Mar 2021
Before social stratification (differences in wealth and power versus lack thereof) hunter/gatherers rarely fought. They were all equal and sensed it.
But when groups became big enough, they formed cities like Sumer in Mesopotamia, and concomitantly some people got wealthy and powerful while most did not.
Society, therefore, became, in time, stratified and in more time created superficial distinctions among the people of that city.
Obviously, my commentary is grossly oversimplified, but the point I'm going to make here is spot-on; namely, what has never changed among human beings is the locus of everyone's innate, inviolable worth, which is within each one of us, not without.
But the people of Sumer and other cities that followed were duped by the illusions of wealth and power as being worth, and that led to stratification of different groups based on false premises. And that led to making some groups slaves while the wealthy and powerful remained, they thought, superior.
This was the wrong turn in the fork in the road humanity took.
Humanity thus forgot we all have the same worth, and this inimical illusion only ballooned over millennia.
The right fork we need to find is the one the hunter/gatherers had taken and the whole world needs quickly to take that fork again before we all destroy Earth.
TOD HOWARD HAWKS
But when groups became big enough, they formed cities like Sumer in Mesopotamia, and concomitantly some people got wealthy and powerful while most did not.
Society, therefore, became, in time, stratified and in more time created superficial distinctions among the people of that city.
Obviously, my commentary is grossly oversimplified, but the point I'm going to make here is spot-on; namely, what has never changed among human beings is the locus of everyone's innate, inviolable worth, which is within each one of us, not without.
But the people of Sumer and other cities that followed were duped by the illusions of wealth and power as being worth, and that led to stratification of different groups based on false premises. And that led to making some groups slaves while the wealthy and powerful remained, they thought, superior.
This was the wrong turn in the fork in the road humanity took.
Humanity thus forgot we all have the same worth, and this inimical illusion only ballooned over millennia.
The right fork we need to find is the one the hunter/gatherers had taken and the whole world needs quickly to take that fork again before we all destroy Earth.
TOD HOWARD HAWKS
