The Inevitable Decline and Fall of Empire

THE INEVITABLE DECLINE

AND FALL OF EMPIRE

Errol Nelson

Writers Club Press

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Inevitable Decline and Fall of Empire

All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Errol Nelson

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I Empire and Civilization: What HistoryBooks Never Told You

Chapter 1 History 101: Primitive, Empire, and Common Eras

Chapter 2 Once upon a Time: The Prehistory Era

Chapter 3 Prehistory: Survival Instincts Persist

Chapter 4 Down on the Farm: The Early Empire Era

Chapter 5 Stratification: The Empire Era Grows up

Chapter 6 Empire: 8,000-Year Aberration orNecessary Step?

Part II Cultural Chaos

Chapter 7 Empire or Civilization? Understanding the System of Empire

Chapter 8 Response or Reaction? Chaos and the Emerging Common Era

Chapter 9 Cultural Schizophrenia: Transition from Empire to Common Era

Part III What’s Sentience Got to Do with It?

Chapter 10 The Sentience Paradox

Chapter 11 Man Is a Funny Animal

Chapter 12 Every Man Is an Island

Chapter 13 But Together We Are a Tribe

Chapter 14 Man: Victimized by His Own Sentience

Chapter 15 The Human Social Contract

Chapter 16 This Land Is My Land—Maybe

Chapter 17 Reality and Perception: Taking Sentience out for a Spin

Chapter 18 Adventures in Sentient Thought and Thoughtlessness

Part IV The Myth of Group Sovereignty

Chapter 19 The Individual and the Group

Chapter 20 Civilization, Empire, and Bureaucracy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Chapter 21 Legal Standards of Behavior: The Genesis of Law

Chapter 22 The Law: From Restitution to Criminality

Chapter 23 Statute Law: Rights and Rule of Law in Extremis

Chapter 24 Sovereignty—Taking Care of Our Own:Public Is Empire

Chapter 25 Empire, Empire Everywhere: The Law and Corporate Shield Run Amok

Chapter 26 In Whose Compelling Interest?

Part V The Myth of Spiritual Dependency

Chapter 27 Religion: The Spiritual Guide

Chapter 28 Monotheism—Just One Step Farther

Chapter 29 Does God Exist?

Chapter 30 The Belief Trap of Sentience

Chapter 31 The No Assumptions, No Limitations God

Chapter 32 Dependency Depends on Limits

Part VI Equilibrium

Chapter 33 Leaders and Followers: Checks and Balances

Chapter 34 Empire Shall Resist

Chapter 35 Can Civilization Prevail?

Chapter 36 True Civilization: Back to the Primitive—Sort of

Chapter 37 Tearing down the Borders: Physical and Cultural

Chapter 38 And Justice for All: Universal Rule of Just Conduct

Chapter 39 What Price Sentience? What Cost Dominance?

Chapter 40 A.D. 2000: That Apocalyptic Year

Chapter 41 Science and Religion Do Mix—You Can Take It with You

Chapter 42 Living with What We Are

EpilogueRemedies: The Best Is Yet to Come

Bibliography

About the Author

Acknowledgements

A mong the people I would like to thank are all those authors that just keep writing and advancing the limits of knowledge. Books published in the past five years made a significant improvement in the manuscript. Special thanks to Walter Little and Judy Vollbracht for their helpful comments and suggestions, and to Kris Fulsaas for editing the final manuscript.

Introduction

C ongratulations! You have purchased a book that brings you a different view of the origins, advancement, and possible outcome of humanity. You have also paid a sum of money to me so I can selfishly continue to survive and prosper in the here and now. Thank you for your contribution. I hope the analysis in this book provides new meaning and understanding about humanity, and reciprocates what you paid me for the book. More bluntly, did you get your money’s worth? I hope so! Read the book and you will understand why.

Everyone wants to make some meaningful contribution that validates their life and leaves something tangible for posterity. This is mine. First and foremost, I wrote this book for me. It is the culmination of more than ten years of attempting to connect the dots between humanity’s sentience, individuality, physical reality, group institutions, selfish and cooperative instincts, reciprocity, and social evolution: Why does man exist? What are our basic needs and motivations? How did we get to the present? What are the impediments to individual fulfillment? And, what is our physical and spiritual destination? In essence, it is a far-too-limited series of personally inspired essays, a synopsis of human knowledge and history, a polemic liberally spiced with commentary and invective, opinion, speculation, theories, and possible solutions to some of the problems that plague humankind. This is one person’s assessment of the personal and institutional chaos that humanity perpetually seems destined to suffer and endure, seemingly without resolution, a view that both reflects current knowledge and is a significant departure from conventional wisdom espoused in current social theories and literature.

This book is not for the timid or complacent; it is a guidebook for the intellectual rebel, the malcontent, the adventurer wanting to explore the depth and meaning of individuality, liberty, and human values. Here you’ll find mind food for the curious wanting a different approach to the meaning and basis of life, and the dissatisfied who are fed up with endless claims of elitist institutional supremacists and self-serving self-appointed leaders who want to retain unfettered control over our conduct and behavior. This book follows in the tradition of the early American pamphleteers, who fomented public opinion resulting in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. It is about individuals who want to celebrate their individuality, and conduct their lives without being suppressed and controlled by endless and needless artificial rules and laws perpetrated and perpetuated by a few elitist leaders with delusions of empire.

Have you ever wondered why things work the way they do? Why some people seem to get every break in life and others get none? They are rich and powerful, you are poor and powerless. The leaders seem to have it all, while you are just one of the abused, put-upon masses. Why are there a lot of common-sense rules, but even more silly rules they say you must obey; as a child, as an adult, as a senior citizen? Why can’t you do this, or that, because those running the system say it’s illegal, improper, prohibited, or…

Want a reality check: A different perspective on the history and evolution of humankind? What is civilization? And what is its counterpart—Empire? What role, if any, does humanity play in the grand scheme of the universe? And, where is humanity going—in both a physical and a spiritual sense? If you wonder about these concepts and would like a different viewpoint, then this book is for you.

Today there is a voluminous and growing body of knowledge and information on the humanities, biology, science, government, law, and religion. This book is an attempt to meld widely and wildly disparate subjects into a broad-brush portrait of the origins of humankind: our progression to sentience and literacy; the conflicts that still exist between ancient inbred instincts and sentience that we now possess; and the role in and response of the physical world as the result of our rapidly expanding technology and activities.

To date, the advancement of humanity has occurred by adapting ancient biological—selfish and cooperative—instincts and survival skills to increasingly complex technological, social, and political systems. The communal tribe has evolved into government, business, religions, and corporate entities—powerful, faceless groups that now disclaim reciprocity and eschew legal, ethical, and moral responsibility for their collective actions. Tribal leaders have become politicians and corporate officers in empires, exercising power from afar, no longer having to face direct personal consequences that may accompany their actions.

Empire is not countries or states bounded by physical borders, or monolithic religious, government, or business entities; nor is it some war between good or evil, although that is how human behavior is often characterized by the elite to rationalize empire. Empire is an institutional condition, a chronic disability endemic to humanity, originating out of our evolutionary instincts and perpetuated by personal selfish interests through the acquisition and exercise of power, exclusion, and barriers. A system that creates artificial limitations and social order imposed on the majority of humanity by a few leaders because, in part, that was the way pre-sentient humanity survived and prospered (for a definition of sentience, see the Definitions section at the end of this chapter). Empire is a continuing reliance on the selfish side of our instincts that allow power and wealth to be wielded by a few for personal gain over others; it is falsely labeled civilization.

Civilization, however, is an individual and communal agreement between sentient humans characterized more by our instincts toward coexistence and cooperation, based on trust, access, reciprocity, and trade. We are now approaching an impasse in the evolution of our selfish and cooperative inbred instincts and the divergent systems of human interaction and governance they offer. The transition can only be accomplished through recognition of their general function, purpose, and application in our lives. Do we want to be responsible for the conduct of our lives, or increasingly dependent on corporate state and business institutions that have evolved over the past 8,000 years? Only when humanity rationally overcomes the selfishness that accompanies empire, and recognizes that civilization among people and Earth’s nonsentient life forms and natural resources is based on the instinct to trust, cooperate, and coexist, can we achieve it.

Man’s basic needs today are not much different from those of our ancestors: food, shelter, protection, and procreation to ensure survival of the species. Only the methods for obtaining them have changed. In many parts of the world, technology achieved via sentient manipulation of natural resources has mechanized and improved humanity’s quality of life. In the developed world, tribes and villages have been replaced by cities, governments, and corporations, with money a universal exchange medium, providing an endless supply of natural and artificially produced goods and services. But do not equate present-day institutions of the state (government) or business (corporations) with collective society, capitalism with free markets, or religion with spirituality. They are not the same, or even equivalent concepts; they are the difference between societies built on the selfish motivations that epitomize Empire and the cooperative motivations that accompany Civilization.

Try to not only analyze the scenarios, analysis, and events in this book on an intellectual level—our sentient heritage—but also visualize and relate them to your life experiences on a more instinctive, visceral level. There is a continual, two-front battle that rages within humanity: a conflict between the metaphorical rights of the individual and the welfare of the group (society based on either Civilization or Empire), and the expanding ability of humans to alter and affect real world natural and biological systems. Circumstances, knowledge, and technology generated by sentience and literacy have produced the growing, festering impasse between our ancient biological instincts and the authoritarian institutions of Empire they have spawned and nurtured over the past several thousand years.

The impact of our expanding knowledge and technology affects the ability of man to coexist in both the real world and a sentience-induced metaphorical world. What are these two worlds? We all live in both a real, physical world of cause and effect, with immediate consequences for our mistakes, and what I call a metaphorical world, defined by our sentience, with proclaimed human rights, philosophies, laws, and religions. The confusion lies in separating what is real and what is metaphorical, imagined as real but having no substance.

There is little we can do to change reality; the laws of gravity and motion are immutable and quite unforgiving. Earthquakes, storms, and crop failures are real, as is the need to put food on the table for your family, often requiring braving the hazards of traffic and hundreds of other petty annoyances, pleasures, and pains that define our daily lives. Loss of nonsentient life forms and consumption of natural resources to maintain humanity’s dominant position in Earth’s ecosystem have real consequences, regardless of the technology we invent to harvest them, or metaphorically justify the right to use them.

There remains, however, much we can do to change our sentience-inspired, largely metaphorical world that imposes a reality circumscribing our behavior, conduct, and social order according to an imposed notion of propriety. Existing systems of rules and law to control and coerce behavior and conduct to obtain individual conformity with prevailing group norms, whatever the leaders of those groups and empires declare them to be. The alternative is more general rules of conduct that emphasize proper individual behavior based on trust, cooperation, and equal access to methods of redress in disputes?

That is the crux of the issue, and the focus of this book: Who should make those rules? What is their basis? What should they be? And how do they yield a civilized society that maximizes coexistence in the real world? What rules do we really need to have individual freedom to conduct our affairs, and permit us to believe as we wish so long as everyone else is granted the same rights and privileges? Distilled to its very essence, the issue is this: All sentient human relationships are based on a delicate balance of self-interest on the one hand and trust, cooperation, coexistence, reciprocity, and restitution with others on the other hand. In allowing the selfish aspects of those relationships to be manipulated and distorted by a few in pursuit of individual power and wealth through law and corporate institutions, we have lost much of our basic nature that made us a sentient species. We need to get it back.

The ultimate irony is that the changes we are presently encountering in our evolution as a civilized species and the development of common legal rules are going to happen anyway. There are two roads to that future: continuing the status quo of Empire with the selfish few dictating the agenda for the many, or charting a different course wherein each of us can be master of his or her own destiny. There is hope and a brighter future waiting for humanity, and we all have it within us to be a force to advance toward it or be an impediment to it. You get to choose which.

Definitions

The dictionary definitions here are from The New Lexicon Webster’s Dictionary of the English Language (Lexicon Publications, 1987). Also included for some of these words is my usage in this book (noted in parentheses).

Civilize: To endow with law, order, and conditions favorable to the arts and science.

Civilization: Making or becoming civilized. (My usage herein: a society of laws and conditions based on trust, cooperation, and coexistence.)

Corporate: United, combined into one. Belonging to an incorporated body. Acting as a body rather than as individuals.

Corporate Shield: (My usage herein: Use of the corporation, the legal artificial person, as a means of protecting the individual members of the body from individual responsibility for personal or corporate actions on its behalf.)

Corporation: A body or society entitled (by law) to act as a single person. An artificial person created by charter, made up of one or more persons.

Empire: A sovereign state whose possessions have been extended by military or economic conquest, colonization, or federation to include countries or territories originally independent of it. (My usage herein: a society based the acquisition and exercise of corporate power, and legal, political, and economic systems of favoritism, subsidy, exclusion, and discrimination of nonmembers.)

Metaphor: A figure of speech in which a name or quality is attributed to something to which it is not literally applicable, e.g., an icy glance. (My usage herein: application of behavior or conduct—through law or rules—that may have no substantive effect on the real world, but may result in real consequences to individuals; a literal effect from perceived notions of behavior, conduct, or cause. e.g., being penalized—fined, incarcerated—for failing to fill out, or improperly filling out, a corporate form.)

Reality: The state or quality of being real or of existing in fact. Someone or something that exists in fact. The real world. (My usage herein: actions and conduct subject to physical and chemical laws. Compliance with real-world conditions.)

Reciprocal: Mutual. Something in an inverse relationship to something else. Complementary.

Reciprocity: The state of being reciprocal. An exchange or trade between nations, etc., based on privileges granted to both. (My usage herein: For a good provided or service rendered, a good or service of approximately equal value is expected in return; a fair exchange.)

Sentience: The state or quality of being sentient.

Sentient: Capable of feeling, having the power of sense perception. (My usage herein: Capable of feeling and sense perception, awareness; capable of reasoning and thought, ability to understand and manipulate natural systems, ability to formulate ideas and communicate them through language, art, and music. NOTE: My usage in this book is a much more restrictive and complex definition of sentient, and applies primarily to Homo sapiens. The dictionary’s definition applies to almost all life forms. However, there is no general biological term applicable to differentiate the additional analytical and reasoning capabilities possessed by human beings. So, for the purposes of this book, humans are defined as sentient, and other plant and animal life forms we interact with are defined as nonsentient.)

Sovereign: Having the undisputed power to make decisions and act accordingly. A person or body of persons supreme in a state.

Sovereignty: Undisputed political power. The state or quality of being sovereign. (My usage herein: the undisputed power and ability to make decisions and act on behalf of a state, corporate, or group entity.)

Part I

Empire and Civilization: What History

Books Never Told You

After 1492, the histories of many peoples scattered and isolated from each othe.r in all corners of the world became one single, interconnected, and inseparable history. The slow, daunting, grandiose, and irreversible march of humanity toward universal civilization was set in motion.

—Mario Vargas Lhosa, Reason, January 1995

Chapter 1

History 101: Primitive, Empire,

and Common Eras

Each tribe has its own discrete sources of information, its own vocabulary, its own

doctrines carefully cleansed of any potential

polluting ideas. Each forms its own perceptions of reality and

stubbornly resists competing ideas.

—Ross Anderson, The Seattle Times, October 9, 1994

H istory, the discipline, is the chronicling of events and advances of humankind, with assessments of their importance, truth, or falsity. Exactly when humanity achieved sentience—as defined herein—is still subject to speculation, but genus Homo evolved approximately 3.5 million years ago (Harris, Marvin, Our Kind, 1989). In the ever-changing mosaic that comprises human history, the 3-million-plus-year interval between achieving sentience and attaining literacy is largely devoid of corroborating physical evidence.

Even the development of literacy—a condition unique to Homo sapi-ens—is largely based on estimates. The first crude pictographs date back approximately 30,000 years. Written languages first appeared 8,000-10,000 years ago. Only then did humans use language to record events for posterity, allowing subsequent generations to study and interpret them.

Based on physical evidence—or lack thereof—sentient human development and advancement can generally be separated into three eras: prehistory, empire, and common; each possesses distinct social, cultural, and technological differences.

Prehistory Era: a preliterate, precivilization era more than 3 million years long wherein newly sentient humanity consisted primarily of nomadic tribal bands and small villages. People lived at a basic subsistence level in a hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Historical records are limited to crude pictographs, cave drawings, and development of crude implements, tools, and weapons in the latter portion of this era.

Empire Era: an era of permanent villages and bounded communities evolving to the modern nation-state. Began approximately 8,000 years ago, coinciding with the general development of agriculture and literacy. When combined with human evolutionary instinctive self-interest, burgeoning groups developed a more formal social order and class structure. Communities and cultures became