What Got Us Here

Unlike the rest of my essays, which my friend has indicated can be read by a space alien 1,000 years from now, there are certain fashions and cultural patterns that exist within our lifetimes that won’t change anytime soon.

Before Now

Culturally, many precedents have existed a long time ago, relative to now:

  • Greek thought explored many philosophical domains that framed our understanding of the world.
  • The Roman Empire was one of the first foundations of infinitely scalable government.
  • Even the most devout atheist can agree the ideas of Jesus Christ have been profoundly influential toward society’s development.
  • The Catholic Church, directly designed by Christians, was a dominant political system that took over a portion of the Roman Empire’s authority and both ran and educated the world for a millennium.

Most other pedagogues would start at the Roman Empire, but I don’t think it’s as relevant as our near-history. Like memory, history fades with time, and all we have are selected writings about the experience, with very limited understanding of how those people lived or thought differently than us.

The Beginning

The beginning eras of our present state of existence starts in 1346. At the time in Europe, the last thing that had significantly happened across the world was the Great Schism of 1054. Most people were peasants run by a comparatively small number of kings, and every empire was subject to the Catholic Church.

Within 7 short years, a bubonic plague pandemic killed 30-60% of the people. It came unexpectedly (and we still don’t know what precisely started it), and it forced people to directly face the Great Unknown.

From that point, there was a tremendous explosion of thought and action into entirely new endeavors:

  • For various economic, religious, and political reasons, here was a push for colonization into new territories.
  • Philosophical discussions started moving from the abstraction of a relationship with God into more practical matters like “how can we best live together as a society?”.
  • Religious development exploded, beginning with Bohemia and bleeding into everything else starting in 1517. The Catholics and Protestants chose sides and picked endless debates about nearly every aspect of daily living.

By the time we’ve arrived at the year 1650, European society is expanding its influence across the planet, the colonies are steadily growing, and there’s plenty of economic gain for non-nobility. That gain generated a comparatively sizeable middle class that quietly maintained an ever-growing quality of life.

The ambition of humanity may be a universal, but the ambitions of the past five centuries have given us more opportunities to communicate and perform than ever before. The consequence of it is that we’ve found more purpose and meaning within society than ever before. There are far more specializations someone can have, for example, and with far less time necessary to start into that role.

More Thinking

By their nature, the unsophisticated culture of the underclass doesn’t possess the complexities that naturally comes with maintaining the lifestyles of high society after at least a few generations. Giving them more power means unpredictable changes that veer into creatively straightforward approaches.

In particular, the Protestant Reformation cast off many institutions of religion. Those people were given a lot of economic power by taking the risk on settling the colonies’ politically unclaimed land. The beginnings of their political freedoms developed into further desire for even more freedom.

By the 1750s, people had been thinking for themselves for a while, without the clear guidance of a religious overseer. Besides Protestantism, those religious devotions were far more pragmatic, and religion dovetailed neatly with political parties.

To this day, secular religion exists as the social standard, and science and philosophy have completely replaced the role of tradition and religion.

A New Empire

Some people in the 1770s decided to take the risk to assert their independence through semi-secular, semi-religious philosophical values birthed in the Age of Reason. There was some religious overtone to the new nation that arose, but only to the effect that God was the essence of morality and truth. It’s apparent in their founding documents that they believed in a type of human universal, but didn’t want punitive measures about the specifics.

The United States of America created itself on the presumption that every person had certain inalienable rights and privileges, with a brand-new political system that tried to bring more representation to individuals. This arose through many wealthy upper-classmen giving power to everyone else. They were able to succeed after the second try, and it has been that way for a few centuries.

After quite a bit of success, this development went farther, with the economic/political/cultural dam bursting in the 1860s with the American Civil War. Until that point, human ownership was a long-standing institution, but the nation that won dramatically eroded that institution’s authority, to the point that it has had to go underground to maintain its practice.

The secular trend advanced further when concepts such as Marx’s socialism arose in public discourse.

Even now, people in the West tend to believe their opinion has inherent value, to the point that they tend to voice it without fear of torture or death.

Power Consolidation

People on the highest end of society like to stay there, and the underclasses receiving power was not a welcome experience, since the ruling class would naturally lose their authority.

One of the most significant power-consolidation tricks was to maintain a state of war. The 19th century’s Age of Imperialism saw every little empire squabbling with every other empire. Skirmishes abounded, with the profit going to the financiers of both sides of the equation: military equipment going in, and reconstruction after the war had settled.

Meanwhile, just like America would bring redemption to random nobodies looking for a new life, it would bring salvation to the aristocracy. Enterprising innovators like Rockefeller and Carnegie developed the living fiction of the trust into a full-fledged long-term wealth-bearing vehicle called the corporation.

The existence of an indefinite inheritance through the trustee was able to create a new form of wealth management free from aristocracy: the corporate board member.

The Great World War in 1914 was devastating to the war-based power game. Within 4 terrifying years, the entire system of proxy wars and alliances devolved with the new development of technologies like aircraft and mustard gas, mixed with military tactics that hadn’t been updated to defend against them.

The after-effects of the War in Europe resulted in Germany, who was on the losing side, receiving all the blame. They were required to pay off reparations debts for all the harm they had caused, but the face-for-an-eye punitive justice model arose against Germany, and they were utterly devastated.

From the Great World War onward, any sufficiently talented, hard-working, obsessive, and lucky individual has been able to climb all the way to the top of society. Before, they’d have to swear devotion to nobility and prove it over time, but now they can become nobility for the comparatively smaller price of their identity and wellness.

A Larger Empire

Every loss in power creates a vacuum, and the aristocracy responded to the war in the 1920s by moving their collective wealth to corporations, many of them in America. This advanced a way of life that provided more conveniences, for more people, than had ever happened before in written history.

Anything beyond this point is a political statement, and you can go here to read the remainder of the story.