Last post and the one before sort of establish a baseline.
That any one random sovereign individual dealing with any other random sovereign individual on a one to one basis may well cover an entire range of possibilities from absolutely equal to significant equality and advantage bestowed to one of the two over the other.
It may not be ideal, and it may suck donkey balls if you find yourself on the unequal end of such dealings with someone else who holds all the cards, nevertheless, it is by far the fairest deal on the planet.
If it is one sovereign individual on one side, having to deal with another sovereign individual, and that second sovereign individual is themselves accompanied by a large and associated collective of aligned sovereign individuals, then you are back to the situation I was describing yesterday.
A situation where the ONLY POSSIBLE forms of interaction are those that will exert control and influence over the first, lone, sovereign individual…. it is literally a one way street, the lone individual is always utterly powerless.
Sure, they can, in extremis, simply attack the second individual, who turned up to the party mob handed with the collective at their back, but most times, the collective is already expecting that, so the lone individual has even more of their sovereignty removed at the point of initial contact.
———————————————————
Fundamentally, the commonest “one plus one” building block of human relations and society was of course boy meets girl, they get married, start making babies.
Fundamentally, once it becomes boy meets girl + state, eg the state is suddenly involved in them co-habiting, any arrangements they make such as marriage etc, then as we see from the above, the inescapable conclusion is that the only possible forms that such things can take are all going to be universally negative for whoever finds themselves the lone solitary sovereign individual in such deals.
It is not a zero sum game, it is a zero game.
The larger the population of the collective on one side of the equation, the greater the disparity in power, and the bigger the loser the solitary sovereign individual becomes.
With the vertical integration of society, this means these collectives are vast, and the gulfs between them are now non-existent.
My first school was run by two women, it was a two room school, that was the entire staff, that’s how things were in small villages, parents paid for the kids to attend, the two women registered as a school, but it was like registering a dog and getting a licence, and there was no health and safety or anything else… it was a business, pure and simple.
Of course, by then, though I did not know it at the tender age of seven, I was about to get screwed for the first time by the collective and its inherent inequality.
You see, up until the age of seven, I’d been “home schooled” pretty much, which meant two hours at the kitchen / dining table in the morning after dad had gone to work and my own chores were done.
It’s efficient, mano a mano teaching, in two to three years of pretty relaxed one or two hour lessons five days a week, so 5 to 10 hours a week, that’s all, I go to a “proper” school at 7 and share a class with 20 or so other kids, and I learn nothing new, I’d already learnt all this, and the same the next year, and the same the next year, and by the time I am 10 and in my final year of primary education, I am finally starting to learn the odd new thing. Mainly I have spent three years being bored, fucking around, and finding trouble to get in to.
And this was a small two room village school where the vertical integration of the collective pretty much stopped there.
Nevertheless, thanks to increasing vertical integration, the entire apparatus of the entire collective, millions to one, is focused on every single primary school, health and safety, diversity and equality, dedicated non teaching staff to oversee the teaching staff, curriculum planners and so on, and compared to the BEST of modern primary schools, that little two room school I went to was a centre of excellence, because not one single pupil got to ten years old without knowing the entire times table up to twelve by heart, and by heart I mean 100% perfect every time, not one single pupil could not read and write and spell at least 5,000 basic vocab words both perfectly and legibly, and not one single pupil didn’t have at least a passing acquaintance with subjects such as geography and history as well.
We were quite literally better educated than 16 year old school leavers a scant generation and a bit later in 1999, and they in turn were better educated than the assholes leaving school at 16 today.
You see, we are back at the boy plus girl thing, the vertically integrated collective did not just fuck up the educational system from 9 to 3:30 Monday to Friday, it fucked up marriage and home life too.
I have linked to this before.
You see, what many were scared of was exactly this shift, from being individuals to being mere fungible cogs in a vertically integrated machine.
I’m not being a luddite or trying to deny technology or progress.
The point is that it is not, was not, and never was NECESSARY to implement all this in a way that just built ever larger and more vertically integrated collectives on one side of the equation, while still leaving solitary once sovereign individuals on the other.
We, as a society, did not fucking *have* to build it that way.
Lots of whiners like our own Price Charles claimed to rail against all this, but he didn’t really, he has just always complained about the outcomes and goals of central planning and vertically integrated collectives, their *targets* are wrong, that is all…. he has never complained about the status quo, the very *structure* being wrong.
***********************************************************************
We started out by saying that it is simple human nature, one individual at a time can deal with one individual at a time, but the moment you get two or more individuals working together, suddenly everything changes, suddenly that new group tried to redefine the thing that they are against as that which they themselves do not do… even though invariably it is just a case of a new shade of lipstick on a pig.
We have said that into this body politic we get shifts from red team to blue team at apparent (to an outsider) random, and periodic temporal changes between two legs good and four legs bad, to four legs good and two legs bad, and so on.
The emergence of electronics, and then digital electronics, and then computer tech, IT, comms, is a wet dream for anyone looking at this simple human nature, talk about a duck to water, and suddenly levels of vertical integration of the collective, and therefore a shifting of the power from the individual to the collective.
It’s not mere coincidence that the rises in certain recorded events, such as divorces, is not *merely* a function of new laws being brought in that increase the collective power, but also with the technology of IT, which allows such data to be collected in the first place, and reported in the first place, and then mined, and so on.
There was a foreign country that I lived in many years ago, there were as always many laws that were passed down from on high.. but some of the locally unpopular ones that required that such and such a sector of society had to complete form ABC123b every year and then this that and the other were neatly sidestepped, the local authority just did not order any copies of form ABC123b, if there is no paperwork, nobody can fill it out, voila!
That’s all past, IT has evolved to the point where you no longer even say all it takes is a computer and email or a net connection, now a smartphone will do.
Of course, much of the form filling is automatic…
So where does it all leave us?
In a pretty bad place, really, from the individual perspective.
The First World War was hailed as being bloody awful, never again and all that, and they were right, the second world war was different, troops did not die on such a vast scale, but thanks to greater collectivism and vertical integration in society (IBM sold calculating machines to the nazis as well as everyone else) on a global scale more people in total died.
It’s not *just* that you could not have made anything even remotely like facebook back in 1960, because the technology of the day simply would not permit it, it is also that you could not have made an Islamic Caliphate, or a EU, because the technology of the day simply would not permit it.
Which makes world war three what?
Even less military casualties than WW2?
Even greater non-combatant casualties? Even more collateral materiel damage? Even more countries involved?
We didn’t merely ignore all the canaries in the coal-mines dying as we increased the vertical integration of the collectives in the home / marriage / schools / workplaces / etc, at every stage to the utter depredations of all the sovereign individuals involved, we fucking celebrated every single dead canary and paraded it as proof that the de-infestation policies were working, yellow rats with beaks, god the bastards are everywhere, thank fuck for this new and improved yellow rat catcher.
Take an asshole who can barely manage his own life, which is in truth every human being ever born, and give him power over ever greater numbers, and all you do is make the inevitable final fuckups ever greater.
Make these assholes so powerful that they think they can manipulate the game itself, which is the state of play today, and the fuckups can *only* be legendary in status.
Nobody is going to have time to notice if me and the ten year old down the street agree to enter into a sexual relationship, or I agree to buy a product that is the result of her child labour a continent away, or if she is long pig on the spit.
The bankers and the billionaire and the politician and the other echelons in the vertically integrated collective are going to have other priorities, and they won’t be hanging on to power or wealth or property or status.
they will be hanging on to illusions of grandeur.
