We Have Yet to Be Drawn and Quartered

History is a series of variations on basic feudalism, with limited exceptions during which serfs threw off the worst of their shackles for some years in the sun, before being pilloried and stood on once more. Wealth is always most effectively accumulated through the indentured labor of others, so indenturing will remain the default. As most humans are too apathetic to kick others in the gut without instruction, or too decent to do so, there are relatively few lords, and always a vast number suffering under these lords’ psychopathies.

We have probably just had a rare period in the sun, stimulated when the worst excesses of colonialism, European fascism, communism, and a couple of world wars sort of coincided to lay bare the harm that unbridled power can do to others. The decay of Western democracies apparent over the past several years, including the weaknesses shown through compliance with Covid-related human rights abuses, suggests dimming memories are allowing the feudal norm to return. 

Several decades of rapidly increasing inequality in wealth within Western societies have given this a sense of inevitability. However, tempting as it is to seek victimhood, we still have the freedom to highlight it and push back. This means we are still way better off than almost ever before. 

Life Was Once Really Bad

Recognizing reality can dampen our sense of drama, but it generally helps. It tells us that variants of oppression we experience today are probably milder than those our direct ancestors survived, finding time and inclination to procreate in the process. It means that the people at the top, who we keep trying to knock off their pedestals, may be less overtly nasty than their predecessors. We should feel positive about not being under the boot of Genghis Khan or gradually dismembered on a Medieval rack.

While all this may seem frivolous, being dismembered isn’t. So, living in awareness of history is important. I would challenge anyone to suggest a time when no one in government or commerce was illicitly or dishonestly purloining large stashes of wealth that belonged to the majority. 

Was there ever a government that was consistently honest with its population on matters of public significance for more than a year or two, in recorded history? Try to think of a time, before the past 200 years, when officially sanctioned slavery was not prevalent over much of the globe (it still is prevalent, but not officially sanctioned and so probably less common and with more potential for escape).

For the majority of these last two hundred years, however, much of the world was still forcibly colonized by more powerful States. Many others have lived under brutal dictatorships where dissidents were consigned to a bullet, salt mine, concentration camp, or mental hospital. The best we have probably managed is to vote in short-lasting regimes on the basis of information provided by a media controlled by wealthy financiers and industrialists, based on political parties dependent on much the same financiers and industrialists. Better exceptions must, we hope, exist, but to avoid their numbers diminishing, we should avoid reading too widely.

Before That, It Was Even Worse

So, when the present day seems bad, it is comforting to remember the Medieval rack and the life my European ancestors endured between about 500 and 1,000 years ago (if your ancestors were African, Asian, native American, or nearly any other ethnic group, their stories would be similar). 

After stumbling through slavery and indentured labor, then getting invaded and reinvaded, they were compelled by the local lord to invade someone else so their lord could settle an irritating family squabble. They survived the Black Death and a few other plagues, the Thirty Years War, and the Hundred Years War, and in good years between they could harvest crops for the local aristocracy without being whipped too heavily. If they were press-ganged into a navy, they got to travel prior to drowning. 

Or to return further – to the European Dark Ages and raiding Avars, Magyars, and Huns, or slavery under Rome, or slavery under the Celts, or probably a hundred thousand years of variation on that theme (in Europe, at least since we slaughtered the Neanderthals). This is, probably for as long as we have been, the human condition.

The people forcing this life upon them through the millennia were, more or less, the ancestors of those running the government and finance world today. So, really, they have either improved, or we have got better at restricting their excesses. We should hold this thought.

Three Reasons Not to Be Depressed Now

In the relative luxury of today’s consumerist serfdom, we get to argue about which vaccine should be banned (actually, that is the aristocracy, not the peasants – the ones who claim the right to rule), about which rising resistance star is pure or which is controlled opposition from the descendants of the lords of our ancestors, and which World Economic Forum YouTube seminar is more overtly fascistic than the other. 

These are not small matters, and human freedom is no less vitally important and, because history repeats, constantly under threat. But it also tells us some important lessons that can help us enjoy the fight a bit more.

First, there is no white knight coming to save us. There was St George, but dragons don’t really exist, and killing them was simply propaganda to get the masses behind someone else’s cause. The Richard-the-Lionheart types were not fighting for the freedom of their peasants – the peasants were the cannon (or crossbow) fodder. Those leading genuine peasant revolts came to sticky ends, and even their memories are sullied (Robin Hood, Hollywood would have us believe, was no simple Yeoman but a noble who lost his birthright to oppress others). 

Second, the aristocracy and bankers, despite appearing on top of things, never have the control they intend. Society can be directed to a certain extent but stuff happens out of their control. They then end up fighting each other or simply making mistakes, being basically run by greed. They fart and grow old and wrinkled (or pay a plastic surgeon to look worse) and then they die and their bodies rot into the ground – just like the rest of us. Then, once dead, they find that in seeking and craving power they completely missed the point. The sense of waste must be devastating.

Third, the sun shone during the Black Death and Hundred Years’ War, and the flowers bloomed. And people still laughed in the alehouses and made love in the stable, which is why we are here. Their lives were, in most ways by which we now measure success, terrible, but there you are. 

We are doing well, even when corporate hegemons stifle our preferred career paths. Such setbacks are not comparable to being captured by a Corsair, mutilated, and carted off into North African slavery as a million or more of my ancestors’ compatriots were well within written history. That was a better definition of democide than any we find now, though apparently also unsuccessful – here we are today!

The Sun Insists on Coming up

This all means we need to fight for ourselves, not complain about others failing us. And we need to pace ourselves and not claim the apocalypse is upon us whenever a distant United Nations bureaucrat writes some drivel or our supposed heroes prove more interested in serving the status quo. We also need to be really firm and resolute, because they will keep doing this and the struggle is not going away. Weekly apocalypses are exhausting.

The deep problems we see are not about to be solved – we are in a never-ending battle against the default societal model. This involves fighting to keep our present window of relative decency open, not to implement paradise. We are not in unusual times – we are fighting the same people with the same motivations – those who rise to the top by being more callous than others or were born there, and mistake their own profound human weaknesses for strength and divine right.

The sun will keep rising, despite the efforts of malicious miscreants to dim it. The first priority must be to hold onto that, and enjoy it, as those before us did in far worse times. Expect to be betrayed fairly often, because it would be weird if we weren’t. Humanity is what it is. If we put our faith in the transcendence of integrity and actual love over all the dross, then we have picked the side that never loses. There is an obvious reason why it hasn’t, which comes back to who really holds the ultimate power in all this. We then have a reason to fight and a platform from which to do so.