ETHOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON "CLIMATE CHANGE"

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Was Zeus right?

A game between Gods

Zeus, king of the gods of Olympus and master of the thunderbolt, upon learning that Prometheus – a lesser god – had taught humans to lose their fear of the fire and to use it, punished him by having him bound to a rock, where every day an eagle would eat his liver, an atrocious torture, since the gods, although immortal, are also sensitive to pain.

Prometheus, defying Zeus’s opinion, had decided that the skills acquired by a family of apes since they began walking upright were a sign that there was no need to wait any longer to give them fire, the tool that would make them recognized as the gods’ favourites and the most powerful mortals on the planet, destined for great achievements.

Like Zeus, the other gods and goddesses of Olympus considered that although those apes were the most intelligent of all animals, they still had a very immature nature and were incapable of managing adverse situations, to which they reacted either with too much fear or with too much violence.

Nevertheless, they told Zeus that he was being too harsh with Prometheus, although admitting that he had not done any good for humans by giving them a tool that, surely, would serve more to harm each other than for good; they criticized Prometheus’ frivolous character and his constant desire for notoriety, but he was family, and they expected more leniency from Zeus. However, Zeus paid no heed.

It is important to note that for the gods of Olympus, what humans did or did not do was not their primary concern, as they were focused on their own adventures and family stories. Thus, Zeus’ severe decision must have had serious motivations.

A look at Ancient Greece is always enlightening, as that doubt about the limits of humans often assaults our thoughts, incapable of understanding the brutal paradox of being capable of the most admirable achievements in our own eyes, while, in addition to fighting among ourselves violently, we provoke the degradation of natural systems and accumulate toxic waste all over the planet and within our bodies, living in discomfort. And what is even worse: we condemn future generations to severe hardships with no foreseeable end and cause enormous harm, some even leading to extinction, to countless species of animals and plants.

We have considered Prometheus as the friend of humans and Zeus as the autocrat who wanted to keep us in animality, but his indignation was not whimsical, and now there are many voices that predict the same fate that the great god of Olympus feared: extinction, caused by our inability to manage fire.

In the current state of health of the biosphere, future prospects are more than alarming, and the problem becomes extremely serious when governance proves incapable of finding a solution, while the scientific community affirms with information, data, and irrefutable evidence that climate disaster is a very threatening reality.
All other animal species maintain predictable group behaviours in the face of any change, and to the extent of their abilities and opportunities, they seek security; we, however, in the face of concrete problems, can have perceptions that are not only different but sometimes even contradictory and very often conflictive.
Unfortunately, the essential need to perceive ourselves as a unit is a recent discovery in the history of our species, always polarized around myths that bring divisions and conflicts, and always manipulated by ambitions and interests, whether personal, from partisan politics, or from saviour ideologies.
For our well-being and for our survival as a species, we need social governance instruments of a global scope, which allow us to make the most appropriate decisions in the face of the great challenges and persistent conflicts that are common to us.

The United Nations, the UN, preceded a few decades earlier by the failed League of Nations after World War I, is humanity’s first attempts to feel and define our species as an organized society. However, it arrives too late and, above all, weak, due to the enormous inertia of ancient myths manipulated by current interests, which for now remain irreducible.
Humans have always abused natural resources, out of ignorance, but for many decades now we have had enough reliable information, corroborated with scientific instruments, to know how vulnerable and limited they are. Now, practically everyone is aware that with our behaviour we are condemning future generations to adverse conditions; so adverse that they are impossible to imagine. The current generations of adults face a serious moral and psychological problem that we don’t know how to solve or confront; it is even hard for us to talk about it.
There are ideas, initiatives, and projects – the vast majority with public funding – that we already know will be completely insufficient to reverse the destructive trend in time. In fact, we don’t even know how to approach the problem, since any effective response requires political levels of understanding and solidarity between states that are currently lacking, and everything suggests that they won’t be reached within an acceptable timeframe. Meanwhile, the UN, institutionally incapable of legislating, executing, and sanctioning, is limited to recommending, warning, and alerting, with very little success; the phrase:

… We have entered through the gates of hell…

This is from its Secretary-General.

Recently, the US government proudly announced that the long-awaited nuclear fusion energy could become a functional reality in a few decades, although they could not provide more details due to the challenge of obtaining the materials and the technical system to confine the plasma. However, assuming the most optimistic forecast – around forty years – the environmental effects predicted by atmospheric warming foretell multiple dramas and tragedies, at least for the next half-century. And fifty years of meteorological degradation is a very long time.
The possibility of having a clean energy source in the future represents a turning point in the problem of atmospheric warming, but to avoid the great disasters that are anticipated, it is a future expectation that is too far off. Time is against us.

The first apes that walked upright, from which we descend, have been named Homo erectus by anthropologists; a few hundred thousand years later, a new species appeared, an ape that modified stones and sticks, which we call Homo habilis; several hundred thousand years later, those we now consider intelligent appeared, and we call them Homo sapiens; finally, the last evolutionary step, those who are very intelligent, that is, us, who recognize ourselves as Homo sapiens sapiens. However, this last designation that we pompously give ourselves might be more the result of an unjustified self-satisfaction rather than a rigorous and scientific term. The name Homo habilis miles would be more realistic, unless Zeus, in addition to considering us a mistake from the very beginning, sees us as arrogant narcissists without a solution and, in a fit of bad temper, ends us.

According to Greek mythology, in ancient times Zeus allowed five different human races to become extinct, some for being too warlike and others for being too frivolous; during the Trojan War, observing the disappointing behaviour of the combatants, he considered for the sixth time letting us become extinct. He did not do so because some goddesses of Olympus, especially Athena, convinced him not to, as they still saw a worthy future for us. Now, three thousand years later, convincing Zeus not to let us go extinct cannot be very easy – assuming Athena still loves us – as, in addition to having destructive behaviours towards ourselves, we are driving many animal and plant species to extinction, and that cannot be pleasing to them.

Sadly, only by using absolutely negative adverbs can we qualify our individual, societal, and species’ daring, which leads us to risk the destruction of the marvellous nature that has needed 13 billion years to express itself as it is now. Due to a few decades of selfish disregard, we run the risk of setting the history of planet Earth back by 500 million years, to a time when life was only simple organisms, as well as interrupting the mental progress of our species toward understanding ourselves, our history, and the laws that govern the universe.

By halting evolutionary progress, some deficiencies in our emotional and sentimental world drive us toward states of drama and tragedy, and we can be sure that, if Zeus is considering punishing us, it’s because he does not consider us mentally limited, but morally irresponsible.

Climate Change

The term “climate change” is a semantic strategy to trivialize, in the public’s state of mind, the disturbing effects of the progressive warming of the atmosphere and oceans.
The climate is the set of meteorological constants, which include certain variables: temperature, humidity, wind, atmospheric pressure, etc., in a specific geographic area; these meteorological constants are not rigid, but they do have margins of variation that are quite predictable, with parameters that may change in certain episodes, but which are observed regularly and, thanks to which, plant and animal life, with limitations based on the origin of each species, has adapted. Each region of planet Earth has its own climate, and each place has its own microclimate, which, with few variations, has remained the same since the end of the last ice age more than 10,000 years ago; since then, its alterations have been caused by gas emissions produced by volcanoes, with effects similar to those emitted by the industrial system.

The word “change” is used to indicate the transition from one situation to another and implies the substitution of one option for another; however, the reality is that we are immersed in an accelerated process of disordered degradation of meteorological constants, and saying we are changing the climate is a misleading statement, made either consciously or out of ignorance. More appropriate terms, avoiding harsher qualifiers, could be “erosion of the climate” or “destruction of the meteorology.”

The current process of atmospheric warming and its effect on ocean and air temperatures alters marine flows and winds, causing irregularities in regional weather patterns and threatening the adaptive capacities of all species, especially those on which we depend absolutely: agricultural species, which are precisely the most vulnerable.
Of all the problems arising from the increase in air and water temperature, the effects on agriculture are likely to be the most catastrophic, as plants require very specific conditions to complete their vital, reproductive, and productive cycles.
Future projections of regional weather patterns cannot be made, but everything points to the fear that agriculture will be greatly affected, not in a linear and predictable manner, but abruptly. In some places and in certain crops, this reality is perceptible and causes alarm among farmers.

The so-called “climate change” is a new problem, caused by the reckless use of fossil fuels stemming from two technological inventions: first the steam engine and then the internal combustion engine, which release the residual gases from combustion into the atmosphere. The first alerts came in the late 1980s, when NASA and later the UN detected an unprecedented increase in the average air and ocean temperatures, and diagnosed the cause.

At that time, major world leaders committed to addressing the problem of “climate change,” with passionate speeches from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, claiming it was the challenge of their generation. Now, more than forty years later, with different faces and voices, we hear the same. Since then, emissions have continued to rise year after year, growing more than ever before in history. In laboratory settings, the ability of carbon gas to accumulate heat has been a known physical property for many decades, so there could be no surprise within the scientific community: releasing large amounts into the atmosphere, the result was predictable. However, there has been no rational behaviour from either the scientific community, the world of economics, or governance. We are decades late in reacting, and the problem grows more difficult to solve every day. For decades, world leaders have not been true leaders in confronting what threatens us the most.

The environmental problem is not just climate change. Several decades earlier, the UN was already aware that desertification and the loss of biodiversity are two serious threats to the living conditions of future generations. However, none of the three scourges have been properly confronted; and beyond political declarations and many contaminating and frustrating international meetings, CO2 emissions remain high, desertification continues to take over entire regions, and every day we allow several plant and animal species, both wild and domestic, to become extinct.

A large-scale scourge, which has become persistent and devastating in recent years like no other, is wildfires in the boreal forests caused by lightning storms with no rain. In 2023, 15 million hectares burned in Canada, and by mid-2024, numerous fire outbreaks are causing fears of even worse. The polar ice reserves—upon which we depend for life in the current scenario of atmospheric warming—are slowly melting, but the boreal forests, if the current rate of destruction continues, could disappear completely within a decade. Their burning, like that of all forests, leads to significant losses, but the greatest loss is the activation of the release of naturally frozen gases, also greenhouse gases, accumulated over millennia in the boreal soil as a result of the fermentation of organic matter.

Doubts about human capacity have their logic, since throughout history there has always been much violence, poverty, and desertification; and if now, despite the immense development of the economy, culture, communication, and science, we are still not able to eradicate these scourges, it may be that our brain is dominated by a negative gene that frustrates the enormous and competent efforts dedicated over hundreds of millennia to satisfy the vital needs felt by our species. Although our total extinction is not easily achievable, large conflicts and massive suffering due to the scarcity of food and water, and the intense heat and cold on a planet with a severely deteriorated biosphere, are foreseeable. It will be populated by societies full of internal and external tensions, many heavily armed, and some with the capacity for mass destruction.

Despite the exponential progress in science, technology, and organizational capacity, nothing suggests a future better than the present, and this fatal perception is felt both individually and on a planetary scale. We perceive that in the past we made many mistakes, as the current state of the biosphere leads us to this inevitable conclusion. However, we neither know why we have erred so much, nor do we know what we can do to get out of this mistake. Neither as individuals nor collectively.

The assaults on natural systems, on which we are absolutely dependent, have been a constant throughout our history as a species distinct from animals. Looking back with perspective, desertification, the loss of arable land and biodiversity, and the various processes of pollution are assaults on natural systems capable of leading to extinction—longer-term than “climate change,” but still leading to extinction. Due to its severity, causes, and consequences, the deterioration of the health of the biosphere cannot be understood and treated as just another situational problem, as a natural catastrophe or a war. There has always been doubt about whether following a certain path or making a decision that involves risks, sacrifices, and pain could be a strategy for achieving future improvements; waging wars has always had this justification. But, the destruction of the climate and the general environment is simply destruction without return, destruction without justification, and destruction without hope. It forces us to absolutely review all the “certainties,” whether cultural, ideological, or political, on which we base our way of life. Especially when, too often, scientific institutions monitoring global warming have to confirm errors in predictions that push away any hopeful news.
The drift towards disaster becomes more evident with every passing day, and anxiety, longing, and helplessness gradually take over the emotions and feelings of everyone who isn’t “impermeabilized” by a childhood or epigenetic trauma. The problem appears almost hopeless when, although slowly, and as long as the big problems are not solved, citizens begin to perceive that the highest levels of political, social, and economic decision-making are intensely populated by people who belong to the impermeabilized group. It is hard to understand anything else, every time a high-ranking official makes a decision motivated by economic gains, personal power, or corporate power, knowing that it will have serious consequences for the health and lives of so many people.

It is not only Zeus who doubts humans, but also ourselves, and the need to eradicate negative behaviours has been expressed throughout history. The educational vocation for moral order is a constant in all cultures. In fact, the first novel in history, The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Sumer about 4,300 years ago, already responds to this purpose and poses the question of what the vocation of governance should be. We feel the need to understand the origins and causes that generate individual and group attitudes and behaviours; all the philosophies, ideologies, and religions that have emerged throughout history have this vocation: to identify, understand, and define the problems in order to point to the correct path. The present times are full of concrete problems and filled with threats that are still poorly defined quantitatively and temporally. And since these are not situational but structural problems, and cannot be justified as efforts to reach a better world, the most widespread perception is that humanity is incapable of managing and solving the problems it generates. A pessimistic and even fatalistic mood is taking shape, especially among young people.

Positive feelings and intelligence are the tools we have to face any difficulty and challenge, and when these fail, the words of the wise Aeschylus, written in Athens 2,500 years ago, come to mind, when he warns:

The god who leads mortals to wisdom, ordains that in pain they become masters of knowledge. Even in sleep, the painful memory of our misfortunes distils upon the heart, and even without intending it, we come to think with reason.

This thought is made of the same material as the Hebrew Bible: only through punishment are we able to learn. The problem is that today’s adults are not receiving “the thinking with reason,” and “the pain” will be borne by our descendants, while we, the ones responsible, entrenched in high levels of consumption, make few efforts to stop the drift. In the mentioned phrase, Aeschylus refers to the individuality of human tragedy, for the Ancient Greeks understood that the disasters we humans cause in the social realm all have solutions when a democratic system is in place.

Whatever happens, because we don’t know what is happening.

This popular, ancient, and wise phrase, which may exist in other languages in different words, attributes our troubles to our own ignorance. The Enlightenment philosopher Emmanuel Kant added a nuance to this: “culpable ignorance.”

By observing social behaviours, we can consider that while some can be objectified and predicted, what determines the most decisive ones are emotional states and complex feelings, which are difficult to define and predict within statistical, economic, or social parameters.
I reproduce a passage by Pere Molas from Chapter 12 of Manual de Historia Moderna, published by Ariel in 1993, which briefly explains a trend that, over the past few decades, has been increasingly imposed on almost all historiography.

The history of collective mentalities constitutes an attractive field for the renewal of historical work in the last fifteen years. Under the name of “history of mentalities,” several realities can be found. It mainly concerns understanding the collective mindset of people from the past, comprehending their way of thinking, feeling, and behaving in life—what some historians have called the “collective unconscious.” It aims to study not only real elements but also imaginary or fantastic factors that men and women of other times knew through oral tradition. It also seeks to reconstruct feelings, attitudes, sensitivity, affectivity, and religiosity. The history of mentalities is a consequence of the incorporation of topics and methods from anthropology into historical science.

The author states that the “history of mentalities,” also known as the “collective unconsciousness” and some other names, is a recent addition to the intellectual discipline of historians. However, it is quite evident that, throughout history, this perspective has been the one that most occupies rulers. The accumulated experience of the political class leads them to understand that the mental, emotional, or sentimental state of the public concerning a particular issue, even one that might be seen as trivial, can be more decisive than any other truly relevant element.

Despite the magnitude of the threat, except among those who make it a militant cause, “climate change” is not much of a topic of public conversation. And when a striking news story forces the mention of it, only a few short, clichéd sentences are dedicated to it before switching topics. It is hard to say whether this is because it’s too overwhelming or not perceived enough. It’s a challenge to understand the “collective mentality” of today that allows such a serious and general catastrophe threat to receive so little attention from the public. Do we think about it but not talk about it? Or are we simply not concerned? There will be a variety of answers; surveys say it concerns everyone, but it is talked about little, and even less are we involved.

We intuit, we know, that any reflection on climate change leads to a reflection on ourselves, on our behaviour and our responsibilities: we know that we abuse practices we should restrict, we know that we bow to the power of the moment and silently accept many of its abuses, we know that we have not been aware of some obvious threat until it was too late, we know we have made mistakes, we know that… The reflection, or the conversation if shared, ends with a few moral and ethical conclusions of little lasting impact; and the conversation shifts.

We say that in the great matters, we are driven by principles; much reflection exists on this matter, and morality and ethics hold a central place. This Chronicle adopts a perspective that, without belittling them, explains the progress of societies—and of individuals—by observing the greater or lesser satisfaction of certain needs that we share with animals and that, by evolutionary order, condition us more than morality and ethics. These two can prosper only when primary genetic needs are properly and thoughtfully satisfied. The same as the earth is to the plant.

Understanding that, as the animal species we are, our ability to live well and in peace is innate, and that only the subculture dominated by supremacism and corruption distances us from it, this text proposes a few reflections that make this statement of principles not absolutely accepted, but at least understandable, adopting criteria for interpreting history based on that part of human ethology we share with animals.

This Chronicle of a Million Years is a brief walk through history, from when we were skilled apes until today, highlighting both the progress and the most relevant difficulties in our evolutionary progress, ultimately exposing the shortcomings that weigh on our attitudes and behaviours, leading us to extreme situations like the current one.

Another interest is to propose a few reflections on realities that are widely known but have been little considered, despite being very relevant, in my opinion due to a cultural supremacism—the ethnocentrism generated by power—but above all due to the ideological purpose of hiding, or at least ignoring, those societies and cultures that experienced significant positive processes, founded on values entirely different, and even opposed, to those now dominant and characteristic of us.

It seeks to identify the elements, factors, and junctures throughout history that, without an educational project, led to the emergence of solutions, recipes, and systems that proved valid for overcoming shortcomings or problems and progressing; and, in parallel, to identify the obstacles, burdens, and misunderstandings that act against them.

It also delves into the idea that poor governance is the inevitable result of the accumulation of emotional, sentimental, and thought deficits, rooted in individuals and societies, expressed in supremacism and corruption, the two sides of the same coin, where the real goal is corruption, and supremacism is merely the tool for agitation to achieve it.

A non-fatalist investigation leads to detecting that along the long path of history, despite many destructive episodes and behaviours, there have been societies that, by adopting new strategies, have reduced, redirected, or neutralized them, and were able to live enviable periods of creative fullness. Some of these cultural and social strategies were gradually integrated with different intensities and forms into other societies, like ours, and constitute a valuable cultural heritage.

A common characteristic of those successful societies—the wise societies from Chapter XII—all ancient, is that they did not have sacred books or educational projects. The purpose of these pages is to identify, understand, and describe those civilizing processes, referencing them in space and time, and to detect the characteristics of current societies that are their heirs.

If this historical perspective has any meaning, the wise verse by Antonio Machado:

. . . . . . traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking. . .

seems as the most realistic formula.

If the reader looks at the last page of this text, they will see that it aims to be a critical, not poetic, expansion of the phrase that Sophocles places in the chorus’s mouth in the tragedy Antigone, a praise of humanity, ending with a strong warning: when we tolerate corruption, we may lose everything that, with great effort, time, and the help of the gods, we have achieved.

The violent gene

To understand our behaviours, both individual and group, it is helpful to understand the nature of our close evolutionary ancestors; observing a herd of any herbivorous mammal, wild or domesticated, such as apes, buffaloes, horses, goats, etc., can be insightful.

The media often offer images of wild animals and their behaviours, recorded with great skill and effort by filmmakers. Unfortunately, it is common that the commentary accompanying the reports attributes perceptions, emotions, and feelings to animals that are only characteristic of humans, thus distorting their nature and missing the opportunity to explain ethology and ecology, which could have a powerful motivational effect.

It is more useful for us to understand our animal nature than to anthropomorphize animals, which only serves to infantilize the viewer. Another “error” is attributing to mammals the will to have offspring, when in reality, they do not seek to have children and mate merely to satisfy their sexual desire. We, the intelligent humans, still do not know at which point in our long evolution we discovered the cause-effect sequence. It is in the unconscious evolutionary system where the wisdom of the species resides, not in the will of the individuals.

Except for a few species of animals in which individuals live alone, most are social and form more or less large communities depending on the species, where a sense of harmony prevails. The image of a peaceful group is sometimes disrupted by confrontations between males vying to be the preferred sexual partner of the females, and in some species—such as docile sheep, for example—challenges can end with the death of one of the contenders.

This violent behaviour is the system that evolution has adopted to improve the species and reduce inbreeding: physical fighting ensures that the healthiest and strongest male in the herd is the one who passes on his genes to all the females, including his mothers, sisters, and daughters.

In all these species, it is observed that the males who have not won the battle to become the alpha—i.e., all the rest—do not show hostility toward the females, even though almost all the females show a sexual preference for the winning male. In other words, the sexual dissatisfaction of the males is not taken out on the females. However, in humans, patriarchy leads to aggressive behaviour from sexually dissatisfied men toward women. In matriarchal societies, this male behaviour is non-existent.

In animals, apart from these episodes, which only occur during the females’ fertility periods, there is no violence, although there may be violent play among young males, but it is always friendly and pre-arranged between two individuals of the same age and weight, in clashes similar to regulated boxing matches.

In most of these species, females lead the group, and there are no fights between them for leadership, nor does it carry any privileges. The role of the males, aside from being sperm dispensers, is quite irrelevant within the herd, even though they are often attributed the role of group leaders, an opinion influenced by the prevailing sexism that affects few species.

The explanation is simple: the dominant male has a short-lived role, perhaps one, two, or three years, depending on the species and circumstances, as there is always another younger male challenging his position. In contrast, females accumulate experience throughout their lives, are much better prepared to lead the herd, and the genetics have adapted accordingly.

It is impossible to ignore a greater propensity for violence in male individuals compared to females, a specific characteristic that is part of the evolutionary strategy. However, in modern humans, that violent gene no longer has any vital function, as about 50,000 years ago we overcame the strategy of the strongest male, adopting more or less free sexual pairings between men and women, with relationships as distantly related as possible.

Certainly, aside from this inevitable violent gene inherent in males, violence can take hold of individuals and groups, including females.

It can be observed that in the open field, both wild and domesticated herbivores, the scarcity of grass never leads to a fight to pasture it: we can see herds of different species grazing together without problem, and when grass is scarce, they move to another location. Surprisingly, they violently fight for food provided by the farmer.

It can also be observed in all these species that, when confined to small spaces or lacking sufficient food, they may enter into conflict and generate violence. When this violence is triggered, if animals from different herds are present, the first to be attacked are those from different family origins than the majority, even if they have peacefully coexisted for years. There is, therefore, a latent “ethnic” discrimination that is activated in times of scarcity and can trigger violence within the group.

In the face of carnivore attacks, the usual response of herbivores is to flee, but in some species—like African buffaloes and wildebeests—the violent gene can also be activated for self-defence.

Another observation is that those species of primates that use stones to crack open the shells of nuts do not use them when males fight among themselves.

It’s also worth noting that when a carnivore cub feels cornered, it tries to defend itself aggressively, which is not the case for an herbivore cub, which seeks safety by fleeing. Human infants behave more like herbivore cubs than carnivores, but as adults, we become quite warrior-like.

We come from a sequence of species that were initially completely herbivorous, later began eating insects and small animals, and eventually, thanks to fire, larger animals. If we had evolved from a carnivorous species, the potency of the violent gene inherent in these species would have likely led to our extinction long ago.

However, despite our biological origin as a vegetarian primate species, our behaviour throughout history has been more characteristic of carnivores, marked by fierce competition to lead the group and by intense struggles between different groups for territory and resources.

It was after the domestication of fire that humans began to act like carnivores, chasing, cornering, and sacrificing the adversary—in this case, the animal to be slaughtered.

The behaviour that involves the use of violence for the purpose of eating large amounts of meat represented a cultural shift, enabled by a technological improvement—the domestication of fire. It was not a genetic change, and therefore, in principle, should not be hereditary. However, experience shows that the violent gene inherent in carnivores has been activated in us, whether it’s due to our consumption of meat in abundance or not—it’s unclear. The necessary figure of the alpha male from the evolutionary strategy, combined with the activity of hunting, added the exaltation of the great hunter, creating a potent mix.

We cannot claim that before the domestication of fire, our ancestors, even if they did not feel threatened, always behaved in an entirely peaceful manner. We know that chimpanzees are capable of organizing expeditions outside their territory to go and kill a former rival of the current alpha male, exiled by him and now living in another group; however, chimpanzees are already omnivores.

In humans, we know that in a violent environment—a war—extreme negative feelings and behaviours can arise, such as fear, cruelty, revenge, cowardice, hatred, and supremacism; but also solidarity, courage to the point of heroism, compassion, and empathy.

This sequence of explanations and reasoning leads to the conclusion that the great objective of culture and society, and therefore governance, must be to minimize the reasons and opportunities in which the exercise of violence can generate personal satisfaction and social recognition. When this happens, the violent gene becomes a “dominant culture” capable of rooting itself in society; and this is when violence is justified, praised, and can become entrenched as a myth.

Thus, what the title of this section calls the “violent gene” is not actually such, because it is not hereditary, but culturally transmissible. It is not of a biochemical nature, but moral.

Another perspective, from the prominent Viennese psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich, a disciple of Sigmund Freud, based on medical hospital studies—both were, one after the other, directors of the Psychiatric Hospital in Vienna—wrote that the effects of poor learning in affectivity in infants and sexuality in children and adolescents are at the base of most antisocial attitudes and behaviours, such as the tendency to pathological selfishness, resorting to violence, drug addiction, and unchecked sexism.

Horrified, he predicted the rise of Nazism and the social adherence it would gain. One of his texts is applicable to our time:

The lack of pleasure is the ground upon which the individual projects ideologies that deny life, which are the basis of dictatorships. The fear of a free and independent life becomes a powerful source from which individuals or groups extract energy, in order to carry out all kinds of reactionary political activity.

Mars, the Roman god of war, copied from the ancient Greeks, who called him Ares, has been highly regarded for centuries. The Greeks, however, unlike the Romans, saw him as a pernicious god and did not worship or revere him; a malevolent force that only brings suffering, evil, destruction, and death. In this, we have been heirs of the Roman Empire for centuries, and European empires achieved their dominance by mobilizing armies led by the myth of Mars.

Now, among the majority of citizens, this god has lost followers, but still maintains dominance in many places of decision-making.

One form of extreme violence has been present throughout the long period from the development of agriculture until just over a century ago: slavery, the reduction of people to a servile condition with no rights whatsoever. It is assumed that it was in the first urban societies that slavery appeared with two different origins; one came from soldiers defeated in battle; the victors could execute them or make them slaves; the other came from unpaid debts that were redeemed with the total submission of the debtor to the creditor. The Roman Empire expanded the sources and invaded, enslaving the defeated, and centuries later, European empires did the same in America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

From the vast array of behaviours, one species emerges: the bonobo chimpanzee, which has been able to evolve by adopting individual and social behaviours, all of a sexual nature, aimed at eradicating violence within the group. It may have been these creatures that were the future recipients of fire as a gift from Zeus, which Prometheus, imprudently, gave to Homo erectus. It was known that Zeus often travelled to the interior of Africa, though it is not known the reason why.

The four genetic needs

In light of history, psychiatry, and ethology, we can understand that the capacity for empathy, solidarity, and other moral qualities, as well as the attitudes and behaviours that are contrary to them, do not depend on our evolutionary heritage encoded in the genetic code, but rather on the quality of the emotions, feelings, and thoughts that we have been able to develop in a specific environment and era. And this capacity, or incapacity, is not inherited by descendants; rather, for it to manifest, the general conditions that fostered it must be reproduced.

However, our primary emotions, such as joy, curiosity, fear, jealousy, or anger, are the same as those experienced by higher animals and are indeed genetic.
The basic needs are also genetic: recognition, well-being, security, and freedom.
Understanding and accepting that these four needs, which are fully human and also fully animal, are genetic and therefore inevitable, would save many problems. Unfortunately, however, neither political projects, nor educational ones, nor political science take them into account as interdependent and essential references for good governance.

Because they are of genetic origin, the greater or lesser level of satisfaction of any of the four needs affects the physical and psychological health of individuals and societies. The negative effects can last over time, depending on the duration of the restriction, its intensity, and also the previous physical and psychological state of the person or collective that has experienced it; all restrictions on genetic needs leave lasting effects, which can only be healed by their sustained satisfaction over time.
It is clear that we can experience polarizations in each of the four needs, whether as a basic characteristic or as a temporary condition: some people are very vulnerable to the emotion of fear, others feel their personal satisfaction conditioned by a high level of material well-being, and some demand a high level of recognition from others.

Progress, both individual and collective, consists of ensuring that the four genetic needs — recognition, well-being, security, and freedom — are met at a balanced level.
This perspective can lead us to imagine a happy world, provided these needs are well met; when an individual, group, society, or country experiences a period of balanced fulfilment of these needs, their abilities are expressed in full, and not happiness emerges, but the joy of living and creative talent. In reference to groups, several “historical moments” demonstrate this; and in reference to individuals, everyone can experience it throughout their life.

A historical reality that can be observed is that when a society with restricted freedoms and recognition elements sees a decline in well-being and security, the response is tumultuous revolt and violent anarchy.

By evolutionary order, which is a hierarchical condition, only with the balanced and weighted satisfaction of the four needs can the feelings and thoughts that drive individuals and societies forward in all their challenges and abilities be fully developed.
An illustrative example is that of good soil, which is essential for having healthy plants: all the efforts spent caring for a plant may be largely in vain if the quality of the soil supporting it has deficiencies or imbalances. The reflection on the four needs continues with the observation that in humans, they evolve and acquire complexity.

Recognition

Even in other species, but in all mammals, recognition is the first need felt right after birth, when the mother, and in some species of birds and amphibians, also the father, show affection and begin to protect and feed the young.

As mammals, this first relationship consists of a marked sensory dependence that imprints and roots itself in each person’s life, defining some or many of the basic traits of their character.

Recognition can be defined as the need to be acknowledged, respected, and loved. Since it is always sensorially associated with the first affection, the first nourishment, and the first sensation of well-being and security, its rooting and importance are absolute. It shapes the quality of our lives and is essential for both material and moral well-being.

It is in the need for recognition where humans have added the most complexity, ranging from the sense of justice and equity to the respect for identities of different kinds, intimacy, within the family, the immediate social group, and the broader social collective.

It could be said that it is the “constructive factor” of individual personality, as well as the engine of socialization and social changes; when we refer to discontentment, either individual or social, or lack of freedom, it is recognition that feels attacked or diminished. In fact, our lives are markedly conditioned by the greater or lesser satisfaction of this need; almost all personality problems and emotional deficiencies and incapacities are related to it.

Having been thoroughly addressed and considered very relevant for several decades, everything related to recognition has gained prominence, both in the concerns and aspirations of citizens and in the media. Books, individual and group self-recognition techniques, political speeches, and legislative changes aim to increase the elements of recognition in order to achieve psychological and moral well-being, both individually and socially.

In recent years, a new activity has been introduced into the daily life of many people: attending social networks, with many variations ranging from trivial entertainment to almost addiction; and this whole world revolves around recognition.

A society with many associations and groups with various activities—cultural, sports, gastronomic, artistic, philosophical, etc.—is a collective with many elements of recognition, and tyrannies know that a society with many elements of recognition evolves toward a greater demand for freedom; that is why the freedoms of assembly and association are restricted in many countries. Authoritarian powers perceive a society with a wide range of recognition as a threat.

It must be observed that, although it is not necessarily a cause-and-effect sequence, recognition is a major factor in the acquisition of responsibility, and this leads to organizational capacity.

Many species of insects have a high organizational capacity, but strictly limited to certain functions; and there are mammals—few species—that also have it, but only for hunting and guarding against predators. Humans are capable of acquiring and applying it at their convenience, but, strangely, now that we need it the most, it is hardly seen anywhere.

Well-being

Understood as material security: food, drink, and protection from cold, heat, and pain are needs to be met. Animals are frugal; they don’t “consume” more well-being than what they need for survival. In this sense, humans are uncontrolled and heading toward destruction, both in how and why we consume, and in what we waste.

Security

It is the emotional state of living without fear; animals are very rational beings but are less intelligent and imaginative compared to humans. However, in us, these two latter traits reduce the former, and we seek security, even to the point of falling into illogical insecurity. As the wise saying goes, fear hurts more than harm itself, and it’s not just a play on words.

Animals can be afraid only of what they perceive in the immediate moment and, in any case, they file away that situation in their memory and stay alert if it repeats. However, if there is no threat in sight, hearing, or smell, they live in security. In humans, the ability to foresee, combined with abundant imagination, makes us vulnerable, and fear causes us to lose rationality. In this regard, tortured humans, in addition to rational insecurity, have added many others that are less rational, such as the fear of death. For many centuries, the fear of going to hell was the primary concern of the citizenry.

Freedom

There is a vast amount of literature and speeches dedicated to the idea of freedom; we consider it a human value, but it is certain that the sensations and emotions experienced by animals who, after being confined, regain their freedom are the same and as intense as those we might experience. The difference is that we can express it in words and writings, while they cannot.

The need for freedom is manifested in animals through the freedom of movement and the ability to make sounds, activities essential for satisfying recognition, well-being, and security. In humans, it also manifests in the need to express emotions, feelings, and ideas, and to associate with others.

Surprisingly, we are capable of greatly relativizing the need for freedom, even though, from a biological standpoint, it is the most relevant, as it makes it possible to satisfy the other three needs. For an animal, what is vital is the freedom to interact with its peers, to find food, to mate, to protect itself from adverse weather, and to defend itself or flee.

Humans, although sometimes not fully aware of it, also have this biological need due to their genetic inheritance and hierarchical nature. Any restriction—whether imposed or self-imposed—damages our emotional, sentimental, and cognitive system in ways that may be more or less conscious and intense, but are inevitable.

The common expression “vocation for freedom” is misleading, as a vocation presupposes the ability to choose: painter, mechanic, politician, pastor, salesman, etc., and is therefore an option, whereas freedom is a vital need, equivalent to the need for food or protection. One could say that freedom is a primary need, which philosophy has turned into a right, and it is surprising, in contrast, the little attention and importance given to the exercise of freedom dedicated to protecting the collective, whether it be the group or society. It is reserved for the figure of the hero, almost exclusively in ancient passages and children’s stories, except when exceptional behaviours that make the news arise. In my view, in the current state of affairs, the future depends on the greater or lesser satisfaction of the freedom of expression.

Both for individuals and societies, when freedom is not severely or violently restricted, but we consider it a transactional element and renounce it in exchange for well-being or security, we lose psychological health and the ability to react to adverse situations.

It is relevant that, of the four needs, two—well-being and security—can be relativized, while both freedom and recognition must always be fully satisfied. When this is not the case, the individual or society lives in a low mental state that affects the quality of emotions, feelings, thoughts, and even physical health.

This is the vulnerable point of the human adventure, both individual and collective, because the exercise of freedom is an irreducible genetic need. Inhibiting attitude, action, or speech due to a calculation of the amount of well-being or security we might lose—unless the punishment is unbearable—makes us ill. We cannot bear, without psychological harm, having renounced the freedom of speech or action when we felt our emotions and feelings required us to exercise it.

Today, the idea of freedom in countries with a consolidated democracy is part of recognition, as it is freely granted to us by the political system. However, it is not felt as the fundamental element of our self-perception, and due to cultural bias and political distortion, it is presented as an ideological option, when it is in fact a metabolic necessity.

Exercising freedom for the collective good is an honourable, even heroic, act, and it is in this function that freedom acquires its greatest value. In this Chronicle, when freedom is mentioned, it is always in this sense: the individual exercise of freedom for the collective good.

Of all the different feelings of freedom that humans have developed, the freedom of thought is the most complex. At first, since it can be exercised without asking anyone’s permission, one might assume that everyone can always be a free thinker. However, observing attitudes and behaviours leads us to understand that not everyone enjoys it, and not always.

Immanuel Kant, one of the most notable theorists of the vigorous 18th-century cultural movement known as the Enlightenment, wrote:

Enlightenment is the release of man from his self-imposed incapacity. The incapacity is the inability to use one’s own intelligence without the guidance of another. This incapacity is culpable, because its cause is not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of courage and decision to use it for oneself, without the tutelage of another. ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding’ is the motto of enlightenment.

This declaration of principles represents the recovery of ancient forms of feelings and thoughts from Classical Greece: Socrates, Diogenes, and all the others from that glorious time in history used their own reason. We must agree that using one’s own reason that is free thought represents the highest stage of human consciousness and forms the most conducive environment for the development of all our capacities.

This extraordinary virtue might only be fully possessed by children for a few years: the incessant asking of why? About everything seems to indicate this.

In adults, free thought is never given in an absolute form, as it is the result of individual exercise—difficult to communicate and persistently continued reflection, testing the application of common sense and empathy, in parallel with the moral effort to purify feelings of separateness and the exaggerated needs for recognition, material well-being, and security. At best, it is the work of a lifetime—and even then, not always. It seems that the Greek Socrates was capable of teaching the way, but figures like him are not found on every corner.

Distortions

Once the four genetic needs have been identified, the process of civilization consists of adapting each of them to the changes brought about by four categories of different conditioning factors: demographics, the state of the natural environment, the state of the social environment, and the state of technology.

We get to the heart of the issue when we identify the elements that can interfere with and hinder progress in satisfying the four needs, potentially leading to conflict. We can find two factors with the capacity to disrupt harmony and even destroy the civilizing process: one is violence and the other is deception. I dedicate a few sentences to illustrate them.

Farmers and other animal domesticators apply these two strategies, combining them as needed, to guide, confine, herd, and when necessary, sacrifice the animals. The same occurs in human governance; history is full of it. In fact, it is a continuous process.

In humans, violence and deception can arise within a collective or from external invasion. Violence can be expressed in different forms and intensities and inevitably causes pain and rejection in those who suffer from it. Deception can manifest in various ways, such as simulation or lying, but especially in collective self-deception, which occurs when a person or group implements seduction strategies towards a utopia based on supremacist feelings. These can be so strong that they twist both individual and public opinions, ultimately inhibiting the needs for freedom and recognition.

It should be emphasized that all moralizing texts throughout history, both heterodox and orthodox, consider supremacism as the only true sin, giving it other names such as separatism, labelling it as the greatest obstacle to moral progress, both for individuals, groups, and all of humanity. It is the source that feeds the superiority complex and expresses itself in individual, familial, organized group, racial, tribal, or national supremacism, and all of them always have disastrous effects, first for those who suffer from them and then for those who practice them.

I prefer the word separatism over supremacism, which is too associated with wars. Separatism is a moral evil, a sin of uncertain origin—it could be a pathological excess of the need for recognition, or as a friend of mine puts it: it consists of attributing a moral deficit to the adversary, and it can engulf both individuals and groups, nations, and entire civilizations. It cannot be denied that, to a greater or lesser extent, it affects everyone and can grow in the face of any restriction or conflict, always driven by a well-orchestrated deception. The sin lies in giving in to it, and this is a drift that can affect both cultured and uncultured people, rich and poor, from any ethnicity or geography.

In this realm of distortion, which is deception, another aspect to observe is the fascination with the alpha male, inherited from our animal past, which can degenerate into submission, whether to the political leader, the warrior, or the media influencer.

II
The Gift of Prometheus

The First Fire

Archaeological research dates the first signs of fire manipulation, all in Africa, to more than a million years ago, by a pre-human primate species called Homo erectus, which populated the planet for over a million and a half years.

Individuals of this species weighed around 50 kilograms, stood about 1.6 meters tall, and their cranial cavity in the earliest ones, dated to 1.8 million years ago, was 850 cubic centimetres, while in the later ones, dated to around 300,000 years ago, it was 1,000 cubic centimetres.

The erectus were able to learn to manipulate fire because they already had highly developed dexterity in their fingers and hands, inherited from their ancestors, the Homo habilis, who were the first in our evolutionary line capable of modifying stones to make them sharper.

The increasing dexterity of the fingers and hands seems to be the most determining factor in the evolution of the early Homo species, which occurred thanks to the ability to walk upright.

In China, fire remains have been found from about 500,000 years ago; in Europe, from 125,000 years ago, in settlements of Homo sapiens from the Neanderthal period.

The difficulties in knowing the beginning and progress of fire manipulation are enormous due to the time distance and the impossibility of knowing whether the first signs were merely bold experiments: a game with burning wood from a natural fire. In any case, those distant relatives had lost, unlike all other animal species, the fear of approaching it and dared to handle it.

Paleontological and archaeological research continues to gather clues and evidence on the evolution of fire domestication, and very possibly, in the future, we will be able to know more certainly both the paths and the timeline of its spread across the planet.

There are indications that it was during the period of Homo sapiens sapiens—us—around 45,000 years ago, that our ancestors learned to ignite it artificially. If this is the case, and since they were necessarily itinerant, the task of keeping it alive for hundreds of millennia, especially during long journeys, appears to be enormous.

The advantages of fire domestication during this long period of prehistory are obvious: driving away wild beasts, cooking food, having light during the night and in caves, and warming up. It can be said that the arrival of this invention to any human group changed their lives and caused a true revolution, the greatest ever experienced by the Homo lineage, placing them suddenly and with great advantages at the top of all species. It seems, then, that initially, Prometheus got it right.

One very important improvement in the lives of our ancestors was that, thanks to their ability to handle fire, they were able to begin living without the constant fear of attack by large carnivores, being able to sleep peacefully, something that wild animals can never do; and sleeping well improves both physical and mental health. Another important improvement was a significant increase in the dexterity of their hands and fingers; the need to handle fire—since mistakes are very painful—was accompanied by the activation of new neural networks and an increase in physiological organic capacity, in a learning exercise that required high concentration, a mental quality that until then pre-humans had developed very little. Predators, genetically, do have great concentration abilities, as they need them to select their victims and catch them, but in herbivores, this ability is much weaker and lasts for only a short period of time.

In addition to the aforementioned advantages, cooking meat was the most immediate and decisive, as making it more digestible allowed them to eat much more than they could when it was raw; furthermore, its smells and flavours were, apart from being new, utterly seductive. Our ancestors then began to behave like great carnivores, seeing herds of herbivores as their main target.

We cannot know how the knowledge of fire control was passed from one human group to another, due to our ignorance of how they interacted. However, the long period between the first signs of fire and its mastery by all the groups on the planet suggests all sorts of ways the technique could have spread.

These ancestors of ours, hunting, gathering herbs, fruits, and tubers to accompany the meat, using animal skins and fire for protection, warmth, and illumination during the night and in the caves, had a fairly easy life; in any case, by far, the easiest life among all animals. They were physically very strong, and since their greatest concern, like all other species, had been the constant threat of large carnivores, with the mastery of fire, they could feel like the masters of the world.

On foot through the wide world

A surprising and admirable behaviour of our early ancestors was their traveller vocation, as they spread across the entire planet. The vast majority of animal species solve the increase in their population by forming new family units at the periphery of the original group; however, not all of our ancestors proceeded in this way, as long before populating all of Africa, some groups migrated to Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and much later, 40,000 years ago, to America. This enormous expansion cannot be attributed to the need for living space, as Africa is very large and they were few.

The truth is that this early vocation for discovery and travel is unique to humanity.

Throughout this long period of extensive dispersal, they always travelled on foot, obviously without roads, forging their way through territories that were always difficult to traverse and full of wild animals, equipped only with sticks and bones, more or less tanned hides, modified stones, and fire, in an enormous individual and collective effort. They travelled on foot, carrying all their equipment in their hands and on their backs, as they were unaware of the possibility of using pack animals; an oddity that deserves a few observations. Humans did not learn to domesticate animals until much, much later in time, only about 11,000 years ago, around the same time we discovered agriculture.

For anyone familiar with animal behaviour, especially herbivores, whether a farmer, ethologist, or simply an animal lover, it is a mystery why domestication came so late, as we know that with little effort and a few simple, common-sense strategies, humans can befriend almost any herbivore, and even carnivores, be accepted into the herd, and be loved.

In recent years, we have seen documentaries of people calmly petting wild species known for their aggressive behaviour, such as African buffaloes, rhinos and hippos; also bears, lions, tigers and hyenas.

From the current perspective, certainly limited by our lack of knowledge about many of our ancestors’ realities, it is strange that such a valuable resource as domesticated animals was ignored for hundreds of thousands of years.

Anyone with experience dealing with animals knows that humans fascinate them, and they want us to touch them. If they don’t know us, they might not approach us, but it’s due to fear and natural shyness, not hostility. With empathy and gentle movements, we can make friends with them. It is important to give them time to smell us and let them make the first contact. They appreciate gentle caresses and kind words, and they see us as friends and protectors.

There could be many reasons why humans didn’t take advantage of the friendly behaviour of animals, although all are hard to understand. Perhaps, because the minds of those early ancestors hadn’t yet developed the necessary qualities to establish trusting relationships? It’s also possible that they were incapable of “pretending” to behave friendly toward an animal they wanted to kill.

However, this last observation doesn’t apply to Homo sapiens sapiens, as “we” are indeed capable of pretending; still, we continued ignoring domestication for many thousands of years.

It might also be because, from the very moment we had fire, our obsession with eating large amounts of meat led us to act violently, attacking them, killing some, and chasing the rest of the herd away. And we felt good in that role.

When an activity that expresses the violent gene is recognized by the group, it strengthens, becomes entrenched, and prevents seeing other alternatives. This explanation would indicate a significant lack in the development of intelligent feelings, but it seems probable.

For hundreds of thousands of years, every human group had the opportunity to “befriend” some herbivores; however, even if some of them did so, it didn’t spread, because those early ancestors, in their long journeys first through Africa and then across the planet, would have brought along some animals with them. And far from their origin, these races would have experienced morphological changes, but there is no evidence of their existence.

Archaeology is based on discoveries from which to draw interpretations, and since what I’m talking about here is merely speculative, it has little value. I’m referring to a very valuable and practically essential object for travel: a water container. Those very distant ancestors who emerged from Africa had one on hand: the calabash, not the one we eat, which is native to the Americas, but the African one capable of holding liquid. Since it’s organic in nature, no remains can be found, however, they had it on hand and surely ate its seeds. As a very young child, I remember that when I accompanied my grandfather in the vineyard, he always carried a calabash full of wine.

The First Desertification

Although there are natural deserts on the planet, such as the Namib in Western Africa, the Gobi in northeaster Asia, and others of smaller size, the vast majority of arid and desert regions are the result of overgrazing caused by humans. The Sahara is the most significant, both in terms of size and because it was the first large region to host a huge population of hunter-gatherers for millennia, which ultimately led to a true disaster, irreversible due to its enormous scale. The topography of its landscape shows a vast network of rivers and lakes — now all dried up, except for Lake Chad — where a dispersed population once lived, mostly sustained by cattle.

In many places in the Great Desert, where there seems to be no evidence of human presence, sifting through the sand reveals arrowheads, knives, and other flint tools made by humans from different periods before the advent of animal domestication and agriculture. In some areas of its vast geography, paintings can be found on stones, depicting herds of cattle. Extensive semi-arid and arid regions of the Middle East are also the result of the rise of hunter-gatherer societies, as are the great Asian steppes.

The pursuit of increasing the number and size of herds of herbivores led to the reduction of both carnivorous predators and forested areas, in favour of grasslands. However, when a deforested area, already heavily pressured by grazing, experiences a drought, even a short one, it renders the plant cover vulnerable, which can ultimately disappear. Continuous grazing eliminates annual species, as most do not reach maturity to produce seeds. Thus, the emergence of agriculture can be seen as the major change that prevented the complete desertification of the temperate plains of the planet.

Across the world, there are semi-arid regions, arid regions, and desert regions, resulting from the progressive loss of plant cover: first trees, then shrubs, and eventually grasses, leading to the disappearance of microflora and microfauna. When the loss of soil fertility can be attributed to human activity, the 1992 FAO-organized Lomé Convention coined a new term: desertification, which refers to the appearance of desert conditions caused by poor management attributable to humans.

The construction of collective imaginaries during this long period, from the domestication of fire to the beginning of pastoralism and agriculture, was driven by emotions and feelings that primarily affected the males of the group, as animal hunting was the area of empowerment for men. In recent societies, this model still holds, and back then, the epic of the brave, strong, and ingenious hunter became the dominant narrative of the group and society. It became entrenched. It is likely that women participated in hunting, but due to time constraints and lack of physical strength, men had to be the primary figures.

It’s possible that an instinctive reflex affecting almost everyone — the fascination with the alpha male — began to form and strengthen during this ancient era. The truth is, this fascination has reached us as a source of disorientation in governance, leading to leadership that often borders on caricature. The fascination with the alpha is normal in the world of sports and aesthetics, where image and physical form are paramount, but it becomes deadly when it contaminates political power.

III
The Stone Age

Flint

Several species of current apes skilfully crack open hard fruits by striking them with stones. Looking back in history, before learning to control fire, our distant ancestors, the Homo habilis, were already modifying stones to create cutting tools.

From the use of stone as a tool, nearly everything we know about our most distant ancestors consists of stones that they modified themselves, used for striking and cutting. The efficiency of these tools improved over time. In the state of the technique of stone working, a linear progression is observed over more than a million years.

Of the different types of rock, they learned that the most suitable for cutting tools was flint, one of the hardest minerals, although quite fragile when shaped into thin layers.

Flint is not very abundant on the surface, though it is quite dispersed across many geographies. It is found in its pure form, mainly as small pebbles, formed over thousands of years in a geological environment with high pressure and moderate humidity and temperature. Its molecular composition is SiO2: one atom of Silicon and two atoms of Oxygen, the same as quartz, but amorphous, without crystallizing.

Another mineral used was obsidian, which has volcanic origins. Due to its ease of fragmentation and especially its high hardness, it is also well-suited for use as a cutting tool. The Maya culture in Central America made it their most characteristic ritual object.

The Homo erectus modified pieces of flint to make them more efficient, but it wasn’t until the Homo sapiens sapiens that they acquired the skill to strike them while hot, creating sophisticated knives, scrapers, arrowheads, awls, and other tools. The first objects made with this advanced technique are from about 60,000 years ago.

Archaeology determines the evolution of flint knapping techniques by measuring a relationship that demonstrates the greater or lesser efficiency of the flint knapper: how many linear centimetres of cutting edge have been obtained from a given volume of flint. The further back in time, the more efficient the use of the mineral, meaning more tools and more effective tools.

The ability to strike flint while hot represents a significant advancement in the state of the art, going beyond mere manual dexterity, as it involves the prior thermal treatment of the stone and entails a cause-and-effect relationship that requires observation and intuition.

This technique aims to exfoliate the stone along lines of least internal resistance, resulting from the physical and chemical process during the formation of the mineral. The skill of the flint knapper lies in detecting these lines and applying pressure to fracture them, obtaining various shapes.

With designs of great beauty and intricacy, typical of skilled craftsmen with aesthetic styles that archaeologists and anthropologists have learned to catalogue, these flint tools are almost the only evidence from the long period known as the Stone Age, and are precious objects valued by collectors and museums.

Since those distant times, the interpretation of the points and directions of these natural exfoliation lines of the stone has been essential knowledge for the daily work of all stonemasons, whether working with marble, granite, precious stones, or any other material. When mechanical cutting systems appeared in the 20th century, this knowledge became less demanding, but it continues to be indispensable.

Megalithic Cultures

There is a period in history, more recent, that is manifested in different places on the planet, where human groups, we do not know if with or without communication between them, began the construction of large stone monuments: like the slabs of the Bekaa Valley in present-day Lebanon, with regular and well-cut prismatic blocks of 4.5 meters thick, 20 meters long, and weighing 1,000 tons, dated between 4,000 and 5,000 years BC; also the monoliths of Stonehenge and other places in Great Britain, the Menorca Tables, the constructions in Malta and Turkey; later, the millions of medium-sized blocks of the pyramids and the fabulous monoliths of Egypt; and much later, the Mayan pyramids and the immense stones with irregular and precise measurements in Cusco from the Inca society.

We know that the pyramids were part of the political-religious, psychological, social, and economic system of the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Mayan governments, and although we do not know the motivations behind the megalithic constructions—except for the ones in Cusco, which were for protection—they can be seen as evidence of a desire to transcend the present.

We still do not know for certain how they extracted the blocks from the mother rock, how they cut them, or how they transported those immense stones, sometimes from hundreds of kilometres away.

As for the state of the technique in this global construction phenomenon, the primary and indispensable tool for working was the hard stone cobble, used as a hammer, both for extracting blocks from the mother rock and for roughing them and giving them the desired shape. These were cobbles of the mineral diorite, a very compact, hard, and heavy rock, which stonemasons skilfully handled, continuously interpreting the lines of least resistance and using them efficiently, both for fracturing and for finishing.

It is worth mentioning that these gigantic constructions temporally coincide with the advent of the first agriculture and livestock, which allowed for sedentary lifestyles and the formation of villages with a certain number of inhabitants. Some of these monuments are from a time before the first agriculture, a condition that makes them even more mysterious.

The construction of these giant monuments must have brought together countless wills over a long period of time, and evidences the existence of a society with a great vocation and organizational capacity, which led the individual to increase both the sense of belonging and subordination to the collective.

It is in these periods and activities that the gregarious nature of humans is formed and developed, as well as the tendency to form large collectives, where the individual seeks security and recognition. And it is when dominant powers emerge.

The rapid growth of cities in the valleys of the Tigris, Euphrates, Indus, and Nile can be better understood if one takes into account the earlier megalithic societies, as this is when tendencies towards gregariousness and the necessary hierarchy that any organizational system requires first appeared.

A great fortune for us is that thanks to the numerous cave paintings preserved and located in several places on the planet—most of them from the same period as the great megalithic monuments, but in different geographies—we have images of how they dressed, their ritual dances, masks, hunting scenes, and an idea of the human landscape.

IV
Families, Tribes, and Nations

Avoiding Consanguinity

With a few exceptions, such as orangutans, tigers, leopards, pumas, various cats, and a few others that live alone, all mammal species live in family groups consisting of varying numbers of individuals. Herbivore herds, depending on the species, can range from hundreds of individuals, like African buffalo, to dozens, like horses, donkeys, cattle, and pigs; or even thousands, like wildebeests, zebras, and reindeer, which are transhumant species.

In primates, different species of monkeys can form family groups of several hundred, chimpanzees do not exceed 100, and gorillas live in families of 8 or 10.

Archaeological evidence shows that, at least until the adoption of agricultural culture, human groups of hunter-gatherers were composed of about twenty or thirty people from the same family, agile enough to respond quickly to any alert, danger, or need. Fossilized bone remains also reveal that these human groups suffered from consanguinity problems.

We do not know the customs within the family group; we do not know if the male was established through physical strength as in animals, or if they had found other ways, but the fact is that in human remains from about 50,000 years ago, malformations of some bones have been diagnosed, caused by inbreeding.

However, from that time onwards, some families of Homo sapiens sapiens and contemporary Neanderthals had detected the problem and found a way to avoid it, as there is genetic evidence that adult women in a family came from other groups.
The sites that have provided this relevant information are located in Asturias, in the north of the Iberian Peninsula, and inform us of a significant step in the cultural, social, and evolutionary history of humanity, which had been hindered until then by physical malformations and psychological afflictions.

Thus, while further research may suggest otherwise, it must be assumed that due to living in small groups and not being aware of the causes and effects of inbreeding, for a long period in history, our species suffered from “hereditary limitations” of the most severe kind in its evolutionary process. We must recognize the enormous effort made by our ancestors before this time, with each generation striving to preserve life while gradually acquiring new knowledge, despite being subjected to severe life restrictions.

Due to the difficulty of finding archaeological sites of nomadic families, we do not know what strategies the different groups, societies, and cultures used to ensure that the women who reproduced within a family came from different groups than the men.
New research based on DNA analysis of other sites in the not-too-distant future may be able to determine when and where during this long period this strategy was adopted.

Much later in history, on the pages of his first book, the Greek historian and traveller Herodotus describes several episodes of wars caused by the theft of women. There are many other reports that this was a very common practice in many societies, including the founding of Rome itself: traveling far to kidnap or buy women, sometimes to reduce them to slavery and at other times to make them formal wives. We still do not know the extent, in time and space, of these practices in the earliest periods.

The strategy of pairing with distant families, combined with the diversity of family groups around the world, may have led to cases where it was the men who left their families to find a partner in a distant family. Could this be the origin of the cultural exception that are matriarchal societies? Could it be that families where young men left to seek a partner formed matriarchal societies, while families that received women from other families evolved into patriarchal ones?

The Tribe

The first humans, still without domesticating animals, had to move with all their belongings: fire reservoirs, skins, tools made of wood, flint, and bone, and some food and water supplies. By gathering plants and hunting animals, those families from which we descend had very limited mobility, which did not allow them to stay in groups of large size.

In most animal species, when the group becomes too large to be effective, a lower-ranking female and her direct descendants separate to form another herd, at a sufficient distance so as not to disturb the food supply, but without straying too far or losing contact.
The same likely occurred in human groups, and the bonds between families that had separated were surely maintained, meeting at agreed places and times; these reunions became celebrations, increasingly crowded and significant: a place for exchanging emotions and also objects. It is in this early period that the tribe was born, as a relational and emotional continuity of the descendants of the primordial family.
Since then, until today, in many regions of the world, the members of each family have been aware of belonging also to the tribe, understood as the “Great Family,” sharing various signs that identify them. Thus, the tribe maintains its most relevant features, which are continuities of family bonds, making it the best relational organization of affection and solidarity that humanity has managed to compose from the beginning of its existence until today.

Modern democratic societies today “aspire” to make solidarity the behaviour to adopt; in tribal societies, solidarity is the “natural” way of living, just as it is within the family.
It can be argued that within the family, solidarity sometimes falters, but of all forms of association and coexistence, it is where it is most present. And in the tribe, its second level, the same applies.

With the advent of agriculture, just 10,000 years ago, the first stable settlements were formed thanks to the abundance of food obtained nearby, and we were able to start living in larger family groups, that is, in society. We can then understand that tribes formed from the beginning of the long period characterized by nomadic life in small family groups, and they maintained their relevance when the sedentary lifestyle brought by agriculture began. The tribe’s landscape can thus be nomadic during the Stone Age and sedentary since the beginning of agriculture, established in a specific space that it has claimed, cultivating the most fertile lands and grazing the rest.

It is after sedentarization in specific areas of the land, where each group knows its boundaries, that tribal values are tested, as conflicts can arise between neighbouring settlements of the same tribe or others, whether over water, arable land, herds, or any other reason.

Historically, these conflicts within the tribe are resolved through mediation, although, obviously, as the population grows and the problem of power arises, those beneficial characteristics of the tribe can lose strength. Certainly, history records inter-tribal wars, but Western literature arising from colonization, to justify its own violence, exaggerates them, and confuses wars between nations—which were frequent—with wars between tribes of the same nation—which were very rare.

The Destruction of Tribal Societies

History is full of behaviours, entrenched for long periods in some societies, that generate horror, and one of them has been massive in many regions of the planet during the last 2,500 years, where tribes have been physically destroyed through military violence, to the point of making them disappear or, at best, significantly diminishing their relevance as social structures and cultural forms.

The admired and praised Roman Empire, through its legions, was the first systematic destroyer of tribes in history, erasing them physically from the map, killing their leaders, enslaving the rest, and forcibly intermingling with women, in the successful social and cultural devastation it imposed everywhere.

Previous empires, in their conquests of neighbouring or distant societies, did not aim to destroy tribal societies. When they invaded a country, neither the Egyptians, nor the Assyrians, nor the Hittites, nor the Babylonians, nor the Persians, etc., destroyed their tribes. It was the Roman Empire that initiated this tragic strategy, which centuries later had many followers in Europe, paradoxically all of them societies formed from the tribal destruction carried out by Roman legions.

Since the 15th century AD, several European societies—all lacking the tribal sentiment due to violent uprooting—manifested expansionist ambitions, and Portugal, Castile, Holland, Great Britain, France, and later Spain, Belgium, Italy, and Germany, following the model invented by the Roman Empire, destroyed the tribes of the regions their armies conquered in Asia, America, Africa, and Oceania.

Europeans and other Westerners who are their heirs have always lacked the specific sentiments of affection and solidarity that are intrinsic to the tribal world; we are unfamiliar with them because we lost them over two thousand years ago, and when we travel to places where they are still alive, we inevitably experience feelings of insecurity, perplexity, surprise, and various pleasures.

The common language, including literary, political, and historiographical language, tends to define the tribe as a primitive and low-level human organization, characteristic of barbarism and incompatible with any idea of modernity.

It is easy to look down on what we don’t understand, and doing so from a moral and intellectual superiority—built on military occupation—is a display of ethnocentrism that needs to be reviewed, because it is erroneous, unjust, and a further demonstration of the incapacity for reflection in relation to one of the most disturbing issues in contemporary times: the persistent poverty in many countries once referred to as the Third World and the massive migrations to wealthy countries, the colonizers.

The belittling of tribal cultures and societies has been—and still is—the prevailing attitude, and today the development strategies implemented by the UN itself, post-colonial governments, and even development NGOs, ignore them as interlocutors. Everywhere, and exhibited as a sign of modernity, the recognition of tribal identity is denied.

The first reading, that of rich Westerners, is obvious: tribes are ancient identity systems incompatible with progress, and consequently, their elimination during colonization and even afterward, was and is inevitable to achieve the modernization of those countries.
However, the discourse and the so-called “beneficial doctrine” are false because the real reason for making tribes disappear is simply that the tribes feel, because they are legitimately, the rightful owners of the land. The denial and destruction of tribal identities and organizations, from the Roman Empire to the present, is driven by nothing other than the desire to negate them in order to appropriate their lands.

The direct result of the destruction or erosion of the tribal system in nearly all colonized countries is widespread corruption in governance, low cultural activity, and few social and economic initiatives.

For much of the world’s population, their most significant sense of identity is their belonging to the tribe, and when this is eroded or disappears, there is a great void. In some places, this is expressed in the fact that, beyond the tribe, the first collective identity is often tied to the national football team, rather than the state.

In post-Roman Empire Europe, where the tribal system was completely destroyed, it took many centuries to rebuild identities that could be adopted and shared without too much violence, and even today, we have not fully achieved that. And the straight lines of many African and Asian borders today, drawn by colonizing states, reflect a destructive view of tribal realities.

For most of the world, the erosion of tribal societies is a constant reality, even in regions where the impact of colonization has been low. Modernity looks down on them, and people who belong to them, in the face of the impacts of post-colonial governance, almost everywhere resembling the colonizers’ own, gradually cease to feel it as their primary identity.

However, despite the loss of characteristics, tribes remain a very real and present reality. Traveling along highways, roads, forest tracks, or paths, at every few kilometres, without signs or markers, small villages and isolated houses form tribal societies, with different names and territorial boundaries for each of them, not recorded on maps but geographically known and felt by the population.

I invite the reader on an excursion to the region closest to Europe, where tribal society is still a reality, with few attributes and no institutional recognition, but culturally and sentimentally very much alive, where solidarity among members and the management of minor collective matters are expressed in daily life.

In the densely populated mountain regions of the Maghreb, society is formed by Amazigh tribes, commonly known as Berbers. Their survival can be explained because arable land is very limited, and the colonizing states, Spain and France, refrained from destroying them, limiting themselves to controlling them militarily after a long and bloody war.

The foreign traveller does not perceive differences between one tribe and the next, but they do exist. They all speak the same language, and for each person, the tribe to which they belong was, until recently—just a few years ago—the primary and most solid identity element.

I mention those closest to Europe—the shortest distance being just 15 kilometres of sea separating Gibraltar from Africa—as recognition to them, and through them, to all the tribes of the planet.

In this small region of northern Morocco, the Rif, stretching 300 kilometres long and about 50 kilometres wide, precisely the territory occupied by the Spanish colonial army from the early 20th century until 1957, there are sixty-six tribes, all still felt as a signal of emotional and sentimental identity, lived within a defined territorial and social scope, where a true and palpable fraternal and solidarity feeling persists.

I invite you to read about them as a tribute to the oldest institutions in the history of humanity.

The closest to Europe is Anyera, right on the southern shore of the Strait of Gibraltar and near the city of Ceuta, Quebana at the easternmost tip of the Rif, and in between: El Fahs, with the city of Tangier, Haus with the city of Tetuan, Ahmar el Fhas, Garbia, Uadras, Sahel, Jolot, Tilig, Bedor, Bedaua, Uadras, Beni Mesauar, Hebib, Beni Ider, Beni Hosmar, Beni Said, Beni Hassan, Beni Aros, Beni Gorfet, Sumata, Ahl Serif, Beni Scar, Beni Lait, Ajmas, Beni Siat, Beni Sechvel, Beni Buseha, Beni Guerir, Beni Mansor, Beni Selman, Beni Smih, Beni Ersin, Beni Jaled, Guesaua, Ketama, Metiua, Mestasa, Beni Seddat, Beni Guemil, Beni Bufrah, Sarcat, Jannus, Bunsar, Tagsuf, Beni Buchivet, Beni Ahmed, Beni Bechir, Beni Messui, Beni Titteeft, Boccoia, Beni Ammart, Beni Uriaguel with the city of Al Hoceima, Temsamam, Beni Tusin, Beni Uliech, Metalsa, Beni Said, Bugafa, Beni Sicar, Beni Sdel, Mazuza with the city of Nador, Beni Buifrur, Beni Buyahi, and Ulad Settut. Beni means descendants of.

In recent decades, the growth of some of its traditional villages to the status of cities has modified the human landscape. The largest can now have about 40,000 people and cover some 400 square kilometres, while the smallest may have a few thousand people and around 100 square kilometres.

In all the other mountainous regions of the Maghreb, the human landscape is tribal, and in many areas of the plains as well, as in the entirety of African countries and also many in Asia and Ibero-America.

Throughout the tribal world, the human environment is particularly friendly, and one has the feeling that here, no one ever feels alone. There is a continuous movement of people between families’ homes, with cooked dishes being shared and children spending a few days at the neighbours’ homes.

The visitor may miss many things, but what they perceive is that they are within a large family; when there is a neighbourhood meeting to organize any task or event, it seems that all opinions are heard: women, men, and youth, and when it comes to making decisions, it appears that it is the heads of the families who aim to reach a consensus.

First, military pressure combined with politics, cultural and social disdain, and later television, emigration, and ultimately mobile phones, have weakened the tribal system, and now it is just a tradition that only a few countries retain some elements of institutional character.

With very few exceptions, there are no tribal chiefs with political or judicial institutional power, and the authority to resolve conflicts is limited only to neighbourhood disputes that do not involve serious crimes. Although rare, there are some societies where tribal institutions still maintain many of their ancient duties, recognized by the state. Ghana, in West Africa, is an example.

As for compatibility with “progress” as we understand it, although there are no written rules and as an extension of the family, tribal morality and ethics do not allow the exploitation of one individual by another, a character trait in which the capitalist model does not thrive.

Within the tribe, there are individuals, or rather families, that own more land and animals than others, but these differences in wealth are small, as arable land ownership is divided into small plots, while non-arable land is communal. There are neither large landowners nor chiefs, despite colonial literature describing a world full of injustices and abuses. There were, however, strict principles and rules for individuals considered harmful to coexistence, as the tribe was not a hippie camp but the organizational system that had to face any conflict, both internal and with neighboring tribes or potential external aggressions.

Colonial ideology has dictated that tribal identity and progress are incompatible, although history has proven this idea false. However, colonialism, based on supremacism and driven by the desire for land ownership, did not allow any reflection on this matter.

We must go back to 507 BC in Ancient Greece, when the reform of the Athenian constitution, driven by Cleisthenes, offers a lesson in the difficult history of humanity.
Like all peoples, the Greeks were also a nation formed by tribes, seen as a continuation of the family, and in their decision-making system, the family heads were the ones who ultimately had the final say.

However, the Athenians wanted more; they wanted each person to have the same level of rights in the Assembly and in the courts of the Republic: one person, one vote, meaning democracy.

Cleisthenes’ reform overcame the tribal system of decision-making, and from that moment on, the Greek tribes, without cultural, social, or political conflict, gradually lost their importance as an identity reference.

The natural democratic aspiration for equality— the most intense recognition factor— overcame the tribal tradition based on family representation. In Greece, the tribal form was surpassed, but without belittling or destroying it, keeping it as an element of recognition of great importance.

The Nation

In current political literature, the concept of “nation” has two very different, even contradictory, aspects. While the highest representative institution we have is called the United Nations, and practically all states define themselves as nations, nationalism is described as one of the most harmful scourges to world peace and security.
The semantic confusion may be suspicious since the nation is the natural continuation of the family and the tribe, and nationalism is its cultural, political, or even economic expression.

The nation is the aggregation of tribes, and historically, it has always taken political form due to some common external danger to all of them, at which point a charismatic leader emerges who unites them. Defining the nation is easy, as originally it is nothing but the higher level of tribal organization, sharing myths, symbols, and language, although not always religion.

The confusion arises because the concept of the state as a political organization has replaced that of the nation, and political geography explains that some of the states that appear and claim to be nations are not always a single nation, but rather group several different ones. In some cases, there is a situation of dominance of one nation over others.
Strangely, in a confused ideological perception, individuals who criminalize “nationalisms” renounce the existence of their own nation while maintaining imperialist attitudes and behaviours, that is, the domination—military and linguistic imposition if necessary—over other nations.

Certainly, it can be associated as a cause-effect relationship the national unification of Italy and Germany in the late 19th century with the birth of the imperialist ambition that led to World War I and later to World War II. It is after this war that political opinions about the evil of nationalisms spread. But what fascism and nazism practiced were imperialisms, that is, the domination of other societies through violence. Italy and Germany, blindly and with strategies of pure malice, simply wanted to imitate what Portugal, Spain, Great Britain, France, Belgium, and other European states had been doing for centuries: sending armies outside their nation to dominate others. And this is called imperialism.

It is highly probable that if Germany and Italy had been well received into the European colonial consortium—formed by France, Great Britain, and Spain—and had been allowed to participate in the indecent “partition” of all of North Africa, probably World War I would not have existed. And maybe neither would World War II.

The nation is simply the natural scale of recognition following the tribe, and it does not carry any destructive seed. The empire is pure evil, and confusing them is simply an imperialist attempt to attribute a malevolent character to national feelings.
It can be added that when supremacism is expressed through nationalism, it is dangerous, but when expressed through imperialism, it becomes tragic.

In the 1960s, Europe had a political and cultural debate about how a united Europe should be structured, based on the successful foundations laid by the European Coal and Steel Community, and the controversy was: Europe of Nations or Europe of States.
The right path would have been the one that was discarded, but in that discussion, the great power of the military, industrial, and financial systems tilted the balance toward the Europe of States.

Behind the more than semantic confusion, there is another designation: empire, which is a political vocation deeply rooted in many nations, consisting of the need to dominate another nation.

Ancient Egypt is called an Empire, when in reality, it was never one. Certainly, in some episodes, the armies of different pharaohs left Egyptian territory, but it was always to protect themselves from external invasions, such as those from the Hittites and Ethiopians; once the threat ended, they would return home. The Egyptians did not seek to colonize anyone, nor did they want anyone who was not Egyptian to adopt their religion or their myths; they lived inwardly, without external ambitions, and despite maintaining this attitude for 3,000 years, we call it the Egyptian Empire. In fact, it was the Egyptian nation, with all the traits that characterize nations: language, culture, shared myths, and feelings of identity and unity.

The Hittites, then the Assyrians, and later the Babylonians, were the empires, and all of them invaded Egypt with the intention of staying there. Rome made itself known as an Empire, and it did so without any scruples. Centuries later, its European heirs followed the Roman imperialist system to the letter, destroying tribal societies in America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.

A historical investigation would be needed, but the vocation of certain nations to become empires is curiously present in those that, in their ancient origins, were pastoral societies; conversely, those that were primarily agricultural societies do not suffer from this disease nor impose it on anyone; this behaviour can be observed, despite the changes brought by history.

In addition to Egypt, the most relevant example is China, an ancient agricultural society that has always been a giant without imperial ambitions, and a victim of them in different episodes of its long history. China seeks market dominance, but does not think of sending an army anywhere, except to Tibet, a fact that goes against its honourable history.

V
Spirituality

The Sense of Justice

In many more or less documented histories, one can detect that the sense of justice has existed since time immemorial; and although it can be interpreted from different perspectives and yield different results, it can be considered that its acquisition represents the highest point of what we understand as spirituality, and it is a sentiment that affects all humans, and only humans.

Since it is non-existent in any other species and infants quickly develop it, not through the learning of adults, it is a mystery how and when it arrived to us. Has it evolved with the species, or has the sentiment always existed, or did it come from remote human species? More difficult to determine than aesthetics, another distinctly human sense.

Symbolic Reminders

Archaeology locates traces and remains, identifies them, and interprets them with as much information as possible; and in the last period of Homo erectus, around 300,000 years ago, the first human burials and the first objects placed with the dead indicate that those distant ancestors had complex feelings and thoughts regarding life and death. There is evidence that elephants also remember their dead, but the action of burying them and accompanying them with objects places the behaviour of those primitive humans at another level, and they are the first indication of the sentiment of transcendence.

There is no observation of animals, not even in apes, that suggests they perceive metaphysical energies or transcendental states. However, the late Homo erectus was already a great observer and notable imagination, needing to find explanations for everything: for lightning and thunder, for illnesses and death, for the sun and the moon, for good or bad luck. It is in this long and early period when the first signs appear that the human mind generates complex sentiments and thoughts that could lead to belief in superior magical beings and the continuity of life after death. A reality that is constantly and commonly found in all ancient, and not-so-ancient, societies is their immense capacity to believe in magical and implausible stories that defy logical thinking and common sense. Magic and miracles have been at the centre of individual and collective life, and believing in things far removed from perceived reality has been a constant throughout our history.

The Problem of Faith

Despite the enormous progress of science, faith still maintains its attraction. Some people reconcile both. A Nobel laureate in physics, whose name I do not recall, said that while teaching at the prestigious MIT in Boston, where all students had completed at least two or three university degrees, he was astounded and concerned to realize that nearly half of them identified as creationists. In any case, the urgent problem we must face—the climate change—is outside the creationist-Darwinist dilemma; both sides are scared and lack the capacity to respond.

About 2,500 years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus, in the second volume where he describes his trip to Egypt, writes that the priests believed that about 13,000 years ago—around 15,500 years ago—the first kings of Egypt were gods. When discussing this topic, Herodotus, the first journalist in history and one of the greatest, does so with as much respect as disbelief, and when the narrative leads him to opine on the truth or falsity of beliefs, he simply states that he stops talking about the subject, as he does not wish to offend anyone. Throughout history, there have been other notable figures who have done the same, and even more beyond; in the mid-1600s, the great French thinker René Descartes, the modern systematiser of the scientific method, in his book Discourse on the Method, after laying out the theoretical foundations, dedicates the second part to scientifically proving the existence of God.

For the Christian priests accompanying Pizarro while killing King Atahualpa, the Inca religion was an aberration; undoubtedly, it was the same opinion the Inca had of that of his executioners. And it must be agreed that they belong to the same psychological category and the same intensity of feelings, the faith of one being equivalent to the faith of the other. The great political ideologies that violently marked 20th-century Europe—anarchism, Marxism, fascism, and Nazism—imbued their followers with emotional and sentimental states similar to those of religions.

Each faith is a product of cultural diversity in a historical context, and they must be considered in the plural.

Metaphysics

Recent biomedical research in human and animal neurons, led by prominent scientists such as astrophysicists Roger Penrose, Stephen Hawking, and others, points to an understanding of physical realities, previously unknown, that can be interpreted as being close to certain spiritual beliefs present across all times and many cultures.
Their research in quantum physics — of which I do not know the exact meaning — suggests that sets of photons and other nanoparticles that are part of each animal brain cell vibrate at speeds close to the speed of light in oscillations and specific frequencies, similar to coded messages. They also speculate that these vibrations guide the evolutionary process of each species, which, considering their special physical properties, can project themselves through time and space.

This physical theory shows coincidences with a line of thought from Buddha — 5th century BCE — which considers that the feelings and thoughts of humans who have died do not disappear, but maintain a lasting continuity and coherence.
Some English colonizers who were part of the Masonic movement, in the mid-19th century, brought these Eastern ideas to Europe, where several theosophical and spiritualist schools emerged, proposing a new name for this phenomenon: “the Akashic records,” understood as a “great quantum cloud” formed by the sum of individual consciousnesses, which stores and processes emotional, sentimental, and mental contents; and is capable of returning them.

Religions and schools following these beliefs claim that there are exceptional individuals who have the virtue of connecting with the Akashic records and reading them, in order to convey them to ordinary mortals. In fact, all “revealed” religions derive from the same principle.

Now, under the protective veil of this new hypothesis put forward by the most advanced science, and without questioning Darwinian evolution, one can include heaven and hell, gods and demons, reincarnation, eternal life, prophets and miracles, etc. etc. etc.
The lesser hypothesis that can be derived from these theoretical advances is that the most sophisticated parts — the most modern — of each species’ brain cells express themselves in quantum vibrations that govern their own evolution; and the greater one is that the sum of individual consciousnesses is equivalent to the creator god. Once again, that beautiful verse by Antonio Machado: Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.
It seems, then, that science and ancient spiritual theories and traditions are no longer incompatible, and the principle that the spirit is the evolved form of matter can satisfy everyone.

All the principles and practices belonging to healers, shamans, seers, witches, fortune-tellers, prophets, etc., stem from the same principle: there is an immaterial and wise world to which certain people can access, some with the help of ceremonies and chemical preparations, others with practices of breathing and concentration, and others as a gift from nature or from the gods.

Accessing, or at least approaching these principles and practices, has been a human tendency since those first behaviours of respect for the dead 300,000 years ago. Now, with the gap of light opened between science and mysticism, the proliferation of offerings of techniques and support to access the Akashic records is an ever-expanding continuum, which must be seen in the need for recognition and, as with many other potentially lucrative activities, there may be opportunism and impostures.

VI
The Speech

Totally Human!

For hundreds of thousands of years, our ancestors had learned to distinguish between different people, animals, plants, minerals, shapes, colours, smells, textures, places, etc., but they were incapable of expressing them verbally. It is likely that we became very capable in bodily expression.

Many animal species emit different sounds to alert of danger and to manifest emotional states, and some, like monkeys, large marine mammals, and many species of birds, can enrich their “vocabulary” with different sounds whose meanings are understood by the group. It is also observed that there are family groups with a larger vocabulary than others of the same species; that is, there is a progressive construction of language, limited by the inability to produce complex sounds.

In many evolutionary processes, need generates the organ, and the need was the growing capacity of sapiens to observe and the desire to communicate this with their group members.

Everything changed when, thanks to a genetic mutation that altered the physiology of the vocal system, they were able to produce many more different sounds and give names to everything they knew and experienced. The species had acquired, through natural evolution, a highly efficient tool for expression and communication.
Laboratory scientific research has dated this essential mutation to about 130,000 years ago, during the time of Homo sapiens sapiens and the Neanderthals.

Language allows for an increase in communication capacity, and it is with the advent of speech that humans embark on the long road of civilization. Although it is a simplification, one could say that before speech, we were little more than very clever monkeys, quite skilled and a bit transcendent, and that speech makes us human.

Since ancient times, there have been five pivotal moments in the progress of our species: the work with stone, the mastery of fire, the physiological change that allowed speech, the eradication of consanguinity, and the first domestication of animals and plants. Of these, only speech was a change brought about by natural evolution, while the other four were human conquests of will. A toast to our ancestors!

Languages

From the beginning of the ability to speak until today, several thousand different languages have been generated. Some have disappeared, either due to extinction, miscegenation, or malicious destruction, and it can be said that all the more than 7,500 still existing languages have virtually the same expressive capabilities. There are important nuances in this, which sociolinguistics has addressed for several decades.

Language is a primary element of identity, and although mastering several languages is quite common in many people today, sentimentally, language retains its identity and familial character. One thing is to know a language, and another, very different thing, is to feel it as one’s own. Obviously, there are personal exceptions to this.
Like all identity elements, languages have been and are objects of conflict, tension, and/or prohibition, exercised by political and social powers aiming for dominance. There have been and still are wars of languages.

Languages represent cultural diversity, and the extinction of any of them must be seen as a real loss, comparable to the extinction of an animal or plant species.

Each society and individual, depending on their ideology and political vocation, may have a different perspective on the meaning and cultural and social value of a language, depending on whether it is their own or someone else’s.

And depending on ideology, one may think that another’s language is dispensable, as their own language may have more expressive capacity, more literary richness, or more practical utility. And when this happens, the language with less political capacity risks being marginalized and eventually forgotten.

Throughout history, when conflicts between languages exist, the issue cannot simply be posed as a matter of linguistic political rights but also of cultural, ethical, and aesthetic love and responsibility.

Writing

Although possibly yogis and Buddhist monks would not fully agree, the Argentine sage of the late 20th century, Ernesto Sabato, a writer and politician by responsibility, stated that writing is the deepest form of thought.

However, it wasn’t this great and exceptional virtue that caused its birth, more than 8,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia; it was the need for a counting tool to manage and control the property of the kings, whose vast size had made them impossible to manage using only memory. The king’s officials needed “external memory.”
As a demonstration of this need, I mention some “accounting data” from the Mesopotamian city of Ur, from 4,000 BCE, recorded on clay tablets engraved with cuneiform signs: over one year, 6,000 tons of wool passed through the royal warehouses, and over three years, 28,601 cattle, 404 deer, 236 wild sheep, 38 horses, 360 onagers, 2,931 donkeys, 347,394 domestic sheep, 3,880 gazelles, 457 bones, 13 monkeys, and one unidentified animal. Data obtained from Los Orígenes del Hombre, edited by Folio.

To manage and control the quantity and quality of livestock, ceramic jars, tanned skins, bags of grain, workers, and to know the dimensions of the king’s properties, taxes, etc., different graphic systems were invented, initially representing schematically what was being referenced, engraved on baked or raw clay tiles, which also constituted the first writing and accounting in history, later also on leather and papyrus.
Over time, signs that were easier to reproduce were adopted, which reminded what each note referred to, and they invented the first ideographic writing: schematic signs to represent each type of product: sheep, pigs, goats, donkeys, barley, wheat, lentils, carts, people, distances, weights, volumes, etc.

These accounting notation signs were later supplemented with others to designate names, actions, situations, and characteristics, until a list of signs — an ideographic dictionary — was available, increasingly extensive and rich.

The same thing happened a few centuries later in Egypt, with their system of hieroglyphic writing.

In all these writings, the system was the same: a drawing that resembles each object or idea to be recorded schematized to make them easier to engrave or draw.
However, this system had a limiting condition, because if a different sign was needed for each thing, name, state, or verb, the learning of so many signs was reduced to those individuals who made writing and reading their profession, which in those societies was limited to the priestly class serving the kings. Thus, writing was only accessible to the powerful, who educated specialists to make it their profession, known as scribes.
In Sumerian culture, archaeology has identified up to 3,000 different signs, and in Egypt, the number of hieroglyphs used in everyday phrases was about 800.

It took several thousand years until a different society, the Canaanites, later known as the Phoenicians, provided humanity with a new, revolutionary, intelligent, imaginative, and above all practical idea and tool.

The Canaanites were a society of farmers, artisans, merchants, and sailors who lived in the Jordan River valley and the coastal mountain range of the eastern Mediterranean; their capital was the ancient Jericho, and they are among the great innovators of history.
Their first great contribution was to make the ideographic system obsolete, which required many different graphic signs, replacing it with a new one, the alphabetic system, which only needed 27 very simple signs.

These signs represent the different sounds that our speech apparatus emits in a clearly identifiable way for the ear. In short, the easiest: write as you speak.
The Canaanites invented the alphabet we use today, democratizing the learning of writing and reading, drastically improving the transmission of information.
Very recently — in 2017 — in the ancient territory of the Canaanite people — today Lebanon, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and western Syria — an archaeological excavation conducted by Tel Aviv University discovered a small object dated to 1,700 BCE: an ivory comb, engraved with the first known sentence in alphabetic signs:

“… that this tusk roots out lice from the hair and beard.”

Joyfully, the first document written in alphabetic signs we know of is a beautiful, kind, and humorous gift.

From the Canaanite invention onwards, the art of writing became accessible to everyone, as it was easy and quick to learn. The Greeks gave it grandeur, producing that wonderful and creative literary period in history; the Bible of the Israelites was also written in the Canaanite alphabet, as was Latin, Arabic in the Qur’an, and except for the Far Eastern languages: Chinese and Japanese, all other languages.

It can be said that this imaginative innovation opened the door to the efficient and rapid transmission of culture. A relevant invention in the history of humanity.

Societies that did not adopt alphabetic writing are not inferior or less cultured. China and Japan maintain the ancient system of writing using ideograms; a classical Chinese text uses about 1,000. Obviously, in these societies, the effort and time required to learn to write and read is much greater than in others, but they manage well. It seems that, at some point, the Chinese communist leader Mao Tse Tung considered adopting the alphabetic writing system, but he did not dare to decree it.

Another issue regarding writing is the fact that many of the 7,500 languages spoken in the world have still not had anyone to transfer them to writing, and this is a serious deficiency that impoverishes humanity’s cultural heritage.

To write

The virtues of writing are many, the first being that it allows for the processing of more information than what our brain’s memory alone can provide. Over time, it has revealed itself to be one of the most enriching human activities.

While we write, our brain remains in intensive activity, as it involves memory, imagination, prospecting, semantics, syntax, spelling, and also feelings, in a continuous exercise of feedback from the intellect.

In the educational sphere, there is a lively debate regarding the virtues of reading as a shaper of intellectual abilities, but reading is an information strategy subordinate to writing, while writing is an exercise in constructing imaginaries using the integral content of consciousness.

It must be valued that the practice of writing improves concentration, while reading does not necessarily have this virtue.

The study of mathematics improves intellectual capacity, but writing also develops the capacity for abstraction, and it additionally engages the entirety of our emotional baggage, something that does not happen with mathematics.

VII
Aesthetics

The Perception of Beauty and Art

Many species of fish, birds, and insects have innate abilities to adorn their nests and burrows with symmetrical shapes or harmonious groupings in form or colour; mammals, on the other hand, do not possess that ability, and the sense of aesthetics in the human species is acquired.

It is a task that distinguishes us from those animal species that inherit it genetically. However, while each of these species has a unique aesthetic project, we can learn to express beauty in many ways and across many fields. This path has been long and has had its ups and downs, some of which are still hard to explain.

We cannot know with certainty the thoughts and feelings of our distant ancestors, except through assumptions based on and justified by the objects they made. The small tools carved from flint and other stones, bones, clay, and wood are the first expressions of art.

At first glance, they appear quite rudimentary, but some of them are true works of art: if you carefully observe a flint arrowhead, whose surface is less than one square centimetre, you can count more than thirty percussion points on each side.
The flint tools are not yet an expression of free, creative art with forms and colours, but they are the first clear manifestation of the sense of aesthetics shared by everyone.
The concern for symmetry and aerodynamic forms, along with high functionality, great cutting capacity, and exhaustive material use, is a physical example that the idea of design is one of the first emotional and intellectual acquisitions of our species.

Can we assume that the sense of aesthetics develops as we become capable of making objects, in a self-reinforcing dynamic?

Any observation of animals leads us to understand that no species enjoys the beauty of a landscape, a flower, or another animal. There are scenes where a gorilla watches a lizard attentively, but beyond the evident ability to observe and show interest, we cannot know if it experiences any contemplative well-being, motivated by the beauty of the creature being observed.

It would be very interesting to know at what point in history a human group first stopped in front of a great landscape and experienced emotional pleasure.

The birth of the sense of aesthetics did not bring improvements in food or security for our ancestors, but it has acquired vital importance in human development.
The sense of aesthetics is an area of learning with a great trajectory, which will lead to the emergence of art and cultural “isms,” becoming one of the most powerful elements of civilization, with great projection and seductive capacity, and the first tool for building symbols, totems, flags, useful objects, art, architecture, urban planning, advertising, cinema, photography, etc.

Sound also plays a role, of which we know very little. There are Egyptian drawings depicting musical instruments similar to some of today’s, but we are completely unaware of their music; it is likely that song and percussion rhythms were among the first manifestations of aesthetics, still alive in some societies.

Artistic Styles

In any aesthetic style, there are always antecedents; it could be a continuation or a disappearance, but no style appears suddenly.

There are mysteries surrounding the most notable early works of art; recently, murals painted over 50,000 years ago, depicting human and animal figures, have been dated in Indonesia. Even earlier, between 17,000 and 30,000 years ago, there are the paintings in the caves of the Basque Gulf region—Altamira and Lascaux—which, due to their realism, sense of perspective, technical mastery, and image dimension, are exceptional compared to all other discoveries to date.

Strangely, these two caves do not contain human images, and this is not due to the artists’ technical inability. The belief that a photograph could steal the soul was still widely held not so long ago, and perhaps it was prevalent in that time and place as well.

Common sense suggests that we cannot consider the paintings that have reached us—across the planet with similar chemical composition and colour—as the first, because, obviously, those ancient artists did not start painting until they had pigments that could withstand the passage of time; they experimented with colorants while painting, and one of the mixtures turned out to be very durable. We cannot know how long—decades, centuries, or millennia—had to pass before they could create the mineral colour mixtures that are still preserved today. Those artists were not painting for us.
Now, where the paintings are in caves or natural shelters protected from the weather, they remain as fresh as the first day and are for us to admire.

The most numerous ones, found in different regions of the planet, were painted in more recent times—between about 6,000 years and 1,500 years ago—and are found in regions where agriculture and animal husbandry had not yet arrived. Many of these depict human figures and all follow the so-called “law of frontalism,” which means the images are represented with their largest profile and in the most prominent projection possible; they always appear static and rigid.

With variations depending on geography and time, the pictorial compositions from this period often feature people in scenes of celebration, dancing, costumes, and animal hunting; others are symbolic motifs, and some depict geometric shapes that do not exist in nature.

This artistic period is not connected with the great expansion of the arts in the early Mesopotamian cities, around the same time; later in Egypt and in a few islands of the eastern Mediterranean—especially Crete—a rich source of visual finds with aesthetic intent and capacity emerged, including images of gods and goddesses, kings and queens, monuments, textiles, objects made from wood, bone, metal, ceramics, murals, buildings, etc.

With the exception of the mural paintings in the Basque Gulf region, throughout this period—first in caves and rock shelters, and later in the early cities—there is a constant that indicates a lack of mastery of perspective. All figures conform to the “law of frontalism,” where the largest use of space leads to a static position and imposes a limited expression.

The inventors of three-dimensional perspective, which overcomes the law of frontalism, were the potters of Classical Greece, around 2,600 years ago, where decorations of people, plants, and animals expressed full form from any point of observation. After initial experiments with perspective in drawings on ceramic amphorae, art underwent a great revolution in just a few years, and Athens, along with the cities influenced by it, became the planet’s centre of creative excellence, reaching its peak in sculpture.

The defeat of Greece by the Roman Empire did not make that aesthetic disappear, as the Romans had adopted it earlier. However, with the fall of Rome, that excellence disappeared throughout the Middle Ages—during which it regressed back to the law of frontalism—and was not recovered until the great artists of the Renaissance and Humanism, inspired by Greek and Roman classical sculpture and painting, emerged. Later, this aesthetic spread to other societies around the world, especially in the pictorial expression, which gave rise to the most “isms.”

There are more mysteries in the succession of aesthetic “isms,” beyond those from the Basque Gulf. Another point in history where the evolution of style and technique cannot be explained is in the paintings on the walls of the palaces of Crete, during the Minoan culture around 4,500 years ago. These homes were adorned with frescoes of slender women, birds, and flowers, with perspectives much freer and more expressive than their contemporary counterparts in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

VIII
Women, Men, and Power

Goddesses, Queens, Kings, and Gods

The first human images discovered by archaeology, dated over 30,000 years ago, are small sculptures made of clay and stone representing women; with a few exceptions, the first figures of men do not appear until 10,000 years later.

In current societies where ancestral cultural forms persist, medicine incorporates physiological, emotional, sentimental, and spiritual health into the same diagnosis. It is detected that the people who take on the role of healers are predominantly women, deserving of great social respect. We can assume that women with these recognized virtues took on leadership roles in those early societies, due to the trust and respect that was given to them.

As a continuation of this ancestral recognition, the first figures representing power in the cities of Mesopotamia, just below the goddesses, were queens. As the cities grew, they were replaced by kings, and when they appeared, they were accompanied by gods. It seems, then, that men needed to associate with the gods to legitimize themselves, to gain respect, or to be obeyed or feared.

Despite this landscape of power dominated by men, exceptionally, both in Mesopotamia and in Pharaonic Egypt, some women—six in Egypt—were recognized as queens.

We know little about the lives of women in ancient societies. In Egypt, the family institution was the norm, and women could divorce; according to Herodotus, they would go out alone, shop at the market, and actively participate in major celebrations, but we know little more. Of the Phoenician women, we know they often participated in long voyages, but again, nothing more. And in Ancient Greece, although in theory they could go almost anywhere, we know that in practice, with a few exceptions, they stayed at home and participated little in public activities.

All these societies were patriarchal, and despite notable differences between them, women had a role, at least, subordinate to men.

It is also known that in many ancient societies, the “capture” of women from a distant society was a normal practice; the very beginning of the Roman Empire is an example. According to Herodotus, the Trojan War was sparked by the “kidnapping” of Helen, the wife of a local Greek king.

Thanks to Herodotus, we also know that the society of Lydia—a country contemporary to Greece, located in present-day western Turkey—seems to have found an imaginative solution to the “women-men” issue. The great historian and journalist describes it in a somewhat astonished and non-judgmental manner: “… In the land of the Lydians, all daughters become prostitutes, thus raising their dowries. They do this until they marry: the husband is personally chosen by them… Apart from this, that their daughters become prostitutes, the Lydians have customs very similar to those of the Greeks. They are the first we know to have minted gold and silver coins, the first to have engaged in commerce.”

In three lines, Herodotus repeats what most surprised him about Lydia. We cannot know the “satisfaction” or “dissatisfaction” of the girls in this sexual exchange, and therein would lie the goodness or badness of the system. It should not be forgotten that patriarchy was dominant in all the societies of the region.

In our world today, in many democratic, wealthy, and cultured societies, violence against women is still a widespread scourge. Now, facts and statistics are known, but one does not have to be overly suspicious to understand that in the past, from time immemorial, it was always like this—and worse.

Strictly considering Life with a capital L, that is, the continuity of life, only females can conceive, and consequently, women should be recognized with a hierarchy, which makes them different and largely vulnerable.

However, despite these undeniable realities, discussions about equality, which is the minimum that should be demanded, are always polarized by ideological and political interests, which cloud the issue. Reality and common sense are ignored, and even now, at the same time as feminist values are gaining strength, many men from many societies around the globe physically and psychologically abuse women and girls.

One can speculate about when or how the traits and behaviours that define a society as patriarchal, misogynistic, and sexist appear. Let’s try it. When humans still lived in family groups of no more than 30 people (which is the estimate made based on paleontological and archaeological evidence), but already knew the ills of consanguinity and had found a solution with pairings between men and women who were not close relatives, a new problem arose that was impossible to solve without conflict. The olfactory incapacity of our species to recognize its offspring brought insecurity to males, the theoretical fathers.

I do not know if all species, but most mammal species, have the ability to identify a genetic individual by smell. It is possible that the sedentary lifestyle and immersion in unnatural odours caused us to lose olfactory sensitivity, or maybe we never had it much developed, but the fact is that doubts and insecurity about paternity have marked the lives of most humans for at least 50,000 years, especially for girls, young women, and women. The males were concerned, and the women were harshly punished.
The advent of DNA analysis several decades ago provided an unquestionable reference that should have immediately rendered patriarchy obsolete and deactivated sexism and misogyny. However, the inertia is very strong, especially when privileges are involved. When we talk about the state of the art, it is always associated with changes that have had a significant impact, but in this case, DNA, despite being science, has not greatly questioned customs. The serious thing is that these “customs” are at the root of most of our personal and collective problems. Never in history has an improvement in the state of the art had such a low impact on what directly concerns us.

Patriarchy was the system born from men’s distrust, which placed all women under suspicion, decreeing the need to control them strictly to ensure the truth of their descent, and we invented the obligatory precept to “protect them from their fragility,” from their “vulnerabilities,” and even “protect them from themselves.” Protection, monitoring, and control, all exercised from insecurity combined with gender supremacism, is the typical sequence of the abuser. Taken to the extreme, female genital mutilation is the same justifying story.

Kindly, sexism could be considered an uncontrollable eruption of testosterone, and as long as there is no abuse or violence, it is not the greatest problem for women and society; it is misogyny—an attitude and behaviour of buried contempt, based on supremacism—that truly constitutes the issue.

In recent years, sexism and misogyny have been facing realities that put them in a severe crisis. The most impactful catalysts have been movements such as #MeToo, the emergence of LGBT+ groups, and the meteoric rise of women’s team sports in the media. The first and second generate controversy, with defenders and detractors, but the third provides psychologically impactful scenes that were unthinkable only a few years ago for any man and many women: talent, strength, endurance, skill, technique, speed, concentration, and organizational abilities—qualities once reserved for men—are now, practically overnight, putting misogynists literally out of the game. Previously, a few women had stood out, but only individually: a circus trapeze artist, a lion tamer, a sharpshooter, or a fast runner. However, the new reality breaks down barriers and wins battles every day.

We are children and grandchildren of a harsh education immersed in misogyny. Even today, in many films, when a couple—man and woman—escapes some threat, the screenwriters, to add drama to the scene, always make the woman fall to the ground or scream hysterically and ruin everything. The weak and irresponsible woman, the generous and brave man who never leaves her behind. The patriarchal society also recognizes the need to protect women, but only in situations of extreme danger; in everyday life, it seems that abusing them with varying intensity is almost the norm. We are still too much heirs of that medieval morality, where knights publicly protected ladies while placing chastity belts on their wives and demanding to “break in” the new brides from the village.

It must be warned that misogynistic and sexist behaviours lead to the formation of a public opinion state that could impose itself in the future: men might become entirely dispensable. Now, medical and genetic knowledge make this possible without endangering the continuation of the species. As a curiosity, much like a zoo keeps a few specimens of an extinct species alive, a society of women would preserve a flock of no more than 1,500 men, the indispensable ones in case of any emergency, paradigm shift, or simply a trend.

It is said, as a justification, that the sexist behaviours and opinions expressed in recent times are a reaction from some men to the rise of feminism and its demands, which they consider too demanding and hostile. A reflection on this is needed—something difficult to achieve—and it should be understood that today’s women protesting against misogyny, sexism, and patriarchy are also expressing the suffering of their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and so on, while complaining men only represent themselves; organizations and expressions of solidarity among men to defend themselves from women have no future.

When the future is presented not as uncertain but full of threats, the entire population suffers, but for a large portion of it—girls and women—it involves a greater level of anguish or, at least, doubt, since for them, the idea, expectation, or simply the vital desire to become mothers becomes enormously complicated, as it involves a future project. Many men, too, may want to be fathers, but for the life project of many adolescents, girls, and women, motherhood holds essential importance. In this regard, one critical observation can be made: “climate change” is a consequence directly provoked by unchecked capitalism and consumerism, inspired, led, and defended by the ideologies and power structures of patriarchal culture. In other words, the failure of men is being paid for by women. This is not new in history. It cannot be overlooked that all violence, whether political, sexual, or climatic, has a decisive masculine imprint.

Despite these realities, some already surpassed by history and others not yet, sexuality, around the world and with a few unfortunate exceptions widely known, is increasingly claimed and lived more naturally every year. In a reverse process to the destruction of the climate, the world progresses in sexual and sentimental freedom, and this is the only ray of light in a future landscape full of shadows. It is possible that, despite efforts to maintain some ancestral customs, we evolve toward bonobos?

Female Genital Mutilation

This monstrous aggression, aimed at depriving girls of the possibility of sexual pleasure, is destructive to the bodies, emotions, and feelings of girls, young women, and women subjected to it in many societies around the world. It is unknown where it originated or when it began, but in many aspects, it is worse than slavery.

It must be recognized that despite the many legislative initiatives and especially truly heroic individual and activist efforts, this practice remains alive, and because it is part of popular mythology and deeply rooted in customs—not religions—the public authorities, despite being aware of its inherent evil, in few countries dare to take drastic measures to eradicate it.

I cannot certify its truth, but it seems likely that there was a pastoral letter addressed to Catholic priests in an African country, saying that God prefers a church full of sinners rather than an empty church.

This news, true or false, illustrates the enormous difficulties in ending the most aggressive expression of patriarchy, curiously practiced by women. The horror. Now, with migration, this subculture, forbidden in the host societies, persists covertly and is difficult to eradicate.

A question I haven’t found references for is that the African women enslaved and brought to the Americas—along with the men—came from societies that did not practice female genital mutilation. The enslaved women were required to have good reproductive health, and genital mutilation made them ill.

Matriarchal Societies

The consideration given to women throughout history in different societies and cultures is varied and surprisingly contrasting, especially considering that we all come from common origins. In the present day, in different regions of Africa, Asia, and America, there are societies with very distinct characteristics compared to the rest: these are matriarchal societies, where the social role of women and their recognition within the family and society differ in significant ways from those in patriarchal societies.

Matriarchal societies are few, none of them have institutional recognition, and there has been little or no communication between them. There is no “norm” for being matriarchal, and customs vary greatly, but they share some similar principles and strategies regarding the most relevant aspects of life.

In Europe, there are none, and we do not know if the destruction of tribal societies by the Roman Empire has anything to do with this, but all indications suggest it does.

In the societies where this culture survives, daily life is different from that of the rest of the world. I am sure that the emotional life is more balanced; sexual relationships are more spontaneous, richer, and with fewer tensions; and the learning of sexuality is done without the difficulties faced by children and adolescents in patriarchal societies. In matriarchal societies, men do not feel threatened or oppressed, while women live much better lives; there is no aggression, rape, mutilation, or killing.

In matriarchal societies, the obvious is recognized: the centre and reference of the family and the household is the woman, as the biological and vital reality requires that they symbolize stability and continuity, physically, emotionally, sentimentally, and patrimonially. This makes them deserving of recognition and protection from society as a whole. And men do not feel threatened or oppressed; on the contrary, they feel fully realized.

The daily life of children and adolescents is developed in an environment free from emotional and sentimental suffering caused by potential breakups between the parental couple, as their life frame of reference does not make the protective presence of the father indispensable. For children, the affection and attention they receive from the father is an added gift, not essential for their emotional and sentimental health. Fathers relate to them without barriers, but they do not act as their “owners.”

The evolution of world history has meant that large demographic matriarchal societies no longer exist. Kerala in India—where British colonial authorities repealed their indigenous laws—the Ashanti society in West Africa, and the Messoufit people in the Sahel region, are still matriarchal within, even though they no longer appear as such outwardly. There are many other such societies, some with only a few hundred people.

From the first and last mentioned, the testimony of the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited these societies in the years 1330-1340 AD, describes customs and situations that left him astonished. In fact, in contemporary patriarchal societies, thanks to the rise of feminism, there are new realities that resemble scenarios and customs typical of matriarchal societies. It is noteworthy that these societies exhibit a high level of organizational capacity—already observed by Ibn Battuta—and a business world much more developed than their neighbouring patriarchal societies. One example described by the same traveller was the exploitation of a mineral salt deposit in the Sahara by women from Oulata in present-day Mauritania. Today, the Ashanti society of Ghana also shows a high level of development, as does the society of Kerala in India.

It is of great interest to approach behaviours detectable in current patriarchal societies that are moving closer to matriarchal culture, as they represent a before-and-after in the dominance of the system and its crude excrescences, namely sexism and misogyny. The empathetic attitude and protective behaviour of mothers toward their daughters is a new social phenomenon in the history of patriarchal societies—certainly not widespread everywhere but significant. Just a few decades ago, mothers could be extremely unfair to their daughters who suffered abuse from their husbands, and if the girl asked for refuge, they would often shut the door on her. Few mothers spoke of sexuality with their daughters, or anything remotely related, inhibited by a “modesty” that should be considered pathological, the result of misogynistic violence blessed by monotheistic religions. Now, for the first time in the history of patriarchal societies, there are new horizons in this vital issue.

To conclude this chapter, it is surprising to note the great ignorance and lack of interest from militant feminism in wealthy countries, both regarding matriarchal societies and those patriarchal societies that practice female genital mutilation.

IX
The Neolithic

The Great Revolutions

During the long period of formation of our species, the groups of people consisted of two or three dozen individuals, continuously moving through more or less familiar geographical environments to gather plants and hunt animals. About 10,000 years ago, in a few places on the planet (few), several families of these hunter-gatherers learned to domesticate a few animal species and cultivate a few plant species, selected from those they had appreciated for thousands of years.

The earliest knowledge of this historical reality is not due to archaeology, anthropology, or ethnography, but to botany. This chapter is dedicated to explaining the beginnings of this revolutionary innovation in the strategy for food supply that caused significant changes in our ancestral way of life, such as the life in human groups of larger size, since they were no longer forced to continuously move in search of food every day. We became sedentary, forming increasingly larger, more comfortable, and safer villages. We also began to invent products and objects that were more useful, efficient, and accessible.

Science has named this new period of history the Neolithic, a term that is not very explanatory but is characterized by a mental explosion in the pursuit of innovations.

As an introduction to this chapter, which discusses the sources of our food, I propose an observation regarding the different “gastronomic cultures” of the planet. In my view, there are two clearly identifiable and distinct models: one consists of eating the most abundant and tastiest food possible, and the other of eating the healthiest and also the tastiest food possible.

It can be said that Indian cuisine and that of other Asian countries are the greatest expression of the second model, while the rest of the world predominantly follows the first, with some individual exceptions.

These two models are very different, with India’s approach being the one that should prevail, based on common sense, for the protection of human health, animal welfare, and the environment’s health. Now, it is also more economical, due to the enormous extra cost involved in prioritizing animal-derived products for sustenance.

Feeding on cereals, legumes, vegetables, etc., is 8 to 10 times less expensive, both energetically and economically, than consuming animal products. And since the human population continues to grow while agricultural land is limited, it is evident that we need different productive and consumption strategies from the current ones. This perspective is independent of climate change, although it accelerates it.

Livestock Farming

In the third section of this writing, I express my astonishment at the delay in the domestication of animals, since 50,000 years ago Homo sapiens had developed all the necessary characteristics to begin domesticating them, using them for carrying loads, and breeding them for food and clothing, thus saving the arduous work of hunting them. There was opportunity and necessity—two key factors that shape any decision—but for many millennia, we didn’t do it.

From the mastery of fire and throughout the long period before domestication, hunting had become the most highly valued social activity, because it represented the group’s food source, but also because it was very attractive to males and granted prestige to the best hunters. Physical strength, organizational strategy, and the ability to kill are the distinguishing traits of hunters, and when the prey is a dangerous animal, great courage is also required. There is recent history in some African, American, and Australian societies that follows this model. Perhaps our ancestors, comfortably settled in a successful dynamic, ignored the tremendous advantages of animal domestication for millennia.

The first findings in archaeological excavations indicate that domestication began with the dog, the first fossil of which was found in the U.S. and dated to 11,000 years ago; followed by the domestication of sheep 10,500 years ago, exclusively in the Middle East, the same region where cattle and goats were domesticated between 9,500 and 7,000 years ago, as were pigs in Southeast Asia; silkworms in China 5,500 years ago, along with horses in southern Russia and llamas in the Andes; donkeys and bees in Egypt 5,000 years ago; Bactrian camels in southern Russia and dromedaries in Arabia 4,000 years ago; elephants and chickens in the Indus Valley about 4,000 years ago; cats in Egypt 3,600 years ago; alpacas in Peru 3,500 years ago; and reindeer in northern Eurasia 3,000 years ago.

However, this interpretation of the beginnings of animal domestication is insufficient. History places the chronological start of domestication based on the discovery of fossils of domesticated animals, identifiable by small morphological differences that allow us to classify them as either wild or domesticated. The domesticated animals show acquired characteristics from the domestication process.

The image we can form is of a family of 20 or 30 people who, instead of sacrificing a young animal, adopted it and, with minimal effort, domesticated it, making it part of the group to exploit its milk, perhaps its wool, or sacrifice it for meat and skin, or use it to carry loads, depending on the species.

This initial domestication would not have left traces on the skeleton, as changes come from increased consanguinity, and the few animals—probably only females—that a nomadic family had domesticated would mate with wild males from surrounding herds, preventing morphological changes.

This initial period of domestication without morphological changes is difficult to date, as the sites from this period are scarce and left few traces, since we were still itinerant in small groups.

The formation of herds of domesticated animals from a few wild specimens led to a series of morphological changes due to their evolution over several generations as a separate group. These changes arise from several factors: the first is consanguinity, caused by the separation of a few animals to form a new herd. It is considered that a species contains all of its genetic variability in more than 1,500 individuals, whether animals or plants, and since a new herd is formed with few animals, it leads to a restriction of the genome, which will manifest in changes in the skeleton’s structure and in features such as horns, if present.

The second cause of change is that now the herder chooses the breeding male according to his preferences, which could be based on characteristics such as higher milk production, being smaller in size, more docile and easier to handle, larger or smaller horns, coat colour, resistance to certain diseases, or greater fertility.

A third cause of change, which takes place over a longer period, is the adaptation of animals to the climate, vegetation, and terrain of new environments.

We can consider that there was a period, difficult to determine, when nomadic hunter-gatherer families learned to domesticate a few animals, followed by a later period when humans became sedentary due to agricultural activities, at which point large herds were formed and changes in the morphology of the skeletons classified as domesticated animals appeared.

This series of conditions brought about by domestication over 10,000 years has resulted in an enormous proliferation of breeds within each domesticated species, a multiplication of genetic variability that has led to great biological, economic, cultural, and aesthetic wealth. As data, despite the extinction of many breeds in recent decades, there are still about 450 sheep breeds and 900 cattle breeds in the world, all descendants of the first females domesticated by a few families from a small region in ancient times.

The summary of the domestication of animals is that, ultimately, humans learned to treat them with good, yet deceptive, methods. The herder takes the best possible care of his animals, either to eat them or to make them work. Historically, we have never shown much empathy toward them, although there have been some wonderful exceptions in history. Surprising attitudes and behaviours toward animals were seen in Ancient Egypt. Herodotus explains them with both admiration and perplexity:

“… all of them are considered sacred, both those that live with humans and those that do not. But if I were to explain why they are considered sacred, my discourse would touch on sacred topics, and I try to avoid dealing with such matters… “If someone intentionally kills an animal, the punishment is the death penalty; if they kill it unintentionally, they receive the punishment determined by the priests. However, if someone kills an ibis or a falcon, whether intentionally or unintentionally, they will inevitably die.” … “If a cat dies in someone’s home, everyone who lives there shaves their eyebrows; but if a dog dies, they cut their head hair and shave their entire body.” … “The bodies of cats are embalmed and transferred to the city of Bubastis, where they are buried in a sacred burial chamber. Dogs, on the other hand, are buried in their city, in sacred coffins.” … “Some Egyptians consider the crocodile to be a sacred animal; however, others pursue it as an enemy. Also, those who live in Thebes and around Lake Moeris believe crocodiles to be sacred animals. In each of these regions, they collectively raise a crocodile and tame it until it becomes familiar. They put earrings on its ears with crystal and gold pendants and decorate its front legs with bracelets. They feed it a prescribed sacred diet, and during its life, they treat it like royalty. When it dies, they embalm it and bury it in a sacred coffin. However, the people of Elephantine do not consider the crocodile a sacred animal and even go so far as to eat it.”

Outside of the magical Egypt of the pharaohs, and with the exception of India, also driven by a religious idea, empathy towards animals is a recent phenomenon in human history. Respect for their well-being is a sentiment that emerged only a few decades ago, representing a radical change in the way we perceive the pain caused by the conditions of domestication and the process of taking their lives. Social sensitivity is on the rise, and laws regarding animal welfare are being enacted.

This shift in sentiment towards animals is still in its early stages, and its development parallels the growing awareness of the limitations affecting industrialized livestock farming, both in terms of the agricultural space dedicated to their feeding and the accumulation of waste and increased vulnerability to diseases.

In this unquestionable progress, there is a deep crack, which is the “discrimination” that the protective sensitivity demonstrates, magnifying the “rights” recognized to certain species categorized as pets, while completely ignoring those of other species in an incomprehensible distortion of thought and feeling. While people cry out when a dog has been abandoned, we completely ignore the truck that passes in front of us full of pigs on their way to the slaughterhouse. Pigs are just as sensitive, intelligent, and empathetic as dogs.

I absolutely share all the criticisms of animal breeding for our benefit, and I firmly believe that all farming practices must be radically modified because they cause immense suffering. If we want domesticated animals, it should be under the condition that they do not suffer from deprivation, anguish, fear, or pain of any kind.
However, in my view, abandoning livestock farming is a misguided approach for several reasons. One of them is that it would lead to a reduction in animal lives and the extinction of many breeds.

When animals are not mistreated, they are happy—truly happy—and eliminating the existence of this natural happiness is more than just a perspective error; it is an aberration towards nature. We, humans, at best, may experience happiness for a short time and contentment for a longer period, but happiness as a state of normalcy is a privilege of non-human animals.

It is possible that the state of Buddhist enlightenment, Japanese Zen, and Greek ataraxia are permanent states of happiness; personally, however, I believe that the happiness of animals is superior, or at least it seems that way to me when I observe them when they feel no threat or restriction. It is their “enviable” way of living. I believe that opinions and attitudes against livestock farming stem from excessive zeal, expressed by people without experience in continuous and intensive interaction with livestock animals.

Over the past 10,000 years, there has been a continuous process of generating new breeds for each domesticated species, in a spontaneous process that resulted in enormous diversity. Livestock farming culture led to a success in genetics until a few decades ago; after that, except for strictly commercial purposes, it has turned into a true failure. In modern times, the generation of new breeds is, except for pet species, not only stagnant but, unfortunately, the less profitable breeds are no longer raised, and they disappear.
The 1992 Biodiversity Conference in Rio de Janeiro, organized by the UN, achieved a great agreement among all the world’s states to protect endangered breeds. However, the success has been only partial, and today there are still domesticated animals from some species, being the last exemplars of an ancient breed, who are sent to the slaughterhouse—even in cultured and wealthy Europe. Some of them have photographs.

Agriculture

Like all plant-eating species, pre-humans and humans had been gathering wild plants from each environment for millions of years, choosing the most flavourful, digestible, nutritious, and suitable for preservation.

Until around 10,000 years ago, in several places across the planet and without communication between them, a few families learned to reproduce the seeds of those plants they most appreciated by sowing them and tending to them until the harvest. In a few millennia, this new activity became the most important of all, and sowing, caring for, and harvesting cereals, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and tubers became indispensable for almost our entire species.

In fact, we are, above all, an agricultural culture, as this is the most determinant activity of all and the only one that is obligatory.

Archaeology establishes the beginning of agriculture when seeds obtained by cultivation are found in an archaeological site. The way to distinguish them is by comparing the seeds found in human settlements with the wild ones of the same species present in the surrounding area; the same criteria used to detect the beginnings of animal husbandry: while seeds are not transported to distant geographies where the wild species capable of pollinating them does not exist, new varieties different from the original will not be generated.

Thus, it must be understood that the places where the first agriculture began are not exactly those where archaeology detects the first agricultural societies in the plains of Mesopotamia. When seeds were transported from their places of origin to near rivers for irrigation cultivation, the same wild species did not exist in the new locations, and pollination only occurred between seeds brought from afar. The descendants of these, combined with the selection work done by the farmers seed by seed, began to form the first varieties that archaeology considers cultivated.

It was 50 kilometres further north, in the valleys of the Zagros mountains, where the first farmers in history appeared. The proximity of the great rivers of the birthplace of the first agriculture made human history evolve rapidly toward complex social forms and city-sized dimensions.

The discovery of agriculture is very much like a children’s game, observing how a seed buried in the ground after a few days can generate a plant, which after a while bears fruits identical to the seed sown. Just like the domestication of animals, our ancestors seem to have woken up late, but in the case of agriculture, this is more understandable, as it involves a set of radical changes: the first being the need to stay in the same place during the months between sowing and harvesting; it also entails the need to protect the crops from herbivores to prevent them from eating them; also suddenly having all the food for the year and the need to store it safely. Many new learnings and behaviours are required to become a farmer.

A plausible possibility is that, with the beginnings of animal domestication, humans overcame the need to continuously move to obtain game, and began to settle, not always in the same place, but almost. And it is then that we had the opportunity to experiment with the wild seeds we gathered and ate.

One of the key elements and values of agricultural culture is that during the last 10,000 years, farmers who appeared across the globe have been selecting, harvest by harvest and year after year, the most promising seeds according to their sensory preferences and acquired knowledge in their cultivation. The image of the peasant family, on long winter nights busy selecting the biggest and best-looking seeds to sow the following year, is illustrative; the selection might aim for seeds with the best taste, the largest, those that had better resisted disease, or those adapted to a microclimate, or some seeds that are different from the rest of the variety resulting from an abnormal pollination. The same principles that inspired breeders: selecting the specimens they love and making them reproduce.

The enrichment of biological diversity that agriculture has generated from a single local wild variety, through the seed selection process and its evolution to adapt to new climates and different cultural preferences, has led to the creation of many thousands of varieties, evolved from a single endemic variety. An example of biological evolution driven by human hands: all the more than 40,000 rice varieties grown around the world come from a single wild rice ear, sown by the first farming family in some part of Southeast Asia, where the only place in the world you can find the same wild species of rice.

A point of interest is how, from the Centres of Geographic Origin, agricultural plants and domesticated animals spread across the planet. Agriculture and animal husbandry, besides the seeds, seedlings, and animal specimens, also involve a set of complex knowledge and techniques, whose transmission to other people and groups, especially in agriculture, requires time and a tranquil human environment, as agriculture is outdoors, and between sowing and harvesting, several months pass during which crops are very vulnerable.

In the early days of agriculture, human groups were small, and there was still enough living space, two conditions that suggest the process of transmitting agricultural culture and animal husbandry, like the technique of flint cutting thousands of years earlier, spread freely through osmosis and through travellers in a tribal world of good neighbourliness, peace, and friendship, prone to “win-win” exchanges.

We owe our knowledge of the history of the beginnings of agriculture not to archaeology, but to botanical research. In the 1930s, the great Russian botanist Nikolai Vavilov, through travels around the planet, determined that, with few exceptions, each cultivated species of agriculture has a single Centre of Geographic Origin. Taking barley and wheat as examples, it is known that the thousands of varieties grown around the planet all come from a few wild ears collected in that limited geographical environment, the Zagros Mountains, in southwest Iran.

That is, although different varieties of wild barley and wheat grow in many geographies, all cultivated varieties come from that location. Clearly, we owe agriculture to a few specific human groups residing in different parts of the world, whose identities and characters we know nothing about; archaeological research in those territories could provide new finds and new clues.

By deducing that the first agricultures began in regions where the wild ancestors of the cultivated species can still be found, Vavilov undertook botanical surveys at many points on the planet, establishing criteria and maps associated with cultivated species, which archaeology later confirmed as the places near the first agricultural societies.

There are a few (few) Centres of Geographic Origin for plants and domesticated animals: the Middle East is the most prolific; in Europe, various points in the Mediterranean region; in Africa, Ethiopia; in Asia, one in China, another in India, another in Malaysia, and another in the steppes north of Tibet; and in America, one in Mexico, another in the region embracing parts of present-day Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia, another in Chile, and another on the coast of Brazil.

It must be understood, then, that when some families in these geographies were experienced pastoralists and farmers, the rest of the vast world still maintained hunting animals and gathering wild plants as the only food-providing activities. In many places, it took several millennia before these practices were known and adopted.

In traditional agricultural culture, for millennia and until recently, seeds for cultivation have travelled the world without hindrance. However, the landscape changed at the beginning of the 20th century with the arrival on the market of artificially sterilized cereal varieties, from which the ability to reproduce beyond the first generation was removed. This condition, obviously, requires the purchase of new seeds for each sowing.

Despite the cost that this compulsory annual purchase represents, the high yield of new varieties of seeds achieved through forced crossings (not transgenic, which appeared in the 1980s) gave them great commercial success, causing the ancient varieties to lose their presence in the market and initiating the process of extinction of many of them: the least productive in quantity.

In professional language, the set of agricultural varieties and domesticated animal breeds is called Domestic Genetic Resources, a well-chosen name, but one that is little respected. At the mentioned 1992 Rio de Janeiro Biodiversity Conference, all states of the planet committed to preserving domestic animal and plant breeds inherited by culture, but this goal has been achieved very insufficiently, and although there are many seed collections frozen, many preservation measures are too unsatisfactory and insecure. Especially in fruit trees, the preservation efforts are very insufficient; there are protective gardens, but few, and they do not house all the varieties of each species.

In addition to the fact that in wealthy countries not all varieties have been protected, in many distant geographies of countries with low economic development, there are still varieties that, if no one preserves them, will surely become extinct. In animal breeds preservation, the objectives have also been partially achieved, and many breeds from all species have been allowed to go extinct.

The loss, even if partial, of this immense vital heritage is a serious problem, as any future breed or variety, even if it results from a technological improvement, requires the genomes of those achieved through the selection work done by farmers and breeders from all over the planet over millennia. Flavors and textures have been lost, and still are, in an unjustifiable failure of gastronomic culture, fostered by the disorientation of farmers and accompanied by the inhibition of public administrations.

In fruit trees, reproduction is done through cuttings, not through seeds, as while the pulp is exclusive genetic material of the variety, that of the seeds is the result of airborne pollination and, therefore, may be another variety; and the seed selection work, as practiced with cereals, legumes, etc., would not be useful in fruit trees. Thus, the improvement of flavours, colours, shapes, and volumes of fruits was not possible until the invention of the grafting technique, which seems to have originated in Classical Greece, although Persians, Indians, or Chinese might have mastered it earlier.

It is a paradox that today’s society, full of scientific knowledge, gastronomic sophistication, and cultural exhibitions, is the first in history to enter into an accelerated dynamic of losing varieties and breeds. This widespread irresponsibility leads to a reduction in future options for humanity, and the plagues that struck potatoes and vineyards in Europe at the end of the 19th century demonstrated the need to preserve as many varieties and breeds as possible, because they are the only available genetic reserve against future diseases and restrictions, and a wealth of sensory and cultural diversity.

Now, in the following, I explain a technical system to conserve viable seeds for decades. I recommend doing viability tests with a few seeds before using it.

All seeds, once harvested and dried, contain between 10 and 12% molecular water, and in order for them to be well preserved, this must be reduced to 4 or 5%; however, heating them to remove the water can damage them. Their moisture must be absorbed slowly and at room temperature, which is how they do not lose their ability to reproduce. Gentle drying of the seeds is achieved thanks to the hygroscopic ability of some mineral products like gypsum, or chemicals like silica gel.

In this “homemade guide” for conservators, I recommend using the gypsum used in school chalkboards or also in powdered form available commercially. The procedure is simple: first, heat the gypsum in the oven to remove all the moisture it has accumulated since its manufacture; after heating it for a few minutes, let it cool inside the oven, and then place it in a container that can be sealed airtight, where the seeds are placed in a paper or cloth bag. The approximate ratio is four parts gypsum to one part seed. The container is sealed, and the slow natural transfer of moisture from the seeds to the gypsum begins, lasting a week. Afterward, the gypsum is removed from the container, which is securely sealed with wax or paraffin to prevent moisture from penetrating. The containers with seeds can be stored protected from light and temperature changes, in a refrigerator or freezer, depending on whether you want to keep them for a few years, a few decades, or many decades.

There are opinions stating that, in the not-too-distant future, science will be able to obtain any type of genetic material, but this assertion has cracks. Without questioning it—I lack the knowledge—what laboratories won’t produce is the great variety of flavours or adaptations that the evolution of agricultural culture has gifted us.

In any case, whether due to organizational incompetence, scientific ignorance, or calculated interests, neglecting or facilitating the extinction of part of that heritage worked on carefully by farmers worldwide over 10,000 years is a serious, irreparable mistake.

There is only one valid explanation for this disaster, and that is that, since the new scenario began at the beginning of the 20th century with the production of “improved” seeds by private companies, the possibility of organized corruption entered agriculture, in a battle to dominate the seed market. In the heat of battle, public authorities have not risen to the challenge, leaving many varieties of agricultural species unprotected or with insufficient protection. The same has happened with animals.

For decades, different agronomic strategies to achieve higher production have been adopted without reservations. However, now, with evidence that climate change could lead to rainfall scarcity, extreme episodes of wind and heat, or unusual cold, all difficult to predict, the needs of improved varieties—practically all those now used in global agriculture—are appearing more as a problem than a solution, especially because they need more chemical fertilizers than the old varieties, and more water to dissolve them.

The pursuit of greater agricultural productivity as a generalized strategy cannot be justified by the lack of food worldwide because, since the appearance of steamships, railroads, trucks, and tractors, there has only been food scarcity in some parts of the world on a few occasions explained by political causes, but not because of a global production deficit.

For decades, the overexploitations of agricultural land and deforestation to create more space for crops and pastures have only forecast problems for a near future.

Also, the irresponsibility of building houses, warehouses, and factories on the most fertile agricultural land is an absurd mistake, seemingly impossible to correct, despite the catastrophic side effects in the form of floods that sometimes occur. Fertile land is limited, while the population is growing.

Food Security

For several decades, this term has been associated with health aspects, but that was not its original meaning. It was in Great Britain, during the first weeks of World War II, that the government established an office dedicated to “knowing in real-time” the country’s food reserves, which were under threat from the German navy.

Deficient in basic foods due to its large population, the government needed to know the average quantities of these foods in homes, stores, warehouses, and on the move, to determine the “minimums” before facing hunger, thus enabling them to import them in a way that would be compatible with the need to share ships transporting weapons from the United States and Canada.

Now, “climate change” is negatively affecting agricultural production in some regions, and all forecasts and projections indicate that this reality will increase, and we must anticipate food shortages in the not-too-distant future.

One of the consequences of “climate change” is the continued loss of regularity and predictability in regional weather patterns. Thus, those regions that are currently touted by climate change advocates as favourable for agriculture, such as large areas of the Northern Hemisphere, are also not immune to climate fluctuations; they may be favored in the short term, but not beyond that.

And as the emission of greenhouse gases continues, in the not-too-distant future, the planet will experience food shortages, and then there will be an “overabundance of people”; however, to claim that the cause of our problems is overpopulation is a fallacy.
The increase in the global population, in the medium term, could trigger food shortages if the high consumption of animal-based products persists. However, given that obtaining one kilogram of animal protein is approximately 8 times more costly than obtaining one kilogram of plant protein, and that humans can be vegetarians without being malnourished, we can conclude that, if climate change did not exist, the future expectations would not be dramatic.

Our current problem is strictly related to the accumulation of waste — in other words, dirt — and propagating the discourse that the problem is overpopulation is extremely dangerous, as, in the face of possible real restrictions, it will only serve to fuel exclusionary purposes. Considering that those most likely to be labelled as “surplus,” even if not openly stated, are mostly poor families from the world’s poor regions, the very same ones that emit the least harmful gases, any catastrophic demographic discourse is socially and politically dangerous, not to mention fundamentally wrong.

To conclude these sections dedicated to food sources, it is important to note that, despite the complex issues, due to “climate change,” the most relevant goal for agriculture globally is no longer concern over Genetic Resources — what is lost is lost — but rather preserving and improving the fertility of the cultivated fields. For this, each agro-ecosystem must have its own practices, with different approaches, aiming to increase the biological diversity of the soil at both micro and macro levels. Soil science is now the priority in agricultural strategies.

X
First Settlements and Inventions

First Settlements and First Inventions

Agriculture and livestock farming allowed for the numerical growth of each family and their sedentarization, as the need for some of their members to separate and form other groups had disappeared. We could continue living together.

Throughout the vast and fertile Crescent, the region covering present-day Palestine, Jordan, Israel, southern Turkey, Syria, Kurdistan, and Iraq, archaeology uncovers numerous remnants of settlements that show a tendency towards sedentarization, built and inhabited by increasingly larger groups of people, just before or at the beginning of the first domestication of animals and plants. From the findings obtained, conclusions are drawn, understanding that any new excavation and discovery may change them, as the territory that marked the entry into the history of this part of the world is very large. The existence of hundreds of undug sites is known, and there are still many thousands of square kilometres unexplored.

By cultivating the land and domesticating animals, Neolithic humans began to live in a fixed place or at least a fixed place during the period from planting to harvest. It seems that in the early stages of agricultural culture, this seasonality was the most common, but soon the first settlements began to be built with more durable and increasingly comfortable materials, allowing their populations to settle and form the first stable villages.

It is in this period of history when, freed from the need to move residences, living in increasingly comfortable spaces and having more free time than ever, our ancestors were able to start inventing objects and processes: the art of weaving came from their itinerant past, and soon the first pottery to have containers and cook food, and the first comfortable houses made from durable materials, and very soon the first agricultural tools were invented, as well as looms; also the wheel, used as a mill to obtain flour from cereals and legumes, and as a tool in the form of a cart for transportation.

Regarding fire, for several hundred thousand years, its use was only as described in previous pages, and it was not until this period when we began to find other functions for it. The first was the obtaining of lime and gypsum for building houses, two materials that are still indispensable today and are obtained by heating the corresponding minerals to temperatures of 900 and 1,000 degrees Celsius, respectively. The enormous positive impact of this application of fire is evident, as it allowed people to live in solid houses, in addition to building water canals, monuments, and defensive walls.

The second use was firing clay to produce pottery, a skill that allowed our ancestors to make pots for cooking and jars for transporting water and milk, and which immediately served for producing the first wines from grapes and palm, beer from barley and wheat, and for storing oil. The dating of the first pottery in this part of the world is 10,000 years old; in Japan, pottery has been found dating back 1,000 years earlier.

In addition to its functionality, potters soon gave their works an aesthetic function, expressed in the shape of the container and the decoration of its surface, and in no time, pots, jars, plates, amphorae, cups, and many other domestic items, with various designs in form and profusely painted and engraved, became the most characteristic objects of each society and culture, serving archaeology to classify and date them. Pottery objects and their fragments are key indicators in archaeological research, as, being creative works, their shapes, ornamentations, colours, types of clay, and production methods from different eras and locations provide all the necessary information to know their cultural and geographical origin.

The work with ceramics led to the invention of the potter’s wheel to make circular pieces—6,500 years ago in Mesopotamia—and by improving mixing and firing techniques, increasingly heat-resistant ceramics were made, allowing the progress of metallurgy. This is because testing the melting of different metal ores is not very difficult; the challenge lies in having a container resistant to the required temperatures to melt them. To obtain bronze, the copper and tin alloy that melts at 900°C, much time was required; the first was produced in Thailand 6,500 years ago, and in Europe, it began to be obtained 5,000 years ago, in present-day Greece. It wasn’t until 3,300 years ago that a society inhabiting present-day Turkey, the Hittites, succeeded in creating iron objects (which melts at 1,300°C), and thanks to this abundant, durable, and tough metal, they conquered a large empire, briefly dominating Egypt during the time of the pharaohs. According to the Bible, the Hebrews declared war on the Philistines (ancestors of present-day Palestinians, who already lived in Gaza) because they dominated iron technology and the Hebrews did not. The Philistines were probably one of the so-called “Sea Peoples,” who ravaged the wealthy regions of the eastern Mediterranean around 1,200 BCE, eventually being defeated by the Egyptian Pharaoh’s armies, some of these peoples disappeared, while others settled there peacefully.

The most notable artistic and symbolic form of this era, common across different places, are small ceramic figures representing naked women; also, walls decorated with geometric drawings, small symbolic figures referring to animals and the deceased; and the first architecture with houses, some of which were two stories, with sloped roofs and walls made of mud bricks and plant fibres. Inventions civilize us in a magnificent and admirable creative process. With each invention, there is more well-being; and also, for the first time, valuable objects and materials needed protection from predatory animals and, of course, from human thieves. And the first perimeter walls begin to appear, which will soon become defensive walls.

In this temporal evolution, the growth of economic differentiation among families within the same village becomes evident; archaeology observes that the first stable settlements consisted of houses of more or less equal size, but over time, smaller and larger houses appeared, indicating the beginning of economic and social differences within the same village, that is, within the same large family, the same tribe.

In the transition from a nomadic lifestyle to settling in a fixed place, two exceptions should be mentioned because they were true cities on a planet where there were not even small villages. One is Jericho in the West Bank, and the other is Çatal Hüyük in Turkey, now the two first cities in human history; the first is now a city with 20,000 inhabitants, and the second is an archaeological site. The excavated part of Jericho is notable for its monumental architecture and the size of its space. Dating back 10,000 years, with an area of about 3 hectares, the ancient city was protected by a large stone wall, still partly preserved, with a 9-meter-high circular tower. No evidence of agriculture or animal husbandry has been found there, and the explanation for its size in a time without villages and even less cities remains a mystery. It could have been a merchant city located at the centre of the best route between Egypt and Mesopotamia, both still without cities, or perhaps the proximity of the Dead Sea led to a human agglomeration dedicated to extracting and trading salt. It’s hard to imagine the existence of stable villages, much less cities, without developed agriculture, but no agricultural seeds or bones of domesticated animals have been found there. One possibility is that they were trading centres, and they fed themselves by cultivating wild seeds and raising animals from wild species, which were kept unchanged by aerial pollination and the proximity of wild herds. Two mysteries for archaeology, ethnobotany, and historiography.

Jericho’s artistic creativity is revealed in a human skull with clay additions, well-crafted, with a cowrie shell—a small mollusc—placed in each eye socket. This mollusc has always fascinated humans; in modern times, it has been widely used for centuries as currency in trade between India and Africa, and now it is commonly used as a decorative element. Thus, the cowrie shell has been highly valued for at least 10,000 years and is the oldest symbolic object in history.

At Çatal Hüyük, large, brightly coloured murals have been found, as well as pottery and signs of furniture.

A nearby later site to Jericho is Beidha, in present-day Jordan, notable for the abundance of remains that provide information about the social evolution of our ancestors at that time. Beidha is much smaller than the two cities mentioned, but the fact that it was abandoned several times and later reinhabited has allowed us to learn important aspects of the evolution of the first human settlements. In Beidha, the deepest excavation levels, dating back 9,000 years, identify sets of small dwellings, initially built with stakes fixed in the ground and later constructed with stone and mud, arranged in a circular shape, signalling a community-based lifestyle. In this settlement, only remains of wild animal bones and wild seeds have been found, and no signs of perimeter protection systems exist. A thousand years later, at a higher excavation level, the settlement consisted of stone and mud houses arranged randomly, and remains of animals and seeds from domesticated plants have been found. At higher excavation levels, finds indicate the growth of the settlement, a tendency toward differentiation among houses, and the construction of perimeter walls for protection. In this small settlement, which, due to its size and number of houses, would have been inhabited by a few hundred people, surprising works have been found that show the state of technique at that time and location: stone mortars, remains of mineral-origin paintings, two small baskets made of plant fibres (the first woven items in human history), many flint and bone tools, and remains of gypsum and lime in some walls.

Agriculture and livestock farming led to new ways of practicing group life and relations between different groups; a new scenario that gradually became widespread throughout the region, giving birth to new forms of relationships, both within the group and between neighbouring populations. It should be noted that the existence of defensive perimeter walls should not necessarily be interpreted as a permanent state of hostility between groups, as such vulnerable things as crops indicate a reasonably peaceful human environment. The first roads between populations and the first regional markets likely started during this period.

Before the first villages, the values that governed relations between different groups probably did not involve many confrontations, as the world was still very large. We could call it the “free period.” However, with the practice of cultivation and animal grazing, human groups of a family nature stopped being nomadic hunters-gatherers, grew dramatically in number, gained security and comfort, and settled in territories that, sooner or later, would begin to be delimited in relation to neighbouring groups undergoing the same process.

There are no statistics on the demographics of those times, but everything points to the fact that the well-being and security provided by food reserves and housing promoted population growth.

It is certain that this first awareness of territorial limitation, conditioned by the proximity of other groups, would have led to the emergence of a sense of identity in each different group. It is also likely that festive celebrations, bringing together nearby groups, were a continuous part of the life of our ancestors, and in the stable settlements, the forms of relationship required increasingly complex feelings and finding shared identity elements.

The overflowing human imagination in asking questions and finding answers generated myths that, depending on the interest they awakened and their success, became common heritage of the different groups that adopted them. These beliefs would form the foundation of new urban identities.

XI
First Cities and First Empires

Mesopotamia

When some of these proto-farmers from the Zagros Mountains realized that crops in irrigated fields were much more abundant, they moved to a nearby area with plenty of water, the valleys of the two great rivers: the Euphrates and Tigris, which cross the plain of Mesopotamia. In these floodplains, in just a few centuries, a continuous series of prosperous settlements were born and grew, some of which eventually became cities, such as Akkad, Sumer, Ur, Uruk, Nineveh, and Babylon.

2,000 kilometres away, the Nile River went through the same process 3,000 years later, when major inventions like ceramics, agricultural tools, the mill, the loom, the wheel, the chariot, and several domesticated animals were already common in Mesopotamia.

Four natural regions: the Zagros Mountains, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the natural corridor connecting them, defined by the Jordan River, were the frontlines of history in this part of the world for 6 millennia, and saw the growth of remarkable organizations and human achievements to which we are indebted.

The cities were formed around a building that had two simultaneous functions: that of being a religious centre and a collection point for the taxes that the farmers paid for the right to farm the land and to access water; families lived in the countryside and came to the city to pray and pay royal taxes. Built in elevated areas of irrigable zones, temples, palaces, warehouses, and walls, they were the organizational centres of a vast network of canals and dikes, which directed the water to the crops or drained it when needed.

The productive success of irrigated cereal farming required an efficient, complex, and hierarchical organization, which necessarily involved enormous individual and collective learning; and it is during this period that the systems of power and social organization that, with more or less variations, have governed human history up to today, appeared.

Everyone was dependent on the work of herders and farmers, and the cities generated goddesses and gods, queens and kings, priestesses (with little or no power), priests with much power, officials, many officials, and many warriors, as well as merchants and artisans, and many slaves. Despite the vulnerability of crops and herds to human conflicts and natural adversities, those cities thrived even after devastating floods, enduring dynastic crises, territorial and water disputes, or simple large-scale thefts in the form of invasions from neighbouring or distant cities. We are in the midst of modernity.

The last of the great Mesopotamian empires was the Persian Empire, a society of herders that ousted the abusive Assyrians and developed an admirable urban culture, certainly with slaves and with violence when conquering societies, but without destroying them, as all the great ancient empires did before the rise of the Romans.

The Persians aspired to an “ideal” society and built cities of a modernity that is hard to accept today: in addition to sophisticated architecture, they had sewage systems, irrigation systems to fertilize arid zones, public gardens, public schools, paid maternity leave, and other details.

One of the greatest forms of sophistication was the adoption of the Golden Ratio, or Phi (1.618), for the definition of urban grids and the measurements of buildings in the city of Persepolis, the new imperial capital. The Parthenon in Athens also incorporates this principle.

Inspired by the law of natural harmony expressed biologically and visually in the growth patterns of molluscs, plants, and flowers, the Persian sages were able to interpret and translate it into a dual geometric-arithmetic key, eventually finding that the number 1.618 was magical. The Golden Ratio bestows beauty and aesthetic balance to any space that adopts it as the unique reference for measurements and proportions. How they arrived at determining the number 1.618 through the observation of nature remains a mystery. The Persians were able to draw inspiration from nature to create beautiful architectural forms, not by imitation, but through their interpretation and translation into a specific number and its multiples.

In modern times, in the 12th century A.D., the Italian mathematician Fibonacci further studied it, but by then, 1.618 was already a known result.

The concept of the garden is also an invention of the ancient Persians, constituting a cultural advancement and an important social improvement: bringing nature inside the city is a sign of modernity; unfortunately still little practiced and implemented.

A geographical reality, which I don’t think is interpretable, but is curious, is that the new capital of the Persian Empire was built very close to the Zagros Mountains: the social, aesthetic, and cultural sophistication represented by Persepolis was not far from the place where the first herding and agriculture began. It’s worth noting that the Persians must have been unaware of these distant origins of modern civilization, which were only discovered through the botanical studies of Vavilov 100 years ago.

In Mesopotamia, with variations depending on cities and periods, myths and images of all-powerful goddesses were soon replaced by male gods, giving way to a figure of representation and power: the kings, who in this region were almost never considered gods, but only blessed by them, and who, in their representation, held the ownership of land and water. In Egypt, it seems that from the very beginnings of their agricultural society, kings were always considered gods.

In Mesopotamia, the great monuments that most characterize the civilization are, like in Egypt, pyramids, but stepped ones.

Egyptology

Since Napoleon’s expedition at the end of the 18th century, this brought Ancient Egypt to Europe’s attention, the interest in understanding that society and culture has given rise to a branch of archaeology: Egyptology and research has never ceased. Every day, more information is uncovered about how that fabulous society, thousands of years ago, was able to construct the most beautiful and imposing buildings in the solar system.

There are thousands of studies on Egyptology, and the purpose of this section is to highlight a few aspects that serve to explain some of the criteria for this brief Chronicle.

I will focus the perspective on the challenge posed by the construction of the great pyramids of Giza.

Before these, Egyptian architects were already building pyramids, and as archaeology has explored, dated, and studied them, we now know they served as “research” to construct the aforementioned ones. From this line of continuity in expertise, a family of architects stands out: Nefernat and his son Eliuno, the respective builders of the two largest pyramids: the Bent Pyramid and the Pyramid of Khufu (Cheops).

The first pyramids were stepped, like those in Mesopotamia, until Pharaoh Sneferu, who reigned for 50 years and was the father of Khufu, commissioned architect Nefernat to build the first large, non-stepped pyramid. Nefernat boldly experimented by constructing one with two different degrees of inclination, which was a correction of the initial project that aimed to reach a height of 150 meters. Too steep an angle and too much height led them to reduce it midway through construction.

The experience and errors of Nefernat, evident in the Bent Pyramid, allowed his son Eliuno to achieve the perfect geometric forms of the later pyramid and create a school of architecture.

It is important to note that the construction of the four great pyramids—from Sneferu’s Bent Pyramid to Menkaure’s pyramid—took only about a century, roughly from 2,620 to 2,520 BC. According to Herodotus, the Great Pyramid of Khufu was built in only twenty years. It consists of around 2,000,000 blocks of stone, each more than one cubic meter and weighing about 3,000 kilograms. If we do the math, that’s approximately 274 blocks per day, or 27 blocks per hour, or about 2 every minute for twenty years.

Intriguing, due to our lack of knowledge, are the techniques they used to “square” each level and “close” each edge without noticeable deviations; and how they managed to illuminate such a vast distance from the exterior, without suffocating or leaving intense smoke traces on the elaborate and detailed decoration.

The pyramids amaze not only for their visual impact but also for the enormous work accomplished in such a short time. It warrants reflection, as the sheer number of stone blocks that make up each pyramid, from quarrying them from the bedrock, cutting them to size, polishing them, transporting them, and then raising them to form the massive structure, would be a challenge even for a modern construction company.

But, would a company be willing to build a replica of any of them, only if they could rely on modern technology: efficient stone-cutting machines, large cranes, and other transport and building tools? Today, calculating and obtaining exact measurements for horizontal frames and edge profiles would also be easy.

However, if the project required building them using only the technology available in that era, the bidding for the project would likely be deserted, as no company would have the capacity to do it, even if funding and construction time were unlimited.

First, because even though modern architects and engineers have advanced knowledge of geometry compared to their counterparts 4,500 years ago, without modern tools for calculation and measurement, the challenge would be immense. There are other more pressing reasons.

For the task, the ancient Egyptians had very little at hand: copper tools—an extremely soft metal—along with stone hammers and chisels, textiles, ropes, wood, wooden boats, and the auxiliary strength of donkeys and oxen. The domestication of these animals began in distant regions; they didn’t even have horses or camels yet.

There was plenty of stone, capable architects and engineers, inventive and skilled in calculation, organization, and logistics, and men—at least one from every Egyptian family—who dedicated the required months every year to the construction.

And they had little else, except for that unique spirit that permeated all of Ancient Egyptian society, from the Pharaoh himself to the families.

In any modern construction project, architects and engineers take great care to foresee possible accidents in the form of injuries, trauma, or death. There are technical safety indices that are predicted based on the height of the work, the weight and volume of the material, and the time of execution. In every new project, the challenge is to reduce the safety index. For this reason, no company today would accept the construction of a pyramid using only the technology of that time, because the chances of serious accidents would be extremely high. Neither the workers, the companies, nor society would accept the level of risks involved.

On the other hand, Egyptology affirms with full knowledge that the workers who built the pyramids were not slaves but ordinary citizens, and each family took on different specialties: the stonecutters, who were both father and son, as had been their grandfather; the families who transported the stone blocks, likewise; the painters and sculptors; and the men who raised the blocks during construction. Professionalism was guaranteed, passed down from generation to generation.

Egyptology also explains that there were some instances of strikes to improve working conditions or compensation, and the workers won.

Herodotus travelled to Egypt when the three great pyramids were already more than 2,000 years old, and he writes that the priests with whom he conversed told him that to build the pyramids, each stone block was placed on a platform, which was lifted step by step using wooden cranes. He also writes that, according to the priests, two of the pharaohs who built the pyramids, Khufu and Khafre, left bad memories for the citizens for being tyrannical, but that Menkaure was loved, even though stories about him were often extreme.

Herodotus does not explain why the first two pharaohs were remembered poorly and the third was adored. What is evident, and what is suggested by the accounts of the priests to the historian, is that the faith in the Pharaoh-god had decreased significantly compared to the time when the great pyramids were built. There was an obvious “revisionism” of the Pharaoh’s image, with the Pharaoh being seen more as a king than a god.

Only by acknowledging that the construction of the pyramids was the result of a very specific and determined spirit, unique to that era, can we understand how the hardworking Egyptians built those magnificent monuments. It is tempting to imagine the scene—whether quarrying the stone, preparing each block, transporting it, or the actual construction. It must have been most akin to a large insect colony, like ants or bees, working tirelessly with high organizational tension, perhaps with choral accompaniment and musical instruments, and surely with beer made from barley.

And above all, it required a high level of psychological resilience to the dangers and accidents of the job.

To define that spirit, identifying it among the wide range of emotions humans have developed throughout history, the result is that it corresponds to the much-lauded virtue of faith, which can be defined as boundless trust that surpasses all reasoning, no matter how rational or evident it may seem.

If this sequence of reflections and hypotheses holds any plausibility, it is in Ancient Egypt where the virtue of faith was expressed in its most splendid and grandiose forms. Later on, other cultures founded on faith, such as monotheistic religions, would emerge, where faith is seen as an intimate and personal feeling, in addition to collective prayers and ceremonies.

Certainly, in times of high tension, such as in war or accidents, personal heroism arises. However, building a pyramid was not quite the same, and yet individual heroism was present at every point of the work and continuously.

Herodotus mentions that during the construction efforts, there were always 100,000 workers, who were rotated every three months.

Throughout history, in different societies and at different times, faith has imbued collective life. However, the intensity and continuity of the faith of the Egyptians is unmatched, as they were truly willing to give up their health and lives at any moment and for many centuries, devoutly serving the Pharaoh-god to ensure that the Nile River continued to bring fertile water.

It is almost certain that in the more than 3,000 years of Egypt’s history, that commitment to the Pharaoh’s will did not remain as intense as when the great pyramids were built. We know that over time, the afterlife was “democratized,” and over the centuries, first priests and later prominent figures like great military leaders and high officials, acquired the precious right to it.

Continuing with his research, Herodotus explains that, according to the priests, the first humans to invent the idea of life continuing after death were the Egyptians, many thousands of years ago. They believed that after death, they went through various stages, reincarnating as different animals: first as insignificant insects and then as animals of greater importance, both domestic and wild. After a cycle of 3,000 years, they would reincarnate as humans again. Hinduism has a similar belief.

Based on archaeological findings, the reading of hieroglyphs, and aided by Herodotus’ detailed accounts, Egypt appears as a country full of magic, where people were festive and ate and drank well, though modestly; a society that blindly believed everything was owed to the Pharaoh-god who controlled the river’s water, where everyone worked diligently and was willing to give their lives so that he, immediately after death, could return to his home—the sky.

The continuity of the immense architectural work reveals that Egypt’s rulers—the pharaohs, priests, nobles, and military leaders—had high-level political strategies, very ambitious ones, and apparently very successful. Egyptology asserts that the workers involved in constructing these monuments came from all over Egypt, were well-treated, learned and practiced an inherited trade, and after their working period, returned to their homes with many experiences, new friendships, many memories, and, of course, with the conviction of belonging to a great and powerful collective, sharing common beliefs and convictions. It was a political strategy to reinforce national identity and unity, and to perpetuate the interdependent myth of Pharaoh-god-great river.

According to Herodotus, in Egypt, there was more work in hydraulic constructions than in temples and pyramids: dikes, canals, large-scale drainage, modifications to the water flow of the Nile’s complex delta network, and other works enriched their agriculture in a hard-working and competent manner. An unfinished project was the attempt to construct a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea, wide enough for two ships to pass, which was abandoned after digging several hundred kilometres into the desert.

One remarkable aspect of Egyptian society is that they did not practice human sacrifice rituals; while in ancient Greece, among the Hebrews, and in many other societies of that region, human sacrifices were practiced, at least until around 1,200 BC.

For 3,000 years, Egypt resembled an ant colony, where each individual knew their rights and duties, what their job and their descendants’ jobs would be, where every year the river would rise according to the predicted calendar, and where the only source of law and power was the Pharaoh, with priests as his mouthpieces and implementers of his will.

We could say that the Egyptians were born with their life’s script fully planned and detailed, and they felt content with it, as there are few records of revolts throughout their very long history.

One difference between Mesopotamia and Egypt was that in the latter country, the king, in addition to being the owner of everything, was considered and felt by the people as a god. The cause of this strong belief stemmed from the periodic, gentle, and well-regulated floods of the great Nile River, which provided fertility to the crops, and which the Egyptian people recognized as the personal power of the pharaoh.

One observable fact for everyone, but unexplained at the time, is that it almost never rains in Egypt, yet the river always carries water. In all other rivers, when it rains little, the water level decreases, while the Nile is always very regular because its water comes from the distant tropical region far to the south of Egypt. This mystery was skilfully exploited by a clever king who attributed power over the river’s water to himself. The blind belief in this “miracle” was further supported by the origin of most of the population, particularly families of nomadic herders who had migrated from the already desertified Sahara. They arrived in a fertile and protected area for agriculture, where the nature and power of the pharaoh had been institutionalized thanks to efficient administration and had permeated the collective imagination. The newcomers integrated, and the myth grew, propelling the beautiful madness that we can contemplate 5,000 years later.

In Egypt, political power was almost always singular for 3,000 years. Certainly, in so many centuries, there were dynastic disputes and some wars, but, comparatively, it was the country with the longest periods of continuous peace in history, where there were no defensive walls anywhere, a condition that indicates a society not prone to rebellion. The testimony of Herodotus, even though he visited it during a time when the Persian invaders ruled, describes a peaceful society, without poverty, and with many popular festivals that were widely attended.

One of the most important features of Egypt is that it only took its armies outside its natural territory to defend itself from invasions or threats from external peoples, but it never sought to dominate other peoples or wanted the pharaoh to have worshippers outside of Egypt.

They had to defend themselves from the Ethiopians who tried to enter from the south, and on one occasion, they conquered Egypt’s political and military power, leading to the period known as the reign of the “Black Pharaohs.” They also had to protect themselves from invaders coming from the north, such as the so-called “Sea Peoples,” the Hyksos, the Hittites, the Assyrians, and the Babylonians. They freed themselves from all of them, with varying lengths of occupation, until the Macedonians under Alexander the Great settled there peacefully for almost three hundred years, until the defeat of Queen Cleopatra’s fleet by the Roman Empire.

The Egyptian citizenry had their economic well-being and security guaranteed by the pharaoh-god, although on a few occasions—few—they were invaded by foreign armies. In this general framework, recognition, apart from familial and neighbourhood connections, was granted by the contribution each man made to the pharaoh in the form of technically specialized work in different trades.

Thus, the factor of personal recognition belonged to the social organization with the pharaoh at the apex, and it did not go any further, as governance did not recognize any form of individual rights. The pig breeder remained so for life, and his son was obligated to inherit the profession. The same applied to the priests.

Since the land and water were the property of the pharaoh, who could grant or lease it, and since the profession was obligatorily hereditary, the social and economic system of Ancient Egypt could be considered a pure and extreme form of communism, managed by priests in service to the pharaoh.

Without any alternative for freedom and with the elements of social recognition being entirely regulated and restricted, Egypt lived with considerable well-being and security, in an endless loop for almost 3,000 years, leaving us a fabulous architectural legacy, while the lives of the people passed peacefully, without major upheavals, without significant demands, and without questions.

Egypt was a special spiritual, cultural, social, and political model, economically and demographically powerful, that dedicated the entire surplus generated by the labour of its society to creating beauty.

The French philosopher Georges Bataille, from the first half of the 20th century, in his book La Part Maudite (“The Accursed Share”), theorizes about the course of history, stating that the evolution of societies is the direct result of the priorities in dedicating “the surplus” that remains after being nourished and cared for in conditions of reproductive health. The Egyptians dedicated their “surplus” to building magnificent monuments and efficient irrigation systems, while the rest of the contemporary societies—except for the Canaanites and partly the Greeks—dedicated “the accursed part” primarily to war. In this regard, Ancient Egypt was also exceptional.

A separate chapter, which was very important for several years, is the mysterious appearance of violent invaders in all the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, known as the “Sea Peoples.” It is known from accounts and images that they arrived in small boats and devastated towns and cities; it is also known that the Egyptian pharaoh’s army defeated and drove them away, but for a time, they represented a serious destabilizing element until references to them ceased, as if they had been a passing plague. This occurred around 1200 BC, and historical research has never been able to determine either their geographic origin or whether they were a single society or several.

Current historiography explains that these migratory waves were triggered by regional “climate change” caused by the eruption of the volcano that is now Santorini, north of Crete. The large size of the cone formed by the eruption and the thickness of the ash and lava deposits indicate that it was one of the most significant geological cataclysms of the last 10,000 years, and unfortunately, it occurred in the region where the first great societies of this part of the world were developing.

The most well-known episode of these invasions is the destruction of the Phoenician city of Ugarit, on the coast of present-day Syria. At Ugarit, ceramic tablets have been found inscribed with messages addressed to the kings of the neighbouring island of Cyprus, requesting aid to contain the invaders, and shortly before, asking for grain to withstand the famine caused by a persistent drought. Ugarit was a prosperous Canaanite city—Phoenician and Canaanite are two names for the same people—and as the thousands of inscribed tablets found buried in the ruins are read, more knowledge is gained about this almost unknown society.

It was during this period that the Canaanite people—Ugarit was a wealthy city on the Canaanite coast—suffered violent invasions by the Israelite tribes of nomadic herders, who came from the desertified regions of the east and south, as well as from the Philistines, possibly one of the Sea Peoples, who dominated iron metallurgy, a fact that suggests their origin in present-day Turkey, where the Hittite people had learned to smelt and work with iron.

XII
The wise Societies

Justification

This title, which I recognize as discriminatory towards other societies that have populated and still populate the planet throughout history, refers to a set of cultural and social realities that made them different from past, neighbouring, distant, and future societies, defining a continuity of progress in essential aspects that had never before occurred in history and, unfortunately, was interrupted by external circumstances unrelated to their own internal dynamics and evolution: Crete, Phoenicia, and Greece were the three wise societies.

I do not mean to suggest that there was no human progress outside these three, but it can be asserted that without them, we would surely still be stuck in a loop of ignorance, fanaticism, and violence. It is important to remember that the loop of Ancient Egypt lasted 3,000 years; and one cannot help but think that if those three wise societies had not existed, the dynamics of Roman Imperialism and Christianity would have kept this part of the world in a disastrous and stagnant loop.

I justify focusing on this perspective of the march of history because the modern world, with a few exceptions, is imbued with existential reflection and the governance experiences lived in that small region of the planet, which began in the Mediterranean Sea, in the Phoenician cities and colonies, and developed in Ancient Greece. The Roman Empire did not inherit them, although it did imitate them in superficial aspects, and ideologically reinforced by Christianity, it formed another model of feelings and thoughts that were completely opposed to those of the Phoenicians and Greeks.

Crete, the Minoan Society

Crete must be considered the place where one of the wise societies developed, because there is sufficient evidence to affirm that the culture of Ancient Greece began on this island, and also because, before the Phoenicians, the inhabitants of Crete practiced the seafaring lifestyle that the Phoenicians later developed. In fact, the emergence of the Phoenician navy chronologically begins when the Minoan civilization disappears.

The inclusion of Minoan civilization as one of the three wise societies has solid foundations but is limited, as the information we have is scarce: inscriptions on clay tablets in a pre-Greek language and magnificent constructions that must be presumed to be palaces for notable families, with lavish decorations of a refined aesthetic—mentioned in the chapter—and channels for clean and waste water, all predating 1,200 BC.

It seems that this civilization suddenly disappeared due to a violent sequence of volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis, capped by the incursions of the previously mentioned Sea Peoples.

Archaeological findings, dating back over 4,000 years, point to the Minoan society of Crete as a precursor to many of the innovations and characteristics that would spread to neighbouring societies, especially Phoenicia and Greece. That society presents at least a few special attributes and distinctive qualities: the most relevant is that they were the first great seafarers on the open sea. It is very likely that they—or other sailors from different Mediterranean peoples, who did not reach the level of development of the Phoenicians and Greeks and are ignored by history—were the first to reach Iberia and inspire the rock paintings depicting ships, dating back to 4,000 BC.

Another characteristic is that, throughout the island, in the excavations of the many towns that existed, no defensive walls are found. This means that there could have been few wars between them, even though Crete is extensive.

Another feature is in the field of aesthetics, which has already been explained in Chapter VII.

Based solely on the information obtained from excavations, the Minoan society of the island of Crete can be considered the true cradle of modern civilization, as a precursor of Greek civilization by historical continuity and a precursor of Phoenician civilization due to its condition as the first seafaring society. The ancient Greeks believed that their myths began in Crete, with the exception of Herodotus, who claimed they originated in Egypt; perhaps there is no contradiction, as both versions are compatible.

We must consider it wise because maritime navigation, as an innovative technical state of the art and in which they were pioneers, prompted new life experiences, such as the life of a small group of people away from kings, gods, and priests, forced to learn to live according to their own rational criteria and with solidarity as an essential value. The dangerous and insecure life of sailors, being part of a small group of people far from home, should have fostered the development of a set of new perceptions, new feelings, and new thoughts, which embrace the entirety of the personality and lead to the discovery of one’s own individuality, always keeping in mind the sense of being part of the group. In miniature, the ideal society that, upon returning home, would influence the entire citizenry.

I like to think that humans became modern by sailing the Mediterranean. The Homeric hero Odysseus—Ulysses—is the prototype, who could have been Minoan or Phoenician, if his author had not been Greek. The thought and discourse of Odysseus in the Odyssey is that of a free-thinking man, a precursor to modernity, who loves his fellow sailors and values freedom, respects and fears the gods, but knows that they can confuse humans.

Phoenicia, Praise for the Canaanites

For many years, historiography has stopped asking about the original origin of the Canaanites: did they come from the south? Did they come from the east? It is now known that they were a society that maintained a cultural continuity, at least from the beginnings of agriculture, and perhaps even earlier.

Their capital, Jericho, was already a walled city 10,000 years ago; destroyed several times, and always rebuilt. To want to see a historical continuity of the Canaanite society with the ancient city is too speculative, but it is likely that there was continuity with the stonemasons who cut the massive stones in the Bekaa Valley, weighing 1,000 tons as mentioned earlier, dated to 4,000 BC.

Inhabitants of the Jordan River valley up to the Mediterranean coast, an evident historical continuity is detected, which Herodotus confirms when, in response to his question about the founding of the Phoenician coastal city of Tyre, the priests inform him that it had been around 2,300 years ago—this being the year 450 BC—and Tyre was not part of the ancient Canaanite city. The evident fact is that in a geographically small area, there are signs of cultural continuity for thousands of years.

At the end of the 19th century, the ruins of Ugarit, the Canaanite maritime city destroyed by the Sea Peoples, began to be excavated. Thousands of ceramic tiles engraved with unknown signs were found which did not resemble either the cuneiform script of Mesopotamia or the hieroglyphs of Egypt. Years passed in uncertainty until it was discovered that these were the first physical testimonies of a new writing system: the alphabetic script, our script. Thus, there are “documents” from 1,200 BC found at Ugarit written in the Canaanite language using alphabetic signs.

The recent finding mentioned earlier, of an ivory comb with the friendly dedicatory inscription: “May this tusk remove lice from the hair and beard,” dated to 1,700 BC and written with alphabetic signs in the Canaanite language, pushes back by 500 years the first evidence of the existence of the alphabet—at Ugarit—and suggests that, by that time, Canaanite society had such a consolidated and mature culture that it no longer depended on the scripts of its powerful neighbours, inventing and using its own.

The Bible explains the fascination of the Hebrew nomadic shepherds who found grapevines, according to them, of enormous size—a rarity that can be explained because the wild vines eaten by the nomadic peoples were always smaller and less flavourful. They then focused their future on the vineyards and other crops of the Canaanites, a decision that, according to the Bible, was directly inspired by their God and which proved disastrous for the Canaanites, who had to take refuge on the coastal region.
The biblical episode of the destruction of the walls of Jericho, achieved because the god Yahweh was on the side of the Israelites, according to studies from Tel Aviv University, is pure fantasy because, during the historical period described in the Bible, the city’s wall had been uninhabited for 200 years due to an earthquake.

The Canaanites, pressured from the desert, began losing the fertile inland territory and had to take refuge in a few rugged places on their coast, where they adopted and developed a society and culture based on maritime adventure. The precarious conditions forced upon them as “refugees” on the coast are expressed in a letter from a Canaanite king to the Pharaoh of Egypt, in which he says that they have many space issues, so much so that they cannot expand the cemetery.

The Ancient Greeks called them Phoenicians, because they always wore some piece of clothing in purple – in Greek, phoenike – a very special dye that only they knew how to make, obtained from a mollusc. They never identified themselves as Phoenicians, so this name was more of a “nickname” born out of a certain degree of envy, although the ancient Greeks admired them, imitated them, and recognized them as being advanced in everything.

There are ancient and modern signs and indications that strangely mistreat the Canaanites; from now on, I will also refer to them as Phoenicians, but remembering that St. Augustine, the celebrated Christian bishop of Hippo, wrote that when the people of the country were asked who they were, they answered that they were Canaanites. St. Augustine lived in the 5th century AD in present-day Tunisia, where the Phoenicians had established the colony of Carthage more than a thousand years earlier. Thus, the continuity of the consciousness of belonging to Canaanite society and culture was solid and long-lasting.

The Phoenicians were prolific in innovations: many improvements in construction, shipbuilding, and nocturnal navigation using the North Star. It was at their shipyards that the best ships of the time were built. They invented glass and the previously mentioned purple dye; they were also recognized as the best manufacturers of bronze tools, the best goldsmiths in gold, silver, and precious stones, the best weavers of fine fabrics (importing flax fibre from Egypt, which they exported woven and dyed), the first geologists to prospect for rich metal or ornamental stone deposits; of the entire broad region, they were the only ones to cut down large trees and planks of wood, and provided it for Egypt and Mesopotamian cities; according to the Bible, they were also the builders of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem, contracted by this king.

Ancient testimonies recognize their craftsmanship; to put it mildly, Phoenicia, for 1,000 years, was the equivalent of what we would now call Silicon Valley, MIT in Boston, Switzerland, and the most reputable naval construction centre on the planet.
When the Persian Empire, with its capital in Babylon, decided to conquer Greece, it had already subdued the Phoenician cities and Egypt; and since the Persians did not have ships to build the bridge they wanted to use to bring their army to the Greek coast, they requisitioned 1,200 ships from the conquered territories, of which Phoenicia contributed 300 and Egypt 200. These are at least indicative numbers that help estimate the size of the Phoenician fleet. It is also worth assuming that many of their ships were on voyages across the wide sea.

Neighbouring empires with an expansionist vocation, at certain times, subjected them and made them pay taxes, but without stifling their activities; with one exception: the conquest and destruction of the city of Tyre by Alexander the Great, who wanted to send a warning in order to enter Egypt without resistance.

Another remarkable characteristic is that, although Phoenician society consisted of several coastal cities, each had its own kings and independent power structures, entirely separate from one another. Even though they often disputed amongst themselves, they did not go to war. In some history books and popular articles, they are absurdly denied the status of a nation; there seems to be a kind of hostility toward the Canaanite reality that inexplicably still emerges.

In many contemporary texts, the Phoenicians are presented as mere opportunistic merchants, a senseless and absurd misjudgement because, in the economic sphere, they were, first and foremost, producers and manufacturers who were technically advanced in everything they touched—and of course, they were traders. In fact, they should be considered the first entrepreneurs in history: they bought raw materials, manufactured goods, and had ships that carried their goods to many points in the Mediterranean and beyond, where they maintained trade houses and where many of them lived with their families.

Perhaps due to their long historical experience of living in the Jordan River valley, the natural and obligatory communication space between Mesopotamia and Egypt, they developed an original mind set born out of the need for survival as a differentiated society and culture while simultaneously taking advantage of the opportunities presented by their privileged geographic location. And when they were forced to depend—except for the cedar and oak wood from their forests—only on the sea, they dedicated themselves to it with all their cultural knowledge.

An imaginary but very likely real example in the field of mining: the first trip to a Mediterranean area where they had located lands with geological signs indicating the potential presence of minerals of their interest: copper and tin to make bronze, silver, gold, and lead. With permission from the locals, they would extract pieces of the mineral, exchange them for their own goods, and take them back. After several trips, once a relationship of trust had been established, they would teach the locals to extract the metal-rich parts of the mineral and take them. Later, they would teach them how to melt the metals and transport them in bars.

The same happened with the vineyards: first, they brought plants and taught the locals how to care for them, then how to make wine to take it away; the same with olive trees and olive oil mills, and in making fine ceramics.

Then the Roman Empire turned those who had been partners with the Phoenicians and Greeks into slaves. Conquered by the Legions, the natives did the same thing they had learned and practiced during the 1,000 years of Phoenician colonization, but now chained, those who had surrendered to avoid death. It is evident that the meaning of colony was not the same for the Phoenicians as it was for the Roman Empire and later for their European imitators.

A very prosperous economy, that of the Canaanites, based on intelligence, respect, empathy, and agreement; the universal win-win practiced for over 1,000 years, far from home, and without an army. For over a thousand years, the Canaanites were the wealthiest in the Mediterranean. Herodotus visited the Phoenician district in the very heart of Luxor, the lavish capital of Egypt, where the pharaohs and their court resided.

They were also the first great sailors in history when the Egyptian pharaoh Necho—the same one who tried to open a canal between the Nile and the Red Sea—hired them with the mission of sailing from the Red Sea and following the African coast until they returned to Egypt via the Mediterranean. It was a three-year journey, more than 2,000 years before the Europeans.

Another high-seas voyage was leaving the Mediterranean to the Gulf of Guinea, on a trip commanded by Hanno, who mentions encountering “strange humans covered in black fur”; they had to fight gorillas, killing a few and bringing their skins back to Carthage. He also describes having seen a huge volcano near the coast, which is assumed to have been Cameroon.

They established Atlantic colonies in present-day Morocco, Portugal, and the southwest coast of Great Britain, which was rich in tin, and they always kept this a secret from their Greek imitators and competitors. They also had settlements all over the Mediterranean coast and on many of its large islands, some identified and many others with traces like the names of small rivers in northern Morocco. They also supplied aromas, spices, and luxury minerals from the coasts of the Indian Ocean to Egypt.

They invented viticulture, classifying and commercializing wines from the first and second presses, with different qualities and prices, cultivating vineyards on terraced slopes, recognizing the first appellations of origin, and giving ceremonial and religious meaning to wine through the goddess Astarte, also known as Inanna, of Mesopotamian origin. Ceramic pieces found at Ugarit explain this.

They brought agriculture to all their colonies and areas of influence, and they had an exhaustive treatise on agronomy techniques with 28 books—now lost—written by the Carthaginian Magon, who inspired the Roman Columella, who gained the fame. The Canaanites can only inspire admiration for their inventiveness, courage, empathy, and entrepreneurial spirit.

According to references from ancient authors, the Canaanites left many writings, almost all of which have disappeared. Such loss may suggest that someone had a persecutory grudge against them and destroyed their books when they had access to them. It’s speculative, but the Romans must have had a lot of animosity toward the Canaanites, as they were the only nation that defeated them three times in Italy. It was the Romans, sometimes directly and other times through early Christians, who destroyed the famous libraries of Alexandria, Pergamum, and other smaller Greek cities, where books in Canaanite were likely kept.

As an anecdote, a funny story: Recently, Israeli veterinarians rediscovered a breed of dog mentioned in ancient documents as the Canaan dog, which had been considered extinct for centuries. It was found in families of nomadic shepherds and shows a very special character: it is an excellent herding and guarding dog, but not submissive. If its owner mistreats it, the dog leaves the home and does not return. I do not intend to associate animal behaviour with human culture, but it’s amusing.

Practically halfway between Mesopotamia and Egypt, Phoenicia developed its innovative way of life during the rise of those two civilizations, trading with them. At times, they were subjected to one of the Mesopotamian empires—first the Assyrians and later the Babylonians—and also to the Egyptian pharaohs during some minor episodes, but they never lost their identity, their economy, or their way of life.

One more remarkable contribution to us, explained in the chapter dedicated to language: they invented the script we now read and write in—except for the Chinese and Japanese—by all non-illiterate people on the planet, turning the learning of reading and writing into a very easy challenge.

An extraordinary curriculum, that of the Canaanites, well known but strangely little recognized as the foundation of our culture and the civilizing elements that characterize it. Reading some contemporary writings, it seems they still provoke either disdain or envy; incomprehensible and strange attitudes.

The necessary praise for the Canaanites—throughout history also known as Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Punics, and now as Lebanese—is not complete in this long list of contributions to culture. There are two that are particularly relevant and deserve more detailed discussion.

The first does not belong to the field of economics or governance but to individual and social psychology. It refers to the birth of a new way of feeling and living daily reality, of perceiving oneself and perceiving the collective. A new way of understanding and living the world, generated without an educational project, without a priestly class, no king or revered book, but through an improvement in the technical state of the most crucial activity of that society: the dangerous adventure of sailing far from home.
Before Phoenician seafaring existed, ships already existed on the rivers of Mesopotamia and the Nile in Egypt, but they did not navigate the open sea. The Phoenicians were the first society known to have lived the experience of traveling as a small group of people at constant risk, facing the inherent dangers of open-sea navigation on primitive ships, unsafe in storms and difficult to handle. Their ships were no more than thirty meters long, and setting out on them to explore the world must have been as fascinating as it was reckless and extraordinarily risky, but this was the foundation of their life for over a thousand years, many of which were dangerous but exciting and economically very well exploited.

That new experience in history, unlike any previous situation experienced by a human group, had to generate new emotions and feelings.

One must put themselves in their shoes to understand the changes that seafaring adventure brought to their lives. They were citizens of a society, like all societies of their time, very stratified, very authoritarian, and very religious, where the individual lived immersed in a group environment, enjoying the security of living in a community but without many possibilities for independent thinking.

The human evolution from sedentarization driven by agricultural activity to the urban societies of Mesopotamia and Egypt was a continuous process of gathering people and the consequent adoption of social organization systems, with myths and forms of power capable of providing factors of recognition while also offering material well-being and feelings of security. All of this was experienced in a new environment for those people, who had come from millennia of small family groups and had to learn quickly to live immersed in a large collective and adapt to it.

During their voyages of months and often years, the Canaanites learned to face and adapt to each situation, relying solely on their own personal judgment, as the power of myths, gods, and kings became so distant that they lost all their powers, protective, guiding, and coercive abilities. After praying to the goddesses, gods, and kings, making sacrifices, casting dice for luck, and the storm still didn’t subside, these daring sailors had no choice but to do what their hearts and common sense told them. This intense and vital learning shaped their character, generating a new type of sentiment in the history of humanity: a new perception of the meaning of life, where the learning of personal autonomy was the result—the feeling of freedom and the principle of individuality within the collective, serving a common project. These were new acquisitions in human evolution.

The life of a small group of people in rudimentary boats, far from home and in constant danger, led them to discover that each one of them was unique and indispensable, just as all the companions of the adventure were, gaining awareness of individuality and solidarity at the same time.

We can say that the formation of the feeling of individual autonomy was the result of living immersed in a “state of the art” that was new in human experience—maritime navigation. Hundreds of thousands of years earlier, the mastery of fire, as a new state of the art, had also triggered the birth of new sentiments, in that case, self-recognition as beings superior to other animals.

Obviously, it cannot be said that before the Phoenicians, no one had experienced these feelings and thoughts, but never before had there been a social environment where the principle of individuality emerged as a basic characteristic of a culture. It is to be assumed that the culture of Crete may have already been like this, but there is no evidence, and there was no historical continuity.

Immanuel Kant’s quote, written in the 18th century AD, which is reproduced in Section 5 of the first chapter, reminds us: “Dare to use your own understanding” is the motto of the Enlightenment.

It is important to observe that the Enlightenment sought to foster self-confidence as the foundation of trust in others and the creation of a universally trusting environment. The Canaanites had learned and integrated this into their culture, at least 3,000 years earlier, as a result of the experience of sailing far away.

I will reproduce a paragraph from a small history book on the Phoenicians, written by M’Hamed Hassine Fantar, director of the Center for the Study of Phoenician Antiquity at the National Heritage Institute of Tunisia:

… it is worth adding that, among the cultural anthropology elements that the Mediterranean owes to the Phoenicians, is the discovery, or rediscovery, of the individual who, responsible for their own destiny, rises as such and claims their right to participate in the management of the community to which they belong…

I dare to suggest a change in this sentence: in the second line of the first paragraph, where it says: Mediterranean, I think the fairest thing would be to write human species, as it is in that time and place in history when, for the first time and collectively, people recognized themselves as independent and interdependent beings. Surely, among the architects and priests of Egypt and Mesopotamia—and in other places in the world at different times—there were special individuals who had this perception, but they were isolated and could hardly communicate it without risking ostracism or punishment.

Phoenician society and culture consisted of several maritime cities that, although geographically very close, governed themselves independently of each other. This helped the overall political stability, the day-to-day governance, and the continuous cultural and economic development without too many disturbances.

Historiography explains that over many centuries, there were some coups in certain cities to take the throne, and also some periods of enmity between cities, but never wars or confrontations between them; they shared culture and a way of life, and competed in technological advancements and discovering new locations for their colonies, but they were always united by the common identity of being Canaanites.

On one occasion, all the Phoenician cities were under the tutelage of the Pharaoh of Egypt. He wanted to launch a punitive action against the populations of the Mediterranean coast to the west and asked the Phoenicians to lend their fleet. They firmly refused, as this incursion could reach the territory of Carthage, Canaanites like them, and without their support, the Pharaoh had to abandon the plan.

Another key contribution of the Canaanites throughout their long history is their wonderful and admirable ability to relate to other societies without imposing themselves and without abusing them, in any condition or framework, with the aim of establishing and maintaining economic exchange relationships.

The base of their business was the search for and exploitation of metal deposits, but they expanded it into a magnificent civilizing work, exchanging goods and spreading agricultural, livestock, ceramic, textile, and metallurgical techniques that had been common in Mesopotamia and Egypt for many centuries.

A story from Herodotus perfectly explains the temperament that enabled them to be well received and establish themselves in many places with different cultures and levels of development:

… the Carthaginians tell the following story: in Libya—that is, in Africa—beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), there are certain inhabited places. When they arrive at this location, they unload their goods, leave them on the beach and then return to their ships and signal with smoke. When the natives see the smoke, they approach the beach and, without wasting time, leave gold as payment for the goods, then step back a little distance from the spot. The Carthaginians then disembark and examine the gold; if they believe it to be a fair price for the goods, they take it and leave. However, if they deem it unfair, they re-board their ships and wait. The natives then, generally, come closer and add more gold until they are satisfied. Neither party lacks fairness, for neither do the Carthaginians take the gold until, in their judgment, it matches the value of the goods, nor do the natives take the goods before the traders have taken the gold.

A few considerations regarding these ways of acting: Phoenician traders ran two risks: the first was being anchored, openly carrying valuable goods aboard in a geography they knew little, if anything, about. The second risk was leaving the goods on the beach, without any guarantee that the invitation to trade would be understood, and the items could be lost.

But, in their difficult history as survivors, they had learned that making friends required taking risks, and they made many. Today, a client is called a friend; they treated strangers first as friends, because their initial gesture was one of trust; then, as clients, offering modernity in the form of goods and new techniques in exchange for raw materials, and later, also as partners, in a progressive sequence that should be considered exemplary.

Always amicably, peacefully, despite being enormously powerful economically, as they possessed the largest fleet in the Mediterranean and vast wealth. Although they were demographically small, they could have hired mercenaries to fight and impose themselves on the people where they established colonies, but they never did, practicing “win-win” relations that lasted more than 1,000 years in many places.

As a key detail of their basic attitude: when, in 700 BC, the government of the Phoenician city of Tyre decided to establish the colony of Carthage in present-day Tunisia, the first thing they did was agree to and contract with the locals to lease a large territory to build it.

That very special character of the Canaanites, which we could call constructive pacifism, gradually changed in Carthage until it became a military power, first confronting the Greeks who pirated them, and then engaging in a life-or-death struggle against Rome. It is clear that the birth of Canaanite “militarism” was to protect themselves from the Greeks and Romans, and not to impose dominance in their colonial relations.

The military confrontation between Carthage and Rome is known as the Punic Wars, which ended with the destruction of the former by the latter. The crossing of the Alps by the Carthaginian army with its elephants, and its victories over the Roman legions, are very well-known episodes. The rise of Rome, or rather, the recognition of its insatiable appetite and its expansionist and annihilatory methods—new in history—made the Canaanites realize that either they would defeat the warlike Roman Empire, or it would destroy one city, one colony, and their millennia-old way of life after another. They decided to fight to defend themselves and lost.

The destruction of Carthage deserves to be considered the turning point with the most negative impact in history, as in the struggle between good and evil, it represented the victory of the latter over the former. I do not find it absurd to compare it to the idea of Nazism winning World War II.

Looking back, one of the great mistakes in history was when the Carthaginian Canaanite, Hannibal, after defeating the Roman legions in three battles in Italy, did not enter the city of Rome to destroy it, dismantling the foundations of that corrupt, supremacist, violent, and genocidal subculture of which we are heirs.

The centuries-long life of Carthage, whose society was known as Punic (another name for the Canaanites, based on the purple dye they alone knew how to make), was fruitful for them and for the societies in northern Africa with which they interacted, especially spreading agricultural culture to the Atlas Mountains, where one can still find a farming tool: the Punic plow, different from the Roman one, and monumental olive trees with trunks 7 meters in diameter and heights of 15 meters.

By sailing so far, the Canaanites encountered a peaceful world with which to trade and exchange. We must imagine an ancient world along the Mediterranean and Atlantic coasts, which was essentially empathetic and tribal; without this condition, they would not have been able to trade, much less establish colonies practically everywhere they arrived, considering they never went protected by armed people.

That very particular attitude of the Canaanites when traveling the world was a sign of their cultural identity, which endured much longer in time, and today, in many countries, there are Lebanese communities that have the same attitude and similar behaviour as their Phoenician ancestors from over 2,000 and 3,000 years ago: trading in peace. Today, in Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and many other countries—both rich and poor—there are Lebanese who thrive and help others prosper. It must be acknowledged that they are an absolute exception, and the Lebanese neighbourhoods in African cities, whether you like it or not, are surprising, as there are no other popular, commercial neighbourhoods with white populations.

In many episodes, they have had to live through difficult situations, such as colonial periods and the resulting wars, and they have always had an attitude that has earned them the respect of the combatants. It is recognized that they always provided moral support to independence movements, acting as mediators when possible.

This presence in current territories considered hostile or at least insecure for the rest of the white populations began in the mid-19th century, and now an estimated 14 million Lebanese are registered in different countries, with another 15 million unregistered.

Meanwhile, in Lebanon, their land of origin, the conditions for continuing to live there are increasingly difficult, almost impossible. This has been the unfortunate condition that history has dealt to this exemplary culture and society over its 3,700 years of documented history: being violently expelled by aggressive societies full of problems, with the written testimonies of their culture disappearing. While they have always been well received, valued, and treated amicably by those distant societies where they have settled.

Had we followed the Canaanite way of life as a model, we could now have a peaceful and prosperous world where justice, freedom, and well-being would not be something desperately sought, but rather the daily bread. If the values, principles, and strategies of the Canaanites were taught in the faculties of economics and political science, the world would be much better, and there would be no wars, no desperate migrations, nor climate changes. Their peaceful, fruitful, and exemplary history should be the subject of attention, study, and reflection.

The historical example of the Canaanites should lead us to conclude that the insecure present we must live through is the result of an unfortunate drift in the evolution of history, with protagonists, dates, and data. Being rigorous with everything we understand as good and bad, and what progress and decay mean, we must recognize that the Canaanites, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Punics, Lebanese, or whatever we want to call them, deserve to be recognized, more than any other society in history, as the bearers of those values, characters, criteria, attitudes, and behaviours that advance individual personality, culture, society, and economy. They deserve to be recognized as the first great “civilizers” in history, yet they are virtually ignored.

The discovery of the ivory comb in Canaanite language from 1,700 BC, and the phrase by St. Augustine in the 6th century AD about the Canaanite identity of the people in his diocese in present-day Tunisia, define a temporal continuity so long that it is a historic clue more than sufficient to encourage further knowledge of that culture and society.

Regarding the satisfaction of the four genetic needs, it can be said that the Canaanites, despite living in different cities and territories, strongly maintained their national ties; they also established friendly and enduring relationships with everyone they encountered in their travels. It is not difficult to imagine what it must have felt like to arrive at a distant place, where the people recognize you and expect something from your return; we cannot find a society with this need more fully satisfied, neither in their time, nor after, nor now.

We know little about that society and culture, but we do know that they always wore a piece of clothing dyed in purple—this dye that only they knew how to produce—which, due to its high cost, was worn only by the very rich and important. They displayed it daily in the places they arrived during their travels, and obviously, they did not go unnoticed: a bright, exceptional colour associated with luxury, worn by those who wanted to establish relationships with you. A commercial trick that should be considered brilliant.

Also, the need for recognition found reinforcement on board their vulnerable ships, where, under many circumstances, they had to feel equal. The most important factor of recognition became the atmosphere of equality created by the dynamic of relationships among the sailors, as they would leave port with a hierarchy, but after many months of sailing, the man who had embarked as an assistant could have become the leader of the group upon return due to having successfully dealt with extreme situations and perhaps the loss of adventure companions.

Regarding freedom, they can be said to have been its discoverers and pioneers; they achieved an economic well-being far above any other people of the time, as it could be said that practically all of them were wealthy. In relation to security, this need was the most poorly met, replaced by an adventurous spirit that led them, while traveling, to always live in danger. Fearless, they were always seeking maritime adventures and encounters with unpredictable human groups, and we must conclude that in this, they felt individually fulfilled, as a seafaring group, and as a society.

If we compare the thoughts and feelings of the Canaanites with those prevailing in neighbouring Egypt and the cities of Mesopotamia during the same era, we must conclude that they lived in a different reality: modern, agile, plastic, fruitful, peaceful, and durable—an extraordinary case in the history of humanity. It must be observed that the Humanists, Renaissance figures, and Enlightenment thinkers did not have the opportunity to learn about the contributions of Canaanite society, and their reference was only Greece.

A cultural aberration, the greatest aberration widely spread and shared, is the firm and intimate belief that war is inherent to the human species, when the more than 1,000 years of solid and rich Phoenician existence demonstrate the opposite. The emotional and sentimental convictions that lead to war are potential supremacies and the corruption of governance, two characteristics that belong to the dark side of both moral thought and political action, and that can only be accurately defined by terms from clinical psychiatry and the Penal Code.

History clearly demonstrates— to anyone not blinded by supremacy—that it is the behaviour of the one with more power—of any kind—that imposes the rules of the game.

Greece, the Republic of Athens

There are thousands of writings of great competence about Ancient Greece. I want to highlight different aspects of that society, which allow for a few observations related to the four needs theorized in the first chapter of this chronicle.

The ancient Greeks recognized that they owed much to the Canaanites in many of the basic elements of their culture, starting with writing; and also their economic model, based on the establishment of colonies in various places in the Mediterranean, literally copying the Phoenician system of relations with the natives and the economic system of manufacturing all that could be exchanged or sold.

Another text by the Tunisian M’Hamed Hassine Fantar, referenced earlier, says:

After having known them and seen them triumph – the Phoenicians – the Greeks wanted to take them as an example and follow their path. And in this way, they discovered the greatness of the free individual and the advantages of feeling solidarity within the community.

That Canaanite innovation in how to be in the world as individual people and at the same time as a group, which had nothing to do with either Egyptian or Mesopotamian models, penetrated the mentality of the Greeks, who were their northern neighbours.

Unfortunately, however, they did not influence all the Greeks, as Sparta, also Greek-speaking, with similar myths, gods, and writing, and allied with Athens in the fight to defend itself from the Persian Empire, chose the path of supremacism, autocracy, and extreme violence. Sparta had opted for a way of life based on the reduction of the native population to slavery, and their society had nothing to do with the Athenians, who rejected tyranny.

It was among the Athenians that the individual freedom discovered and experienced by the Canaanites found the ideal environment to evolve and become the fundamental element in the development of an innovative governance strategy: democracy, the system that, despite all its shortcomings in practice, inspires the most benign, secure, and efficient governance systems today.

The ancient Greeks who formed the city of Athens and its surroundings were a group of tribes settled in a mountainous, dry region with little arable land; it is estimated that during the Republic era, there were about 40,000 men with political rights, meaning the total population was around 150,000, including slaves. They began to imitate the Phoenicians, establishing colonies throughout the Mediterranean, though not without a prior period of piracy, which is why the Phoenicians always kept a prudent distance from them.

The ancient Greeks had clearly understood that an autocrat can be good, just, and even admirable, but that autocracy as a system inevitably generates abuses of power, corruption, and decadence; they wanted to find a system of government that would avoid hereditary monarchy and, suspicious of any form of power, which they believed always leads to excess, they embarked on a search to perfect their system of governance.

In the process of assuming the sense of individual freedom under Phoenician influence, they added their own sense of group freedom in the face of any tyranny and abuse of governance, eventually inventing the Republic. In just a few generations of free-thinking citizens, they created, though tragically short-lived, the greatest wave of intellectual prosperity and cultural production in history.

The Phoenicians did not evolve in this direction, probably because their system of governance was so functional that it did not require changes. Each Phoenician city was governed by a hereditary monarchy with little political power and an assembly of elders from the wealthiest families, who governed through a simple administration, in a framework where almost all citizens were well-off—either as navigators, industrialists, or craftsmen—and felt adequately represented in the council of elders. The small demographic and territorial dimensions of each Phoenician city likely provided social and political stability in a governance system we could liken to a tribal structure.

For the Greeks, the precursors of democracy, the challenge was to acquire material well-being and security, without renouncing freedom and without breaking traditional bonds, both as a society and individually, that is, without harming the basic elements of recognition.

They achieved this through a series of legislative changes, all carried out with two ambitious principles: never accepting an autocratic system of government and continually building elements of concord and social peace among themselves.

The search for social progress developed dialectically in the public square, the Agora, a physical and central place in the city where freedom of expression was sacred in the literal sense of the word. The same as in tribal societies, since those generations of Greeks were trying to find a system of governance that would be the continuation of the tribal system, but on a national scale.

One must attribute to that admirable culture the idea and concept of human progress; before, obviously, there could be progress in different fields: the king could progress, or the politics of a responsible king, or the priests, or the living standards of peasants or craftsmen, but there was no idea or perspective of human progress, which arrived propelled by the exercise of freedom, broadening the view and rationally understanding that true progress must necessarily include all individuals who make up society. This can be considered Greece’s great contribution to civilization; there are others.

For a principle of freedom opposed to tyranny, they never accepted hereditary monarchy, and when faced with specific difficulties, they had to imagine other solutions. The evolutionary history of these solutions has specific names: Draco, Solon, and Cleisthenes, the three heads of government who introduced the most important legislative changes, culminating in the Democratic Republic of Athens, which spread to other nearby Greek cities.

These three political reformers contributed to civilization: the first brought law, the second justice, and the third, as a culmination, democracy. The chronological order of the reforms makes sense.

Of them, and of the people around them, the expert in Greek literature, the Austrian Albin Lesky, in his book The Greek Tragedy, explains that this admirable and accelerated pursuit of “human progress” came when:

…the best men of noble and renowned lineages, in a preeminent and recognized position, put all their knowledge and power at the service of the community. It is one of those happy times in the history of peoples when the will of the individual is aware that it is part of a whole.

In 624 BC, Draco, the first of the great reformers and wrongly labelled as radical in popular language – “a draconian solution” – proposed improvements in the system of protection for individuals; in fact, he introduced written law as a replacement for the justice exercised by the autocrat of the time.

This was not a complete innovation in history, since we must recall the Code of Hammurabi from thousands of years before in Sumer, Mesopotamia; however, Draco’s legislation was of a higher level because it institutionalized the exercise of justice and, most importantly, because of its content.

Draco’s laws determined that the state had the monopoly on violence between individuals, including slaves, punishing “an eye for an eye,” torture, and “witch hunts.” When they were approved, they faced much opposition for being too severe, and a few decades later, Cleisthenes, another key reformer, softened them. It is important to understand that an initial severity had to be imposed to change customs that, some time later, were considered barbaric.

Twenty-five years later, another political leader, Solon, became the second great reformer when a serious social crisis threatened internal peace, due to the rise in grain prices from exports, causing hunger. His personal merit was making the rich people of Athens—he himself being one of them—understand that if they wanted to stay rich and alive, the poor with whom they shared territory and culture should not suffer from hunger or cold, meaning there should be no poverty. By legislating, he limited grain exports to lower its price so everyone could buy it, and promoted the planting of olive trees in mountain areas, which could not be cultivated with cereals, legumes, or vegetables.

These measures brought social peace and also great improvements in the economy, as the increase in olive oil production was complemented by the production of ceramic amphorae to package and export it. Soon, the ceramics business became the country’s first industry, with hundreds of workshops. In short, dialogue and later agreement helped avoid greater harm and led to prosperity.

It was in these pottery workshops where the decoration of amphorae, vases, plates, etc., for the first time in history surpassed the frontal law mentioned in Chapter VII dedicated to aesthetics.

Herodotus explains that once the constitutional reform was approved, Solon had so little confidence that it would be fulfilled and that he would be held accountable, that he decided to leave for several years to neighbouring Lydia. His fear was unfounded, and he was recognized as one of the seven sages.

A few years later, Cleisthenes, the third great reformer, proposed that the tribes play a subordinate role in favour of universal personal voting—not for women or slaves. Until then, as in any tribal society, in the discussions prior to decision-making, everyone could speak, but at the time of voting, only the heads of families would vote.

That intellectual discovery of the Phoenicians, which was the sense and principle of individuality, inseparable from the sense of belonging to the collective, the Greeks translated into personal voting, one of humanity’s great achievements, as socially it is the highest level of recognition—one of the four genetic needs—where a person integrates into society, recognizing it to recognize themselves as part of it, and to protect each other reciprocally.

The famous book The Social Contract, written in 1762 by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the theoretical referents of the Enlightenment and an inspiration for the good ideas of the French Revolution, was not preaching anything other than this, 2,300 years later.

In less than a century, the city of Athens and those around it, evolved from a primitive society—which they themselves recognized as the “dark age”—without breaking with ancestral social forms (the tribe), established a system governed by laws and not by the will of autocrats or oligarchies, with freedom of expression as a guarantee and safeguard.

The evolution of representative bodies led to the separation of powers, where judges were chosen by lottery; a solution that current “democratic” states stubbornly refuse to consider, thus perpetuating the system’s shortcomings.

The Greeks were the “discoverers” of individual voting in the designation of those with power to govern, and thus were its first defenders. But for the designation of judges, they decided that the lottery was the system that guaranteed the most autonomy and impartiality.

The citizens of Athens discovered that, when society protects itself from organized corruption, democracy is the most reliable system because, among other advantages, it allows for the correction of mistakes and the finding of the best solutions to any challenge or problem. It is obvious that when mistakes are made by autocrats, they are hidden and worsened. This is an incontestable historical reality; on the other hand, in a consolidated democracy, when there are mistakes, the structure of the power system first leads to criticism, then a change in criteria and strategies, and if necessary, also of the responsible politicians.

The Greeks were suspicious of any power, and the democratic system is the result of their search and cultural and social evolution in an attempt to establish an efficient governance system that would not stifle freedoms. The idea of democracy is a cultural product, but unlike other forms of governance, it serves the principle of individuality, which proclaims the equality of rights and duties for all people, and applies it to governance through simple arithmetic: justice and rationality.

For us, 2,500 years later, abducted by ancient myths, the seduction of the alpha male, primal feelings of separateness, and a sickly tolerance for corruption, it still remains very difficult to accept and adopt it as an unquestionable system for good governance.

In Athens, the explosion of the reforms mentioned brought about the Republic, the period of plenitude where everything we know is exemplary, both in governance and in social and intellectual progress, in cultural creativity, in economic growth, and in the capacity for self-criticism.

We must remind ourselves that it was exemplary also in the recognition of its defects and weaknesses, such as the idea that having an army overseas to defend economic interests is a real danger for democracy, as the dynamics of a distant war cloud the process of making correct decisions.

There were also clear signs of important changes, capable of evolving towards a fully free, just, and prosperous society; from the republican period, we have written testimonies—letters between friends—complaining that one of them noticed that in the streets of Athens, there was no way to distinguish a slave from a free man, as they all had the same appearance and behaviour.

From those Greeks, we have inherited the best tragic literature in history, where the role of many female protagonists should make us see that their society was evolving very quickly towards the recognition of women’s capabilities; their reading reveals the acknowledgment of a certain moral and ethical superiority of women, endowed with exemplary, strong, and brave characters, only comparable to those of heroes, always men.

Here is a text written during the Republic:

But now, separated from my home, I am nothing. Often, considering the nature of women, I realize that we are nothing. As girls, we live in our parents’ house, the sweetest life for any mortal, for the innocence of childhood is always happy. But when we reach puberty and become aware, we are expelled to be sold far from our ancestral gods and our parents, some to foreigners, others to barbarians, some to sad homes, others to violent ones. And yet, once the first night unites us with our husbands, we must praise them and believe that everything is well.

The text could be from a diary entry or a letter to a friend, but it is a fragment from the play Tereus by Sophocles, recited before a large audience; a denunciatory speech and another example of the rapid evolution of that society. It is highly probable that among the audience, there were fathers who were in negotiations with another father to sell him their daughter.

There are Greek plays that question slavery and even the existence of gods. Euripides, the most transgressive of the surviving authors, writes in his play Io:

… because the only thing the slave suffers is their condition. Apart from that, an intelligent slave is no worse than a free man.

In another play, The Trojans, he writes:

Oh Jupiter! You who govern the earth, whoever you are, impenetrable to our understanding, it may be a law of nature, or it may be an invention of mortals, I venerate you.

Considering that it is in poetry, theatre, music, and painting that the advances of sensitivities, feelings, and thoughts of a society are expressed, the Republic of Athens was making great strides toward being exemplary in everything. We are talking about a period of just over a century. Its small population exhibited the highest level of creativity in history, both in quantity and quality, and we know that of the great writers, at least three-quarters of their works have been lost; and also that some of the great tragedians we read today had placed second or third in annual competitions, behind other authors whose works have disappeared and we only know their names—some we don’t even know that.

It is important to consider that literary works were presented in public contests, performed on many occasions, and witnessed by nearly the entire Greek citizenry, including those from distant colonies. Before the Greeks, there is no evidence that any culture practiced “the game of representing reality,” which is how we can define theater. They were its inventors, and in just a few generations, they wrote and performed works of great quality, at the highest literary, poetic, and moral level, which, as a whole, have not yet been surpassed.

Primarily tragedies and comedies, and also poetry, held a privileged place in the attention of the citizenry that filled the theatres to overflowing, where the ideas presented, even if scandalous to some, were never censored, nor were their authors punished or marginalized.

The Greeks could talk about everything and reconsider everything, even the very existence of gods, as long as it was expressed in cultured ways; it is known that physical aggression against temples and altars was harshly punished. They had a high sense of irony but did not tolerate crude behaviour or language, except in the cultic, provocative dialogues of the comedic plays. The tragic genre was deeply felt and participated in by all citizens, in the noble and wise desire to analyse human characters and behaviour in extreme situations.

The creativity of Ancient Greece in literature, the visual arts—they invented a new architectural style and left behind the law of frontality—philosophy, schools of thought, and precursory science studies should be considered the richest and most prolific in all of human history. And considering their small population and short time frame, it is a miracle of history—the “miracle of history.”

A couple of details that can illustrate the exquisite quality of that culture are two intuitions that seem more of divine inspiration than human. The first is the myth of Prometheus, which gives rise to this Chronicle. Greek mythology explains that all “practical inventions” were given to us by the various gods and goddesses of Olympus: metalworking, agriculture, animal domestication, pottery, navigation, the art of weaving, etc. And nowhere in that literature do we find shadows over these divine gifts, except for Zeus’s angry reaction against Prometheus when he gave humanity fire. Today we know that the inability to protect ourselves from fire’s effects can lead to ruin, but there is nothing that explains how those ancient sages obtained the idea.

Another intuition is the existence of the atom as the fundamental unit of matter, a brilliant idea that modern science corroborated almost 2,000 years later.

It is interesting to explore the most decisive factors that led to that grand and admirable development in cultural, social, and political production, as well as in free thought and governance capability. There are some elements that we will never know, such as the psychological effect on each individual and on society as a whole of the collective magical ceremonies—such as the Eleusinian Mysteries—where all citizens had access: men, women, foreigners, and slaves, with the sole condition of understanding the Greek language. We will never know what happened in those sessions, as what occurred had to be kept secret, and no one ever explained it. It seems certain that drinks were consumed and fumes and vapours inhaled, singing and dancing took place, and the sum of these activities led to extrasensory experiences, perhaps close to perceptions of death.

Several approaches to the contents of these ceremonies have been written, with the most relevant being those by Robert Gordon Wasson published in the mid-20th century. Despite the rigor of his research, they never go beyond assumptions, as the experience was kept secret. It can be speculated that the effects of the rituals on each person were to adopt a wise attitude toward the idea of death and remain calm at the time of dying. The Eleusinian Mysteries remain a mystery.

Another Greek ritual was the Oracle of Delphi, where the most relevant response was: Know thyself.

While it is certain that these ceremonies had a huge influence on shaping their character and personality, we cannot conclude that they were the determinants of their political evolution, as the Spartans also attended Eleusis and Delphi but were characterized by violence, anti-democratic ideals, and a lack of cultural creativity.

It can be said that the psychological effects of magical rituals—most of them originating in Mesopotamia with local variations—were not the determining factors in their political and social evolution. However, it can also be said that without them, the history of the Greeks would not have been the same in relevant aspects, such as the decision to confront the immense Persian Empire, which already dominated the entire vast region, including Lydia, Phoenicia, and Egypt. Only they, with almost no professional army, decided that it was better to die than live under tyranny. They went to war and, against all odds, they won. That victory against the largest army of the time gave them confidence in their most important convictions, confirming that freedom is the most precious good. If they had accepted becoming another Persian colony—Persians were benevolent colonizers, according to Herodotus—they would have preserved well-being and security but would have lost many of their elements of recognition and, above all, lost their precious freedom.

Another important element in shaping the Greek character is that they believed in a host of gods and goddesses to whom they showed great respect. However, everything attributed to the deities—words, thoughts, wills, actions, and ideas—was always the invention of a person with literary ability, without any religious authority. Nor did those in charge of cults have the authority to generate or interpret doctrine. And it was Homer, Hesiod, the great tragedians Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the comedian Aristophanes, and others, all normal men and some women, who, apart from their literary abilities, gave voice to the doctrines attributed to the gods.

The intellectuals freely gave voice to the gods in a way that they interpreted as tendencies of their society and as purification of undesirable ancient practices—such as human sacrifices. Here also fits the wise verse of Antonio Machado: Traveler, there is no path, the path is made by walking.

There was no coercive capacity in all the wills expressed by the gods, which contrasts with the fact that, individually and collectively, the Greeks always had a sense of transcendence that, except for the Spartans, is not found in any of their neighbouring societies.

One unique aspect of Greek culture is that in all theatrical representations, when there is a murder, suicide, ceremonial sacrifice, or fight to the death, and there are many in their tragedies, the spectator never witnesses the scene of violence. Instead, they learn about it from an actor or a chorus member who enters the scene and recounts it. This sensitivity is light years away from that of the Roman Empire, with the circus as the highest manifestation of brutality, and also very distant from our own, where cinemas, televisions, and phones are full of explicit violence, almost as a cult offering. In this regard, which is relevant, we are much closer to the barbaric and cruel Romans and far from the Athenian cults.

Now, we don’t attend real acts of violence, but we do witness virtual ones. Obviously, there is a difference, but not as much in the educational aspect and the moral meaning we give to their practice.

And we should not imagine that the Ancient Greeks had a cowardly morality, much less a double morality; in athletic and warrior games, and there were many of them everywhere, they gave aesthetic worship to nudity, both of men and women, considering it the natural state. They were suspicious of those societies that denied or prohibited it. In this regard, we are still halfway through and full of confusion.

Another aspect is festive humour, clearly visible in some lines of the comic poet Eubulus, who sketches a scenario that could be the same for us on some occasions:

I prepare three craters—large wine cups—for those who are moderate; the first is for health, and it is the first one they drink. The second is for love and pleasure, and the third for sleep; once they drink this, those who have good judgment go home. The fourth crater can no longer be called ours, but of hybris—excess. The fifth is for revelry. The sixth is for the procession of drunks, and the seventh for the funeral eye. The eighth is for the tribunals, the ninth for bile, and the tenth for madness and destroying all the furniture.

Regarding violence, the Greeks accepted it as a last resort to defend themselves against barbarian peoples, but not as a system to settle internal conflicts. Episodes of violence between groups or factions were few, although there were social classes, as well as supporters of oligarchic governments and supporters of democratic governments.

All their great effort, which has been a contribution and remains a legacy for us, was aimed at finding political strategies to govern efficiently and without internal strife. The democratic system is nothing other than the application of common sense to the challenges of various orders posed by the need for governance. Their spirit was the irreducible vocation for freedom and rejection of tyranny, and their ultimate conclusion was the intolerance of political corruption.

The ancient Greeks were not like the Phoenicians, who avoided militarism and war until the threats from the emerging Roman Empire forced them to change their mindset. The Greeks saw themselves as warriors, but not for conquest, rather for defence. With this principle, they developed great military capabilities, especially at sea, and the Greek navy became the cornerstone of Athens’ hegemony, protecting its colonies, merchant ships, and allied cities.

In fact, the military activity of the fleet led to their downfall. After winning the war against their neighbours, the Spartans, they launched an expedition to Sicily, where there were many Greek colonies and interests. There, a series of bad decisions, seemingly caused by corruption among the commanders, led to the loss of the fleet. The five commanders who led it were tried and executed upon returning to Athens. Socrates voted against the sentence.

It was then that Sparta resumed the war and won. Shortly afterward, weakened Athens could not stop the expansionism of its northern neighbours, the Macedonians, ruled by King Philip and his son Alexander, who would soon be recognized as the Great.

Looking at the history of Greece, which evolved into the Athenian Republic, I believe the most relevant factor for its progress was the proper understanding of the importance of the four basic human needs and their criteria for prioritization and weighting.

They knew they had to fight for liberty—internally as freedom of expression, and externally with arms—and they were able to grant themselves abundant recognition, which resulted in a high level of material well-being and, considering the barbaric world around them, also a high level of security. Many speeches in the Assembly and reflections written by different figures suggest that this consciousness was very much alive.

They were able to defend themselves successfully against the Persian Empire, but eventually, they succumbed militarily first to Sparta, then to Macedonia, and finally to the Roman Empire. In fact, the strange thing is not that they succumbed, but that they were able to be what they were for such a considerable period in history.

Despite their relatively short duration and small population, and despite their physical destruction, it was the most fundamental stage in Culture with a capital “C.” Two or three thousand years later, any idea or principle of progress is still oriented by the brilliance of their legacy.

To conclude this chapter, I cannot resist repeating that, even today, many writings and screens express views about Phoenicia and Greece that are inexplicable. Concerning Phoenicia, in some places, its members are generically attributed objectionable behaviours, such as being thieves—a claim justified only by a passage in an ancient novelistic narrative written by a notable competitor of the Phoenicians, such as Homer in the Odyssey. And regarding the Athenian Republic, the most common criticisms are that they had slaves and that women were not free.

In relation to Greece, it should be understood that they did not aim to give lessons to anyone, much less to the moralists of 2,500 years later. The tendency to compare them with our society regarding human rights and public morality is misplaced, as we owe them the most fruitful concepts and ideas in the history of humanity.

The satisfaction of the four basic needs, modulating well-being and security, and prioritizing freedom and recognition, provided them with all the capabilities for self-realization and progress. Unfortunately, now, 2,500 years later, we are still unable to apply this formula, and due to intellectual laziness and various dependencies, we absurdly cling to useless myths, medieval taboos, and self-destructive customs.

They should serve as observatories for experimentation to acquire the ability to govern ourselves well, as they were masters in this. Today, with all the great intellectual, social, economic, and scientific advances we proudly display, we still fail in this regard. And yet, in a strange outburst of supremacism regarding the past, we declare their teachings exhausted, asserting emphatically and alternately that we are fully free and democratic societies.

Just now, when, after two thousand years of suffering, we are playing with our health and lives.

XIII
The Triumph of Barbarian Societies

The Hellenistic Period

In 318 BC, with the conquest of Athens by Macedonia, its northern neighbours led by King Philip, the father of Alexander the Great, began a special period that lasted 300 years, known as Hellenism. This vast region spanned from India to Egypt, Mesopotamia, modern-day Turkey, Greece, and Bulgaria, where the great king dreamed of implanting Greek cultural values but with hereditary monarchical governments.

Pierre Levéque, in his book The Hellenistic World, writes: Athens became a university city, a reserve of the past, which continued to fascinate its neighbours, who loved everything about it, except for democracy. Having lost their freedoms, that exceptional laboratory of ideas in ethics, politics, aesthetics, and science nearly died, staying active in philosophy and science in Alexandria, Pergamon, and other smaller cities.

Macedonia was a hereditary monarchy, and its king, Philip, was a warrior in love with Greece, to the point that he had hired the Greek philosopher Aristotle as his son Alexander’s tutor. Upon his father’s death, at 19, Alexander inherited the throne. It is hard to understand what the admiration father and son had for Greece consisted of, for they loved its cultural output while detesting its system of government; a complete contradiction, as one cannot exist without the other, and in this contradiction, they revealed themselves to be barbarians.

The Macedonians, like the Greeks, had the Persian Empire as a powerful neighbour and felt its perpetual threat, materialized in two invasions within a few years, both frustrated by the courage of the Greeks. Once Alexander was on the throne, he decided to carry out what his father had long been preparing: to unite the conquered Greeks in a common cause they would greatly appreciate—war against Persia. Alexander sought to create the largest empire ever known, one that would also be the most cultured, and after his death, his successors, all Macedonian generals from his army, divided up the vast territory and, with more or less success, continued his dream.

Historiography exalts Alexander the Great’s warrior virtues, but we must also see him as a great diplomat. In one episode, without violence, only with cunning and political wisdom, he managed to be recognized as the king of Egypt, i.e., as a god and pharaoh, later founding the new city of Alexandria to make it the capital of his empire. Before reaching Egypt, he had destroyed the Phoenician city of Tyre as a warning.

The Hellenistic period extends from these events until Egypt’s conquest by the Roman Empire, 300 years later, and presents a set of characteristics that make it more than notable. It is a time when aspects of Classical Greek culture, such as philosophy and science, persist and grow, but also many features of ancient empires, i.e., without democracy, in a mix of governance forms that, in many places, were extraordinarily fertile in cultural advancements, but also violent.

It is in this period that science becomes independent from philosophy and begins its development, which would be cut short by the rise of Christianity, only to timidly resurge with Humanism in the mid-15th century and, by the 20th century, reach almost all societies on the planet.

The 300 years of Hellenism are also marked by the existence of many armies with large and sophisticated war machines battling to conquer neighbouring states, but also by long periods of peace and great creativity, especially in architecture following the Greek model. A devotion to Classical Greek culture was also born: the first great libraries and a passion for collecting books and art pieces produced by Greek culture became trends of the period. Strangely, despite its intrinsic interest, they did not value Egyptian culture.
Also, the discovery of the placidity of the countryside by wealthy urbanites is a significant feature of this golden era for culture, which in some aspects could be compared to the English Victorian era and also to many current societies.

The city of Alexandria was the focal point, with its marvellous lighthouse, monumental street festivals that lasted days, gatherings at gyms, intellectual discussions, philosophical schools, and pure research in mathematics, physics, and astronomy—fruits of the encounter between the Greek spirit and ancient Mesopotamian and Egyptian wisdom. It was the largest city in the world at the time.

It was in Alexandria, and also in other cities like Pergamon and Rhodes, that a world was developed most similar to the present, but with slaves. This world was made up of the Macedonian families of Alexander the Great’s generals, privileged elites of public administrators, intellectuals, artists, and Greek merchants who formed the urban elites, as well as Egyptian peasants and many slaves from different origins, who allowed for the luxuries.

These societies, in some smaller cities, had adopted systems of governance similar to the Athenian Republic, and they gradually prospered on the path from barbarism to modern society until the Roman Empire, once Carthage was destroyed, was left free to express its desire for absolute dominion, sometimes initially using diplomacy but always ending with extreme violence. The hereditary monarchy implemented by Julius Caesar replaced the powers of the Roman Senate, and his successor Augustus, after defeating Cleopatra, the last Pharaoh, imposed Roman law throughout the Mediterranean.
And thus, all the lights that the Phoenicians and Greeks had ignited were extinguished, and although Hellenism was neither republican nor democratic, it continued in aesthetics, philosophy, technique, and science.

The Roman Empire

Many books and numerous audiovisual productions express admiration for the Roman Empire and its achievements, and it is common to claim that Western societies are its cultural heirs. I do not agree with the admiration, but I do agree with the heritage.

Modern-day Lebanese people are descendants of the Canaanites and are heirs to their behaviour in migration countries. Similarly, the modern Hebrews are descendants and heirs of the followers of the Bible, while modern Egyptians are indeed descendants of the ancient ones, but they are not their cultural heirs. The modern Greeks are descendants of the ancient Greeks, but they are no more cultural heirs than I am, or anyone else living in any other part of the world.

And the same goes for the Romans, as only the Italians can consider themselves descendants, while almost all of humanity today is their heir, if not absolutely all societies, the vast majority in significant aspects.

Obviously, violent behaviours had always existed, but the Roman Empire institutionalized them, exhibiting them as an official doctrine throughout the centuries of its existence.

Various authors have tried to explain this sinister character with two arguments: the first is that its founders, the twin brothers Romulus and Remus, were sons of Mars, the god of war; and the second is that one of them, believing that a strong country should have an absolute king, killed the other. A very bad beginning, especially when used as an excuse to justify cruelty.

In architecture, they built admirable works, improving the technique for large infrastructures, but their contribution to the progress of science and construction techniques, despite valuing the architect Vitruvius and others, should be considered very modest, given the many centuries of their dominance, the size of their economy, and the large number of public works undertaken. Roman architects and engineers, despite having the marvellous Lighthouse of Alexandria right in front of them, never dared to build something similar, despite it being a useful infrastructure that bestowed prestige.
The admirable dome of the Pantheon in the city of Rome, almost 2,000 years old, is a unique and magnificent construction, the result of Emperor Hadrian’s ambition, evidenced in the smaller domes he had built in his home as preliminary experiments.
The innovation lies in its design, but the key point is that the only material used in its construction is the millennia-old lime mortar, a mixture of this mineral obtained by heating limestone, water, and an aggregate extracted from Mount Vesuvius, known as pozzolana.
It’s worth noting that Emperor Hadrian’s innovation didn’t have many followers; now, 2,000 years later, it fascinates, but we don’t consider it a construction reference.

It is surprising the great admiration that many people today express for the great achievements of the Roman Empire when, aside from the fact that the architectural works were built with much cruelty based on slaves, their contributions to the state of the art are almost nil, as their famous great works directly drew from what had been established by the ancient Greeks in Alexandria and Greece itself, from where they copied before conquering them.

A balance of so many centuries of such vast power shows that their contribution to the visual arts, literature, theatre, philosophy, and science was very low.

Rome aspired to be like Greece, but it never offered anything significant to humanity’s cultural and social heritage. Obviously, in the economic aspect, they had successes, but when examined closely, except for their size, they never achieved anything significant that the Greeks and Phoenicians hadn’t already achieved before, but without killing, enslaving anyone, or destroying any ethnicity, culture, or language. And in relation to Roman Law, the idea and concept of law are Greek contributions, not Roman ones, even acknowledging the normative development achieved due to the empire’s size and longevity.

Any critical approach is negative when we consider values like justice and ethics, in which the Roman Empire imposed a brutal setback. The decline was huge when compared to wise societies, but also when compared to other great empires from earlier times, with the exception of the Assyrians, who, although not employing systematic cruelty, were quite violent. But neither the Sumerians, Hittites, Persians, nor Egyptians practiced strategies of violence against people as a system of conquest and domination.

The reality of ancient history, while recognizing that many peoples practiced conquest over their neighbours and even distant ones, except for some particular kings known for their cruelty, the systems of occupation and dominance consisted of fully appropriating the wealth of the rulers of the conquered state and collecting the taxes paid by the citizens. But there was no humiliation of the defeated peoples, appropriation of their farmlands, destruction of their identities, or systematic reduction of their population to slavery. In some cases, conquerors even reduced taxes to be well accepted by their new subjects.
Witnesses to this political reality are a few, and all trustworthy, like Herodotus himself, who travelled through Egypt, Phoenicia, and Lydia while these countries were occupied by the Persian Empire. He notes their presence but doesn’t mention complaints about that domination, except against one of the Persian kings: Cambyses, cruel to everyone, including Persians, and cursed by all, even the Persians.

It is astonishing how the script, set design, and acting in the hands of experts can work miracles: the literary mastery of Shakespeare, the cinematic mastery of Mankiewicz, and the interpretative prowess of Marlon Brando turned a cruel character, the Roman Mark Antony, into a likable and admirable hero. But in his résumé, he helped Julius Caesar establish the dictatorship and also ordered the assassination of Cicero.
The murderers of Julius Caesar were not the villains in the film, but they were on the right side of history.

The history of the Roman Empire was based on the ferocious domination of the adversary, as the only political strategy throughout the centuries of its existence. The “Pax Romana” involved the elimination of the identities, social structures, and languages of the invaded and defeated peoples. Not by whim, but with full justification, fascism and Nazism copied its aesthetics and practices of coercion, invasion, and domination.

From today’s perspective, there can be no admiration for their civilizing work, where the spectacle of the circus, their symbol of mass culture, glorified brutality and sadism to the extreme cruelty.

Nor, from the perspective of their contemporaries, was there ever any admiration for them, as they only aroused fear and hatred. The Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks, and Babylonians did inspire admiration, but what the Roman Empire truly sought to inspire was not respect, but terror to achieve total submission, and they succeeded completely throughout their existence.

For the ancient Greeks, the greatest leisure spectacle was the athletic games, and especially the theatre, the great theatre; and any comparison with Rome is offensive and unjust, as it proudly exhibited its barbaric and violent society.

The ancient Romans always behaved like nouveaux riches and uncultured barbarians, admiring the Greek legacy and imitating them in religion, clothing, and lavish buildings. Of course, there were personal exceptions, individuals who have rightfully earned a place in history, but the fair evaluation we can make of the Roman Empire is absolutely negative, not for its lack of cultural production, but for its purpose of limitless domination and its systematic practices of terror and destruction.

The writer, philosopher, and politician Cicero, assassinated by Mark Antony and future Caesar Augustus, dreamed of a Rome similar to the Republic of Athens — the very name of “republic” is an imitation — but his wishes were impossible, because Rome’s way of life was based on the military domination of its sources of prosperity: the colonies, conquered and maintained with violence. This was inherent to Rome, and questioning this model meant questioning Rome itself. There was no possibility of progressing on the path to human progress.

Summarized, the history of the Roman Empire is a continuous tale of terror, abuse, and insecurity that gradually settled within its society, starting with the defeated, and later engulfing the victors themselves: first the lower and middle classes, then the legions of soldiers, and later the merchants and families, including those of the oligarchy. It seems plausible that Christianity first took root among the enslaved, and that enslaved women preached it to their Roman mistresses.

The succession of sociopaths in the imperial family is horrifying, with many stories of cruelty known and documented that, to our eyes, seem to represent normalcy, as these were ancient times; a very mistaken and dangerous perception, which reinforces the belief that the experience of fear and pain is relative: the ancients were primitive, almost animals, and didn’t suffer as we do today.

This more than justifiable moral dereliction was useful in admitting the practice of slavery by the rich, cultured, and Christian Western societies, and it still serves today to relativize the suffering of poor people, children, and women living in faraway places, especially when they have skin colours different from ours.

The fall of the Empire was sudden, after a long period of weakening and decadence; it was enough for the mercenary legions to stop receiving their wages, and all the vast military and trade logistics that maintained the economic drain of the colonies to Rome collapsed. It lost all capacity and power because no one cared about it.
Surely, those who were part of its functional structure mourned it, but once it was overthrown, none of the fragments had enough substance or quality to reorganize and rebuild something to replace it. And so began the long era of ignorance, fanaticism, violence, poverty, disease, and abuse of power, which historiography, very benevolently, calls the middle Ages.

Regarding the satisfaction of the four genetic needs, no Roman enjoyed freedom, because all activities were conditioned by the strict functioning of the imperial system. Certainly, those who possessed the right of citizenship could travel freely across the empire, but always in submission, as any critical expression was poorly received and punished.
Regarding recognition, it must be understood that outside of the city of Rome, the emotions and feelings that should have been evoked among the natives of the conquered tribes and nations had to be fear and hatred. They were identified, but not recognized.

The long existence of the Pax Romana should have generated spaces for coexistence, but they must have been very precarious since the collapse of the imperial system and the disappearance of any continuity organization proves that there was never a minimally structured society. The stories of a few natives and a few slaves who became notable and even free are merely anecdotal, useful for maintaining the inexplicable admiration that still exists for the feats of the Roman Empire.

The imperial system sought the lavish well-being of the Roman elites and the gradual boiling of the pot for those who had citizenship, while the colonized populations and slaves were obligatory victims.

Regarding security, no other powerful society has been so lacking in it: the elites were constantly involved in murderous intrigues, the citizens, always at the mercy of the power dynamics and abuses, could not feel secure, and slaves and the poor, with luck, always lived in constant fear.

The gods worshipped in the Roman Empire were copies, with their names changed, of the gods of ancient Greece. Mars, the Roman god of war, is equivalent to the Greek Ares, with the difference that in Greece, Ares was never loved or venerated by anyone and was considered, besides violent, false and treacherous, only seeking to provoke war between two parties. On Olympus, the goddess Athena had a particular grudge against him, and although she was a woman and he was the god of war, she fought him sword in hand several times and always defeated him.

There was no respect from the ancient Greeks for the god of war, unlike the ancient Romans and even those who, for centuries, considered themselves direct heirs: we, the Europeans.

Even in times of decadence, that constant state of fear throughout the domains of the Empire created the perfect environment for the adoption of a religion that preached that the pains of this life were merits for the next one, the one that follows after death. Christianity became the ideology that provided emotional and sentimental comfort to everyone, starting with slaves and women, the lower classes, the legionaries, the upper classes, noble families, and even the emperor himself, the opportunist Constantine, the founder of Constantinople, who declared Christianity the official religion of the Empire.
Some have attributed the disappearance of the Roman Empire to the influence of Christianity, arguing that the supposed sentiment of compassion invented by the new religion weakened its warrior character.

While the Empire lasted, Christianity was notorious for being a violent destroyer of everything that came before its doctrinal history, whether it was places of worship of the ancient gods or libraries that preserved knowledge from Greek and possibly Phoenician culture. An irreparable disaster and a disgrace, explainable by the fanaticism of a religious militancy based on supremacism, which joined the Empire in order to impose its doctrinal principles by force. In doing so, it betrayed its moral message and introduced confusion, because once Christianity became the official religion of the Empire, the state became the arm of the religion, and despite the evangelical phrase, any failure to God became a failure to Caesar, punished on earth.

The Middle Ages

Since the self-destruction of the Roman Empire, nearly all of Europe lived in conditions similar to those of modern-day “failed states,” with numerous violent efforts to acquire power from any location or situation: a castle overlooking an agricultural area, a river crossing or mountain pass, or a natural port, etc., or a good marriage, with men permanently armed in the service of often disreputable feudal lords.

Total insecurity for farmers, herders, artisans, and merchants, who could not travel with goods without being robbed with impunity by the henchmen of the local lord.
There are documents from the early 11th century that describe a terrifying social landscape, where the henchmen of small local and regional tyrants robbed everyone in broad daylight, without even attempting to hide. After so many centuries of iron-fisted domination by the Roman Empire, the entire population was left deeply sick, always terrified of any power.

The Christian hierarchy began to occupy spaces of symbolic power, and in the absence of political, economic, or military powers, it positioned itself as the arbiter, first morally and then politically, of the reorganization of those societies that had suffered under Roman authority. The Christian Church wanted to represent the continuity of the Empire’s structure but without the legions to enforce its will; whenever it tried, it failed.

Tribal organizations had been physically wiped out by the destructive actions of the legions, and with them, their identity systems, their mechanisms of solidarity, and their languages; the neighbour could be seen as a dangerous being, as the social bonds had been nearly nullified, and restoring them would take centuries; in fact, we have not fully succeeded yet.

The centuries we refer to as the Middle Ages are characterized by very low cultural production, to the point of regressing in architecture, sculpture, and painting—especially in the latter, which was very close to the law of frontalism (if it had been merely a stylistic preference, some heterodox artist would have ignored it)—but above all, by thoughts and feelings dominated by a violence perceived and experienced as a necessary norm, as a small-scale copy of the Roman Empire.

Another phenomenon of that time was the frequent plagues, many of which, when compared with societies from earlier periods such as Roman, Greek, Phoenician, Egyptian, and Mesopotamian societies, all of which had a strong sense of hygiene reflected in abundant public baths. For our ignorant medieval ancestors, the cause of the plague was sin, yet they never bathed; great Renaissance artists boasted of never having bathed in their entire lives.

In wealthy and civilized Europe, before the “hygienists” of the second half of the 19th century, bathing was something rare.

One disastrous series of adventures were the Crusades, filled with violent episodes that cannot all be explained as religious confrontations; the most terrible of all was the destruction of the Christian city of Constantinople by the Crusader armies, driven by the preaching of the Pope in Rome, who later, upon learning of the horrors committed, admitted that he had spread the rumour that its citizens were hoarding vast amounts of gold but were not helping the Crusaders.

A particularly crazy and horrifying adventure, designed as the ultimate solution for the conquest of the Holy Land, was the plan to embark several thousand children from southern France to fight in the Crusades, with the preaching that their innocence would make them invincible; the children were “lucky” when a storm caused the entire fleet to disappear.

The city of Rome, as the seat of Christian power and the symbolic continuation of the Empire, sought to play the role of unifier, but the absence of bonds of belonging and shared feelings, the result of the destruction of the tribal system, made it impossible to build any integrative project. In some regions and periods, Christian identity was the only link of recognition, along with being a servant of the local or regional tyrant of the moment.

I have referred to these periods as “loops,” meaning times of little human progress; however, during these centuries, which we strangely call the Middle Ages, people did not live in a loop or a vicious cycle, but in a dark well, until a few Italian cities, not because they were heirs to imperial glories, nor because they were close to the religious authority established in the city of Rome, began to generate small geographic centres where craftsmanship and commerce progressed significantly, and where the middle classes emerged, that is, families with high material well-being from their work, rich enough to demand and achieve certain levels of freedom. This was a new sociological phenomenon in the history of this part of the world, but not in Eastern societies, with China as a reference. In fact, the progress of Italian cities, led by Venice, was the result of the existence of the Silk Road.

In the 12th century, the grasslands inhabited by the Mongol tribes—nomadic herders of the Asian steppes—suffered from years of drought, which, in an environment where overgrazing had destroyed the tree and shrub cover, proved catastrophic.
The result of the regional climate crisis was their unification into a nation under the leadership of Genghis Khan; he and his sons were ambitious and farsighted, building a vast empire, conquering China, and reaching as far as Europe.
The Buddhist culture and political intelligence of the rulers made it so that in that vast empire, citizens from all other cultures and religions were welcomed (the travels of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta are proof of this), and the Mongol Peace was imposed, ensuring that the ancient Silk Road was safe for merchants and travellers.
Thus, the development of European cities that led to Humanism and the Renaissance, i.e., Modern Europe, would hardly have existed without the Mongols, who, in just two generations, went from being rustic nomadic herders to establishing an efficient administration and building beautiful cities.

Humanism, Renaissance, and Enlightenment

Another explanation for the emergence of Humanism and the Renaissance in the 14th and 15th centuries was the rise of Italian cities with a high level of commercial prosperity, which governed themselves independently of each other, despite sharing the same language, customs, and culture. Later, the Enlightenment was also made possible thanks to the existence of different sovereign states in a relatively small area, allowing a freethinker who felt persecuted to often have the opportunity to move to another state that was at odds with the one that persecuted them.

Omitting the possibility that the Peace and Truce Assemblies of the early 11th century may be the first sign of Humanism, it can be considered that it intellectually began to emerge with the figure of St. Francis of Assisi, who felt and said that one should not only look to the sky waiting for another life, but that one could find beauty and also God by looking at nature.

With Humanism, the small cracks of freedom and the reading of some works from Ancient Greece—preserved in Constantinople and many of them brought by intellectuals from Al-Andalus—opened the eyes of the wealthy citizens, and a continuous effort was generated to convince through remarkable writings and activism that the Christian Church, from its foundation focused exclusively on the afterlife, should also focus on earthly life. And it was discovered that the idea of freedom was the great forgotten one.

I reproduce a paragraph from a book written by the Andalusian intellectual Antonio de Nebrija, the author of the first grammar of the Castilian language. Having studied at the University of Bologna, he was a convinced and militant humanist; upon returning, he had problems with the religious tribunal known as the Holy Inquisition, and was saved by Cardinal Cisneros, regent of the Spanish crown.

After overcoming the scare, in one of his writings from the year 1504, it reads:

What devilish servitude is this or what such unjust and tyrannical domination, that one cannot, while respecting piety, freely speak what one thinks?

A continuous effort also emerged from people with an analytical mind set focused on the state of the art to convince that science is the way to reach the truth of perceived phenomena.
However, the Christian religious hierarchy, stubbornly and absurdly, spent centuries persecuting any awakening of intelligence, except in artistic expression, up until nearly modern times. The Holy Inquisition and other Christian religious tribunals were a mix of ignorance combined with cynicism and cruelty, imitating the methods of control used by the Roman Empire.

In the meantime and in parallel, great architecture, great literature, great philosophy, great music, great sculpture, great painting, and, ultimately, the enormous progress of science emerged when the bourgeois classes and governments stopped supporting the church in its persecutory phobias.

Personal attempts to establish a system of governance imitated those of the Roman Empire, and Charlemagne in the 10th century, Charles I of Spain and V of Germany in the 16th century, and Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 19th century staged it with the symbolic element of their coronation in the city of Rome as emperors.
And although the ideas of humanism and freedom continued to spread, they never translated into the side-lining of Mars, the Roman god of war, who continued to leave his mark on all European countries. There was little talk of a democratic system.

Modern Imperialism

Despite the great transformative power of Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, the sentiments and ideas leading to democracy never gained enough social grounding or political strength in Europe. The popular enthusiasm for the victories of colonial armies, the acceptance of slavery, and the justification for the annihilation of tribal societies in Africa, Asia, America, and Oceania leave no room for doubt. The ideological inheritance of the Roman Empire persisted as a social and political mentality that decreed the principle of the destruction of the enemy, whether a different ethnicity, society, social class, or merely a competitor in the race for power or markets.

The amalgamation of principles that strengthened the Roman Empire and the doctrine generated by the religious hierarchy—one with the continuation of Mars and the other with the moral accommodation of any barbarity: “Blacks can be enslaved because they have no soul”—formed a toxic product that gradually consumed much of the energy generated by the reformist attempts of humanists, Renaissance thinkers, and Enlightened intellectuals. The theoretical progress of these thinkers was incorporated into public discourse by the ruling powers, but without affecting governance.

In this regard, some heterodox figures, such as the priest Francisco de Vitoria and others, attempted to ensure that the political and economic powers exploiting the colonies established by Castile in South America respected the human rights of the native population. They made their mark in history, but achieved little. At the same time, figures like Thomas More, Erasmus, and others formulated humanizing projects, though they were largely unsuccessful, with some paying dearly for their efforts.

The great Flemish painter Rubens spent time in London as a diplomatic mediator, attempting to find solutions to the bloody religious wars of 17th-century Europe. During his stay, he painted a series of works in which the figure of Mars loses its centrality and prominence in favour of peace, life, and joy, symbolized by women and children. However, political reality did not follow the same path as aesthetics, and Mars continued to be present as a symbolic figure in European armies and as a model of behaviour in all societies.

From France, the motto Liberté, Fraternité, Égalité was applied and exported by Napoleon through brutal and extractive invasions, the establishment of autocratic monarchies, and his coronation in Rome as Emperor of the West. Napoleon felt a historical mission to implant republican values across all of Europe, much like Alexander the Great sought to spread the values of Greek culture.

A few decades later, after the Napoleonic Wars, modern France invaded several regions in Africa and Asia, employing the same methods as the Roman Empire: violently destroying tribal societies to seize their lands. Even earlier, the British Empire controlled parts of North America and India; Portugal had conquered various places in South Asia and all of Brazil; while Spain, which during the 16th and 17th centuries had been the largest empire, lost most of its American colonies during the Napoleonic Wars.

Colonial practices were universally infamously exploitative, while the ruling oligarchies in the metropolitan countries adorned themselves with successful achievements, such as economic, scientific, artistic, and philosophical progress, all under the guise of apparent liberty, where everything was allowed except questioning colonial policies, the oligarchic-monarchical system of governance, and Christian morality.

In some theoretical aspects, the French Revolution was inspired by the one that had occurred a few years earlier when the new states of North America gained independence from Great Britain. John Adams, one of the founding fathers of the United States, had travelled to France, where he met many of the future leaders of the Revolution. The American founding fathers were Freemasons, an organization that avoids public display and revealing its internal workings, full of symbolism and rituals.

Freemasonry is an ancient organization that seeks to establish the values and principles of ancient Athens. When the American Freemasons took political control of the new independent state, they established a system of governance based on personal voting, the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers, and freedom of speech, which became its key principles and features.

It remains an open question, and it will always be speculative, whether without the adoption of democracy by the founders of the United States, this system of governance would have been adopted by any other country in a foreseeable timeframe. Just as in the times of the Athenian Republic, the U.S. Constitution excluded women and slavery; and, more gravely, the new American state added the genocidal purpose of exterminating native nations, creating a hybrid between the Athenian Republic and the Roman Empire, with an institutional system based on free and periodic elections, independent judges and media, but with the exercise of power not much different from that in colonial Europe.

The abolition of slavery, initiated in Great Britain thanks to the courage of a few daring idealists, was a noble point, but it did not extend to questioning the treatment of native nations.

Colonialism was based on the technological superiority of its weapons, which was made possible by the abundance of coal and iron at the very heart of Europe, and the progress in steel and metallurgy. The art of clock making as a game for the rich had developed in Central Europe, where by the mid-17th century there were intricate timepieces, all utilizing numerical calculations and mechanical devices described in the treatises of the pre-scientific Greeks and Alexandrians, where the first complex mechanisms for salon games were built, later revived by the Renaissance thinkers.

The sum of these elements led to significant progress in metallurgy and, with it, the arms industry, in a confluence of mineral and cultural developments that left a lasting mark on the entire world. With Mars as a totem inherited from the Roman Empire, a few European states conquered more than half the world, imposing a violent system of colonial domination copied directly from those early great destroyers of lives, cultures, and societies.

A phrase written in the 19th century by a renowned Spanish Romantic poet, Mariano José de Larra, says:

Alas for the people that does not wear down, daily with its superior and violent touch, the neighbouring peoples, for they will be worn down by them. Either attract or be attracted. The implacable law of nature.

The poet reflects and defends European imperialist thought with a short phrase that is a firm and vibrant declaration of the political principle that has been active in many eras and places throughout history, from the founding of the Roman Empire to today.

A testament to the prevailing state of mind in the European colonial mindset is a letter written to Barcelona by law student Conrad Roure during the invasion of Morocco by the Spanish army in 1860:

The patriotism that turned the streets of the city into a boil of enthusiasm penetrated into the classrooms, calling our youthful souls, always fiery, to respond with such force that it seemed as though the fight on African soil was a matter of honour for the student class. Those were youthful moments that will never be erased from my mind! Blessed were the times when the twenty years covered our eyes with a rosy veil and we were enflamed by the actions of the moment, without reflecting on the consequences of the future! Today, the veil of youth and inexperience has fallen, and that consequence we should have foreseen, for it was just, now shows itself in all its harshness! Today, when it is too late to restrain our enthusiasm, we cannot undo what we have done!

In that episode, the boiling enthusiasm centered around 300 soldiers who volunteered to go to war. After the first week of battle, only three remained. Conrad Roure describes an opinion shift, from applauding colonial war to denouncing it in a political mindset in Catalonia, which, due to its history, is not comparable to most European societies of the time. Spain’s next colonial adventure, thirty-five years later, sparked revolts in Barcelona, which were suppressed by the military.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the democratic legacy of the new North American state, due to its cultural, economic, and political influence, began to spread to colonizing Europe. Following Wilson’s doctrine—the American president who supported the independence of subjugated nations—a new horizon began to take shape, which, with the Allied victory in World War II, materialized in significant progress in individual voting rights. The U.S. “forced” European states to withdraw their colonial armies from their domains and to hold regular elections in all those within their sphere of influence, alongside the establishment of rudimentary judicial powers and principles of freedom of expression. The Pax Americana, while maintaining dark areas, is nothing like the Pax Romana.

It is crucial to emphasize the immense importance of the three innovations brought by the U.S. founders, and observe that, even when implemented imperfectly, they foster cultural and social development. Experiencing them has become an irrefutable demand in every corner of the world, and they are widely accepted because they respond to two essential needs: recognition and freedom. Remarkably, without any ideological propaganda campaign to convince the public, people want to vote, want impartial justice, and want truthful information; and in places where these principles have been experienced, even if briefly, they have become an irreplaceable popular demand.

That legacy of Freemasonry has changed relevant aspects of the lives of most societies on the planet, making a world of hope and trust in the future possible. In large part due to its charisma, we remember the aura of John F. Kennedy and that of Che Guevara, two opposing myths representing two different governance models: one that, while pursuing well-being and security, met the needs for freedom and recognition; and the other, which, with its vibrant social discourse, defended the need for the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” control over the media, and the judiciary, justifying it to protect the people from bourgeois thinking and capitalist aggression.

Marxist doctrine was merely a book and a controversy until it triumphed in Russia in the early 20th century; it was the equivalent of Christianity during the decline of the Roman Empire, which promised heaven after death; Marxism promised it in life during an era of industrialization marked by great poverty and labour exploitation. Its followers elevated it to the status of a secular religion, exalting its violent leaders and justifying the physical extermination of dissent.

Since 1945, the economic, military, and ideological weakening of European states, caused by the wars among themselves, combined with the rise of the United States expressed in the Marshall Plan, led to a new world order that left behind the foundations of internal conflicts in old Europe, making peace possible among states with the Treaty of Rome and the Common Market for Coal and Steel, which eventually led to the current European Union, a hopeful innovation in human history.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, despite its tremendous advances in science and technology and its vast human and natural resources, gradually eroded internally due to a lack of freedoms and restrictions on recognition elements, until it fell into moral and economic decay and abandoned the ideas that inspired it.

The great influence of the United States imposed its “democratic system,” which was initially reluctantly accepted by European colonial states, which had to forget their worship of Mars when their armies returned home with more sorrow than glory. Initially, Great Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal reluctantly accepted the new world order, complying only to protect themselves from the USSR. However, very quickly—some more quickly than others—they understood its utility in countering Marxist ideology and adopted social democracy, where governance should not have too many evident dark spaces.

For many decades, much of Western society has been governed by “social democratic” principles, adopted by the oligarchies as the lesser evil in relation to the Marxist alternative; the aim was to have a content citizenry within the economic and social system, to prevent democratically elected governments from decreeing the expropriation of private property.

Viewed in perspective, social democracy can be seen as the modern update of a reform adopted in the 6th century BC in Ancient Greece when, in a time of social unrest due to the rising price of grain, Solon was able to make his oligarchic colleagues—he was rich and part of the oligarchy—understand that if they wanted to remain rich and alive, they needed to ensure no one in their country was poor.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the social democratic system ceased to be the necessary lesser evil. However, neither the left-wing parties nor the social democrats have been up to the task of addressing the changes that arose in the mindset of the oligarchies with the disappearance of the threat posed by the communist system. Social democracies can function with certain levels of corruption, with the judicial power “oriented” by the legislative power and with the media dominated by “political correctness,” as the welfare and security provided by the system keeps the citizenry calm. But when these last two elements falter, poor governance caused by corruption becomes fully visible, and problems of trust and legitimacy begin to emerge.

Unfortunately, political parties that claim to want democracy have not been able to understand that their role in the new socio-economic-geographical framework should be to establish full democracy.

Considering the general economic parameters of this brief period of social democracy, it is relevant that the business world did not weaken, despite having to contribute fiscally to the welfare of the population, and the entire citizenry had their needs met in health and education. A good invention that, once the communist threat was forgotten, the most ambitious business elites decided was no longer valid, and they embarked on a new era: erecting governments with extremely liberal economic principles and extraordinarily restrictive of freedoms.

The Colonized Societies

There are several political attitudes and behaviours implemented by many wealthy Western countries that have led and continue to lead to insecurity, drama, poverty, conflicts, and wars, causing massive migrations of people from Ibero-American, African, and Asian countries with limited economic development and low levels of basic education but with a very vibrant demographic dynamic.

There is a quantitatively significant “escape effect” of populations where, in many places and situations, people risk their lives. For citizens of rich countries, these extreme and reckless behaviours are difficult to understand. I will try to explain this a little, though I must confess that I don’t understand them all either.

Any person from a rich country who travels for the first time to countries that are the source of migrants, unless they remain locked up in a hotel and do very little else, will find that the landscape that appears before their eyes as they move further from the city centre will become increasingly difficult to accept, and it will be hard to understand how those people can survive with so many obvious deficiencies.

If, in addition, the visited country has an arid climate, going deeper into it will have a strong impact in two different and opposing ways: the first is the attractive beauty of the desert landscape, but the second will be total panic, if it crosses their mind—the inevitable possibility, at least for a moment—that they might have to stay and live there permanently under the same conditions as anyone in that country.

Before the start of “globalization” and also before the first meteorological disruptions of climate change, millions of families from vast regions of the planet lived very frugally on subsistence farming and livestock; they were dignifiedly adapted to it, with food self-sufficiency as nearly their only activity.

However, in recent years, due first to globalization leaving their meagre agricultural surpluses out of the market, and then to increasingly severe droughts affecting crops and water sources, families feel there is no future, and many young people, unable to find work, only think about migrating. And now, everywhere, there is someone with a mobile phone, opening up a whole world that is easy to fantasize about, especially when there’s little else in sight. And they decide to risk their lives.

In this human and environmental landscape, wars and harsh dictatorships add to the troubles. Their citizens are suffering, with few hopes and a strong desire to leave.

For decades, all economically poor societies have been waiting for aid from the rich countries, but these countries, we, have blindly not done this, nor have we done so in the past or now; and the result is catastrophic for both sides, with rich countries being the sole responsible party. It should be said that it is the citizens of poor countries who are waiting for help from rich Europeans and North Americans; their oligarchies have already received it.

Certainly, there have been and still are aids in the form of loans or favorable tariff conditions, but for many decades, the most decisive policies have been supporting autocrats and military dictatorships, who are the ones who best protect the extractive ambitions of large companies from wealthy countries.

From an exclusively economic opportunity perspective, strangely and blindly, wealthy societies have underestimated the enormous growth potential of poor societies. In the rich world, the surplus of accumulated wealth—savings—has fed into disastrous speculative “bubbles,” when these private capitals could have been invested in small and medium-sized business initiatives in underdeveloped countries, all of which have young populations eager to prosper.

In the vast majority of migrant-sending countries, it is the lack of legal security for businesses—not the danger to individuals—that has prevented the massive arrival of entrepreneurs from rich countries. Tourism makes this clear.

This possibility exists, and for a century and a half, the Lebanese have found their place and survival system, but they have thousands of years of experience practicing “commercial empathy” and are experts in adapting to any cultural diversity and any political difficulty. They are Phoenicians.

The disastrous direct result of the bad policies of rich countries is that, due to the lack of legal security, investments and the establishment of small and medium-sized businesses have been virtually non-existent. The neocapitalist strategy has been, and is, very uncapitalist, and despite the undeniable drive of globalization, the low level of development persists across much of the planet.

The desirable future is for many entrepreneurs from rich countries to frequently travel to poor countries and for their citizens to forget that emigration is their only future, in a human landscape where people are moving in the opposite direction of the current one.

For many decades, the UN, with the support of rich countries, could have helped in establishing full democracies, but nowhere did it go beyond applauding the holding of elections, and in some places, not even that. There was no support for the existence of a judicial system accessible to citizens, nor for the existence of media with protected freedom of expression.

All states born from colonization have tribal roots, and decimated by neo-colonial powers, people need new elements of recognition in order to feel like members of the new urban society. And the best elements of recognition are the ability to vote, to denounce corruption, and to feel protected by justice.

But the powerful rich countries have not recognized this vital need for freedom and recognition, allowing growing local oligarchies, built in the image of those from colonizing states, to impose themselves.

And now, when it is very late, we realize that many of the governments of these countries prefer to ally themselves with Russia and China, while Western countries, for not having committed to democracy when there was an opportunity and it was a necessity, are left out of the game.

This scenario is reinforced by the political strategy of equidistance from large countries like India and Brazil, to name the most populous, and the result is that state governance on a global level is leaning toward the normalization of authoritarian regimes.

In this matter, development NGOs have also failed to detect the needs of these societies, adapting their activities to the criteria of the states and societies that generate and finance them. Strangely, they have understood little of the values represented by tribal identities and organizations.

Since the beginnings of colonization and for a long time, concern for the living conditions of poor countries was exclusively the domain of Christian churches, until the 1970s, when Robert McNamara, president of the World Bank—former minister in J.F. Kennedy’s government—promoted the figure of the secular volunteer, a well-intentioned, funded person who moves to some part of the Third World to help with its social and economic development. And since then, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have been the kind, benevolent, and generous face of rich countries towards poor countries.

However, in the push for economic development, the balance of NGOs is disappointing; and in relation to the money and work invested, it is a real failure. Medical NGOs, those that address massive emergencies, and those that assist migrants in danger, are excluded from this negative assessment, as any contribution they make alleviates the suffering of someone.

The phenomenon of massive migration from poor, semi-failed, or completely failed states to the U.S., Canada, and the EU must be viewed from any perspective as a tragedy, a collective failure of expectations, and a desperate individual attempt to overcome it.

In the societies that receive migrants, alongside the discourse that they are indispensable for the continuity of the welfare state—I personally do not see it this way—it is unquestionable that it is a source of conflicts, some real and most rooted in racial supremacism, which are adopted as tactical arguments by the far-right.

Regarding this issue, my opinion and personal sentiment are twofold: I reject migration because it is the result of a malicious strategy to take advantage of massive poverty, while I accept and respect the migrated people because they are the victims, and because some of them are my friends and neighbours.

I do not have the experience of having travelled to all the cultures of the world, but I am certain that no society is capable of receiving foreign populations in statistically significant numbers without generating expressions of reservation or rejection. I fear that no society, whether rich or poor, has enough empathy and wisdom to integrate a massive influx of people from different societies and cultures without problems, unless these people bring only clearly positive elements and demonstrate respectful behaviour in every way.

The effects on the countries of origin, even though it is argued that the money sent by migrants is very important— and it is— the balance is disastrous, as young people emigrate, many with education and all with strong character, precisely the elements most needed to develop any society and country.

The bad policies of rich countries now lead many governments of states with weak economies and internal problems to find in Russian and Chinese foreign policy their protectors, as the governments of these states neither impose nor recommend democratic reforms and behaviours, whereas the U.S. and the EU, driven by public opinion, do.

An African leader recently stated that Westerners give sermons about democracy while the Chinese build roads.

In this complex issue, where there is much drama marked by a recent past full of violent supremacism on one side and forced submission on the other, bad structural political decisions have been continuous—and they continue to be. With perspective and economic sense, it must be acknowledged that the demographic dynamics of the countries that provide migrants guarantee the satisfaction of all short- and medium-term forecasts for unskilled labour that rich states may need.

There are many ways to manage this issue, and neither so much humiliation nor so much tragedy is needed to have cheap labour.

The Counterculture

At the end of the 1950s, in various countries, movements spontaneously emerged, primarily led by youth, mostly in rich societies but also in some less wealthy ones. In Europe, analysts said it was the voice of a generation that hadn’t lived through any wars, but at the same time, in the U.S., the movement was also against the war the country was fighting in Vietnam.

All of these movements had in common pacifism and cultural communitarianism—not the Marxist ideological kind—and aspired to a cultured and happy world, with new music that strongly captivated adolescents and young people. The English mods, progressives, May ’68, rockers, hippies, pop, punks, and other urban and rural tribes marked an entire generation, and many of their values were quickly assimilated and adopted by global society: the rejection of racism and sexism, militancy in pacifism and feminism, animal welfare, and environmentalism were their most significant traits.

Certainly, these were not new values, but they entered through the front door under the broad wings of tolerance as a widely shared sentiment—also not new—but for the first time expressed in a social collective of significant scale and projection.

Eastern mysticism readings, especially Buddhist ones, and a few literary works by Western authors influenced the formation of the counterculture. However, it cannot be said that they were the causes. It was the first time that youth felt like protagonists of global cultural progress.

It can be considered that this movement occurred thanks to the relevance of social democracy, which offers wide spaces for the exercise of freedom. We can say that the counterculture was an explosion of freedom in a world with abundant material well-being and considerable security, despite the latent threats of nuclear war and the continuation of some post-colonial conflicts.

With the exercise of freedom, that generation was not seeking more well-being or more security, but rather more recognition. It is important to remember that the demands mainly focused on moral and customary aspects, especially concerning sexuality and confronting patriarchy.

However, without any leadership or doctrine, only with some writers seen as references, and surprisingly, with widely shared moral and aesthetic principles—before the internet, mobile phones, or social networks—that movement was considered a real public danger by the political powers in the U.S. They found in the prohibition of marijuana, which had become symbolic, the way to place this new culture outside the law.

The U.S., half a century earlier, had already had the disastrous and costly experience of prohibiting alcohol consumption, so it is surprising that a natural substance with less health risk, such as cannabis, which is not physically addictive, was pursued so severely. The only justification for such a decision could be perceiving that new culture as a real threat to the system. Marijuana had already been banned in the U.S. because it was a substance consumed by the black population, and it was a way of controlling them; now, that law was being applied against university students.

Another legal strategy was the persecution of the consumption of hallucinogenic plant preparations and the famous LSD synthesized by a major pharmaceutical company. Today, those prohibitions are seen as purely political, and unfortunately, they harmed medical research on these substances, which is now being reconsidered.

In fact, the counterculture was threatening to the system because it believed in the equality of all people and in freedom as a superior good, and it also believed in respecting nature and rejecting war. It was the complete opposite of the principles and goals dominant in both the capitalist and communist systems.

Unfortunately, without ever attempting any participatory political reflection, that innovative force gradually faded, transforming at times into resistance movements of a cultural and, in some cases, political nature, such as the firm opposition to the nuclear system.

The problem, perhaps driven by youth and their hedonistic vocation, was that this movement, which rejected any idea of organization (because it involves discipline and restriction of spontaneity), never proposed organizing anything except music festivals. Some of its more socially committed members adopted those old, outdated ideologies that had already demonstrated their incapacity for progress, becoming Marxists and others anarchists, much like what had happened more than half a century earlier. Strangely, they ignored the only formula for governance progress, which is democracy, invented by the Republic of Athens, and the only tool for global consciousness, which is the UN.

The vast majority of that generation readapted to the system, smoking marijuana, first secretly, now not so much, some taking LSD and various entheogens, and we decided to survive resigned, seeking the material well-being and security provided by social democracy. It seems that, once the smoke cleared, the dream ended, and that youthful energy, without being sterile, never considered having a political expression.

The Demolition of the Berlin Wall

In that historic year, so recent in human history—1989—a great mistake, more than an error, was made: the greatest mistake in modern history. The Western intelligence, entirely dominated by the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower had denounced, consciously and voluntarily missed the opportunity to eliminate all nuclear weapons from the planet, taking advantage of the fact that the Soviet system had collapsed.

The nuclear arms race has its origins in the ideological rivalry between the Soviet world and the capitalist world, decreed in 1945 at the end of World War II. Once that tension had ended, nuclear weapons should have been destroyed.

Nuclear armament is one of the issues of nuclear energy, and waste management is another, different, but equally grave issue. In one hundred years and even a thousand years, our descendants will have to dedicate many of their resources to keep them monitored, secure, and without radiation.

When, in 1989, ideological exhaustion, social frustration, and especially economic incapacity to maintain the arms race led the USSR to dismantle its political and economic system and offer definitive peace to the capitalist world, the new geopolitical situation should have resulted in complete denuclearization, at least in Europe. However, the U.S. government, with the complacency of Great Britain and France—all nuclear-armed countries—decided that the atomic threat should not disappear.

Being a weapon of mass destruction, there was no justification for not eradicating it. Certainly, other countries had nuclear weapons, but if the great powers had decided on total elimination, there would not have been insurmountable resistance. At that time, China was not yet the power it is today.

But, “the military-industrial system” decided that it did not want to disappear, seemingly waiting for another confrontation.

This aberration in history is now paid for with much blood, as the invasion of Ukraine would never have occurred if Russia did not have nuclear weapons.

Also, a few years earlier, Russia’s integration into the European Union would have been easy if its government did not have the ability, expressed in pretension, to assert itself as a nuclear power, but rather as a state with a low GDP, a large population, vast territorial dimensions, and large reserves of raw materials, which is its reality.

Globalization

Great political speeches declared it, and the collapse of the USSR seemed to confirm it: the great progress of Western societies is explained by the values of capitalism, governed by democratic systems.

But we are not so exquisite; China, with a single party and few democratic pleasures, has progressed in a few years far more than the most optimistic (or pessimistic) could have imagined. And no one can predict what the continuity of this “progress” will look like—whether with more democracy or less.

In relation to the satisfaction of the four genetic needs, and knowing that within certain limits, we have the ability to compensate for them, prioritizing some while relativizing others, what we do progress in is material well-being, while freedom and recognition are limited, certainly more so in some countries than others. Now, with the threatening announcement of climate change, the sense of security falters in the face of any violent and unusual weather event, because it signals a loss of well-being for a future that we fear may not be far away.

Despite these setbacks, we are doped with material well-being, as all the data on resource consumption confirms. Low-cost tourist flights are the most striking indicator of the business, citizen, and political resistance to acknowledging the threat posed by “climate change.”

It can be said that there have been two completely different elements that have pushed the world toward an economic, social, and cultural system, which the most cautious call the globalized consumer society.

The first was the appearance of the container for transporting goods, a tool that strangely did not reach the market until the 1960s when technically it could have been developed centuries earlier. It was not an advancement driven by research, but simply a practical application, with which global trade increased spectacularly thanks to the drastic reduction in the cost of maritime transport.

The second factor driving globalization, made of a more subtle material than the iron of the container, was Western supremacy when “disregarding” the abilities of the Chinese to organize and progress in industry, trade, and technological and scientific research.

When the communist system collapsed and the regime signaled its intention to become a normal country, Western capitalism saw it as an immense opportunity for economic growth, all while externalizing the problems generated by industrial activity—labor and environmental issues—and China became the world’s factory, while white, Christian Western countries gradually turned into a sort of eco-museum, conserving the most decisive elements of the economy, and representing the fiction of being paradise on Earth—a glass dome where millions of people from all parts of the world want to live.

However, the efficiency of the shipping container and the talent of the Chinese surpassed all the predictions of the great Western strategists, who now eagerly want to return to manufacturing more and importing less, especially from China.

It was more than explained—it was preached—that globalization was the guarantee that wars had ended, and that any new conflicts would be minor, no more than tribal disputes and all in the Third World, because the conflicts of interest that before globalization were resolved through wars, would now be solved in the market.

Now we realize that globalization does not guarantee what it promised. There are wars, states are rearming, and the most pessimistic commentators talk about World War III.

Once again, Mars is the great victor, and Athena loses. And as long as Mars remains on the altar, any effort to achieve justice, peace, and well-being will amount to very little. The globalization that promised so much has, however, succeeded in one thing definitively: filling the planet with waste.

Another aspect of globalization is the large-scale migratory phenomena, which had been foreseen and warned about in many UN documents and civil society organizations in the 1980s, 45 years ago, when Europe had not yet seen the arrival of Africans or Latin Americans, or in any case, very few.

In the mentioned documents, there were warnings, recommendations, projects, programs, etc., environmental, agricultural, economic, and social, aimed at promoting the development of those societies and regions; however, nothing was implemented. The UN only has the authority to point things out.

There was no surprise regarding migratory pressure, and there were legislative stimuli at the beginning of its scale in the 1990s, which responded to the idea that there would be no continuity of economic growth in rich countries without the availability of cheap labour. Also, the motivator “solidarity” exhibited by left-wing policies has appeared as a justification for the phenomenon.

One cannot ignore the historical relevance of deciding the movement of people from other religions, cultures, and ethnicities in considerable quantities, with all its possible drawbacks; however, the ruling elites treated the issue as if it were a mere tariff reduction on any product: importing cheap labour, saving the cost of transportation. But the product is people, and in many cases, the transport results in tragedy.

The economic growth of rich countries has indeed been maintained, and now emigration is being negatively instrumentalized by the same interests that initially demanded it. With the guaranteed migratory flow, fears and distrusts from a part of the population are used as tools of political erosion to de-democratize social-democratic societies.

Signs of Decay

If we rewind the calendar a few years, considering the episodes that have most negatively impacted the global population, the wars in Palestine and Ukraine are obviously at the forefront, immediately followed by COVID-19, and looking further back, to 2009, the crisis caused by real estate inflation and the subsequent ruin of individuals, some banks, and state indebtedness.

It has been an onslaught of bad news, new realities that spread their bad aura, radically changing our perception of the state of the world and future expectations.

Before these “eruptions,” the general perception and the speeches of the ruling classes regarding their achievements, the growing global economic prosperity, and the extension of human rights—both in rich and less rich countries—led one to believe that the world was prospering, in some areas slowly and in others more quickly, but prospering nonetheless.

And despite episodes of violence like the Iran-Iraq war, the invasions of Kuwait and Iraq, the genocide in Rwanda, the unfortunate Afghanistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Sudan, and others, as well as numerous attacks from religious and political radicalism, the prevailing perception was that Homo sapiens sapiens were winning in all the challenges that just a few decades ago history had considered impossible. Only death remains as the inheritance of the past, but often, hopeful news appears on how almost to overcome this burden; and real death, the loss of loved ones, has been increasingly detached from reality, turning it almost into something virtual.

Science in general, and cutting-edge medicine, contribute to the formation of this imaginary, where everything is possible: living on the Moon and Mars, traveling through interstellar space, living to 120 years without ever being sick, and simply orienting thought, magnificent intelligent machines will make everything available to us. Prosperity without limits and for everyone, just a few days away.

But, although today these wonders are still theoretically possible, in a short time they have lost much of their ability to motivate us, and almost overnight, the world has turned hostile, angry, and the prevailing sense is one of a futureless existence.

In addition to the emotional, sentimental, and economic consequences caused by recent crises, there are the first signs that irregular weather patterns are now a global fact, and the result is a widespread perception that we have entered a period whose duration is unknown, marked by a strange psychological sensation that drags us toward paranoia, pessimism, and even nihilism.

Another new factor is the emergence of new political ideas and organizations that aim to challenge many of the values on which society has based relationships, both at the societal, state, and global levels. The problem is that these new actors, besides irritating the public, almost forcing them to polarize, only denounce problems that may have popular resonance but offer no path, strategy, or solution. They are dubbed “populists,” and they are the right-wing with an autocratic vocation of all time. Pericles had already defined them 2,500 years ago.

While optimists used to claim that human society is capable of overcoming obstacles and continuing to prosper while maintaining the same course, now climate change has turned everything upside down. Far too late, we are beginning to realize that the systems and mechanisms of progress are unreliable because they disregard the recycling of waste. We have sinned with pollution—CO2 is waste—and in this, returning to consider animal behaviours as a reference, we resemble those with limited intelligence, like horses, sheep, goats, and cows, who excrete anywhere, even on top of food; and we resemble far less the more intelligent animals, like dogs, pigs, and donkeys, who always avoid dirtying what they eat and where they eat.

The media has the power to guide public opinion and shape our mental framework, with cheerful and eye-catching artistic productions broadcasted through radios, press, television, mobile phones, and computer screens, both private and public.

Social media is increasingly influential, but it must be noted that the vast majority of its content focuses primarily on three of the four genetic needs: well-being, security, and recognition with clearly positive desires, but with such disappointing results that it leads practically all of its users to frustration.

Meanwhile, freedom, the most decisive of needs because it is the essential tool to achieve the other three, is scarcely visible in the contents of social media, and the result is that such powerful and technically efficient tools of information and communication are underutilized in what they could be most useful for.

Certainly, there is content pursuing the advancement of freedoms, but it has few followers and low cultural and social impact. Consumerism and trivialization, quantitatively predominant in much of it.

Now, with more or less awareness and certainty, we understand that we have reached the limits of a magnificent stroll through history, which obviously hasn’t been the same for everyone, but has been for many people.

Meanwhile, the citizens of less industrialized societies, who contribute very little to global warming, frightened and with the sense that there is no future, neither near nor distant, some desperately pin their hopes on emigration, while their neighbours and friends adopt a resilient attitude and, downhearted, remain in the country.

And the citizens of rich countries take it as if it were just a bad dream, trusting that when they wake up, everything will be as it was when they were happy, enjoying the well-being that allows them the high level of industrialization achieved through centuries of work and imagination. But that well-being, which we proudly displayed, was built—still is—on severe abuses, culpable deficiencies, and incomprehensible mistakes.

What would be surprising is a vigorous reaction to stop climate change, when the UN, hindered by states, had to give up its protective functions for peace and biodiversity decades ago.

The Invasion of Ukraine and the Destruction of Palestine

Regarding the invasion of Ukraine, I propose a perspective on the four genetic needs; the most relevant is the lesson given by the Ukrainian citizens, who in a few hours made the decision to give up well-being and security, subordinating them to freedom and recognition.

Certainly, collective heroic behaviour has been expressed on countless occasions throughout history, but fortunately, few in modern times and none in a society with high levels of well-being and security, such as the Ukrainian society before the Russian army’s tanks entered, with television channels, nightclubs, supermarkets, cars, heating and cooling, internet, mobile phones, social networks, etc., etc.

In just a few hours, the people of Ukraine went from a consumer society to the trenches with the utmost dignity, admitting that despite their fear of suffering, dying, and killing, they went to war to expel the invader and earn a future in freedom.

The goddess Athena, Zeus’ favoured daughter, wants humans to be happy and to prosper, but she is not a weak pacifist and does not hide before a violent intruder. Instead, with her sword, she fights to win. In mythology, Athena faced Ares, the god of war, several times, and always emerged victorious.

I find it hard to speak about the war in Palestine, and just thinking about it puts me in a bad mood; but in the days that I finish this Chronicle, it is necessary.

I fear it is a conflict, a never-ending war, between the strong religious-national mentality prevailing in Israel, reinforced by the fear of centuries of diaspora and the legacy of the Holocaust, and on the other hand, the vast scale of Muslim societies that feel the aggression against Palestinians as their own, in addition to the moral rejection that violent strategies employed by the Hebrew state provoke in other societies around the world. These strategies aim to completely dominate a territory that, according to them – they claim with a page from the Bible written about 2,800 years ago – the very god of everyone, the creator of all things, gave exclusively to them around 3,200 years ago when they discovered the Jordan River valley.

Throughout history, many societies have been violently wiped out; Palestine has not been, because Muslim solidarity prevents it, as the Palestinian land is also sacred to them due to the passage of the Prophet Mohammed.

The strong religious sentiment of the Hebrews pushes their governments to adopt policies contrary to common sense, morality, justice, and piety, in addition to international institutions, when the state of Israel itself is the result of a decision by the UN as compensation for the terrible wrongs inflicted by Nazism. But despite this origin, politically dominated by a triple ethnic, religious, and patrimonial supremacy, it does not respect their decisions.

I do not see a war between religions, as the Palestinian reactions would be the same if it were a secular society; the other issue is that the religious extremists preaching violence try to capitalize on and dominate the resistance. However, I do see a religious war from Israel, as its entire expansionist justifications stem from their faith and tradition, not from the need for living space. It is the Palestinian citizens who live in restricted spaces.

I have read somewhere that the U.S. president, Roosevelt, after the meeting with Churchill and Stalin in Yalta, where they designed the post-war world future, made a stop in the capital of Arabia to meet with its king. Roosevelt informed him that, helpless, he had to approve the creation of a recognized Hebrew state with borders. King Ibn Saud told him that with that decision, he would bring the entire region into a state of insecurity and continuous war. It seems that Roosevelt responded that he saw it that way too, but he could not avoid it. The American president lacked health in the last months of his life, and shortly thereafter, he died.

A perspective to consider is that the Jewish population cannot blame the Palestinians for having had to emigrate from their “promised land” almost 2,000 years ago, as it was the Roman legions that made their lives impossible. There is no place for an ancient resentment to explain the extreme cruelty towards the Palestinian population. The state of Israel treats Palestine the same way the Roman Empire treated them: violent conquest, land appropriation, and the expulsion of the population, just like all extreme imperialism throughout history.

The state of Israel and Hebrew society, in just a few decades and on a global scale, have gone from generating first incomprehension and then compassion, to generating widespread rejection. The inventory of people who have lost their lives and health, of material goods destroyed, and of energy consumed over so many decades gives a completely negative balance. And considering only the economic terms, Israel can count the costs with precision.

If Israel needs, at any cost, a specific geographical space, the best thing it should have done – and can still do – is make a purchase offer to the Palestinian population. It would have been cheaper, and they would be well-regarded everywhere. Now, they cannot enjoy “their territory,” they are in continuous war, and day by day, they earn the animosity of practically everyone who has no ties to them.

The triple ethnic, religious, and patrimonial supremacy is a historical legacy that is difficult to handle, and what Jews must understand is that there is no rejection of the first two from the rest of the planet. However, the third is a joke and is unacceptable.

XIV
The Empire of the Absurd

Planned obsolescence, waste, and dependencies

Observing each industrial activity separately, the result is that almost all of them comply with the legal measures regulating them, so it seems that the entire system should work well. However, since it cannot be said that climate change is not the result of the industrial system, we are trapped in an absurd paradox, which turns out to be fatal.

At a Fire Station in a North American city, there is a light bulb that has been on 24 hours a day for more than a century, and it has never burned out. It does not suffer from Planned Obsolescence.

Certainly, light bulb manufacturers, in order to survive, need a certain degree of obsolescence in their products, as do those who produce furniture, radios, cars, washing machines, refrigerators, TVs, computers, mobile phones, and thousands of other devices upon which we base our well-being. However, the absence of regulations concerning product durability and recycling leads to collapse, both in terms of the availability of raw materials and environmental pollution, as well as constituting a direct fraud against buyers and users.

The term “Planned Obsolescence” was coined in the early 20th century in the United States, when the production of domestic industrial products had reached a high level of activity. The U.S. was the first country to have mass industrial production, and it soon became apparent that a large amount of junk and useless items was ending up in vast landfills on the outskirts of cities.

At that point, a laudable and necessary initiative was born, which its promoters called Planned Obsolescence. This involved assigning each object coming out of the factory a predetermined lifespan and a path for disassembly and recovery of its components for reuse. Thus, this term, which now has a negative connotation, originally represented a sensible attempt to balance industrial activity’s continuity with the prevention of filling the world with trash. However, the financial crisis of 1929 and the ensuing economic turmoil led to the project being forgotten, and today the term is used to refer to industrial strategies that, by seducing buyers, pursue the shortest durability for products.

This dynamic has proven very good for corporate profits but very bad for buyers and users of the products, and so aggressive that it is unsustainable for both the local and global environment.

There are almost as many Planned Obsolescence business strategies as there are products on the market, and the construction sector has not been exempt from this strategy. Due to its social and economic importance and physical dimension, it constitutes one of the areas where Planned Obsolescence causes the most harm, both to users and to the economy and environment.

For more than a century, almost all buildings have been constructed using Portland cement as a binder. This industrial product, obtained by heating limestone at high temperatures through several cycles, can have a limited lifespan, barely lasting over 100 years, due to its molecular structure experiencing “material fatigue.”

It is important to note that before the introduction of this modern type of cement, from the first Neolithic settlements until just over a century ago, the only binder used had been lime cement, obtained from the same mineral through a single firing at a lower temperature. A building constructed with lime cement can last in good condition for more than 2,000 years. Houses, churches, palaces, city walls, canals, etc., have been built with lime for 10,000 years, and many of these structures are still in use today.

However, large infrastructures such as long beams, bridges, tall buildings, etc., need to be reinforced internally with iron bars, which adhere well to Portland cement, while the chemical nature of lime cement rejects iron, making the construction of horizontal structures impossible. Looking ahead to a maximum lifespan of a century, except for buildings constructed before the adoption of Portland cement, all others will need to be demolished due to material fatigue, and the debris will be removed from the cities. Minerals and energy will need to be supplied to obtain materials for new construction.

This presents a future challenge that, due to its absurdity, scale, challenge to common sense, and the gravity of its consequences, generates mental rejection. It is absurdly and capriciously announced that future buildings will be made of wood, without asking how many can actually be built, considering that there is hardly enough wood for furniture.

The generation of non-recyclable and polluting waste is another aberration of the industrial system, and this text, no matter how many pages it had, would be insufficient to mention all of them. I will point out one significant example that has been widely studied.

Many studies and checks on the health of seawater report the presence of high doses of microplastic particles in suspension, which is very serious, as well as their detection in the organisms of fish and even in humans who eat fish. These particles are residues shed from fabrics made with petroleum derivatives during their necessary washing. Once detached from the clothing, they end up in the sea, where the fish we eat consume them. However, neither the textile industry, the fashion industry, nor clothing manufacturers address this issue. Except for cotton, there is little consumption of natural fibres such as linen, hemp, and nettle, and some sheep are left unshorn.

Similar harmful dynamics and effects affect nearly all sectors of the industrial system and also industrialized agriculture and livestock farming. Since inevitable business competitiveness conditions and limits executive decision-making in favour of sustainability, what should be healthy competition between companies to offer the best product turns into an abominable race toward collapse.

Being consistent and rational, or at least prudent, in the current state of biosphere degradation and the risk of catastrophes we have reached, it must be considered that all those consumer products that are not strictly necessary, nor those that are contaminated, should not be produced or manufactured.

Society is fully aware of the need to reduce the production of pollutants, and this attitude should be supported by governance. However, the list of toxic products that have flooded the market for decades until administrations were forced to withdraw them from sale is enormous. Before being sold, the manufacturers were aware of the harm these products caused, but it wasn’t until there were serious, evident, and public consequences that their commercialization was stopped.

Two past cases illustrate this well: the insecticide DDT and asbestos fibre. The dangers of both were well known, and in some states, they had been banned, but in others, including some wealthy ones, they remained on the market for decades.

Now, governments must bear the cost of removing asbestos structures, from which construction companies profited, as well as the health costs for those affected. The health damages to individuals are not accounted for.

Several products currently on the market follow the same sequence and path: first, government approval and significant profits for the producer, followed by problems for everyone, and finally, government prohibition, accompanied by assuming the cost of repairing the economic damage.

A few months ago, in a highly popular Spanish public television program, a renowned scientist from the pharmaceutical world explained in detail that there are currently two widely consumed products on the market that, while effective in relieving symptoms, do not cure and, on the contrary, generate addiction.

Another dependence: the mobile  telephone, very intelligent, but not at all empathetic, and also addictive thanks to the size of the screen.

The Almostasser

At the beginning of the 11th century AD, in the 1030s, during the Middle Ages, an initiative was born in the regions of Occitania and Catalonia, promoted and protected by the Christian Church’s hierarchy. Through a papal bull that condemned offenders to excommunication, the initiative aimed to protect farmers, artisans, and merchants from the continuous thefts and abuses they faced at the hands of the feudal lords’ hitmen. It sought to make it possible for them to bring their products to market one day a week in a designated place, always in front of a church.

During those centuries, with tribal identities erased and constant population movements hindering trust and the development of empathetic and supportive attitudes, the vast majority of people lived in misery, subjected to local or regional powers that continually exercised violence towards the people, towards neighbouring lords, and within the feudal families themselves. Many places in Europe lived in situations we would now call “failed states,” with armed groups dominating daily life, and constant abuses of all kinds.

Meanwhile, in the same period, in southern Catalonia, Andalusian Muslim society experienced economic prosperity, cultural splendour, and social peace, where farmers, artisans, and merchants freely brought their products to weekly markets held every few kilometres. In the Maghreb, where this culture originated, Romanization was less intense than in Europe, and many tribal societies persisted, continuing the millennia-old tradition of local weekly markets.

Since time immemorial, and still today in rural Morocco, the person responsible for the market is called the Almostasser (the organizer). This person organizes the sales stalls, ensures the measuring tools for weights and volumes are functioning properly, and handles any other issues or conflicts that may arise.

It is certain that the Christian bishops of the early 11th century knew about these weekly markets and understood their beneficial effect on society, which obeys the wise maxim: without exchange, there is no development. We must recognize and appreciate their early sense of modernity, centuries before the first Humanism.

That the Pax et Treuga initiative was inspired by the markets of Al-Andalus becomes evident in the fact that, in the following centuries, both in Catalan and Castilian lands, the name and role of the Almostasser assumed the same functions as in the Maghreb markets, increasingly taking on more responsibilities at local, regional, and even broader levels.

Now, a thousand years later, with the economy developed and the term disappeared in Europe, the responsibility for the same functions is taken up by a variety of public and semi-public institutions that ensure the same as the Almostassers of local markets did and continue to do.

However, the functions and responsibilities of today’s Almostassers are often questioned by proponents of the almost complete absence of market regulation, a view recently shaped by liberal and ultra-liberal ideologies, and now taking the form of populism. A sector of the “business sensitivity” argues that legislation is limiting and harmful to the overall economy, as it discourages many initiatives. In opposition to this opinion, it can be argued that the dynamic entrepreneur, in order to express all their energy and creative talent, has ample access to knowledge spaces, technical resources, and financial resources to start any business, and that no talent is lost in a regulated market economy designed to serve the needs of the well-being and security of society as a whole. On the contrary, talent is lost when it is employed in economic initiatives that are a direct attack on the pocket or health of the buyer or a detriment to collective interests. The role of the Almostasser—laws, norms, regulations, supervision, etc.—is precisely to avoid these pitfalls.

I understand the criticisms of the public administration’s functioning, which should be more severe, as in many states they constitute a real burden on many economic activities because they are inefficient, bureaucratized, and slow. However, in my view, the problem arises from the corruption that contaminates the higher levels of public administration, where the combination of officials with those appointed by political parties often creates a “dark zone” highly conducive to corruption (in some states more than in others). These “dark zones” stain everything, generating corrupt behavior at various administrative levels, from public service to the interpretation of laws, norms, and decrees. Public servants who do not participate in “dark zones” lower their professional responsibility levels and even renounce their intelligence, appearing to the public as a group of profiteers, well-paid and somewhat lazy. Public administration, if not democratic, is corrupt; and democratic behavior does not necessarily mean assembly-based. People working in public administration, all professionally capable, should be able to do so with their heads held high, feeling that earning a living by serving society is a privilege, which the corruptors steal from them.

The business mentality, especially the oligarchies, pursues continuous growth and, the larger, the better, of economic activity. However, this mentality has led us to disaster. The lack of regulation acts as accelerators of economic activity, already naturally accelerated by the healthy and logical principle of competition, and this dual force of acceleration often causes growth to go unchecked, ending in financial, economic, or social cataclysm. Now it is an extreme environmental cataclysm, so much so that we must inevitably make dimensional changes, with braking as the first voluntary measure, or an accident if nothing more decisive is done than what has been done so far.

Many critical voices against “climate change” consider it the direct consequence of the capitalist system. However, in my view, this perspective, even widespread among many “capitalists,” constitutes a limiting ideological bias, insufficient to understand the phenomenon and sterile. It is important to remember that historiography traces the beginnings of the first “capitalism” to the mid-15th century AD when some European regions experienced significant commercial growth and capital was generated for investment.

However, there are abundant and well-known historical accounts that certify that, throughout the planet, there has always been massive destruction of natural systems, fratricidal wars, conquest battles, multiple injustices, and discouraging ignorance. Millennia before any form of capitalism emerged, humans already behaved irresponsibly in many aspects that still condition us today, so focusing on capitalism as the root of the problem is to abandon the understanding of our inability to confront them.

One of the main problems presented by this critical limitation is that neither in the political nor ideological market are there alternatives to the capitalist system. Many criticisms exist, and more are warranted given the state of the world, but there is nothing more; no idea, no proposal to change the capitalist system and the market economy to a better one, at least concretely. But, apart from good intentions, there is nothing practical about how to manage the economy or wealth.

Another problem is that by attributing “climate change” to capitalism, any deep effort to understand and rectify the situation is likely to be of little use. We already have the diagnosis, now we just need to dismantle capitalism, and everything will be fine.

At different points in this chronicle, without questioning them, I mention the glaring shortcomings of the capitalist system, such as the lack of a “climate investor” role and the scarcity of small and medium investments in Africa, Ibero-America, and Asia. The market economy, “the system,” is like a knife: with it, one can either do harm or good, but everyone who is not an ideological zealot recognizes its functionality.

If we travel to the current rural Maghreb, as an example to locate it geographically and socially, today or a thousand years ago, if someone questioned the existence of the weekly market, they would think they were ill. And if an important merchant preached the near abolition of the Almostasser, everyone would see that what they are trying to impose are their own norms. Certainly, the small regional market is not strictly capitalism, but it is a market economy.

In ancient history, for many centuries, there existed a true model of economic growth and development that was purely capitalist: production sites and chains for raw materials, manufacturers, traders, and distribution logistics, all operating in a completely free market economic framework. This was the Phoenician economy, with all the characteristics of capitalism: large personal fortunes earned through innovation and risk, major investments in production infrastructure, and large markets near and far across many places in the Mediterranean and beyond. And many workers dependent on these activities, some specialized, others less so, and slaves.

The existence of such a successful and long-lasting reality in history shows that economic progress does not require destruction, nor does it need to take away dignity, mistreat, enslave, or kill anyone. We may be incredulous in accepting this, because we still carry with us a mindset born of a long and disastrous cultural drift in history that keeps our gaze down. Evidently, there is no other conclusion if we look into the mirror, but there are other conclusions if we throw the mirror away and look forward.

The Oligarchies

Extracted from Wikipedia:

Oligarchy (from the Greek Ὀλιγαρχία, oligarkhía) is a form of government or social organization in which most or all political power effectively rests in a small segment of society (often the wealthiest, most powerful individuals due to their wealth, family position, military power, or political influence). Historically, many oligarchies granted political power legally and openly to a minority group known as the aristocracy (the government of the “best”). These states were controlled by powerful families whose children were educated to inherit the oligarchy’s power. However, in other societies, this power was not exercised openly, and the oligarchs remained “behind the throne.” Although Aristotle was the first to use the term as a synonym for “government of the rich” (the exact term for this type of government is plutocracy), oligarchy does not necessarily refer to a government exercised through wealth, but rather through a privileged group of society. Oligarchies are complex political systems, with many increasingly concentrated circles of power, specialized according to the domain of power (commercial, legal, religious, military, technological, etc.), and with power often exercised discreetly and collegially. They are often dominant families for whom political position is an element of heritage passed down to their children, with education organized accordingly. If the oligarchy is centred around mythology, religion, or race, caste systems can emerge.

Since the first urban societies in ancient Mesopotamia, professional associations have existed, and in some eras and places, they have played a significant role in economic, social, and governance progress. The medieval guilds were fundamental, and later, employers’ associations shared similar goals. In recent decades, the term lobby has emerged, referring to an organized group of businesses and people who present their sector-specific proposals to politicians and high-ranking public officials, seeking to ensure they are well-informed of their realities, aspirations, and projects, which can be a positive thing. However, when businessmen or their organizations pressure and manipulate public officials to ensure that legislation and the necessary follow-ups are favourable to them, it is appropriate to call them oligarchies.

Some global geopolitical authors attribute to the USA the central role, starting from the end of World War II, in all the strategic initiatives of control, whether economic, political, or ideological, that have emerged on the planet. I cannot share such an extreme opinion, but I do believe there is much truth in this.

In this chronicle, I’ve already mentioned it, and now I will reproduce a brief paragraph from the speech Dwight Eisenhower gave in 1961, during the transition of power to J.F. Kennedy. A strong denunciation:

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions, and we recognize the imperative need for this development. But we must not fail to understand its grave implications… that society be protected from the acquisition of unjustified influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. Its potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist, and we must not allow the weight of this combination to endanger our liberties or democratic processes, for we cannot take anything for granted.

In his farewell speech as President of the United States, the famous military leader and politician warned with a dramatic sentence that from those years onward, the world would have to endure a new oligarchy, so dangerous that he urged citizens to fight against it, pointing out that eradicating it, or at least controlling it, would not be easy. He stressed that we cannot take for granted either liberty or democratic processes. With this farewell, Ike probably didn’t keep all his friends.

Powerful weapons, many of them capable of mass destruction, with an associated nuclear industry, and as reinforcement, the oil business, have since shaped a network of companies, interests, and doctrines, which one must fear, as they pursue control over all major political, economic, and strategic decisions on the planet. This new power could be called the Oligarchy of Fire, the very thing Zeus feared to the point of punishing Prometheus painfully. Imagining its real existence is part of science fiction, but given the uncontrolled climate drift and the rampant rise of hard-right ideologies as a cause-and-effect relationship, the temptation to believe in its existence is not strange.

The facts seem to confirm this possibility, which many political commentators label as a conspiracy theory. But Dwight Eisenhower was not a conspirator, a paranoiac, a street protester, or a marijuana-smoking hippie; he was the one who best understood the state of the world on all relevant issues and who held more top positions of supreme power over the last 20 years.

Once the military-industrial system began to dominate, it has, one way or another, shaped a transnational super-oligarchy, often in conflict between centres of power from different origins but with similar strategies and shared ultimate interests: those of Mars, the Roman god of war. War for war and the pursuit of total dominance as a way of being in the world: the superior and violent clash called for by the poet Larra, whether against the neighbouring nation, the faraway nation rich in resources, the ideological opponent, or the commercial competitor.

History shows that many governments have collaborated with different oligarchies, as corruption has always been deeply rooted in centres of political power. The military expansion of many European states from the 16th to the 20th century to colonize Africa, America, Asia, and Oceania clearly shows that the political class has almost always behaved in a servile manner to great economic interests, pursuing unlimited profits, no matter the means. Now, living with the so-called climate change imposed by the Oligarchy of Fire, medium and small oligarchies continue to thrive without governments cancelling or at least limiting them. In this matter, there are significant differences between states. There are oligarchies everywhere: small and large, very powerful and others only locally influential, some very harmful and others less so, and the political class tolerates them with very few resistances, in a dynamic of corruption justified at the origin by the need to finance political parties.

In many countries, officially rich and cultured, public television broadcasts advertisements for products for children that everyone knows—and science certifies—are harmful to their health and do not contribute to nutrition.
In July 2023, that is, right now, the WHO, which is the UN department responsible for health, insisted that governments—even those of cultured Europe—must be stricter in controlling products intended for mass consumption by children and adolescents. This WHO reminder must lead to the conclusion that if, in a matter so clearly harmful, which benefits only operators who, no matter how large, are of lesser relevance in the global order, states are so ineffective, hoping that they will protect us from the abuses of the Oligarchy of Fire is an illusion. It seems impossible that governments that do not control the small abusers will undertake effective initiatives against the large ones.
The general problem appears more acute when other lesser and even local oligarchies show the same indifference to forecasts that threaten our survival. There are businessmen and politicians who seem not to read, not even specialized magazines, let alone local newspapers, nor watch television or listen to the radio, as their projections remain as if there is a great future for their projects, their products, and their companies.

On the nature and danger of oligarchies, the Ancient Greeks had already almost figured it all out. We read the historian Thucydides, from the 4th century BC, when the Republic of Athens, putting the following speech in Pericles’ mouth:

But, as I said, the people of Athens know this, and I am sure they look after their interests; here, there are men who invent stories that do not exist and cannot exist.
And I realize perfectly that what these men desire, not for the first time but always, is to frighten you, the people, with fantasies like these, and even more perverse ones, or with their actions, with the aim of gaining control of the city. And I fear that one day, in trying to do this, they will succeed; because we are unable to be on guard before suffering harm and react against them when we realize their machinations.
For this reason, our city is rarely at peace, endures many dissensions, and suffers from more internal conflicts than from external enemies; and sometimes also from tyrannies and unjust personal regimes. Of all these evils, if you are willing to follow me, I will ensure that none comes in our time; therefore, I will try to convince the majority of you to punish those who orchestrate such plots, not only by catching them in the act (which is difficult), but when they have the intention, but not yet the means (since, against the enemy, we must defend ourselves in advance, not only by what they do but also by their plans, especially if, by not being the first to be on guard, we may be the first to suffer).
And regarding the oligarchs, my job is to discover them, watch them, and warn them, as I believe this is the best way to steer them away from the wrong path.
It will be said that democracy is neither intelligent nor equitable, and that those who possess a lot of money are the best to exercise power most wisely.
But I affirm, first of all, that the people is the whole of the citizens, while the term oligarchy designates only a part; and then, that the rich are the best guardians of money, but for giving the best advice, we have the intelligent; and that to make the best decision after listening, it is the majority. These elements, indiscriminately, separately or together, have an equal part in democracy. Oligarchy, on the other hand, involves the majority in the risks, but as for the benefits, it not only takes the largest share but takes it all.

There are oligarchies of different orders and capacities for influence and domination, and Thucydides’ writing puts them all in the same category because they all share the same predatory behaviour against the general interests. In my view, looking back, the political influence capacity of various oligarchies has not changed much. Many opinions say their dominance is now greater than ever, an idea with which I disagree: a hundred years ago and two hundred, etc., they had much more than now, as they were less subject to public opinion scrutiny. Globalization fosters the formation of new oligarchies, especially those formed by companies in new communication technologies, which, in addition to their total leadership ambition given the nature of the sector, add their influence in favour of anti-regulation policies, shared with those promoted by reactionary politics.

Rebellion or Extinction

We recognize ourselves as very intelligent and capable of great conquests and achievements — we are the wise sapiens — but we don’t know how to manage the complex problems of the present nor prepare for the future. And we don’t know how to explain it to children, adolescents, or young people.

What lies ahead must be seen as the generalized resignation of human society in the face of the problems it generates for itself. There can be no winners, and everyone must come out as losers.

The bulk of speeches and commitments from public powers, while warning of the many difficulties, promise solutions within a timeframe long enough to reverse the climate drift; but these promises never arrive, and there’s a continuous stream of information about forecasting errors, weather threats, shortages, and multiple catastrophes. Paradoxically, we have high levels of science and many tools at our disposal to enhance our organizational and problem-solving capabilities.

An acute problem is that we do not trust either the proposals or speeches of the political class, due to the huge deficit of trust in governance, caused by the large gap between their speeches and their achievements. And for both the reason for the distrust and the unstoppable rise in atmospheric temperatures, we can blame the political class, because they have it; we can blame the shadow powers, because they have it; we can blame many of the large corporations, because they have it; and we can blame political and religious ideologies, because they have it.

And once these responsibilities and blames have been attributed, what can citizens do? Apart from attending protests, singing in the streets, and the most lost among us damaging works of art.

Many expert analysts recommend that citizens not dedicate their savings to leisure but invest them in business activities that improve the environment. A very good piece of advice, unfortunately and incomprehensibly still not widely followed, even though it aligns with the capitalist system.

The figure of the climate investor is not protected because the elements of trust capable of guaranteeing the truthfulness of what companies state are lacking. There are many quality seals, but to the eyes of buyers, few are credible due to the inefficiency of the “Almostassers.” There is a lack of credibility in companies to motivate climate investors; a painful deficit with serious consequences.

When we look more closely at the different categories that make up human society in relation to climate change, we must perceive varying degrees or levels of incapacity, depending on geographic origins, material well-being, cultural backgrounds, and the level of information about the state of the planet.

It must be acknowledged that neither the attributions of responsibility in atmospheric warming nor the options to remedy it can be equally and arithmetically distributed among all humans: there are about 5 billion adults, and we cannot attribute to each of us a five-billionth part of responsibility, either for the cause or the solution to the problem. Many people and families practically do not emit CO2, but the climate disaster will affect them the same, or more, than someone who uses a private jet to go see a show on the other side of the world.

For this reason, it might make sense to privately and individually practice a game where each person self-assesses on a scale of greater to lesser culpability or responsibility in the destruction of the climate, and also on the scale from greater to lesser ability to reverse it.

The Catalan poet Joan Maragall coined a fortunate phrase: “the hour of fear,” referring to when a person understands, and accepts, that the end of their life is approaching and feels, inevitably, the need to take stock. We, individually, should not have such an extreme perception, but to overcome the difficulties that will arise and since we are already years behind, it would be very helpful for us to adopt that attitude where self-deception has no place, nor the delay of solving the problems we feel are pending.
I believe that there can be as many types and levels of self-attribution of responsibility as there are adults on the planet, because when it comes to finding excuses, we all see ourselves as subjects of unique circumstances; and it cannot be denied that we are.

A psychologist, I believe Austrian, whose name I do not know, coined the term “functional illiteracy” for cases of people with high education and professional responsibilities, who over the years lose interest in anything outside their daily work activities, becoming true ignorant about almost everything beyond their professional spheres.
This phenomenon can be attributed not to neuronal fatigue, but to an emotional and sentimental refuge effect, which gradually activates as the individual advances in that attitude that Pericles, the head of state of the Athenian Republic, denounced in the mid-5th century BC:

“… those men who only attend to their own affairs cannot be considered calm, but rather useless.”

Apart from its meaning and intention, the fact that this phrase comes from a head of government is strange to us; I do not recall any current or past ruler who has so harshly censured a fellow citizen for evading participation in public life; our rulers encourage political participation only when elections are near; they call for voting, but not for “attending” matters of general interest.

In recent years, two civil society organizations have been at the forefront of the movement to stop atmospheric warming: one is Friday for Future, led by Greta Thunberg and joined by young people; the other is Rebellion or Extinction, initially promoted by university professors from the United Kingdom, highly successful, organized, and primarily supported by people with a good level of education and material well-being, compared to the global average.

Regarding the first organization, I just want to thank the inspiring leader and encourage her, as well as all young people, to continue denouncing and demanding significant changes, with more action from the UN as a primary demand.
Personally, I believe that the strength to confront current global problems is most rooted in the consciousness, will, and energy of girls and women; the adult generations, especially men, do not know where to look or what face to show; meanwhile, young men are torn between understanding women and being supportive of them, or being swept away by misogynistic and sexist impulses. This dilemma determines their political allegiance.

The other organization, for adults, causes me some discomfort; I’m not saying it’s not necessary, but after years, it still hasn’t found a way to express rebellion effectively. I have attended some working meetings and protests, and I plan to continue doing so.
The name of this organization itself prompts a valid reflection for anyone who is not impermeable, but it raises doubts and confusion because the word and concept of “extinction” is of absolute gravity; there is nothing more serious than extinction, which is the painful end of a process that can only be illustrated through comic books and disaster movies.

An informative text, taken from Wikipedia: In psychology, procrastination is the action or habit of putting off actions or activities that need attention, in favour of others that are less relevant and more pleasant. Procrastination is a behavioural disorder associated with the perception of the action that needs to be taken as involving change, pain, or discomfort.

The attitude of procrastination in relation to climate change, with all its threats, means capitulating, giving up, and destroying the future.

The maintenance of this deficient psychological mechanism creates, in adults, a generalized environment of self-contempt towards their own reality as humans, which inevitably and irresponsibly we pass on to children and young people, making them even more vulnerable to the challenges they must face and the growing problems they will have to endure. The summary phrases are all negative: “There’s nothing we can do,” “We are just incapable,” “There are too many of us,” “It’s capitalism,” etc.

A psychological factor that greatly hinders attitude and behaviour is that we have no other experiences to serve as references. Individually, except when faced with the judgment of a judge or a doctor, we are unable to give credibility to an inexorable announcement of painful future; and collectively, even less so. We are still in the denial phase, not of the theoretical problem, but of the urgent need for an active response; and we seek to ease our discomfort with language: extinction or apocalypse, hoping that the epic will help make the distress bearable.

Evoking extinction as a slogan, relating it to “climate change,” leads to imagining painful and final scenarios, which are not at all like the one caused by a large meteorite approaching second by second, arriving while we pray, sing farewell songs, and embrace in a great final apotheosis, certainly epic and even beautiful. The climate apocalypse is not epic, dignified, or honourable; on the contrary, it is shameful because we are the ones causing it. I must say that, for some reason, I find it difficult to imagine the total extinction of our species caused by climate destruction.

The Rebellion o Extinction movement and any others with similar participants and objectives, allow us to visualize widespread behaviours that result from deficiencies in the balanced satisfaction of four genetic needs, and to correlate them with the persistent inability to confront and reverse climate destruction. Obviously, all those who do not participate in protest movements share the same responsibilities; the Greek philosopher Aristotle said that it is not necessary to act to be guilty, because guilt can result from both doing and not doing.

Regarding levels of responsibility, it is clear that there are social groups that bear more responsibility than others.

A few considerations must be especially critical for those groups whose salaries come from public money and therefore owe explanations to the public. One such group is journalists working in public media, and also in private media receiving public money; another includes two different social groups: people holding positions of responsibility in public administrations, and those working as teachers and researchers in university centres and other institutions, also funded with public money.

In these groups, the behaviour known as “political correctness”—initially applied to the way of expressing oneself and quickly extended to content—and the common concern for “not appearing as antisystem” are behaviours widely practiced. In light of the state of the world, and being mostly people with high professional training and social standing, journalists, high-ranking civil servants, and university educators appear to the public as the equivalent of the priestly class of Ancient Egypt: the eye, the voice, and the hand that serves the will of the pharaoh, in exchange for privileges in material well-being, security, and recognition. They are indispensable for enabling the corruption of governance, because what we understand as the political class, meaning elected officials and party elites, are absolutely ineffective without the active or passive participation of the mentioned groups.

The three groups, each in their area of competence, process all the material that allows the political class to decide on all those harmful actions and inhibitions that have led to and continue to lead to the degradation of the biosphere and climate destruction. In their presence, during working hours, harmful strategies and activities are decided upon and implemented that are contrary to the public interest, whether in the economic-business sphere, polluting the natural environment, favouring planned obsolescence strategies, making business with health, or engaging in influence trafficking and privileged information operations, or other imaginative schemes directly predatory of public resources and interests.

This paragraph does not intend to point to the individuals in these three groups as predisposed to being bought off; the paths of corruption are winding, discreet, with few participants, practically secret. Public workers who detect “strange things” have three alternatives: collaborate in what the corrupters want, not collaborate and enter a zone of dangerous discomfort, or report it, a decision not impossible but quite unlikely, which may lead to significant problems. We should not imagine a world of corrupt civil servants, neither by vocation nor by sudden opportunity, but we must imagine that when a corrupt plan is well-structured, the possibility of resistance and denunciation by public workers is limited, as these workers, in their daily workspaces, see their freedom of expression curtailed due to the lack of internal democratic mechanisms and the absence of specialized judicial protection. Many well-founded ideas and criteria are silenced, forgotten, or put in the drawer, and many questions are left unasked.

We must consider that these three groups have high organizational capacity and handle all the information necessary for good governance. Therefore, without them as leaders, the rest of the public, besides being scared, protesting in the streets, playing on social networks, and seething inside, has very little to do, aside from voting for those who seem—based on little evidence—not to be as inefficient and corrupt as the others. The splashes of corruption and inefficiency, no matter their size and scope, tarnish that personal privilege of being able to work professionally for the common good.

In all the people who form these social groups, the perception of satisfying the four biological needs is strangely complicated; they are people who belong to groups that prioritize satisfying their material well-being and security, while renouncing the freedom to express what they know with certainty.

In our era, full of enormous and threatening well-defined problems, exercising freedom necessarily consists of expressing everything that spontaneous emotions and feelings detect as aggression towards the human collective. In the film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance directed by John Ford in 1962, in a passionate speech, the town’s journalist and printer, referring to the role of the media and journalists, just before the tyrant beats him and destroys his printing press, says:

“… they are the conscience of the citizens, they are the guard dog that protects us from the wolf.”

Since always, the challenge has been the same, and Thucydides, one of the legendary Greeks considered the “first historian” of history, expresses it in a short phrase:

“… the secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom is courage…”

To face the wolf, one must be brave, better organized, and better protected.

This point in the narrative, invites to express my conviction that empathy, the courage and the culture are the three characters that we must improve throughout our lives, until the last day, which is when the first two are most relevant.

In the world of private enterprise, many of its executives live with displeasure the adoption of some of the decisions that pertain to their job; in their case, a behaviour of resistance, and even more of denunciation, must be considered heroic, while in the group that lives off public money, it must be seen as obligatory.

The pointing out of “potential corruptions” is unjust when applied in a generalized way; there are maps about the scope of corruption, detailing states, sectors, and “operators.”

The human foundation of democratic governance is political parties, organizations vulnerable by their nature. Formed by people who join and collaborate by their own decision, two types must be blindly distinguished, with different and totally opposed characters and purposes: some, the majority, out of a sense of responsibility, motivated by improving general conditions and seeking the common good; and others—strong-willed people—who see political activity as the most favourable path to achieve personal goals, even if they are contrary to the general ones, and adopting the ways and speeches of the party, work to progress in the organization.

There is another type of politician, unpredictable; in a tragedy by Sophocles, Antigone, which I will mention again on the last page of this book, there is a wise and at the same time worrying phrase, a warning given by Creon, the tyrant who sentences the heroine protagonist to death:

“… it is nevertheless difficult to know the soul, feelings, and opinions of any man, before he has manifested himself in the practice of power and laws.”

Subjected to that duality and to the third possibility that Creon enunciates, to avoid corruption, the internal vigilance of political parties must be rigorously and scrupulously democratic and ethical. The ethical oversight committees of political parties are the first line of protection for society against corruption, and this is an ongoing challenge since the possibilities of corruption are also ongoing, some by vocation, others by inhibition, and others by unanticipated opportunity.

That phrase which Thucydides puts in the mouth of Pericles, when he calls those citizens who do not attend to public affairs “useless,” translates today into political parties with few regular collaborators, that is, without Sectorial Committees—which should be the foundation of their capacity to govern—that are only activated when elections approach, to disappear afterward. Without functional Sectorial Committees and without vigilance against corruption, political parties cannot serve society’s interests.

Cost and Price of Energy, Scarcity or Abundance

The cane, the pebble, the axe, the hoe, the knife, the rope, the wheel, the plow, the pulley, the windlass, and other inventions, were for thousands of years the tools with which we applied energy generated by humans and animals, by wind and by the current of water, until millennia later, the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, using firewood, coal, and oil, and later nuclear reactors, provided the abundance of energy that has allowed the great technological and economic development we enjoy—though not everyone—and that, like an addictive product, has us so hooked that it leads us to risk losing it all.

The transformation and acquisition of any material requires four elements: raw materials, human labour, technology, and energy. And it must be noted that, although energy is now the element that appears to be contentious, its price is only a reference in the final cost calculation, as long as it is the same for all operators and all processes undertaken. What limits us are the availability of raw materials and fertile land, while we are overflowing with talent for technique and science.

The communication strategies of the oligarchy representing the interests of oil, coal, and nuclear companies threaten citizens with the return to the caverns if polluting energy sources are abandoned. However, this discourse is only credible to an uninformed public, because the reality is that in order to continue obtaining profit from oil wells, gas, and coal, these companies and states need to restrict the production of clean energies, as that’s how they ensure the irreplaceable demand for dirty ones. Without oversimplifying or reducing it to a childish tale, we must understand that, with wind energy as the sole source, and electricity and hydrogen as fluids for its transport, storage, and application, climate change would not be a life-threatening danger and would not be at the top of current problems. And if we consider photovoltaic, solar thermal, and the underrated marine energies, the current state of the art for energy provision is more than sufficient to prevent the fatal global warming. Windmills are not new to the history of landscapes; there are many types and functions. A relevant geographic and cultural reality of this energy generation system was a large field of windmills installed in the agricultural plains of inland Crete, used to lift water from the aquifer; now only a few remain, but just a few decades ago, there were thousands—more than 5,000—one next to the other. These were medium-sized (about 8 meters in diameter) with sails made of cloth, not rigid. For Cretan farmers, they were no aberration, and the wheat and chickpeas they grew in their shadow were very good. It is painful and shameful to think that if we imitated the Cretan farmers, they wouldn’t need to worry about the possibility of extinction now. And to say that there are not millions of windmills because “aesthetic sensitivity and ethics” of environmentalists and animal rights activists prevent them is nonsense; these people demand many things, and it seems this is the only one they have achieved. Insufficiencies and deficits come from distortions in governance, not from the incapacity of technique and science; and windmills have existed for more than 2,000 years.

If we had one million, or two million, or ten million more windmills than we currently have, there would be no problem in the world economy, nor any atmospheric threat. I mention the windmill because the image of Crete is suggestive, and it’s the same for all other systems of obtaining clean energy. Safeguarding the aesthetics of the landscape is a poor excuse, as it would mean we prefer to have a good image, even at the cost of our health or lives; and also the protection of birds, because large wind turbines are indeed a deadly trap for them, due to the large length of the blades and the wide spacing between them causing visual confusion. However, traditional windmills with broad, closely spaced sails pose no danger to them, as they detect and avoid them, just as they do with tree tops. It’s all absurd, since climate change will also kill the birds.

The cause of the protests from citizens against large electricity wind turbine projects is the perception that their installation is not about saving us from climate change, but only to prolong their own drift, while some make profit. If governance presented them as the solution, as part of a credible plan, they would be well accepted. But since none of the forecasts derived from current plans come to fruition, citizens feel deceived.

By implementing the principle of obtaining clean and abundant energy, and given the excellent state of science, technique, and the high professional capacity of humans, we could forget about the threats of “climate change.” But, while its production is subjected to financial, legislative, and administrative restrictions, the path to disasters and tragedies is unavoidable.

In the face of such a poisoned outlook, one alternative to explore is a pact between the international community and oil, gas, and coal-producing states, in which they cease their extraction until fusion energy becomes effective, in exchange for guarantees that once “the climate” is restored, they will be able to exploit their reserves again. Without this renunciation, meteorology will continue its loss of constants, ultimately causing a large-scale and permanent shortage of food. And when this situation is reached, the reserves of energy minerals will be worthless.

Regarding the large accumulation of potential energy stored in nuclear arsenals, I do not know enough about its function in replacing CO2-emitting fuels. Uranium, once extracted from the earth and concentrated, is already dangerously radioactive material, which can be stored in warehouses, in the form of armament, or converted into energy. It seems that after the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. bought uranium from the Soviet nuclear arsenal to use as fuel for their power plants. However, nuclear energy, well-regarded by some and greatly criticized by others, will never be fully accepted unless there is a level of global governance that ensures the control and management of this powerful and dangerous energy.

Playing with Fire

Our planet is a thermal unit, and by filling the atmosphere with gases capable of trapping heat, we cause the global temperature to rise and the polar ice to melt. As long as this sequence is possible, there will be no extinction; however, if the ice runs out, complex life forms like ours will disappear in no time due to excessive heat.
Without needing to travel to the poles, mountaineers know that every summer there is less ice; and the data from oceanographic and climatic observatories show that the same is happening with the polar ice; the average temperatures across the entire planet continue to rise.

We are still alive, thanks to the ice accumulated over thousands of years, but we are running out of it. Meanwhile, scientific projections about “climate change” predict scenarios and set deadlines to avoid the total depletion of these cold reserves. It is said that at the North Pole, where there is little ice, it could disappear in 4 or 5 years; the South Pole is the large reserve, and there are no published calculations; no one dares to make any predictions.

Looking at any TV channel or reading any newspaper, there are two very clear and, at the same time, completely contradictory messages: we are heading quickly toward deprivations, dramas, and even tragedies, while making magnificent future projects that don’t take this into account. Absurdly, in our minds, it seems that both realities are compatible.

We are comfortably installed in the heart of the Empire of the Absurd: the planet’s leaders—economists, politicians, and ideologues—working on strategies for maintaining dominance, as if they had a great future ahead; while the rest, the governed, are disoriented and have a tragic sense of impotence, trying to ignore that we are building a future for our descendants that is not uncertain, but filled with serious problems.

The existence of a “global intelligence,” formed by large businesspeople, important politicians, and influential gurus—who often meet physically, such as in the Club of Rome, Davos, the G-7, the G-8, or the G-20—might lead one to imagine that there is a plan B designed by the most powerful, intelligent, and capable people on the planet, which allows us to continue burning fossil fuels and maintain the good pace and control of the economy, all while avoiding having to suffer major disasters or pain due to the warming of the biosphere. Everything under control! However, in my view, there is no plan B, C, or D… or Z; we are simply losing future options due to the inability of global governance as a whole, trapped by outdated ideas, principles, fears, and obsessions, which could have been more or less understandable and more or less bearable when the common grave threat didn’t exist, but now they seem pathetic.

It can be speculated that one of the reasons why world leaders are able to maintain their large projects is that they are experts in industrial and financial systems, where everything can be programmed down to the smallest detail. However, they are completely illiterate when it comes to understanding the multiple vulnerabilities of natural ecosystems, especially agricultural ones, and the lack of food is more than foreseeable.
The term “functional illiteracy,” coined by the Austrian sociologist mentioned on page 117, could be assumed as a common syndrome among many people with high responsibilities, whose decisions affect all of humanity, and more.

We say that we are an industrial culture, or post-industrial, or a service society, or digital, or post-digital, or any other label depending on the perspective, but our only essential activity is agriculture. We can do without almost everything that modernity provides, but we must eat a little every day; it could be said that the rest are luxuries—magnificent and fun, but luxuries.

The all-powerful Oligarchy of Fire cannot control the drifts of regional weather, and these disturbances should be the gravedigger of all their fanciful ambitions of perpetuating more power and more wealth; they are also the same for the natural and legitimate aspirations of others to live.

Observing how the disturbance of the weather evolves and observing the will of the oligarchies to maintain power, one could say that there will come a day when there will still be fossil fuels at gas stations, but the shelves in food stores and cold family refrigerators will be empty.

Projections can be made about how severe restrictions may affect citizens’ behaviours, but what the leaders of governments and the raw energy companies must rule out as impossible are societies that do not react abruptly in the face of severe food shortages, with no prospect of improvement. Then, the ruling classes, politicians, and everyone else will lose that consideration they love so much: being seen as responsible, and will shift directly to being seen as guilty, with revolt being the next phase in history.
One projection that can be made is that when, after a few weeks of citizens in rich societies being deprived of food, or suffocated by heat, cold, water, or wind, citizen pressure, with more wisdom or more rage depending on the society, will force their rulers to adopt measures that will inevitably have to be drastic and will not be able to respect the interests of the oligarchies—not even those of the energy or communication sectors. The poor societies will have already revolted beforehand, and then the entire global economic and logistical system will collapse, and the leaders of the oligarchies will have nothing left to defend or do, beyond hiding from the fury.

It may be that one factor preventing world leaders from embarking on a common climate restoration project is that all of them, whether political, economic, or ideological, fear that showing any predisposition to a pact will be interpreted by their adversaries as a sign of weakness. If there is any truth to this, it seems we have regressed to the crazy times of the imperial families of Rome, where even the mother was not to be trusted.

In recent decades, the great oligarchies with a desire for dominance pursue their protection and fortification through the weakening of democracies that, with more or fewer shortcomings and more or fewer successes, have been established in many states across the planet. With this goal, they propagate and finance an ideology known as “populist”—the far-right as always—which, with different leaderships depending on the state, presents common elements and discourses: rejecting the UN and international courts, degrading political dialogue in parliaments and outside them, politicizing the already precarious independence of the judiciary, suppressing and controlling critical expression in the media, criminalizing migrants; also, trivializing political violence on the street, which is the prelude to the seizure of power.

The renewed far-right ideologies, with different strategies but the same goals, equipped with high irritability toward anything related to freedom of expression and sexual rights, are now the most vocal proponents of denying climate change. Voting regularly with guarantees and having certain levels of freedom of expression and judicial independence is a framework that planetary oligarchies with persistent abuse goals have decided must be eliminated, frightened by the social storms expected in the medium and long term, arising from restrictions on well-being and security. “Populisms” are their tool, proposing “charming” autocrats suitable for gaining the support of those citizens most dominated by fears, whether or not they share their ideologies.

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The recent November 2024 elections in the USA reflect an alarming behaviour from a portion of potential Democratic voters. In my opinion, the primary factor in the victory of the Republican Party was not the big electoral promises or the prestige of their candidate, but the millions of modern firearms stored in the homes of many citizens, the vast majority of whom identify with the winning party. This “latent army” has had a coercive psychological role on a portion of the traditional Democratic voters, similar to the one played by the black and brown shirts of Mussolini and Hitler’s followers: if you don’t let us govern, there will be violence in the streets. It has not yet been the vote of fear, like in Italy and Germany last century, but rather the vote of caution that gave power to the Republican Party. Having weapons at home creates a great and dangerous sense of conviction and security.

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When a politician says that the deficits of democracy can be solved with more democracy, they are absolutely right, but it seems that this idea only goes as far as being adopted as an electoral slogan.

The political model that is now being eroded, social democracy, despite its virtues, does not guarantee good governance, not even in the most refined democracies, as it is only satisfactory in terms of free and secure voting. However, it still has many shortcomings in freedom of expression and judicial independence, two areas that need to be addressed in order to achieve full democracy. Both the inefficiency and the vulnerability of modern democracies are due to the lack of democracy at each level and in the organizational sectors that make up governance. No argument can justify a restriction on the internal democratic systems of the different professional groups within administration and public service. It is justifiable only in private enterprises.

I return to mention the psychiatrist W. Reich:

… we want a democracy, unequivocal and uncompromising, authentic in real life, not on paper. We want the realization of all democratic ideals, whether it is the “government of the people, by the people” or “liberty, fraternity, and equality.” But we add an essential point: remove all the obstacles that prevent its realization! Make democracy something alive! Do not simulate democracy! Otherwise, fascism will win everywhere!

Sigmund Freud and Reich diagnosed that the great dominant cultures are sick.

There are certainly useful perspectives for understanding the political and social trends that fuel populism – both current and historical: when a person or society feels they are losing well-being and security, they may fall into two different attitudes, depending on their personal character and experiences: either becoming depressed or becoming irritable. In today’s times, with the most restrictive future expectations in history – because they are global – the irritable attitudes place their trust in politicians who, unabashedly, display the same emotion they feel: irritability.

This reaction, as a protective reflex, is a characteristic of animal behaviour explained on page 10 of the section The Violent Gene of this Chronicle, which describes an episode of total violence by a group of animals against one of their own species, but who does not belong to the family, when they are subjected to restrictions they feel are vital.

News of personal or family initiatives to escape the disasters being outlined often appear in the media. There are people who say they are preparing to emigrate to the Moon or Mars, for as long as necessary, and wait there until Earth cools down again. I read this as a comic for children, amusing but unreal. Who wants to fly to Mars to lock themselves in a prison for life? The living conditions on Mars will never compare to those on Earth.

Another reaction is the so-called “prepper” mentality, where individuals, families, or small organized groups foresee and protect their future by stockpiling supplies and adopting autonomous energy-gathering systems.

Another hope to solve “climate change” is Artificial Intelligence. However, our current deficiencies are not in intelligence, but in emotions and feelings, and for now, no one is manufacturing machines to improve them. It is certain that AI can be a tool for progress, although the delay in learning to use it effectively comes at the cost of more manipulation; but this is nothing new.

During the first half of the 20th century, the social consolidation strategies of fascism and Nazism used the most modern media: radio, to preach their ideologies and slogans. And it is worth remembering that in another context, and without the intent to manipulate for political or economic gain, in 1938, the brilliant Orson Welles, using radio, caused panic among many thousands of people with his adaptation of the play The War of the Worlds by writer H.G. Wells.

Many opinion articles, books, etc., often express serious concern about political trends that aim to govern society through technological “systems” for surveillance and control of citizens, not only of behaviours but also of their emotional, sentimental, and thought states, through the use of medical data, personal opinions, trends, and behaviours, which citizens innocently and without much reservation provide. China is the most advanced state in this purpose of governing with everything planned; an unsettling experiment that should not be lost sight of.

In a collection of writings and lectures, the Austrian biochemist and mathematician Ludwig von Bertalanffy, in his search for a governance system based on science, published in the 1960s under the title General System Theory, writes:

We have a pretty good idea of what a scientifically controlled world would look like. In the best case, it would be like Huxley’s Brave New World; in the worst, like Orwell’s 1984. It is an empirical fact that scientific advances are devoted just as much, if not more, to destructive uses as to constructive ones. The sciences of behaviour and human society are no exceptions… In fact, the greatest danger of modern totalitarianisms may be that they are so well-versed, not only in physical and biological technology, but also in psychological technology. The methods of mass suggestion, the unleashing of the instincts of the human beast, and the conditioning and control of thought are highly advanced; it is precisely because they are so horrifically scientific that totalitarianisms of earlier times now seem like the work of amateurs… The main postulate will be: the human being is not just a political animal; above all, they are an individual. The true values of humanity are not those shared with other biological entities, with the functioning of an organism or a community of animals, but those that stem from the individual mind. Human society is not a community of ants or termites, governed by instinct and controlled by the laws of the superordinate totality; rather, it is based on the achievements of the individual, and it is lost if it turns this individual into a cog in the social machinery.

“Playing with fire” is a recurring and very explanatory phrase; our big problem is that more than a million years after we started handling it, we still haven’t learned to avoid hurting ourselves with it. Rightly so, the residents of Olympus saw Prometheus as a fool with little sense, for he merely made us lose our fear of it.

We, the global society – except for the poor families in poor countries – are trapped by two dependencies – in the medical sense of the word: one is the consumption of products and services ingrained in the population, and the other is the pursuit of more wealth and power ingrained in the business elites; and they feed off each other, the first demanding insatiably more products and comforts, and the second providing them to achieve greater dimension. In between is the political class, always with two faces.

One reflection is that we have not made use of the time of fictitious abundance of cheap energy that we allowed ourselves for more than a century and a half – taking it from our descendants – to establish governance mechanisms that would guarantee peace, prosperity, and hygiene across the planet. And now, the sum of wars, poverty, desertification, various forms of pollution, and “climate change” overwhelm us.

They overwhelm us because, in order to enjoy all the possible delights of well-being and security brought by industrialization, we have forgotten that basic need of freedom of expression. And now, when the problems caused by its scarcity reach us, we are demoralized and without vital breath.

XV
Periodization of history

Periodization of history

Periodization invites us to consider defined eras, either due to improvements in the state of technology, a new physiological ability such as speech, or new individual and social attitudes and behaviours related to health, coexistence, religion, and governance.

When viewed from the perspective of the “collective unconscious” and the “history of mentalities,” from the earliest paleontological and archaeological signs of civilization to the present day, several periods can be observed, some of which overlap in time; I will choose the ones I find most defining.

A first period can be observed, from the domestication of fire to the domestication of animals and plants. We know very little about the “mentalities” of our ancestors from this era, as the only information we have consists of a few bone finds and small stone objects, with the corresponding dates provided by chemical and physical analyses.

During this long period, which we could very schematically call the evolution from monkey to human, elements and factors of progress began to emerge that involved essential advancements in our development as a species, as individuals, and as a society. Initially, this involved modifying stones, then the progressive techniques for handling fire, flint work, around 300,000 years ago the first signs of reverential memory of the dead, around 160,000 years ago the physiological ability to emit complex sounds and the beginning of speech, around 50,000 years ago the discovery of the harms of consanguinity and how to avoid it, and around 30,000 years ago mural paintings as the first demonstration of the mental capacity for “representation.”

One of these improvements was the result of a “genetic modification” of the vocal cords, and the other five were “cultural discoveries” by our ancestors; a demonstration of heroic persistence for the continuity of the species and its improvement in various capacities, completely different from those of animals.

Lasting over a million years, the most characteristic and conditioning feature of these humans was that they lived in family groups of no more than 30 people, in an obligatory, perpetual nomadism, collecting and hunting wild food.

For each person, the small family group was their entire protective world—physical, emotional, and sentimental—from which they obtained the satisfaction of their needs, conditions that determined their absolute physical and psychological dependence.

None of the humans of that era had a perception of themselves as beings differentiated from the family group, a way of being in the world similar to that of children and, to a lesser degree, adolescents, before the sense of individuality was consolidated.

They were aware of being superior to animals and, above all, they had imagination, which is the great virtue unique to the human species and what most differentiates us from other animals.

The second period began around 10,000 years ago, with the discovery of a new state of technology: the domestication of animals and the cultivation of plants. This not only became the new and revolutionary system of food supply, but it also allowed humans to leave perpetual nomadism behind, live in stable villages, and begin to invent.

This is when the great human potential as an imaginer and creator of new physical realities emerged; for the first time, our ancestors were able to have space and time for invention, and they began to discover and perfect textiles, ceramics, house construction, metallurgy, decorative arts, etc., and useful tools like the mill, the wheel, the cart, the plow, etc. We owe everything to this period, as they started from nothing.

We can imagine the “mentality of the era” and its “collective unconscious,” heavily motivated by the new realities and expectations that the recent modernity provided, without abandoning the cultural baggage and social forms acquired in the first era. The fact of being “the first inventors” suggests that they recognized themselves as intelligent, skilful, and capable beings. Comparing themselves with animals had become a thing of the past.

The third era begins about 2,000 years later, with another advancement in the state of agricultural technology, when it is discovered that irrigated agriculture is much more productive than dryland farming. Its most relevant feature is the foundation and development of the first cities, as indispensable organizational centres for carrying out and managing the complex network of canals, dams, and dikes for irrigation, along with the new experience of communal life.

The first cities were all pyramidal societies, autocratic and with religious preeminence, explainable on one hand by the organizational needs required for large-scale irrigation, and on the other hand by the origin of their new inhabitants: small family groups of gatherers and hunters who migrated there attracted by the sense of security that the city offered, in comparison to the large spaces from which they came.

For the first time, our ancestors were forced to organize themselves into collectives of a certain size, where the first psychological and sociological behaviours of individuals and groups emerged—those who gained power to decide over others, that is, rulers and subjects, as well as priests and the believing people, generating the first experiences of gregariousness around an authority at the top of the organizational pyramid.

First in Mesopotamia and later in Egypt, political tyrannies formed that were fully associated with religious beliefs; and people, unless they were part of the power elites, did not exist as subjects, either socially, culturally, or politically, except when, under obligation, they were called upon for war, public works, or large ritual festivals.

The dynamics of the formation and development of Mesopotamian and Egyptian cultures present similarities between them, and also with those that would emerge a few thousand years later, based on irrigated agriculture, such as Cambodia, the Mayans, and the Aztecs—also with cities, totalitarian powers, and pyramids.

All of them had similar outcomes in terms of the formation of “collective thought,” which in this chronicle I have defined as a “loop,” meaning historical events and physical realities of great significance, but that keep many human capabilities inactive, especially intellectual ones, as well as many emotional ones and the constant, unsatisfied desire for justice. Perhaps the image of the bison is more suggestive, as it provides the false impression of progress.

From this stage, we know a lot about architectural, economic, political, and social history as expressions of “collective thought,” but we know almost nothing about “individual thought,” because very few people participated in this virtue, while the citizens, the people, did not have the opportunity to develop it, immersed in gregariousness and the discipline imposed by power structures.

For the overwhelming majority of citizens, any look at the environment or upwards only reflected the power of the gods, kings, and priests.

The fourth stage, lasting approximately 2,500 years, develops in parallel with the maturity of the third, and is the era of societies I have called wise: Crete, Phoenicia, and Greece, capable of discovering individuality and eradicating gregariousness, while taking advantage of the advances from previous stages, to which they incorporated new cultural and social values.

In Phoenicia, improvements in construction and maritime navigation technology allowed them to venture into the open sea, far from home, and experience a new reality that fostered the first spontaneous experiences of individual freedom, inseparable from the solidarity among sailors. In Greece, the resistance to accepting monarchy, the vocation for freedom, and the sense of individuality influenced by Phoenicia led political evolution to reach democracy.

It is in this stage, first with the Phoenicians and then the Greeks, when, although maintaining ancestral beliefs, they left behind gregariousness and fanaticism, the eye-for-an-eye mentality, witch hunts, and torture, opening the doors to a world that cherishes human progress as a new and revolutionary concept, where all people are equally worthy, equally free, and equally responsible—conditions necessary for empathy, solidarity, and organizational capacity.

The 300 years of Hellenism were not its continuation but a hybrid parenthesis formed by Egyptian and Greek cultures, tutored by Macedonian autocrats.

The fifth stage begins in 31 BC with the defeat of Cleopatra, when the dominance of Rome is definitively established. Rome preserved Greek mythology, the alphabet, and aesthetics, but for pure ideological reasons, it eliminated all the significant inventions brought by the Phoenicians and Greeks, such as the friendly colonial system and democratic governance. Coldly, as a strategy for dominance, Rome eliminated tribal societies in the invaded territories.

This strategy of domination had an exception in Egypt, where the Roman Empire destroyed nothing relevant, believing that such an immense irrigation network could not be managed by slaves, as it required will and vocation. The exception was emperors who became pharaohs and were represented as such.

This stage has two periods: the Roman Empire and the Medieval period. The first represents order imposed with extreme violence and hygiene; the second, the disorder typical of failed states, fanaticism, violence, and filth in the literal sense of the word.

With the fall of the Roman Empire, the centuries of the Middle Ages became its painful legacy and continuity, extending until the Humanism of the 14th century AD. The 1,300 years of this stage are characterized by a low cultural and intellectual output, compared to the previous and subsequent periods, but above all by publicly displayed violence as “educational strategy.”

The Medieval period was not a meaningless loop, but rather the darkest era in human history, filled with ignorance, misery, and much fear and pain. Except for the construction of cathedrals—the mysteries of masonry—there was little cultural production.

The sixth stage begins with the era known as Humanism, developed thanks to the recovery via Byzantium and Al-Andalus of values that emerged during the fourth stage, and their assimilation by prosperous Italian merchants, thanks largely to the Silk Road. It continues with the Renaissance and the Enlightenment.

However, while these advances developed vigorously, aggressive colonialism also flourished in parallel, led by many European states following the Roman Empire model. When Christian churches stopped persecuting scientists and intellectuals, science and technology progressed rapidly. So did ideas of freedom and free thought.

This sixth stage presents many shadows, so thick that they often eclipse the lights. Mars continued to impose his overwhelming law wherever he saw any threat to the paranoid principles that sustain his perception of the world.

There were great advances in many elements contributing to civilization, but also the persistence of mindsets from past eras, dominated by political and religious inquisitions serving various oligarchies, expressed poetically in the principle “the upper and violent touch.”

The seventh stage begins at the end of the 18th century, with the Democratic Constitution of the new state of North America, when its independence from Great Britain, free and secure electoral voting, independent judges, and freedom of expression were established. Since the Republic of Athens, nothing similar or as promising had been seen. This was now backed by a state that, a little over a century later, would emerge as the world’s leading power.

That model of constitution was only for the U.S. It did not extend to Europe, which was still focused on the violent exploitation of its colonies. Despite the influence of ideas from Humanism, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment, European heads of state did not adopt a constitution that could be considered democratic.

It would take more than a century and a half, until the end of World War II, when, by “American decree,” democratic constitutions spread across half the world. Military occupations of colonized countries ended, and global governance institutions like the UN, the World Bank, and the IMF were created.

In Europe, a few farsighted individuals managed to sign the Treaty of Rome, the embryo of the current European Union. It seemed that, having learned from so many tragedies, the world’s elites had understood what the priorities for governance should be to avoid war and achieve prosperity.

It is important to note that in the post-World War world, all initiatives were promoted by the absolute victors, who did not think of revenge nor promote autocracies. Instead, they created representative and solidarity-based structures, planting the seeds of democracy.

A few moments of this seventh stage resemble those of the Republic of Athens, where a few people in political power feel they represent the whole society and legislate for human progress.

New realities and great progress were made in many areas, such as the implementation of free and secure voting in many states around the world, human rights legislation, the abolition of slavery, feminist values, freedom of sexual identity, values of peace, concern for the biosphere’s health, and animal welfare, alongside the decline of racism, sexism, and misogyny, despite the resurgence of these social pathologies fuelled by political far-right movements.

Reinforcing this global political trend, the adoption of social democracy in industrialized societies, as an antidote to Marxism, fostered more modernity and a hopeful atmosphere of social peace.

In this stage, the Western world transitioned from the Ancient Régime, characterized by a rigid social stratification in a primarily agricultural economy, to industrialized and urban societies, with new social classes and new reasons and forms of conflict between them. The weak establishment of democracy causes the bison effect, and evident progress in many areas does not translate into human progress.

Meanwhile, through sometimes blatant and other times hidden paths, Mars continued to stroll impunely through places of power, ensuring wars thousands of miles away.

Despite these shortcomings, the prevailing “collective mentality” was the perception that technical, scientific, social, and cultural production advances bring well-being and definitive, ascending security to all of humanity. With stumbles and small falls, however, we move forward.

The eighth stage begins in the mid-1980s, when the destructive effects of fossil fuel combustion gases are “discovered.” It’s a direct punch to the face when we thought we were starting to dominate the game.

All state governments would like to adopt efficient measures to stop “climate change,” but whenever they make restrictive decisions, there are aggressive protests from the sectors of the economy that are affected. And when they adopt, or simply recommend, measures that would involve some restriction on comfort and well-being levels, citizens protest or ignore them, as in the case of the proliferation of plastic packaging.

The clear and proven unwillingness of citizens to adopt relevant changes, despite understanding their necessity, shows selfishness. But it is not only that; it is also largely rooted in the lack of trust in governance.

Caught between the mistrust of citizens on one hand, and on the other, the pressure from raw energy producers, governments avoid facing the problem and, choosing the path of least resistance, adopt the “climate tolerance calendar” created by the competent technicians of the oligarchies that own the polluting energies.

It is evident that without a credible project that has gained citizens’ trust, no attempt at reform that involves restrictions will be effective. Credible and effective—two conditions that are not impossible, but are difficult.

This eighth stage is characterized by disorientation and paralysis, where neither global, state, regional, nor local governance can react to the degradation of the climate, expressed in weather irregularities in some regions. Citizens, frightened, remain immobile, while the temperature of the atmosphere and the sea continues to rise.

It is undeniable that, while there have been huge advances in many areas, we have failed in preserving living conditions. Many Democratic Constitutions have been approved, but because our culture lacks that visionary, non-negotiable principle of freedom of expression that led the Ancient Greeks to democracy, we are still halfway there. And although we cannot say that we have autocratic governments, neither can we say that they are truly democratic.

As the measures adopted, whether political, economic, or technical, are implemented with insufficient means, without conviction, and with great delay, I dare to outline a ninth stage.

“Climate change,” in the not-too-distant future, will unfortunately and inevitably cause widespread restrictions on well-being and the sense of security. For citizens, the dilemma is whether to conform to following the always erroneous official calendars and get used to gradual states of precariousness or, having learned their lesson, push to decide who, when, and how to adopt the inevitable and urgent reforms.

There are no magic formulas to evade the problem because it is a global physical and chemical issue, but there are ways to face it; and our greater or lesser success in doing so will determine the survival of many lives and the future well-being and security of humanity.

There are two possible options: one passive and the other reactive. The first is the majority attitude of wanting to ignore the threats, or a variation of this where people feel concerned but, because they have not found a way to participate in the goal of stopping CO2 emissions, they remain passive. The second, reactive, is shared by few people, though it may gather some thousands in protest demonstrations. They are deeply concerned, but without much hope and without knowing which paths are possible or with which political, social, and cultural tools to embark on them.

The Enlightenment called for knowing, informing oneself, investigating, criticizing, and acting, with freedom as the tool. Those ideas and principles have made their way and are now the most valuable global capital. They are “the collective mentality” of the era, which unfortunately has to coexist with orchestrated deception and many forms of violence.

Interest, understanding, and individual and social sensitivity to issues once shared only by minorities have now become the cultural heritage of humanity, despite the resurgence of authoritarianism, racism, violence, and groupthink that often emerge.

Levels of information, education, and general culture, multiplied by the media—new, not-so-new, and old—foster and accelerate these qualitative changes. And despite their vulnerability to manipulation and censorship, they have the power to generate states of opinion that distance themselves from myths, taboos, and ancient beliefs rooted in ignorance and separation. This helps create, for the first time in history, the possibility of speaking of a “planetary consciousness” on a few fundamental issues, shared by the majority of the global population, with broad-reaching aspirations and projects that render obsolete the residual ideologies dominated by Mars and the delusional fantasies of his followers.

So far, freedom of expression in defence of the collective has been exercised to defend ideas, thematic rights, or to denounce group or regional issues. Now, the threat of “climate change” means that the exercise of freedom of expression must be done in defence of all humanity. These feelings, though not entirely new, acquire quality, consistency, and power in our minds, as it concerns survival, opening doors to a new era.

The most reactive attitude is to demand the strengthening of the UN, equipping it institutionally and materially to fulfil its most important founding goal: to prevent wars, which are merely a luxury for the capricious and paranoid, and which, in the current state of the biosphere, we cannot afford. Just observe the apparent character of the leaders who are currently at war: pure narcissism, bomb, and a headlong rush forward.

Throughout these pages, Ancient Greece is often mentioned as the source of initiatives, practices, and discoveries. One such initiative was Draco’s reform in the 6th century BC, which left the “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” law behind, decreeing that conflicts between individuals could not be solved by an act of force from either the aggressor or the victim. From the day it came into effect, the state held the monopoly on violence—wise, prudent, and modern thinking.

Now, with so many existential threats, Draco’s reform must be applied to states: the monopoly on violence should only be held by the authority that represents us all: the UN. For the UN to exercise its function, it is necessary that state governments cede sovereignty and material and human resources to it.

I do not dare to say that if there were no war in Ukraine or Gaza, the world would quickly find solutions to climate change. However, I can say that as long as there are wars involving powerful states, no climate restoration initiative can succeed.

In the face of the drift toward disaster, only new realities that result from the pursuit and implementation of utopias will suffice. The goals are difficult, immense, overwhelming, but there is no other way, and evading them is the worst attitude, as it does not alleviate daily unrest but rather exacerbates it.

Drawing on the lesser or greater satisfaction of the four genetic needs, the current period demands that the exercise of freedom of expression, as an attitude and gesture of personal dignity, be the most important character trait, alongside the reinforcement of recognition elements, with well-being and security as subordinate needs. To do the opposite will lead to disaster; we are now reaping the results of twenty centuries of mistakes in prioritization.

XVI
Athena, does she still love us?

Cultural Diversity

In previous chapters, I explained that I focused the narrative on almost a single part of the planet, apologizing for the strong dose of ethnocentrism displayed and also asking for some time to justify the geographical limitation of the perspectives.

Looking back, even if only a few years ago, the explanation is of a geopolitical nature and related to the progress of science and technology, when, apart from Japan, the only centres of the world possessing such advancements were Western Europe and North America.

Now, this perspective has become obsolete, thanks to progress in China, India, and other societies, as science and technology have ceased to be the nearly exclusive domain of white Christians in the Northern Hemisphere.

Here, I want to express, through real examples, what I understand by cultural diversity in its most relevant expression, some of which I have experienced personally, while others I have read about in different sources.

1976, Freetown, Sierra Leone, capital of West Africa, on an old suburban bus with two seats on one side of the aisle and three on the other.

In front of me, in the middle seat, sits a woman who appears to be asleep, leaning completely on the man sitting to her right. Time passes, and as the bus approaches a stop, the man with the woman collapsed on him gently, and trying not to wake her, guides her body toward the man sitting to her left, who helps with the repositioning with delicacy and naturalness. The woman seems to wake up, looks at her new pillow, and goes back to sleep. No words are exchanged. Later, the man gets off, and the bus continues. My travel companion is from the country but has lived in Europe, and he guesses my surprise. I ask him, and he says that most likely these three people did not know each other, and that it was a normal sight.

1982, Algeria, in the small monumental and walled city of Ghardaïa, at the edge of the Sahara desert.

I was invited to visit the family home of a person from the country whom I had met at the hotel. We enter a large, bright room that leads to a big kitchen. There are women, children, and teenagers of all ages, along with a couple of elderly men, in total, perhaps twenty people. The women are busy—sorting vegetables and grains, grinding flour, sewing, or weaving—while talking non-stop, and the children are playing noisily.
A young woman who has given birth to twins, sitting in the middle of the room, like a naked goddess from the waist up, is breastfeeding both babies simultaneously, admired up close by the children and with distant looks from everyone else.
The man accompanying me is young and interacts confidently and naturally with everyone. During my visit, some men came in to talk for a while with the women or children, greeted me, and then left. I, the foreign guest, am the centre of attention, with many questions, cheerful exchanges, laughter, and a lot of affection. After the initial surprise, I feel at home.

1996, rural Morocco in the Atlas Mountains, near the Ouzoud waterfalls.
In a peasant’s house, a young woman gave birth a few days ago; the girl is wearing a long dress with a large sash around her waist, and inside the dress, the baby, practically naked, skin to skin with the mother, is spending its first days, weeks, and months of life. In a short time, the baby learns to nurse whenever it wants, without needing to ask. Regularly, the mother gently takes the baby from its resting place, brings it to the ground, and the baby excretes almost instantly as a reflex. I am told that within a few days, babies learn this, adopt the routine, and there are never any hygiene problems or bad smells.

As the weeks and months go by, the baby will begin to show signs of wanting to know what lies beyond the mother and will demand freedom of movement, all while living in the happiness that the security, well-being, and recognition given by the mother provide, in a continuity of the pregnancy. During the 4 or 5 days and nights I spent in the house, I never heard the baby cry; and when I returned a few months later, I saw its lively interest in knowing what was happening outside its safe refuge. A marsupial-like upbringing, perfect for both the newborn and the mother. The girl, perhaps on the same day she gave birth, will go to collect firewood in the forest, gather grass for the animals, or fetch water from a distant spring, always with the baby on her back, speaking to it.

Two stories from modern and ancient history, read in different sources:

Kerala is one of the most populated and wealthiest states in India, with health and education parameters comparable to many European states. In 1962, elections gave victory to a Marxist political party, which quickly moved to decree institutional and structural changes following that ideology. Ten years later, an election was won by a party that promised to return to a capitalist economic model, and the new policy was implemented. This whole event unfolded without violence, whereas in almost any other part of the world, it would have likely resulted in coups, violence, and deaths.

Two ancient stories, narrated by an exceptional witness: the 14th-century Moroccan Ibn Battuta, a contemporary of Marco Polo. In his great travel book, when he passed through Kerala, a state already very rich at the time, Ibn Battuta describes customs that his Muslim morality prevented him from viewing favourably. He was annoyed by how free women were in many decisions, how they wore no clothing above the waist, and he says that despite his insistence every day, he never managed to get his servants to wear a blouse.

Upon his return to Morocco, Ibn Battuta travelled to Black Africa, to the land of gold beyond the great Sahara Desert, where he encountered similar situations to those in Kerala, with the aggravating factor that here, the society that recognized relevance and freedom for women was Muslim. He recounts that on one occasion, after arriving in Oulata, in present-day Mauritania, following two months of desert travel on camel, he was invited by a prominent jurist of the country, with whom he had crossed paths during the long and difficult journey, to visit him at his home.
As soon as he entered, he saw a young woman and a man sitting on a divan, talking and laughing. When the host told him that this was his wife, Ibn Battuta protested, citing Muslim laws and customs. The host replied that the man was a friend of his wife’s, warning him that it would be better not to censure or express rejection of such behaviours. He insisted that this was their culture and that they saw no contradiction in being good Muslims. In Oulata, women were the family reference and managed many important wholesale businesses.

These episodes and cases are possible because they occur in societies, either completely matriarchal or with a strong inherited imprint of this beneficial cultural and social anomaly. The stories from the Maghreb have their historical foundation in the matriarchal culture that is still very much alive further south, in some regions of the Sahel, the Sahara, and West Africa. The ones from Kerala are explained by the same background; the British colonial authorities, in the mid-19th century, repealed the matriarchal laws specific to this state.

None of the four stories could have occurred in a patriarchal society, except with a nuanced exception: that of the bus in Freetown, which could have taken place at a party with teenagers laced with alcohol and cannabis.

Thus, focusing most of the chronicle on the white, Western, and Christian world, heir to the Roman Empire, is with the purpose of objectifying it and criticizing it, due to its decisive impact on global society, culture, and economy.

The two great Asian societies, India and China, freed from colonial rule and solidly constituted as states, have characteristics as different from each other as they are from the Western world.

In my opinion, in India, despite the imprint of the caste system and the strained relationship between Hindus and Muslims, the strong establishment of the democratic system typical of tribal systems and also the heritage of the fight for decolonization, grants enormous institutional stability. Here, freedom and recognition allow the country to function despite material welfare shortcomings. In my view, in this great country, authoritarian tendencies are unlikely to consolidate into dictatorial regimes.

China presents an uncertain future, where the lack of basic freedoms and elements of recognition within the new urban society, despite the beneficial effects of Confucianism, could lead to deviations when climate change causes restrictions on well-being.
The Chinese institutional system is one-party, and in my view, a single party does not necessarily equate to autocracy; the real problem, everywhere and always, is the restriction of freedom of expression, whether there are many parties or just one.

“The School Problem”

A news story that appeared in local, regional, and beyond media outlets, due to its extreme violence: a group of 5 or 6 children and some adolescents abused and raped an eleven-year-old girl from their school. In the school environment, videos and comments about the assault circulated for weeks without becoming news, until the victim’s brother, also a student at the school, saw the footage and reported the incident.
This is an extreme case, but one of many that occur in the school environment, with bullying as a widespread problem; it also happens in the streets, with adolescents as the protagonists.

For not much time now, and depending on different cultures and social structures, aggressive behaviours, as well as passive and submissive ones, have manifested themselves at younger and younger ages. Both frequent news stories and statistics about violent actions perpetrated by adolescents and young people cannot be ignored.
There are well-known cases where the only conclusion is that, in many situations within a classroom, student behaviours are polarized: on one side, a few abusers, and on the other, the rest of the students are passive, watching and remaining silent. This presents a very concerning present and future scenario.

Just as children draw figures following the law of frontal symmetry, which is the initial stage of their ability to express images, when they act, they follow the same pattern and, with broad strokes close to caricature, show their perception of the world, imitating adults. The school is their microcosm that reflects the entire world, where the abuse of a few causes the inhibition of the rest. A mechanism learned quickly by both the abusers and the inhibited.

People with experience in dealing with animals often explain, in general terms, the causes of strange, wild, or violent behaviours that may arise in some of them, using the common expression: “They must have been punished.”

It is argued that the tendency toward violence detected in minors is due to the influence of pornography, which they can easily access. However, this is a weak and partial argument, an attempt to point fingers at distant and seemingly unreachable culprits. To be capable of exerting violence, an abuser must be previously dominated by a strong dose of internal tension.

It can be observed that there is no animal of any species that practices violence during childhood and adolescence; they may engage in seemingly violent play, but they do not seek to cause suffering in others. Child and adolescent violence has causes that are not natural, and must inevitably be the result of erroneous upbringing and “education” that the young ones feel as aggressive because, intrinsically, they are. Obviously, there is no lack of love from mothers and fathers, but there is a lack of empathy and information.

As W. Reich observed with concern a century ago, it is still very difficult to have public conversations and debates about problems associated with or derived from a conflicted experience of affection and a distorted understanding of sexuality during childhood and adolescence. Those taboos that now seem impossible and ridiculous, such as the one that prevented mothers from talking to their daughters about menstruation, are still very much alive in many places and among many people.

There needs to be reflection and research, without limits and without taboos, to reconsider some of the rooted customs and habits that are considered normal but inevitably cause suffering or restrictions to children, whether infants, children, or adolescents.
For their sake, society must consider changes in criteria and habits. There is knowledge and technical tools to detect any distress, suffering, or shortcomings, but there is fear that the daily life system adopted by current urban societies will not be able to embrace what research, empathy, and justice would advise.

One example, which was torture for infants and fortunately is no longer practiced anywhere, arising from a fatal mix of excessive zeal and ignorance: just over a century ago, immediately after birth, many families would wrap and immobilize newborns with cloth bandages, almost like an Egyptian mummy. They claimed it was to prevent the baby’s limbs from “dislocating,” but it was torture. Now, there are others, not as extreme, but still present.

In the distortion of learning about sexuality, looking back sends shivers down the spine, as the abuse of children and adolescents has been a constant—no one knows exactly when, but it’s been very old. Dramas like gratuitous violence and sexual abuse have been the common scenario in many families, schools, and factories, with aberrant practices becoming normalized, unnoticed by anyone other than those who suffered from them. In recent times, things have improved, but with frequent news reports, it seems that there is still much to be done.

And this new reality, which is the exposure to screens with sexual images associated with violence, is being put within reach of children before they can even distinguish it. Their display should be a crime severely prosecuted.

The UN, the United Nations Organization

What is surprising and concerning is that in all the demonstrations against climate change, the demand for more power for the UN is hardly seen anywhere, when any solution to any global problem necessarily goes through a well-structured United Nations organization, with legislative, sanctioning, and intervention powers that it currently lacks.

Apart from recognizing that the UN and its extensions are the institutions that describe the planet’s problems with the most realism, and that its leaders are the most persistent voices in denouncing them, the UN is the only body that represents everyone. It must be understood that, as professionals, its civil servants have the mission of having global perspectives.
It suffers from many deficiencies in legislative and executive capacities, which is why the people who are protesting, whether in favour of democracy or against climate change, should demand that governments cede sovereignty to the UN in all relevant aspects that concern us at the planetary level.

It can be observed that few civil society organizations, neither pacifist nor environmentalist, have historically viewed the UN favourably. This may be due to the anarchistic ideological roots of these movements, which are opposed to any idea and structure of power. However, with this mentality, what is most favoured are the desires of autocrats and oligarchies with hegemonic pretensions: the weakness of global institutions.

The UN is an organization that does not have life of its own, and while citizens do not understand the need for its existence, recognize it, advocate for it, and demand it as an indispensable tool, national governments will not cede sovereignty to it.
But without a well-legitimized, structured, and well-equipped UN, the world will continue on a hellish drift; certainly, there may be pacts between large states, but they will only be effective if they serve to empower the UN because planetary awareness can only be expressed positively and efficiently when represented by a global body.
At the moment, it has few powers and responsibilities, and to be truly useful, it needs significant institutional changes, which unfortunately are rarely discussed in public debates. The current makeup of the Security Council, in relation to environmental issues, makes no sense, and in relation to armed conflicts, it is a continuous failure.
A system of representation must be found in any UN body that is weighted by population, pollution generation, environmental vulnerability, and the contribution of resources to address problems.

Without the existence of this governance structure, the UN, the drift toward extinction will continue to shape our lives, in the form of “climate change,” more wars, desertification, pollution, loss of biodiversity, etc. etc.

A simple reflection should make us understand that there is no other way to confront climate change except organizationally at the planetary level. Individual, family, or group salvation offers nothing; neither living on the Moon or Mars nor stockpiling food in a bunker will save anyone.

A few arguments in favour of the UN having political power, with the ability to orchestrate dialogues and agreements, and also the coercive power to stop the armed conflicts that are currently overwhelming us:

Only the UN can bring about the neutralization of wars and establish agreements and pacts between adversaries. There is no possibility of undertaking the major reforms required for climate restoration while there are wars between powerful states on the planet. Without wars, the difficulties are great, but with wars in the mix, they are insurmountable; and the best anti-war strategy is for the UN to have a monopoly on violence, just as current states have it in relation to their citizens.
Currently, despite the UN and the various global Tribunals of Justice, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth” prevails among states, but “climate change” forces us to surpass this barbaric, and more than ever, suicidal stage, and achieve a higher level of civilization.

With the ultimate goal of stopping all ongoing wars, to favour the cessation of hostilities, only the UN can grant conditions of “forgiveness” to those individuals and governments that have waged them.

Only the UN can provide guarantees to fossil fuel-producing states that are willing to close their wells and mines until the climate recovers its normal parameters, with the establishment of a global pact that recognizes these states, so that once the climate crisis is over, their reserves will have a place in the energy market again.

Only the UN can manage a single price for energy, an essential measure to establish the pact.

Only the UN, through the FAO, can take responsibility for food security forecasting.

These statements are merely expressions of good intentions, which could be described as utopian, but at this point in history, seeing the accelerated degradation of the biosphere while the violent powers of the planet continue to challenge each other, we are left with only one mindset, an attitude that must be transformed into action: the determination to make all these utopias a reality, using freedom of expression to disarm supremacism and eradicate corruption.

Human Towers (Castellers)

In Catalan-speaking lands, there exists a collective game that, more than a risky sport, is an art with risk, consisting of “building” human structures of surprising height, both unusual and daring, with no other element than people: one on top of the other, and up they go, reaching heights of up to ten levels.

These are called castells (human towers), and the people who form part of them are known as castellers: children, teenagers, young people, and adults, of all genders and social classes and groups, they do it out of passion; all it takes is good health and courage to be part of it; there are no professionals.

Each group consists of around 200 people who practice very frequently and display their human monuments in public squares on festive days; different structures have been achieved, all seeking the beauty of the obelisk. Today, there are over 60 different groups, and the activity has been recognized as Cultural Heritage by UNESCO.
I dedicate this section to them—without in any way diminishing any other organized manifestation from any other society or cultural sphere, such as an orchestra, a choir, or a sports team—because the activity of building castells contains all the essential qualities to be considered the perfect model of human society in the face of any relevant challenge: personal and group courage, a sense of individuality, empathy, solidarity, absence of authoritarianism, energy, physical and mental effort, sacrifice, and a tremendous organizational capacity, all in the service of an aesthetic purpose, lived in an environment of high tension and the risk of accidents, where neither “shut up, I’m in charge here” nor “last one’s a fool” have any place.

Each casteller knows that if they lose concentration for an instant or if they cannot control a trembling knee, the whole structure will fall, some companions may be injured, and it will be a failure for the group; each casteller physically, emotionally, and sentimentally feels the effort of their companions because they live intensely the process of building the castell, both in raising it and in taking it down. Each casteller feels like an irreplaceable part of the great game.

The characteristics of the castellers, which are all virtues, are not theoretical or good intentions to be achieved, but lived realities that each and every one of them experiences during the time spent building the castell. Yes, there are good intentions, but most importantly, there are personal experiences felt in a collective way, which are absolutely indispensable for building any castell of more than three levels; one only has to try the enormous difficulty, to the point of impossibility, of attempting it. There is a great deal of technical and psychological preparation and learning behind it.
There are often public exhibitions and competitions of castells between different groups, and then another characteristic emerges, which is also a virtue: the members of one group rejoice and applaud the success of their competing rivals.
Contemporary societies and cultures are lacking, in both quality and intensity, the characteristics of the castellers, and we are enriched by looking at these daring, admirable, and beautiful achievements. In them, there is no educational project or moral discourse; there is, simply, a generous collective will, technically competent and extraordinarily organized, with great individual risks and efforts, to generate beauty and gift it to the people who, with hearts in their mouths and emotions running high, passionately applaud every attempt, every success, and every fall.

Antigone

A statistical reality, according to opinion studies, is that citizens consider corruption a serious problem only when a recent high-profile case arises, after which they place in the top spot issues like unemployment, public safety, immigration, the cost of living or housing, or even the environment. However, organized corruption is, except for earthquakes, volcanoes, meteorites, and hurricanes, the origin of all the major problems that weigh on the citizens.

Considering the magnitude and persistence of the problem, it does us a disservice to assume it is only ignorance; in my opinion, from a certain age onward, everyone is perfectly aware of what the core problem is. However, we turn a blind eye due to a pathological renunciation of exercising freedom to defend the collective good.
It may also be that this tolerance is a reflection of group or individual supremacism; we tolerate corruption because we perceive that the current powers, in one way or another, protect us from other latent or emerging powers, fearing that by toppling “our” corrupt individuals, we will become more vulnerable to those who have fewer privileges than we do. The citizens, who, for one reason or another, feel privileged, will show tolerance to corruption until they feel that their well-being and security are seriously threatened.

The reason we are unable to anticipate and prevent pain was pointed out in the mid-18th century by one of the most prominent Enlightenment thinkers, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his essay The Social Contract writes:

… renouncing freedom is renouncing the condition of being human, the rights of humanity, and even one’s duties. There is no possible compensation for one who renounces everything. This renunciation is incompatible with the nature of man: to rid oneself of freedom is to rid oneself of morality.

To summarize, exercising freedom for the benefit of the collective is the behaviour mandated by human nature itself, and shortcomings in moral rigor are paid for with shortcomings in intellectual rigor. So much work, so much sacrifice, and so much talent expressed over hundreds of thousands of years, only to end up facing a shameful and tragic disaster. It seems that Prometheus gave us a bad gift.

I conclude this brief chronicle, which spans a million years, with a paragraph written by Sophocles in his tragic work Antigone. The modern equivalent of Sophocles would be a person who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature and several Hollywood Oscars; applauded, admired, respected, and venerated by his contemporaries in the Greek cultural cities of the Mediterranean and, with a long interruption due to ignorance, also by us. He was born in 497 B.C. during the glorious Republic of Athens, and according to ancient testimonies, he wrote 123 works, of which 114 have survived, few in their entirety and most only in fragments.

Antigone, a young girl, is the heroine who publicly defies the autocrat, disobeying his order to leave her brother unburied as revenge for a supposed disloyalty to the city. There is no calculation of gains in her, only love for her dead brother and honour against tyranny. Brave and fully aware, she earns the death sentence.

Sophocles has the chorus recite:

Many things are admirable, but none is more admirable than the human being. He is the one who, on the other side of the foaming sea, moves, carried by the impetuous wind over the waves that roar around him; to the most exalted of the goddesses, to the incorruptible and tireless Earth, he tills with the plow, which, turning year after year, is guided by the race of horses. And from the light race of birds, he takes possession, spreading nets, and also from wild beasts and sea fish, with woven ropes, the skill of man is expressed. With his ingenuity, he tames the wild beast that lives in the mountains, and the horses and untamed bulls are made to love the yoke. And in the art of speech, and in thought as subtle as the wind, and in the assemblies that give laws to the city, he has become a master, and also in avoiding the inconveniences of rain, bad weather, and the inhospitable winter. Having resources for everything, he does not run out of them in the face of the future. Only against death does he find no remedy, but he knows how to protect himself from troublesome diseases, seeking to avoid them. And possessing the industrious skill of art beyond what could be expected, he acts sometimes well or at other times drags himself towards evil, violating the laws of his homeland and the sacred oath made before the gods.

He who, holding a high position in the city becomes accustomed to evil through audacity, is unworthy of living in it: may he never be my guest, and even less my friend, he who does such things.

Humour

Love, beauty, and humour won’t save us from the disasters of “climate change,” but as special states of mind, they surely help us feel human and better endure and face them. In conclusion, not knowing how to express either the first or the second, I’ll do so with two old jokes, though I can’t remember where I’ve heard them. Could they be from the great Eugenio?

Joke 1
Two old friends, who have known each other forever, one as an optimist and the other as a pessimist, run into each other on the street.
The optimist says:
The fruit no longer tastes like fruit, the meat doesn’t taste like meat, and the coffee doesn’t taste like coffee! You were right all along when you said years ago that we’d end up eating crap!
The pessimist replies:
 The problem isn’t that, the problem is that there won’t be enough for everyone!

Joke 2
On market day, two old friends meet and greet each other; one of them is carrying a heavy sack on his back that keeps moving constantly.
Friend 1 says:
What do you have in the sack that’s moving so much?
Friend 2 replies:
I just bought pigs to fatten them up; they told me it’s a really good business.
A week later, the two friends meet again; before his friend can ask, the pig breeder tells him he’s decided to expand the business and has bought a few more piglets, which he now carries in the sack.
And so, for a few weeks, the pig breeder is always seen with the sack full of wriggling piglets.
Intrigued, one day, the friend says to the pig breeder:

Francesc Ventura Sala
April 23th, 2025