Because if people did realize that there are other ways of living they might decide well actually I don't fancy civilization anymore. And you asked the question about the difference in civilization and industrial civilization, and civilizations have existed for approximately ten thousand years and there have been lots of them but industrial civilization is the latest -- wait one, please.
R.K.: I'll talk for a minute. So you know I have thought a lot about this, one of my first books about it oh maybe fifteen years ago when I was talking to my younger son's class about civilization and I pointed out the civilization brought us slavery and that got me thinking about all of the negatives about civilization and it's really gotten me to a point where I've wondered, was civilization a wrong turn?
And what interests me is like you said that there has been a lot of different civilizations but the idea of civilization existing for ten thousand years, even that's kind of misleading. Ten thousand years ago there might have been a few places in the fertile crescent where humans began staying on and owning land in order to engage in agriculture and domestication of animals but even five hundred years ago, three quarters of the humans on this planet did not live in civilizations, they lived in indigenous tribal and band cultures.
It's only the last five hundred years, not ten thousand years that civilization has become the dominant way that humans have lived.
K.F.: And that's where industrial civilization comes in. Because industrial civilization, I think it's difficult to put an exact date on industrial civilization but maybe the industrial revolution is a good starting point so maybe at the last two hundred years, maybe even less than that.
The growth of the British Empire, the great trading nations, the great trading companies and this idea that you can be a corporation and own things and you can own people, slavery you mentioned. I think slavery is something that almost encapsulates industrial civilization although there has been slavery throughout history, slavery only really became a mass business, and that's what it was a business under industrial civilization.
Industrial civilization is simply the latest and greatest "iteration" of this settled urbanized mass producing mass consuming way of living and it's killing us.
R.K.: Can I propose that maybe it ties in with maybe the beginning, I mean there were slaves since the beginning of civilization but really the slave trade began when corporations started to exist with the East Indies Company being one of the first. In fact there was about two hundred fifty, two hundred seventy five, three hundred years, in that ballpark. So it might tie into corporate civilization.
K.F.: Yeah I think that's right. I would say that corporations are an inherent parts of civilization. The idea that a corporation has as many rights and more rights than human beings I'm not sure how far back that goes, you might know better than me, but yes it's the idea that you can have this mass ownership of people and property, the idea that you have this hierarchy that is all encompassing.
So this idea that you have this small kabal of people that are running the world, I wouldn't say that's necessarily the case, there's a lot of people that are running the world and some of the people who are running the world you might know simply because they play an important part in it, because they've accepted that way of living.
But there are, yes you've got the top politicians, you've got the top bankers, you've got the media moguls, the big industrialists, you've got the military leaders, etcetera etcetera, and they're right near the top and this idea, this very very pointed pyramid I would say is almost unique to industrial civilization, being able to, the bottom of the pyramid being able to encompass the vast majority of the people on Earth, I mean that is a frightening prospect.
As you said, civilizations of the past, they were very small pyramids all around the world but this single global civilization there is now, really is, there's very little outside it and that really is upsetting and that is what I really want to fight back against.
R.K.: What is it you want to fight back against?
K.F.: The total domination of humanity by industrial civilization.
R.K.: And that brings us to Undermining.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
1
1
