Iron Clad Free Speech, Decentralization, and the Fall of Babylon

in #history4 years ago

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IMG source - /pol/, where only fools believe the entertaining tales told

In ~1150 BCE civilizations across the Middle East and South Asia collapsed, concurrent with invasions from the Mediterranean, the steppes, and cyclical reduction in solar output known as a grand solar minimum.

Eventually Romans armed with steel re-imposed highly stratified and hierarchical society across the region again.

It is important to grasp that bronze required vast trade routes, and the imposition of imperial force on peoples armed with lithic technology (stone points, and leather armor) depended on advanced arms and armor. Iron, OTOH, does not require alloying and iron ore is nearly ubiquitous across the landscape.

As iron and steel were seized by blacksmiths in every hamlet, who formerly were flint knappers due to their inability to gain access to both copper and tin ores, the technological advantage formerly maintained by centralized institutions - empires - vanished. As a major shift in technological advance in security precipitated massive decentralization of power, and empires reluctantly coped by radically transforming their internal structures to accommodate the new circumstances, the combination of enormously reduced power to project force and internal cultural reformation failure (combined with ecological and agricultural collapses) resulted in the abandonment of trade, an orgy of war, famine and plague that ended the Bronze Age and ushered in Iron.

What more definitive example of the import of decentralization and freedom on society? Today we face a revolution no less transformative than that of the late Bronze Age when Iron was dispersing across formerly impotent populations. The very centralization that produces imperial power, rather than merely arms and armor, is being obviated as means of production of goods and services are being distributed globally to individuals formerly dependent on institutional industry for those goods and services.

We should expect the inevitable collapse of extant empires as the parasitic extraction of production that deprives individuals of wealth and empowers institutions ends. History reveals that such transformations are turbulent and violent. The Sea Peoples contested with Bronze Age empires for clay that would grow food, closer to the equator than far more barren Northern climes during a grand solar minimum, and after the collapse of empires across the civilized world, far less grand but undoubtedly more free loci of society nonetheless suffered dramatic reductions in cultural sophistication, as trade became enormously reduced due to the failure of long journeys and substantial deliveries of commodities to be superable by the remaining polities.

Today however, we see that transport and commercial intercourse are both scalable and global. Every facet of our extant trade mechanisms are being decentralized as much as possible by centralized institutions, because of improved efficiencies.

A more transformative change in society is coming than that Iron ubiquitously brought into the Holocene: the end of empire itself. Or, rather, the empowering of individual empires; not the loss of cultural sophistication and complex societies but the elimination of barriers that will allow all individuals of society to enjoy it's most advanced expression. This is the promise of the ongoing decentralization of means of production: the democratization of wealth and political equality of individuals.

Even as oppression and barbaric war will become obsolete, that censorship driven by the need to indoctrinate serfs will be replaced by the necessity of open sharing of technological advance to enable all producers of goods - everybody - to gain access to the bleeding edge, and the concatenation of AI and the order of magnitude increase in benefit of pushing the envelope that advancing technology drives will build on extant scientific advances even as we stand on the cusp of delivering the breadth of resources across the starry skies to ourselves and our posterity, each and all.

Take heart. Though the immediate transition we are now undergoing seems dire and apparently terrible, it cannot long endure. Institutional power must wither soon and vanish.

We will be free, wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, and lay the whole universe at our children's feet.

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I am already free and noone will ever be able to take that away from me. :)

Well that's just downright sensational.

Take heart. Though the immediate transition we are now undergoing seems dire and apparently terrible, it cannot long endure. Institutional power must wither soon and vanish.

We will be free, wealthy beyond our wildest dreams, and lay the whole universe at our children's feet.

Honored senior, you are right. However, geopolitics in the United States and East Asia are different.
The United States is the only ruler who controls the entire new continent.
However, East Asia has militant and brutal empires of China, Japan and Russia.
They have waged many wars from the past to the present to take control of East Asia.
They are pushed by the power of the United States and are now maintaining peace. However, if the United States declines and collapses, they will go to war again.

Perhaps true peace will come to East Asia and around the world after Jesus comes.

While institutions like China seem too powerful to oppose now, this is because centralization directs massive resources from productive individuals to them. That flow of wealth is what decentralization stops. Without those resources, China, the USA, and all the Daibatsu will become starved of resources. At the same time individuals will dramatically increase in wealth - and power.

It is very relevant that possessing means of production allows producing modern security mechanisms vastly better than chemically propelled bits of metal, which were advanced technology 1000 years ago. There's much better means of preventing armed gangs from projecting force with firearms today than our stores sell, our media discuss, or our educations teach us how to use.

When we get nominal 3d printers, deploy mesh networks so we can communicate globally without being censored, use cryptocurrencies to facilitate trade between us without being parasitized or prevented by institutions, and CRISPR, aquaponics, and on and on, the billions of people needing to protect themselves from the corporations today seeking to put the population of the world under arrest by default, and make them dependent for every bite of food, good, and service they need, we'll quickly devise and share security mechanisms based on modern, cutting edge, technology.

It's reasonable to fear your enemies, but the cure for that never is to surrender to them. That only makes permanent your vulnerability. The cure for fear is security.

Take courage, and action.

thank you for advice.

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I hope you're right and we can get the boot
off of our collective neck! The more that people
start to awaken and resist the more effortless and
popular the act of resistance will become. We'll win.

The nifty thing is that people only have to grasp the economic benefits of making bespoke stuff for themselves, rather than buying mass-produced crap at Walmart, for us to win.

That's all it takes to end the flow of our wealth, our production, to institutions and the parasites they support with our resources.

This is why I am not an advocate of revolution, violent protests, or war. Those are the tools of imperial might, of institutional manipulation, and conquering subject peoples. We don't need to conquer anyone.

We just need to be free, and all we need to do to be free is stop paying our overlords.

Kinda hard to see that not happening as the ability to do that becomes cheaper and better every day, and the cost of tyrannical government captured by banksters gets worse and more expensive every day.

That comment makes me so much clearer on your perspective on the matter that 3D printing improves the fact that there is nothing to stop the sharing of quality information that’s freely shared from one person to the next — which will, in turn, reduce the cost of living and help us to get the things we need to live!