The Second Age Of Kings

The second age of kings appears to be dawning.

What does this mean?  A look at the first age may provide some clues.

I know of nobody who is certain when and how the first age of kings began.  It is not even always clear how the first kings comported themselves with respect to their relationships with those over whom they ruled.  However, given what is known of human proclivity, it may be safe to say that the first kings may have been something different from those who came later.

If we are to accept that lands such as Sumer were the first examples of human civilization as we now come to think of it, one must ask why they were founded and how.  The question of why requires no great talent for imagination in order to come up with some reasonable speculations.  Areas conducive to trade were probably prone to marauders since the earliest days.  Therefore, the advantages of a walled city may have proven highly appealing for people who had been living a comparatively exposed life in the open.  Getting the first such city built, however, must have been quite a feat.  Could a leader have been able to force others to toil at the task of building?  Possibly, but it seems unlikely in a time when individualism was strong, division of labor less refined, and the average man very much more capable of surviving on his own or in small bands or tribes than we find today.

This being a likely case, it seems unlikely that the earliest men in charge, to whom I refer to as kings for convenience's sake, would have been able to get away with an authoritarian approach to leadership.  We will not go into any details about this here as they are not relevant and speculative at best. Suffice that perhaps the leader of the first walled city lead by consensus.  This seems likely.

For how many iterations this mode of leadership may have prevailed appears to be anyone's guess, assuming it ever existed at all in the comparatively large societies of these walled cities.  What we do know, however, is that at some point in history, kings were no longer just leaders and chiefs, but bosses.  Their word had become law across the face of the so-called "civilized" world to the degree that they enjoyed what appears to have been effectively unlimited prerogative to acquire, keep, and dispose of other human beings as their whim and designs saw fit.

The pharaohs of Egypt are perhaps the earliest examples of this transformation from leader to absolute authority.  This was the pattern for several thousands of years until the Greeks appear to have partly mucked up the works with their forms of governance, which were still seemingly despotic in many respects, but not to the same degree seen in the rest.

It is fair to say that some kings were "better" than others in how they treated their subjects, but this is a strictly a relative measure and at the end of the day the king was still the law.  The Torah gives several examples of this relative difference in character of kings, but to my knowledge it nowhere questions the validity of the notion of "king".

Until the advent of the Christian era, the kings of the world appear to have in the main enjoyed more or less unlimited authority over their subjects.  They collected taxes and lived lavishly in many cases; conscripted men for soldiering duties, and so on mostly without challenge.  In fact, many of the people may well have welcomed the presence of the king as a fatherly figure who would protect them from the harms that would otherwise have befallen them at the hands of marauding bands of dangerous men.

In olden times, the better of the kings must be given credit for their bravery as often they were at the heads of battle charges and many were slain.  It was not until in later times that they remained at the rear in comparative safety.  This willingness to put themselves in harm's way in defense of their people was expected of kings at one time.  But as the ages passed, kings became less and less servants of their people and more and more servants of themselves.

The one constant, however, was the nearly absolute nature of their authority.  This is a key element in understanding the creature and it should be well apprehended.  What counts mostly in the psychology of a king is not so much whether they will be good to their subjects, but that the choice is theirs alone and having been made, is unchallengeable.  It is the challenge to the absolute quality of their authority that would get a king worked up most.  An otherwise "good" king could turn to utter barbarity if the limits of his authority were ever to be questioned, especially openly before others.

By this simple formula did the kingdoms come and go for millennia.  But when the Christian ethic surfaced, a revolution of thought had been launched, the concepts therein impossible to stuff back into Pandora's box.  With the notion that the Almighty was like you and loved you and made you in his image and that all men were equal in his eyes became the elements by which the unquestionable would first be questioned by an ever growing contingent.  In time the questions became more boldly framed and openly expressed, and often the kings responded with the sword in their attempts to maintain the status quo.

The seed, however, had taken root.  People cottoned to the notion that their lives were not worthless and pointless and that the king was nothing but a man in God's eyes.  And as king's grew more desperate to keep the cork in the bottle with violence, and as people's acceptance of their basic self worth grew, conflicting with the king's claims of absolute authority by right, some of the world came to greater unease.  Magna Carta was at least in part a response to this uneasiness that was growing in parts of the world and became a nexus point in the first age of kings, a document which furthered the Christian ethic by legally formalizing its precepts such that for the first time in a long time the king's authority was openly circumscribed.  Kings still held enormous power, just not as much as they previously had.  A new trend was in its infancy.

Then came the renaissance and while kings retained great power, this was soon to change.  As time marched its march, the notions of equality and of the limits of kings developed and for the first time such men were on the wane in terms of what were allowed to do, the operative term here now being "allowed", which implies a limiting agent.  With the institution of the British Parliament, for example, the powers of the English king were significantly limited.

It was with the Age of Englightenment that the first age of kings went into its death throes.  With the rise of science and reason as the new authorities over which kings held no credible power, kings became largely impotent in relative terms and many thrones disappeared outright.  With the dawn of the modern era, the king had become an endangered species and the rights of man were at least outwardly touted by a vast plurality in the western world and for a while it appeared that the human race might well be evolving into something different; something better than it had been.

But then some funny things began happening, one of them in Russia in 1917 when a mob of peasants and factory workers managed to overthrow one of the few remaining traditional monarchies of Europe in the name of equality and justice, much as had the French about 130 years earlier.   But as was the case in France, the elimination of a more or less traditional despot resulted with his replacement by one of a new sort; a despot who had no material reality of which to speak, though it had a name: the state.

The modern state of the past 150 years, of course, has turned out to be far more powerful, muderous, destructive, and generous in doling out human misery than all the kings of the previous six thousand years put together.  But even so, the notions of human rights nevertheless made advances in a slow but steady fashion and at least the overt talk was that of limited governance and human rights.  It was upon this basis that the United States was established and took the notions brought to us first by the early Christians and Magna Carta to the next level. With its establishment and progression into its first half century, the first age of kings received another blow, perhaps the greatest ever, as Europeans fled their homelands in favor of the far freer air of America.

Sadly, this was not to last, for kings are not fond of having their authority put to flight.  As the traditional form of the kingdom faded into obscurity in favor of so-called "democracy", those who retained some considerable measures of power and who sought more were obliged by practicality to alter their appearances and modes of behavior.

As the traditional king became extinct along with the aristocracy, a new form of tyrant emerged with the so-called "state" and a new aristocracy arose in the form of the bureaucrat.  At the beginning, those people had to work quietly behind closed doors because the concepts of liberty and equality had caught on like wildfire in America and to a lesser extent and different form in Europe.  And it was quietly that they went to the task of reclaiming the throne, so to speak.  The period from just prior to the American Civil War (War of Northern Aggression) until about 1980 was the time where those behind the scenes were by practical reality obliged to work in the shadows and affect change in small increments with little bites here, a small push there, always backing off when the wrong nerves were hit and the people complained.

But in time, the small increments of change toward their favor began to add up and in the era sometime during or shortly after 1980 the United States began experiencing a quantum shift toward ever larger incursions and trespasses into the rightful territories of the individual, the great masses having been on the one hand successfully lulled into the belief that "it can't happen here" and on the other the fear of nuclear annihilation in and exchange with the Soviet Union kept their minds occupied.

As the 80s yielded to the 90s, the increments became ever more obvious, until finally on 11 September, 2001 the pretenses were essentially dispatched when the World Trade Center was destroyed along with about 3000 American lives.

Root causes can be endlessly argued along many lines, but what cannot be argued are the results.

Now, as we progress from one day to the next, so-called "government" encroaches further upon us not by nibbles and tentatively tiny steps, but by leaps and bounds.  The freedoms for which so many have sacrificed their lives now fall under the very real threat of extinction by those in power.  The "state" now responds to non-criminal issues with deadly force in the form of police entry teams.  The sword is making a comeback as the solution of first resort in cases where an absence of immediate and utter compliance by what is now effectively a serf meets with the displeasure of agents of the "state".  With each passing day the authority of the "state" takes another, larger steps toward the absolute.

This new era that threatens to come to life and fall upon us as a ravening beast I call the Second Age Of Kings, for even though there may be no man sitting upon a throne obvious and holding the title "king", there are councils of men whose decision making powers are approaching absolute status.  The effective result of being ruled by such councils is indistinguishable from those of the despots of yore.  Therefore, their rise to primacy is in effect the second coming of the kings, only I fear that these men lack even the smallest sliver of the moral character that even the worst of the kings of old possessed.  It is my suspicion that these men, once they have cemented their power to the point they can no longer be materially challenged, will make the bloodiest and most wicked rulers of ages past appear as eunuched choir boys.

Today's rulers have at their disposal not only a vast and rapidly growing array of technologies by which to control, manipulate, and destroy huge populations, but an absence of any discernible moral compunction to act in whichever ways they see fit to achieve goals that are the products of some very unsound and eminently questionable ideas about people, the world, and everyone's place therein.  They appear ready and willing to do whatever they feel the must to get what they want regardless of the outrage.

Unless these people are stopped by some means and without equivocation, bloody or miraculous, the world into which our posterity is to soon be delivered shall not be a pretty one, but rather one where individual freedom has been wiped away from list of human possibilities.

Is this the world you wish for yourself; for your children and others whom you love?  If not, it is high time you got to thinking about what it is you plan on doing about it.  Working "within the system" is unlikely to be sufficient to bring success because it is structured in such a way as to naturally result in failure to produce the results other than that which has been pre-scripted by those in power.

Therefore, the only possible paths to salvation must almost by necessity lie beyond the status quo. Onus rests with each of us wishing to remain as free men to find those paths and work them, rather than wasting time in the naive belief that mere voting and the sort are going to dislodge the new kings from their thrones.  Such men never hold political office and their names are rarely, if ever, known to the public.

I believe that massive, peaceful civil disobedience is one of those paths.

Consider what you really want in life because the time may be soon upon us where you will no longer be allowed such choices.  Please consider this carefully.

Until next time, please accept mybest wishes.

The Four Necessities

Since ancient times there have been those among us who have strived to gain, maintain, and grow power over their fellows.  There may have been a time when such men served practically justifiable roles in a world that may have been in some ways more dangerous.  Civilization as we have come to know it, began with the walled cities of places such as Sumer and Akkad.  Such walls do not build themselves, and so it may have been that people at that time worked in voluntary cooperation pursuant to the goal of their common defense.  The historical record is not quite clear as to how many such cities were built through voluntary cooperation vis-a-vis forced servitude or even outright slavery, nor it is particularly relevant in the context of this work because we know that many such cities were built at the point of the sword.  The tyrant is fact.  The presence of despot kings and the like are well documented in the annals of human history, constituting one of the truly reprehensible constants of our lives as free-born beings.

But other factors in our lives have changed.  With the advent of ideas such as those of Christian ethics and those enshrined in the Magna Carta, the minds of men have changed, albeit by small increments.  There was the time, representing most of human civilization's temporal existence, where the king's word was law.  By this virtue and backed by the sword, people were trained in their thinking to accept royal fiat as their obligation almost no matter how outrageous the resulting injuries to themselves.  The king's tyranny was accepted as a fact of life.  His right to play the tyrant was commonly unquestioned and universally unquestionable.  Those who did question most often met with grizzly fates.

But as the mindset of blind acceptance by the common man slowly changed to one of questioning and eventually rejecting the king and priest as absolute authorities, those seeking to retain their positions and status as powers among their fellows were faced with the challenge of how to do so against the rising opposition to the olden style of openly capricious and viciously cruel domination.

It became increasingly the case that such men were ever less able to brazenly declare themselves the absolute and unchallengeable rulers of the rest, for the hazards of the old approach to dominion had increased significantly.  Therefore, such men had to discover and employ new means whereby the sword became an issue of n-th resort, if not yet the last.  Being the clever fellows that such men tend to be, the once distasteful prospect of lying became the tyrant's new best friend, for through lies was he able to gain the consent of those over whom he presumed to rule.

In time and for a while the sword took a less prominent role on the front lines of one's daily tyrannies, demurring to the greater efficacy of the word, which when artfully misused tended to gain the consent of the people to all manner of abuse.  Naturally, the sword was still commonly applied when the timbre of the king's tyrannies went past the limits of tolerance.  But as time progressed, such tactics were viewed with ever greater criticism as the concepts of human rights developed among the larger mass of civilized humanity.

Therefore, it behooved the smarter cultivators of political power to use that which worked best: words.  But there had to be some principled or at least empirical basis upon which to frame such words.  There had to be a way to know which arrangements would work best and which not to use.

As it turned out, there was indeed such a basis and it has become the foundation upon which all modern tyrants function.  I call it the "Four Necessities", which are the fundamental human weaknesses which, when properly exploited, allow one to wield nearly universal and unlimited power over a population.  As men evolved away from the acceptance of kings-as-gods and toward the realization that no man stood so far above them, the tyrants came to realize something new was needed and they very rapidly zeroed-in on the Four Necessities.  After all, any military leader will tell you that one does not act against the strengths of his enemies, but rather his weaknesses.

To act directly against the strengths of an increasingly doubting and potentially angered mob would have been dangerously foolish.  What, then, were the weaknesses of those over whom they sought to gain and/or maintain their power?  The Four Necessities comprise the body of those most reliable of vulnerabilities in which the tyrant may place his deepest trust to aid him in achieving his ends with but the least prudence in their application.

The Four Necessities lists those failings of the human creature of which the tyrant must take sufficiently clever and ruthless advantage in order to capture and keep the consent of those over whom he would rule.  Failure to maintain sufficient control over any single Necessity would place the tyrant at some jeopardy.  History endows us with abundant examples of those who fell to the awakened wrath of those over whom kings failed to maintain heed of one or more of the Four.  The good news for the tyrant, however, is that with the least care in how one goes about employing the leverage afforded by the Four, one is virtually guaranteed long term success.  Only the most inexcusably inept manipulations threaten his position and objectives.

The Four Necessities, without which the modern tyrant cannot maintain control over a population, are:

1. Fear
2. Avarice
3. Ignorance
4. Lassitude

Fear has always been an obvious weakness of humans of which the kings of yore have taken great advantage.  But even fear has its limits.  Beat a man too much and he loses his fear and will fight back.  Therefore, fear is not sufficient in itself to the aspirations of power, particularly in the face of certain common belief systems.  It is, however, necessary in its ability to enhance the other Necessities.  Therefore, the wise tyrant cultivates the quality of cowardice in the great majority of his subjects such that they live in a state of constant, low-level, gnawing fear.  This may be manipulated in many ways and degrees in order to serve both shorter and longer term goals.

Avarice is the second human weakness.  When tightly coupled with fear, such as that of not getting what one wants or losing that which one has, the power over men grows mightily over the case where fear alone is the motivator.  Mind is nearly everything in the game of politics and once you have the mob convinced that they have something they greatly wish to keep, more than half the battle of the tyrant is won.  The other side of that coin is to cultivate a burning, itching desire for things they as yet do not have but may one day be able to acquire, and a seething sense of envy for those they deem beyond the reach of their lives.

Ignorance can take many forms and its effects most often great, despite being at times very subtle.  Small divergences from truth can result in yawning chasms between what an individual believes and what is in fact true. When closely combined with fear and avarice, ignorance brings the strength of the tyrant's powers to within but a few percentage points of being complete.  How can one rebel against tyranny if he is unable to identify it as such?    The unrecognized enemy is a safe enemy.

Propaganda has been raised to new heights of art, craft, and science in this age of electronic media.  During the twentieth century the despots of the time were quick to recognize the power of these new technologies and those very instruments made clear to them just how vulnerable the common man was to their powers of persuasion through the artfully misleading use of words, and now images, combined to form a new language of such vast power that the average man has great difficulty navigating the trickily opaque waters of the adept propagandist.  To this we bear witness every day as the news broadcaster spews and regurgitates the cleverly contrived expressions of the masters, laced with half-truths designed to lead the audience to a specific conclusion.  And it works like a charm.

Lassitude takes up the remaining slack.  To be lazy is a common and very fundamental human characteristic, just as it is among a great many other species, lions being a good example.  There is nothing wrong with being lazy - to a point.  But when laziness is overly encouraged by word and reward, it becomes a disease condition in men.

When the Four Necessities are properly cultivated in a population, the result is a man whose morbid greed and fear reinforce each other.  Having been lead astray into sufficient ignorance, his fear and avarice are further fortified by leaving him unaware of the truer nature of his circumstance.  Taking advantage of these three, lassitude is cultivated in the man such that by the synergistic force of his fear, his sickly greed, and his woeful ignorance, he finds himself devoid of any desire to alter his rueful condition, for to him it is seen as "normal".

Once a threshold has been crossed, each of the Necessities aids the others in a mutually reinforcing death spiral that can be overcome only by the wildest fluke or through some unimaginably gross mismanagement by those in power.  Or a miracle.

The effectiveness of this combination would be difficult to argue against, as our current state of political affairs so forcefully testifies.  Of interest, however, is the fact that as the state of the population to unconditionally accept the tyrant's whim nears perfection, the sword is once more slowly working its way up the ranks toward primacy.  Having fallen in status as a means of last resort, it is rapidly returning to its former glory as that of the first.  The evidence for this may be witnessed in the ever growing use of paramilitary tactics by police where they shoot first and ask questions later and for "offenses" of ever diminishing significance.  

Just recently a man named Octavius Johnson was savagely beaten by police with a horde of perhaps twenty or more officers showing up at his home, guns drawn and entering without warrant.  His offense?  Having expired tags on his truck!

The real telltale of such events is that these brands of barbarity are meekly accepted by the vast majority of people because they are afraid of what police may do - of what they may lose.  Or, far worse yet, they believe that what has been done is right, their ignorance working its magic in their lives in convenient reinforcement of their cowardice.  In all cases, there is insufficient motive to bring it to an end.  Fear.  Avarice. Ignorance. Lassitude.  All are now evident in alarming and dangerous abundance, intimately intertwined, the whole vastly greater than the sum of the constituent parts.  

While it is true that a growing number of us are standing against such behavior, the question remains open as to whether it is too little, too late.  It is my sincere hope that it is not, but I cannot claim to have found any basis for great optimism there.

Be that as it may, it is my genuine wish that people will take what is written here and give it some careful consideration.  Try to understand what this all means and see how it is in fact the case with the people around you and perhaps even with yourself.  Do not take my word for any of this, but accept it on a provisionally skeptical basis. Question everything and be observant of yourself and those around you and see whether you can identify where and how the Four Necessities are at work.  Pay close attention to what politicians say, what they neglect to say, and try to see where they pander and play to fear, avarice, ignorance, and lassitude.  I am confident that if you do this with some care and diligence, you will come to see what I see and that will be the beginning of your transformation.  But be patient with it because these things can be difficult to identify, especially if you have been heavily conditioned.

Unless we are willing to overcome those weaknesses that the rulers exploit to their various ends, which usually do not coincide with our best interests, we shall remain their wantonly helpless pawns as we jump with every twitch of a string.  Is this the brand of existence you wish to call your "life"?  For your sake, I sincerely hope not.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.