The King is Ascendent

The prospect of a government for the people and by the people, with the promises of justice, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for all was always an historical folly. It has lasted roughly 200 years, a mere mini blip in our history. The last time such a noble and equitable experiment took place was in Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C., with the apex during the Golden Age of Athens from around 480 to 404 B.C. The amount of time for those classical endeavors are shockingly close to our own. 

Now, we are facing a return to the common human story. One of kings and tyrants, of tithes and tributes, of poverty and desperation for all.

The stories go beyond the bloodied first waving man, of course. Society shifts course but always returns to the same cycle. People convince themselves that we are progressing towards the new, the novel experience, the progression of life.  This is the common sentiment, embedded in the wide classes that assumed enough to care so little; to pay attention to so little; to know so little. They tend to be in the broad swathe of the middle class that achieved the position because of the rights of democracy and freedom. They will be passive to the king and will thus lose, in real terms, the most. Any mere film of luxury will be stripped away from them, gearing them towards necessity, the cogs that grind forward to serve the kingdom and the king. They will have no access or rights to privileges because they will be viewed as unworthy—after all they are the viewers, not the viewed; those in the limelight displace those in the shadows as proof of superiority or, worse, the basic inferiority of those who did not climb up into the light of bejeweled ladders. Ahh, what a pity it is to see the belief in the human spirit crushed like peppercorns on the mill. Dust to dust. 

So, the bejeweled and bespectacled moneyed class, those who, in the spin cycles of wealth and material possession, believe they are special because of their sparkle; because their banks prove a superiority to the masses. They misplace luck with destiny and destiny with divinity. They are simply delusional, high on their own supply. They thus have a misplaced affinity with the king, seeing themselves in him, and thus clamoring to fall within his good graces. His light is their light and if bestowed on their bowed heads then they may feel the grace, the grace they perceive to be closest to god. (And my oh my how the progressive use of pronouns will fall asunder. We will have no place for equity and the glamorous kaleidoscope of humanity. It is single headed hierarchy with all else falling into the ranks.) These rich will pledge fealty, explaining their bent knees as the signs of being the most informed and knowledgeable, their feet crimped underneath, on a path that only they can understand as they too are superior and could be someday king. They are the clamorous minions of the king’s court, as mesmerized by the glitter of the court as by their own self worth. Of course, as the annals tell, with each new tithe and bowed head they will become more and more driven by fear and desperation to stay within the king’s graces so as to avoid revealing their sense of superiority as a farce. They clamor for the artificial light, harsh and sporadic, bringing away individuality and difference, planing the existence of this class to conform and comply. 

These stories stand as the reminders that the ways of kings are not to be lauded or revered because they diminish the actual glories of being human. We are a unique species on this big blue ball. We each have capacities to create in ways that no other entity can. We learn and adapt and dream. We strive and work. It is amazing to think that our ancestors wore down beasts by our tenacity to just keep tracking them through the bush. We do that. We can push ourselves beyond all conceivable limits and yet this is also combined with this amazing level of creativity and vision. Our stories are filled with these as much as they are kings. These are human traits, endowed to all. It is only the strictures of society that mold us towards a conformity, towards organizational structures that wash away the vivid differences that make us at all interesting. This is as integral to the last 250 years as is democracy and freedom. They have largely gone hand in hand.

The mistake we made, the mistake that has landed us right back in the iron cycles of history where we will fall asunder to the human organization by kings, is that we gave too much place to industrial models of investment and return, to the cycles of wealth creation rather than to the more basic and pristine aspects of being human: creation, compassion, vision, and love. Factory models were designed as hierarchical and as driven by financial incentives—the baubles of the rich. This industrial era deigned human organization as a machine, which is not wholly wrong as I discuss below, but one whose goal was profit. Initially, this profit benefited everyone with huge leaps in wealth that led to the emergence of the middle class and a level of unprecedented comfort. The philosophical ideals of humanity that led to liberty, freedom, and justice merged with these industrial models of production and profit to create the biggest leap in creativity and innovation in human history. 1910 to 2010 was a miraculous period as we went from the combustion engine to artificial intelligence. The problem was that the models for bringing these innovations to fruition came from across humanity, from the weird to the wonderful, but were always tied to profit creation. Material riches were the reward, and, as we marched forward into a highly visualized form of mass global media, these became the sole incentive. This was propelled forward in the ra-ra 1990s with the dot.com boom and the mythology of investment bankers—greed is good. Suddenly the cautionary tales of movies like the Godfather became aspirational. This led to the bewitched state that people find themselves in as they swipe through the crass media that brings them all down to this profit oriented common denominator. Influencers are surely the clearest sign of our demise.

We had a moment, in the 1950s and 1960s, where the spirits of our best selves, of creation and compassion, were gaining traction. Unfortunately, these were sent right off the road in a drugged up fury. Alas.

So, here we are. As a historian, I am not deeply optimistic about our chances to change course. As noted, the last 250 years have been an anomaly with only one historical precedent in ancient Greece. The historian in me says that our path is thus crystal clear.

Yet, there are a few winkles in time worth considering. The first is also historical. Mother Earth has a lineage and arc far longer than ours and she seems to be reacting to the virus that we have become, with increasing fevers and bile—we have made her sick. She will either die or expel us, the virus. Again, history tends to favor her capacity to be rid of us. 

The other winkle, much more difficult to trace but a visible crevice nonetheless, is our capacity to surprise. This era of ours is miraculous and exceptionally rare. Who in the 1700s or 1800s could have really imagined the amazing breadth of or our discoveries and creations? (There are a few, of course, the sharp and brilliant antecedents.) We have experienced a glorious era when people were endowed all the way around the world with the opportunity to be their best selves, to let their own experiences, intuitions, knowledge, skills, and hard work produce not more profit but more human glory, more love and compassion. While not explicit in Pinker’s work on violence or Friedman’s flat earth or Fukuyama’s end of history, the driver for all of these was the freedom and liberty bestowed on so many. And, let’s be clear. The tech-bro anti diversity clan completely and ruinously misunderstand that the space being created for the marginalized and different is part of this glorious humanity, ensuring that all can participate in human creativity and innovation. These tech bro fascists see it as zero sum game rather than the nurturing of a billion flowers.

I am reminded of Sir Ken Robinson’s work on education that envisioned an agricultural model of learning and growth, rather than an industrial model, which creates more conformity within the rules of hierarchy and profit. An agricultural model sees us all as seeds that have the capacity to grow in both highly unique and highly similar ways. A field of daffodils look all the same from above but as one glides into their rich and warm swarm, the rich diversity that exists is just as clear. This requires a gardeners’ mind set, one where plants are nurtured and protected but otherwise left to grow as they will. 

So, these models that could propel us toward the our full capacities exist. They have been thought about and written about far more convincingly than I can here. And, our propensity to confound the annals of history are legendary as well. But, as legends, they will take a lot to become a new history.

We will need to shred the institutions that have guided us thus far. We will need to replace them not with the Darwinian kingdoms being espoused by the maggots around Trump but with something far more kinder, compassionate, equitable, and sensible. Something that will inspire all of us rather than stoke these flames of hate and fear.

We need a revolution of kindness and love.