Sedj on Nostr: A little something on the origins of power - think coercion, the state, etc. We ...

A little something on the origins of power - think coercion, the state, etc.

We started out fairly naive about how shit works. Yeah, sun comes up, goes down, everything hurts, wind and rain are cold, people die - but those are just things working, not HOW they actually work.

Coercion began when someone decided they knew how things worked, at least well enough to not just tell others how they worked, but to pretend they could control things, or could intercede between others and a "god" to help control things. Then they began controlling people.

Go do a rain dance to appease the rain god. Give me your stuff and I'll do a dance and your hunt will go well. These are acts of coercion, with the threat of things going poorly if you don't comply.

As more people fell under the sway of coercion, it took more than one person to administrate the coercion. Here's where it evolved into religion, with religious leaders - a group of people that had a status of control over others, and a set of practices that the leaders would enact to keep people under their control.

This continued to grow - and power is addictive; being in the presence of power is addictive; so more people ingratiated themselves to the religious leaders to get not only their approval, but their assistance in getting the rest of the people to do what they wanted. This is the origin of politics, although even the origin of religion had the seeds of politics involved.

Now you had religious leaders, with coerced practices (religion), and another class of leadership that had the favor of the religious leaders, but who would pursue other efforts, like building projects, infrastructure, maybe basic agriculture and trade. We'll call them politicians. They could use their favored status with the religious leaders to coerce others as well. And they needed practices as well, to keep everyone else working in line with their projects. And here we have "the state".

All of this predates Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, or any other current widespread world religion. What we have now (both religion and state) have gone through millennia of evolution, with both golden ages of improvement and catastrophic extinction. They've been refined into what we experience today as the coercion of The Church and The State, and many of us are still happy to bend the knee to one or both, because we believe they are needed to preserve "society" - but is this true?

What happens to our "society" when there is no "State"? Or going back further, no "Religion"? No leadership, no coercion - the fact is, I think most of us are so conditioned and evolved to bend the knee to a leader, that leaders will naturally be attracted to the power vacuum, and it will be more of the same, perhaps better, perhaps worse.

How to break out of this? We talk of individual sovereignty, but I don't see this happening until there is a major evolutionary change. Two possibilities - and neither would necessarily get us there, but just things to think about.

1. Telepathy - evolving as a species to have some good ability to have at least an empathetic form of telepathy, where we can accurately sense the emotions of others. This would make it very difficult to coerce or be coerced, because others could sense if your emotional state centered on control or hiding/manipulation.

2. Time theory - if something allows us to see beyond linear cause/effect time, like into the world of quantum mechanics, what would control/coercion look like? It is all based on cause and effect, so if those things are working backwards, out of sync, or even simultaneously, it is very hard to threaten a painful future based on your actions in the present.

Neither of these will come to pass any time soon - but if we zoom out, who knows, generations from now, millennia from now, maybe we will get there, but only if we can survive the potential catastrophic extinctions of State and Religion.