The past few generations of people who have lived on this planet have seen great wars of massive destruction; dizzying technological advancements; mighty nations and empires fallen; world economics transformed; populations exploding; strange new viruses and diseases; the weather itself altered and grown more hostile. The history of humanity has always known war, famine and pestilence, angry weather and abuses of power from the top. But as the Industrial Revolution intensified during the past century and transformed into the Space Age, the stakes were raised; and in this new century, raised again. We have in our mortal hands the ability to make this lush green orb we reside upon completely uninhabitable, whether through callous, steady pollution or else from one act of steely-eyed and determined nihilism.
The complex, interconnected global economy that most of humanity now depends upon for its basic sustenance was long ago designed to entirely depend upon fossil fuels that are now quickly running dry. The life support systems of the planet itself are now compromised, facing possible collapse. We are hurling now into a future that any reasonable person must view as potentially catastrophic. The economic elites know this very well, better than we do, for it was their own plotting and greed that has brought this reality about. And so as we stand now on a kind of precipice of history, they are quick to raise the stakes, quick and unblinking, confident that our own vague awareness of impending doom will paralyze us, push us to go docile and once again fold.
The “Golden Age” has only ever existed as some ancient myth, intruding on our human consciousness from we know not where, a persistent whisper of what we once were and a promise for what we could become. For all of recorded human history we have been ruled by a Dominator Consciousness. Indeed, recorded history is a byproduct of the Dominator Consciousness. The warlords and chieftains who rose up to take power needed clerks to categorize and record all that they had conquered, to better facilitate control in the present and to boast of their prowess before the generations to come.
And so human civilization arose, always in the shape of the Pyramid: A great mass of struggling workers squeezed together across the entire base of the structure, ruled over by a small elite group at the top, with directly below them a slightly larger managerial class—the engineers and accountants; the technicians and the priesthood; and the writers of propaganda, who create stories to tell the rulers how great they are, and to tell the masses how fortunate it is that we live in this greatest of all possible worlds. In more recent times, a charade known as “voting” has been enacted to allow the workers along the base to feel as if they play some role in controlling society. But those at the top of the Pyramid continue to define the state of reality, and have made sure that this charade of voting will never threaten the Pyramid’s structural integrity.
We have always been told that before recorded history, before the advent of civilization, human life was scarcely worth living: Nasty, brutish and short. It is important to keep in mind that the “experts” who have told this story have always come from the class of professional intellectuals, cozily ensconced rather high up in the Pyramid, comfortable and well invested with an interest of keeping the whole structure firm.
But that rumor of a lost Golden Age has always been stubbornly persistent, again and again bubbling up in the collective consciousness and asserting itself in various manifestations. In recent decades, Primitivism Philosophers such as John Zerzan have interpreted the archeological records to show that for tens of thousands of years, hunter-gatherer bands of human beings existed in a kind of anarchist utopia, with mutual aid and cooperation the governing principles. The Dominator Consciousness and civilization itself are only relatively recent and regrettable aberrations, tied to the rise of agriculture.
Another persistently popular theory to arise out of the social upheaval and transformation of the 1960’s and 70’s received it’s most well known articulation in When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone. According to Stone’s research, early humanity worshipped a benevolent Goddess and existed in matriarchal paradise, which was finally overrun and supplanted by the fiercely patriarchal Indo-European tribes who developed into Western civilization as we have come to know it.
Naturally enough, anarchist and feminist theories such as these are routinely dismissed as absurd by the official experts in the field—i.e., those tenured information managers of the academic world, living in comfort and ease well up within the Pyramid’s top half. I am not qualified to do battle against such well armed foes, and that is not my intention here. But I do think it is interesting to give some thought to the social structures of our closest primate relatives, the Bonobos, with whom we share over 96% of the same DNA.
Bonobo society revolves around sexual play and affectionately rendered mutual grooming sessions. When conflict arises between individuals, it is almost inevitably defused by some act of pleasure-causing physical exchange. The life of the Bonobo more or less consists of sharing food and sex, a casual and never-ceasing orgy. Bonobos are matriarchal, as well, with a kind of benign lesbian mafia at the top of their social structure. Everybody eats, everybody fucks, but if a young male bonobo, for example, tries to force himself onto a partner, the band’s close-knit sisterhood will quickly gang up on the transgressing young buck and administer a solid thrashing. It is unusual for even this degree of conflict to arise, though. Most bonobo males seem more than content to enjoy the rare paradise they have been given on this planet.
The rulers of civilization have worked very hard to promulgate the idea that without submission to the authority of civilization, human beings would quickly descend into a vicious state of lawless self-interest. But the idea that early humanity could have existed in a fierce state of snarling dog-eat-dog competition seems rather unlikely. As a species we could not have survived the ice age without a tremendous innate capacity for mutual aid and cooperation. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” is almost certainly among humanity’s hard-wired, biological imperatives.
Kindness, compassion, love—these are spiritual qualities which emanate out of from the human soul, permeating the cellular structure of the individual body and longing for expression. It has been one of the great historical propaganda tricks of the ruling elite to make it seem as if morality instead enters human beings from some place outside of them, through an acceptance of submission to the forces above. The ruling elite have built their pyramid so as to crush these vital qualities out of humanity, in order to sell them weak, synthetic substitutes instead.
Throughout the history of the Dominator Consciousness, throughout the long history of life inside civilization’s Pyramid, a more enlightened and compassionate consciousness has persisted, a small flickering candle protected by what is innate and best within us. At times this higher consciousness has flared up and become glowing and bright within certain individuals, quickly spreading out to those around them, at times even growing bright enough to be seen from the top of the pyramid. That human beings might sincerely discover their own divine light and then recognize that same light in those around them is the only true threat that exists for those who perch atop the Pyramid. From their positions high above they vigilantly keep watch against any sudden flickering light in the darkness, ready to douse it out if necessary, by violent force.
But the light within us is persistent, its hunger to shine strong. There is no way to extinguish it everywhere by force. And so the ruling elite have their employees working directly beneath them, spinning propaganda. The Priest class insists that the individual human is a dark beast, and that the light he hungers for can only be handed down from above, as a reward for total obedience. And in this more recent age of scientific materialism, an even more demoralizing story has steadily been handed down from above—that there is actually no light at all, anywhere, that the entire world is mechanistic and dark. ,
The propaganda of the elite has kept the Pyramid standing and humanity enslaved, for century after century, across the last several millennia. The result has been a steady and accelerating assault upon the living planet, exploding misery for all living things. The Pyramid itself begins to crack; by any reasonable analysis, it appears ready to collapse. From the base of the Pyramid, the candle lights begin to flicker and shine, brighter everyday. In this age that we live in, a desperate race is underway, the future of humanity hangs in the balance. Will enough of us recognize and understand the true nature of the divine light, before it is too late? Will the evolutionary leap in consciousness occur? Will reality be re-imagined and transformed?
Whether humanity enjoyed a great Golden Age in its distant past is a debate for scholars. But it must be the work of all concerned people to bring a new Golden Age about, for if we fail at this, the darkness may very well swallow us all, and before very long, before we even know it has happened.
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