sexta-feira, 6 de setembro de 2024

Your place in the world, at home, in society

Your place in the world, at home, in society

The world has always been socially organized according to hereditary castes.

Egyptian babies had their place determined from the cradle of their parental ancestors from birth to death in the heavy organization of Egyptian society from the first dynasty to the last, approximately three thousand years later, at the beginning of the Roman Empire and during the Hellenistic phase. From the year 300 BC to 2700 BC.

Slaves began with the military submission of their homeland to the Pharaoh emperor and from then on all slave descendants would be slaves until the change of dominion of the Egyptian people.

The scribes and royal servants of the Pharaohs were trained by their parents or relatives or guardians of minors to replace them in their professional functions that became hereditary, as were all professions: carpenters were the sons of carpenters; peasants were the sons of peasants; doctors were the sons of doctors; Sorcerers received the secrets of rituals and sacred herbs from their sorcerer fathers; shepherds inherited their craft from their shepherd fathers; fishermen inherited all the tools and boats from their fishermen fathers; and so on, with all activities.

There was no rebellion or nonconformity, no one knew any other society different from that one, therefore, it would be impossible for a fish to imagine a world outside of the water, right there on the edge of the surface of the liquid, a fish could never imagine what a star, or the sky, or the earth would be like, it had never seen one like in Plato's myth of the cave.

This total immersion in its world prevents it from seeing another adverse reality, such was the 988 years of the Middle Ages, therefore, it did not represent any suffering or any expectation or anxiety for people to dream of social mobility, it was like imagining that a horse dreamed of being a dog, this never happens in the animal kingdom, a gazelle does not dream of one day being a lion; nor does an elephant dream of being a snake.

Like a psychopathic illness, someone at some point in civilization had contact with another type of society and decided to tell what they saw, as in Plato's myth of the cave, except that unlike the myth, someone decided to leave Plato's cave to observe what was outside of Plato's cave.

The result was the destruction of the institutionalized social order, going through a period of strong revolution with the disorganization caused by the rite of passage and the assimilation and adaptation through the syncretism of cultures in the face of the clash of civilizations.

I imagine the indigenous people when they came across the first caravels emerging from the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, where the European crew knew they were discovering new lands, but the natives had the perception that they had encountered the gods: with a strange language, with extremely powerful clothing and weapons they had never seen before, with magical technologies such as the mirror, the thunder stick that spit fire, the magic axe that quickly felled trees, the machete that could easily cut any fruit, the fabrics of the clothes, and everything was enchanted.

The structure of indigenous society provided for a certain hereditary order that ended as soon as the new chief was established for life, as well as the sorcerers and healers, the warriors, the women, the adults and the children, each in their determined place in society.

Everyone was equal, each in their social status in the corresponding hereditary system, and at birth they were given the conditions of class and social caste.

After the Middle Ages, a new idea spread throughout European society about a certain anthropocentrism replacing the traditional social and religious order: now the revolutionaries of the French Revolution of 1789 spoke of the utopia of equality and the end of differences based on nothing, without any scientific or historical proof that a new model of society could work, where all human beings are equal and can be interchangeable in social roles in the social division of labor, with free mobility in social ascent and descent. Since then, society has had to adapt to: unemployment, anomie in the planning of professions, and the supply and demand of labor and products, without any rules; the industrial and mercantilist revolution produced the crisis in logistics and distribution of goods and services that Adam Smith called the free market and that Ricardo assumed that the invisible hand of market anarchy would automatically organize the feedback of demands, producing supply at the second instant where there was a crisis of demand; and conversely, the excess supply, at the next moment, would neutralize the excess production, bringing the market back to equilibrium.

The only problem with this mechanism is the transition time between excess supply and excess demand, and this gap can produce disastrous social effects such as unemployment, hunger, social disorganization, wars and disputes over scarce production factors and supply chains in a dispute that can lead to death through wars of conquest and simple looting and extortion.

It is difficult to defend the idea that freedom has destroyed the social order: it is easier to convince people that they will never be rich or reach the top of the social pyramid; this is unnecessary and destructive of the social division of labor; this is perfectly evident in societies that have difficulty filling their gaps in the production chain, such as in entire countries where there is a shortage of professionals, as happened with the lack of bricklayers, plumbers, garbage collectors and waiters in wealthy Germany in 1980, and now the same thing happening in 2024 in Canada, Australia, South Korea; Society goes to war over social status, where natives in the USA are unable to have a productive economic activity because they do not accept low-status but very well-paid professional positions such as day laborers, cooks, bricklayers, and painters, who have low visibility and social status. So these professions are filled by migrants who start to enjoy a salary that is many times higher than the most socially prestigious professions, the preferred and scarce ones in the labor market for natives.

The universe conspires against egalitarianism. There are eight totally different planets. There is not a single star in the sky that is the same as any other. There is not a single leaf on the same tree that is the same as any other leaf on the same tree, with the same size, color, shape, and two fingerprints on the entire planet. There are two identical retinas in the human population. There are two equal individuals and two equal mountains. Where did they find the idea of ​​perfection in equality?

Egalitarianism is the most perfect form of intellectual, moral, rational, religious, social, physical, and biological anomaly in human culture and science!

Roberto da Silva Rocha, professor universitário e cientista político

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