The capacity to obtain food from the ground, from the land itself, from the plants and their parts and byproducts, all which naturally occur and recur, was already something had by people everywhere. It was practiced since prehistoric times, and one example is the so-called "forest garden". Nomadic peoples knew how to forage and gather wherever they went, and surely those who survived best were amply able at such activities to supplement their hunting.
This skill, the getting of food from natural sources found already in existence in the form of plants and animals, was improved to such a degree that the more primitive, and less mobile villages of the past were left behind by more advanced food gatherers. These groups could bring their livestock with them, and could care for them well on the go, and that was often better for the matter because of the need to change grazing pastures. If arable land were available they might stay in it for an entire generation or several before moving on. Their flexibility made them adaptable to circumstances of all sorts. It required intelligence and industry, as well as courage to get out of the rut of the primitive village and proceed in this manner and also to survive well at it.
But the more advanced form of the village developed as certain areas developed their agricultural techniques into more sustainable practices, able to get larger yields out of smaller areas. They improved their tools and thereby reduced the amount of work needed for the same yield. Because of this the value of their land increased for them, and for others who were without it but who desired its produce. Possessiveness of land intensified, people were more definite about their boundaries than ever before, wanting to move well beyond some foggy notion of ownership through use, and into something more permanent. These groups would gain ascendancy over the nomadic groups, who would sometimes merge with them and be assimilated into their lifestyles. As the history which ensued demonstrates, however, this merging would only temporarily infuse such societies with better virtues, and mostly would only drag them down into a worse corruption, one not too different from their own and which was often worse than that of their new rulers.
Basically, the improvements in agriculture, the improvements in fixed-site living over long periods of time, attracted corruption from within and from without.
This would be a "natural" tendency. Already at this time there were different classes of people who had evolved. Those who had been productive on their land would be sought for their produce, and would prefer to give it to those who had something in return to offer. Because of the failure of some to be as productive as others, there were probably many economic incompatabilities between these types of people though they lived in the same tribes. Over time, protection rackets built up which ensured themselves some food while giving useful vent to their own thuggish skills.
These were the types who were naturally found and recruited for and among the warrior types of the village, the "village heroes" and their like, who had perhaps even won their merit, earned it, in battle against neighboring tribes who coveted the village's possessions, and perhaps they also put down the local bully when necessary. These police-militia types of people would form cliques, and they would definitely bargain for their own gain with the locals, using their own manner of "gunboat diplomacy" so that the locals would find it better to feed them and take care of them than to do otherwise, even in times of peace.
Basically, these individuals would start off being more virtuous in their ways, but with time would sulk into the arrogance of entitlement and corruption. These types represent the common form of the dictator who will not put down his power after the emergency is settled. This form of corruption has been with mankind since the beginning of his tribal arrangements, and it has fed upon his productivity whether or not it produced any form of adequate return in the way of protection and defense of the peace.
But of course as was said, some virtue was involved at the beginning, often really just a resort to a lesser evil, for the sake of a greater good which perhaps could not be otherwise obtained at that time. In the earlier days of smaller communities, with closer living conditions and blood ties, this would be more understandable as being less corrupt and tending to less corruptibility than in later times with looser blood ties between classes and professions, larger areas of management, more intensive concerns about permanent property (especially land), and increasing intensity of technological improvements. These improvements not only made society more productive but also made those who would reap rewards from that productivity more efficient at weighing in with their ever-simple and ever-crude brutality. And with more structurally ensconced forms of property came similar entrenchments in the entitlements to the power to give protection to these properties.
It was mainly the most successful colluding families which became most powerful over the course of this time, and ever since until today. They had been the more cunning of the productive members of society, more like those who were busy doing whatever it took to make their living without actually doing anything productive (protecting others while they did work...), and they promoted themselves to positions of prominence in society by all manner of effort of display and influence bartering. These more powerful families were running a racket so that they could influence the police-militias and have the best end of the protection bargain in all events, and also to use it as muscle against other families when it was felt to be necessary or expeditious for their own gain. They were more than likely of the mindset that if they didn't do it first, someone else would be doing it to them. Called "politics" as a euphemism, it is really nothing but mafias ruling over the weaker, less brutal populace, who happen either to be more productive by talent and resources, and/or assigned that role as it became more and more possible to transfer the techniques and technology, the wealth and the property, to more obedient and agreeable hands over time. The less productive, by hook and crook, enslaved the more productive.
Those who were the most prominent in these groups of families who had both productive power and the power of the sword felt themselves automatically deserving of whatever they had and therefore deserving of any rights to maintain and promote what they had so that it would endure. They'd justify their actions any way which felt right and sounded good. They had illustrious family histories (full of bloated and distorted accounts of their pasts), and they had the de facto power that they presumed everyone else wanted, so why shouldn't they work as hard to keep it and promote it as anyone else presumably would in their shoes?
They were also by default responsible for actually protecting their domains, and this was a ready, if probably more often than not disagreeable excuse for their positions of power. After all, they can do what they want in their domains as long as it isn't too egregious and as long as there is peace and stability for the most part. But if they fail to maintain their power against less-forgiving, and more ambitious enemies from outside their domains, then they'd be toast.
Many intrigues developed over these sorts of struggle for, with, and against power. The history of empires which grew around such intrigues between these groups of people is replete with every kind of backstabbing, double-dealing, influence peddling, manipulation, intimidation, outright criminality and other abuses of power, that it is really odd that history is studied in any other way than in the explicit study of these intrigues. Any reading of any history of any empire or civilization anywhere in the world demonstrates that these conflicts and confluences between powers, between those who produce and those who command, those who innovate and those who exploit, and all those who eke out some existence in the midst of all this, is basically the key to going from one event to the next. The best way to memorize events to be recapitulated for any history test is to keep track of the motives and countermotives of such events between these sorts of competing groups.
From the beginning until the modern age, just having food was a major focal point of contention between people because that was a source of security and abundance which enabled those who wanted to be made more successful at their efforts at power over others. This opportunity was not lost, and was strengthened over time, both by the nature of the have-nots within a society and by the nature of those similar have-nots who already were ejected from, or commanded over neighboring societies. The use of force and the threat of its use were the primary parasitic forces which attached themselves to the development of man's most basic and wonderful early achievement, his capacity to feed himself with less effort so that his necessities could be increasingly well-managed and require less and less of his time, giving him more and more free time to either continue this upward spiral of improvement, to get further ahead (as with food storage methods and technologies, for example) or else to enjoy life more rather than just avoid starving as a way of life. This is what the productive had, this opportunity, and this is what the unproductive and unvirtuous had not.
Therefore, because these cretins took what they had not, largely without giving an equal or even close-to-equal value in return, these areas of possible improvement were made almost impossible by the parasitic forces of the greedy, the envious, the lazy, the angry and spiteful, the vile, who all banded together, within each society, and worked to ensure themselves gain at the expense of others, offering nothing in return except for a modification of their violence which promised (and often failed) to protect their societies from the similar filth which was accumulating in nearby societies and which represented (most of the time) the worse evil. This is the organized brigandry which developed hand-in-hand with agricultural development so as to ensure that all future developments which that basic improvement enabled would be funneled into their control, and would rotate around their foolish and evil exploits both in that land and beyond it.
These colossal creeps have developed quite an extravagant tapestry of myths about who they are and what they represent, and the entire history of the world since these "feudal" origins of these groups has been a hellish story of their enslavement of their own and other populations. In rare cases it has been about an occasionally more honorable group defending itself from the depredation of a less honorable one, but mostly these are circumstances which are so rare as to be oddities in history. History is the story of people trying to find ways to meet the necessities of life all the while they are carrying giant parasites on their backs who sometimes snatch up one of their human chattel and eat him.
Rather than I cite numerous books where this is reported by the peoples of each of these civilizations themselves, wherein these histories are even sometimes vaingloriously elaborated upon by the perpetrators as a feather in the helm on their family crests, why don't you, the reader, dig in yourself? I can guarantee you what you will find in the history of the world, it will be exactly what I've described in outline here.
One thing I will emphasize once more, however, is that these entrepreneurs of self-aggrandizement through cunning force have had a heavy hand even in what history they've carelessly allowed to be printed about them and their actions down through the ages. You'll find that the tone is such that it presents blatant evil as if it were a Grimm's fairy tale, nothing to be flinched at... These historians themselves describe events mainly in outline, confident that the details of their sources will simply bear out their general statements of matters. They often read like a security guard's report of what happened one evening, but this report is expected to cover the significant events of a period of decades at a time. Quite honestly, we don't have time to dig through all of that generality, dig then through the details of the primary sources (which are themselves steps removed from the actual facts), not most of us. Do so at your own discretion. But cursory readings of the general works of history for any civilization will bear out what I've said, and it has been my own experience.
The point to take away from all this is that this is the backbone of the present day, this history of a parasitic choke hold upon human productivity and ingenuity which has been held upon it by a gang of recently fancy pants thugs. The details get only more voluminous since the developments in recording history, and the art of doing historical accounts, have both grown and developed in step with other advancements in technology and science which have led to our current levels of technology and communication flow in just a couple of hundred years. Just as voluminous has been activities which are barely abstracted into such reports, and many times more robust in their evil details than either can be accounted for in any history book or factual research due to the gap between an event and its report, or else on top of that because of the filtering process which they inflict upon any efforts to report what they do concerning the events of corruption which I have described .
Just look at the censoring of historians throughout the ages, but moreover just look at the way public opinion about current events is regulated by a yellow-bellied media, backed up and backed down by the same corrupt forces that history has already reported in similar accounts of their nefarious bullying, deceitful control over speech and conduct in public. Start from the present and work back by looking at the so-called "1%". That alone will garner you a more fruitful research into the meaningful content that history might be able to supply to your efforts, which will still be akin to dredging the Nile in terms of what you'll have to push out of your way so that you can get your focus on the most significant delineations of fact, which are like a string of pearls found at the bottom of all that sediment, which should be called "Royal Bullshit", because that's what most of history and its dissemination is.
So if I had my druthers and my time, and if I had been allowed to go about my work unhindered, I would do every detail of the work myself. But as it is now, in order to make up for lost time due to all the hindrances to Truth which are forced down everyone's throats continually, and due to many other inequities which are part of the nature of these corrupt systems in which we still live now, and in order to come up with the complete and damning folio of all the evidence in detail, I would only need a few good historians, archeologists and anthropologists to work with, and all the requisite tools and access to other resources which are appropriate to such research. Basically, I'd tell them the evidence to look for in all the accounts, first concerning the contents of the reported histories, second concerning the documents of history themselves. They'd seek out every instance of archaeological significance, every historical record, where there was evidence of the development of some innovation in agriculture. There they would find in close proximity the phases of violence from criminals both within and without, then "solved" by the creation of more civil authority. Behind all such authority, at first and also more and more through time, they'd find the concentration of power into fewer hands and among fewer families, and a concurrent corruption of the industry which had sprung up around the innovations to which all these developments are tied. Finally, this would be matured into a oligarchical state, low on innovation, high on taxes and misery, low in health and frequent in disease, ruled over by pampered mediocrities who largely inherited what they had from their slightly less untalented forbears. This then is either taken over by a larger or more vicious, or perhaps more virtuous (less corrupt, and hence more innovative and motivated) state.
This is the history of the entire feudal world, from Europe through the Middle East to Asia, as well as into the Americas before colonial times. This theme is unchanging and it differs only in the superficial details. I guarantee you that their reports will prove the guilt of those "authorities" who have since ancient times ruled by the fiat of their arrogant violence and deceptive cunning rather than any true and ostensible virtue. In that all this is the case, in that innovation is immediately seized upon and relentlessly exploited, and in that those who are its proper beneficiaries are ground into dust under the pampered feet of their supposed betters, and in that all this is repeatedly done everywhere authority has been found to pretend to exist in human form, and in that all this has occurred blatantly and with aggravation, so that to this day people struggle to eat properly the right amount and right kind of food even in supposedly wonderful 1st world countries, and in that all that is produced is made with filthy chemical additives, various intentional poisons, and all sorts of modifications which are malignant to the human body and mind, and in that all this horrible abuse strips at people's time and energy, mental and physical health, and all in such a way as to definitely deprive them of their time's quantity and quality, its amount and value, it is fairly leveled at the oligarchs that they have raped and pillaged mankind's dignity and robbed it of its freedom of will to act as proper human beings. That this has happened in direct and constant proportion to the rate at which technological progress has leapt and bounded, this only adds to the aggravated and intentional malfeasance of all this criminal abuse. That this has been part of well-articulated plans to do precisely this in order to maintain a masterful control of people in the "lower classes" by those who deem themselves the "higher classes" is also a matter of record. That all these modern institutions of authority receive their power and backing from their continuous connection with these older institutions of unhallowed corruption disguised as God's Will on Earth, that is easily demonstrated by "following the money" and looking at all the developments I've outlined in this essay in their modern forms. That on top of all this these "rulers over you" pretend that they are your benefactors and improvers, this just boggles the mind as to the steep height of arrogance required to mock all decency and reality with these empty pretenses to virtue which put the hypocrisy of devils to shame.
Because the problems with society seem firmly rooted in the ball and chain which is forcefully attached to its stomach, it is no surprise that many new problems have emerged which have to do with the health of the rest of its body. In the next essay I will address the matter of medicine and nutrition as sciences and as practices, and how there is evidence in every area of these endeavors which spell out that the same wicked corruption has attached itself to these arts and sciences which has already dug in deeply with regard to people's ability feed themselves (which they perhaps did much better not long ago than they do now).
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