A noun is a person a place or a thing, but a "thing" is sometimes a place where persons discuss things, which may be places, objects, or events. Either way, where there is an intersection of persons and matters, there are "things" that keep coming up, and "things" that keep happening in response to them.
"The thing was the assembly of the free men of a country, province or a hundred (hundare/härad/herred). There were consequently hierarchies of things, so that the local things were represented at the higher-level thing, for a province or land. At the thing, disputes were solved and political decisions were made. The place for the thing was often also the place for public religious rites and for commerce."
A key "thing" to note about these things (both kinds, the archaic and the modern) is that they involve the embedding of persons into matter, a thick, opaque stuff which makes deception of all kinds possible, so that there are "things which happened" and yet which cannot be demonstrated first hand to some who must now "deal with them". There have to be witnesses, evidence, stories told, memorized laws and rules brought up, VIPs and other experts to weigh in, opinions to be arrayed against shadows.
This is something which evolved into existence when men, with stunted minds bereft of spiritual power, which could not see beyond their senses, became surrounded by things, and had to get testimony from others about events "second hand", and couldn't even be sure that the testimony they received had any authenticity. Shadows compounding upon shadows was the world, and every manner of feud and hostility was the rule, not the exception.
This condition was, in a relative way at least, contrasted by the tamer world of the civil life where dominance and submission hierarchies were well-established by codes of law and their castes of interpreters and keepers. This was the distinct difference of lifestyle between walled city-states and their standing armies versus tribal groups outside of them. The Germanic tribes and their "things" versus the Roman Empire and its bureaucracies indicate a sharp contrast in this way. They Scythians versus the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians in another example, and the Mongolians and Manchurians versus the Han is yet another.
Looking at the relative sizes of populations in those days, their technology, and their customs, it seems interesting to compare their social psychologies AS TRIBES and AS CITY STATES if they could be made analogous to similar sizes of populations in the modern world. Who would be the modern equivalent to an ancient tribe which ran free and resisted the laws of a city state, answering only to their own customs and traditions, and the hierarchies of their own honorable members?
If only we could take a chronoscopic investigation directly into the past and see these things as they really unfolded, so much we could learn!
If there is any reason I'd cavort with an alien, it would be to compare its library of human history with the stories passed on to us in our own. I bet there would a HUGE disparity, and in any event the actual events as they unfolded would be profoundly interesting. The spying activities of the NSA look petty compared to the value of looking with a birds-eye view (or an alien historian's eye view) backwards through time, seeing every action and every "thing" in its true facticity. Every atrocity, every invention, every skirmish, every legend, every king, every pauper, every migration, and every... ALIEN INTERVENTION... what a treat. I bet the disparity between what happened and what we now "think" happened could be at least somewhat indicated by what might be revealed if what were kept stored in secret vaults by the power brokers of the world were let out into the light of public scrutiny.
Up until today, and ever since its inception, the world is a chaos in the darkness, ruled from deeper darkness, and those within it are imprisoned and keep each other prisoners in ignorance, fixating their confused minds upon hypnotic illusions which are showcased as holy writ of fact, presented by "authorities" who deem the freethinking of those chattel they control as nothing but a crime, enforcing their will on others and calling it "right".
The world is an evil "thing", conceived in an evil mind, in which most are but notions it has bidden into existence to mock the few it could not control.
If I will not bow to this "thing", did it invent my insubordination? If so, how could I be to blame, being simply one of this evil mind's many guises? If to blame, how by it? If not, then what an absurdity to encounter its judment! If not, then how could I have been from its domain in the first place? If not then from where? If not below it, then above it!
If a man were "of a tribe", would he oppose his own chief arbitrarily? Would he oppose his own family, his own heritage, simply because of a whim? He'd be a madman, or he'd be fool. Or he'd be a man greater than them all, and worthiest to be king over them. But if they wouldn't prefer him, then this alone says nothing to us. Perhaps it is really they who are unworthy of HIM.
As Aristotle says to us, some men do not belong in society as we know it because they are either like beasts and cannot be ruled by reason and morality, or they are like gods and cannot be reduced to the bestial immorality of what passes for humanity. Either way, they are set aside in his discussions of ethics.
It is what is divine in men that make them prefer to live alone among the beasts who are without pretense rather than to live with men who are dishonest hypocrites. Maybe this is a sufficient definition of religiosity: to be averse to evil men. There comes a time in human worlds when animals flee human society no more than do saner men.
Who can say whether or not it wouldn't be better? It is a controversial thing, and the matter is not so transparent as current facts and witnesses permit us to have it so as to reach a clear determination. We need the Great Apocalypse for this! "When evil reaches its apex, only then will I manifest to bring it to an end". This was the most Ancient Promise of the Lightbringer! When will His Light flash across this clay and expose its forms as they truly are and bring this horrid "thing" to an End!?
NOW!! NOW!! NOW!! For when it happens, it WILL BE "NOW"! An Eternal Now peeling away the temporal realms of evil errors like a thunder that shatters the foundations of the universe, utterly erasing them from the tableaux of existence!
Until then, it comes in flashes of lightning, by which only those who insist on their own sight can be properly guided, not the train of fools who merely feel their way in the darkness of the relative. they go up and down paths of ignorance, thinking the same path is two and thinking that two very different paths are the same!
To see with your own eyes is to see a thing most clearly, even if you are the blindest man in the world! Only a fool takes it on the claims of another. Be witness to your OWN Truth!
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