck everything up, but can be indefinitively stable. Whether we like it or not, and be it only because we want to survive, we are in a run-away tech society.

Hence the return of total plutocratic control now would be no cycle, but termination of civilization. Yet, plutocrats are solidly entrenched: just look at Putin, the ex-head of the Soviet KGB, now the hope of masses of naïve fools, just as his (spiritual) grandfather Stalin was in the 1930s.

Why would plutocracy be the end? Because, ultimately plutocracy reigns as the mind of one (or a few), and is no more intelligent than that one (or those few). Whereas democracy is the exact opposite: to exist it has to encompass millions of minds intelligently debating. (That’s why Obama, considering the sorry state of the democracy in the USA, has turned into the Professor In Chief, educating millions so that they can acquire enough intelligence to debate destiny in a half sentient way.)

And that mind of one will have to call to the Dark Side, darker than ever before, to master billions. There would be no limit to how dark things could get.

Plutocracy, entangled with fascism, is this world great Black Hole, and great temptation. See China rushing back to it under Xi. Plutocracy, entangled with fascism, will be resisted through massive force only. be it only intellectually massive force. As Obama just pointed out (in a particular case).

Many philosophies in the past, from Ancient India to the Mayas, to common men wising up, have argued for the Eternal Return of the Same, as Polybius did. This sort of metaphysics is in a way reassuring; do everything wrong, and it will turn out OK in the long run. However science has now debunked this completely: be it geological evolution, atmospheric evolution, biological evolution, or cosmological evolution, the only thing that does not change is change.

Change is your only chance, think accordingly.

***

Patrice Ayme