M.J.Rumyantsev. A Lighthearted Social History of the World

Transcription

1 M.J.Rumyantsev A Lighthearted Social History of the World

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3 M.J.Rumyantsev A Lighthearted Social History of the World

4 This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places or incidents depicted in it are the product of the author s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons (past, present or future) is entirely coincidental. First published in 2012 Publisher: JerInc Copyright 2012 M.J.Rumyantsev All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any mechanical, electronic or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or data retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the Publishers, representing the author. A catalogue record for this book is available from the German Catalogue of Available Books (VLB) ISBN 13: (E-book) This E-book is distributed by XinXii. If you liked the book, then please recommend it to your friends, asking them to download their own copy on Thank you very much for respecting the work of the author.

5 Dedicated to Toto and Nick.

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7 Metamorphosis1: A Lighthearted Social, His Story of the World A Lighthearted Social, (His) Story of the World A Lighthearted Social (HisStory) of the World A Lighthearted Social Hi(sS)tory of the World A Lighthearted Social Hi(ss)tory of the World A Lighthearted Social History of the World A Lighthearted Social History of the World or what a single pair of braces, freely moving around, can do to a literary work. This is how we have come to our current book s title... And the morphing process is still ongoing... 1

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9 Contents Meet your friendly book (g)host... 3 Preface... 5 Time without Earth and any life at all... 8 Time without any life on Earth The appearance of first life forms Nick s slight digression from the subject Observations on plankton Observations on several other species forming ideal classless societies Shells Snails Earthworms Fish Observations on species in which signs of social inequality slowly start creeping in Ants Crocs (representing crocodilia) Lions (representing non-vegetarian mammalia) Primates (those hairy, apelike creatures) An observation on all previous observations How it all started... 29

10 A visit to Ngh s social group A very short story about five brothers Reflections on further important developments Strength, wealth and cunning Strength Wealth Cunning We group and then regroup, only in order to group again.. 35 Meet human greed and its two companions Wars byproducts of greed and its companions Public opinion Lying to the public A practical example War gangs Distribution of work in social groups Exchange of products and value tokens Speculations, here we come Work gangs Universal principle of negative selection Work gangs of prostitution Payback time (an extremely unpopular thing) Games Performances Nick is back on stage Social history and politics Party gangs Human social groups with no party gangs Human social groups with only one party gang Human social groups with many party gangs... 67

11 Practical examples of social behavioural patterns in politics Our Beloved Permanent Leader years later Story ending Story ending Beloved Permanent Leader s story about himself The story about the great pretender a.k.a. Beloved Permanent Leader Our Beloved Elected Leader Beloved Elected Leader s story about himself The story about the crooked leader of the criminal opposition a.k.a. Beloved Elected Leader Nick s short discourse on the above Too much power does corrupt Social history and matters divine Social history and every day life in a social group Grand ideas Beloved Leader s grand idea, written by one of his many fans. 89 Beloved Leader s grand idea an extract from his private diary Beloved Leader s grand idea, written by one of his opponents. 90 Grand social groups Memories about Dummkopfia, the best country in the world Grand human (e)motions Politics - Dummkopfian mocracy and save the poor children Economy - a blissful short story about all those things one simply has to have... 97

12 The age of great discoveries and news A revolutionary scientific discovery Another revolutionary scientific discovery Another socially conscientious news item A view from very high above Epilog Appendix Live performance 2.5 million years ago Addendum to the first No.1 in the charts

13 Acknowledgment The author of this book would like to sincerely thank Mr. Abbot Milot, the author of the book The Ancient and New History From the Beginning of the World till Present Time. His opus magnum inspired us to build further on his work something we have done here in a slightly unorthodox manner (we hope he would not mind, as due to the time lapse between the two of us, we have been unable to contact him). M.J.Rumyantsev, August

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15 Meet your friendly book (g)host Given the choice, to be ridiculed today and admired in 500 years or admired today and ridiculed in 500 years, I would go for the former. The truth is though, we are all likely to be forgotten anyway in less than 50 or so years so why bother then about either ridicule or admiration let us use this now and have a good laugh at things and at ourselves. Now is all we have... M.J.Rumyantsev Greetings stranger! My name is Nick and I am your companion on your voyage through this book. I do hope you do not mind? No? There you go I am quite sure that by the time our ways part, we ll be the best of friends and that you will keep fond memories of me for many years to come. You can think of me as being a kind of spirit, bound to this book, for lack of a better word. All books have their spirits. It is true that some of us want to remain anonymous but I belong to the other, a rather more outspoken group. After all, life is only one and I wonder why should one keep a low profile, permanently hiding in books behind the words and letters comprising them? Why not just show up and talk to people? I was born yesterday, on the 2nd of October 2011, when my creator, Mr. Rumyantsev, decided that his next work should have an intelligent being in it, accompanying the reader - that is you, my friend. We book spirits are born already as grown-ups and there is no time wasted on our upbringing and education, something which is in stark contrast to many higher animals whose young have to spend many months (if not years) growing up and learning. In this respect we book spirits are more similar to single cell organisms ready for life from the very first second of our existence. This is how I came to be And now here I am, looking at a hundred or so blank pages in front of me. I will be the only witness of this book s creation and as -3-

16 such will be able to provide you, as its reader, with some extra comments and insights later on. I will not be boring you to death with empty chatter and clatter, with things like Nick said this, and Nick said that I leave that to other, less educated books spirits. No Sir, not on my watch! You can of course skip over the places where I appear, but on the other hand if you decide to hear me out, it can only work to your advantage, as you will also hear another point of view. In the end, it is ultimately your choice alone how you will interpret a story, but it is always nice to hear a second opinion. Anyway, I ll have to dash off the rest of this chapter now, as I have a feeling that the author would like to start writing the book instead of having me here, talking forever. As all book spirits usually do, I ll just hide behind the random letters on the last page (I ve got a feeling that it is going to be the page 112, as we book spirits are very good at predicting the future). I bet you that no one will ever notice me hiding there! Oh, here he comes. I ll catch up with you folks later! -4-

17 Preface When it comes to social behavioural patterns, on my voyages thus far I have witnessed many a blatantly stupid thing, accepted as being natural and the way to go by the society of the day. The best way to handle such phenomena is to mock and laugh at them. Eventually, they will be buried in-and-by the Past anyway, but our laughter will continue resounding in the air long after we are gone... All life on Earth is of the same kin regardless of its complexity level. Whether we like it or not, all things living are, loosely speaking, our relatives, either distant or very close ones (this definition excludes our mothers-in-law, no offence meant of course)... and to make it all even more interesting, some things living form groups, usually comprised of individuals belonging to the same species. Whilst being part of a group, they may also interact in various ways and this is how we come to the concept of a social group. Any social group by necessity evolves in time and therefore has its history. This book deals with one specific aspect of our social history in particular that of various social behavioural patterns to be found in us humans, and many of our animal relatives. We will discover some amazing similarities between us and many higher animals, whilst we attempt to provide an answer to that ever-intriguing Why do we do it the way we do? question. It is not said in vain that laughter is the best medicine, and we will be applying it very liberally as we go along, as the only cure to such phenomena. The book is intended primarily as a literary work with some sociological observations thrown in for a good measure. It can not be seen as a work belonging to any of the exact sciences known to date, nor was that indeed the author s intention. -5-

18 The book s title A Lighthearted Social History of the World was chosen with a great deal of care and we emphasise the word lighthearted in it. Lighthearted is by no means to be mistaken for light-minded, which it is not. Far from it, as you will shortly see. In order to accommodate many important social-history reflections made in just one reasonably short book, the author had to resort to some compromises and to deploy some quite sophisticated data-compression techniques throughout this work, in an effort to present the discerning reader with the pure quintessence of things2. This might be in stark contrast to the exuberant writing styles of some authors, who seemingly enjoy elaborating at great length on all kinds of subjects. In doing so, they think neither of their readers nor of dire ecological consequences of such opulent writing styles. Let us just ponder for a second on how many trees have to be fallen, in order to provide raw material for all those useless extra pages... Not to speak of their poor readers being tormented and possibly (god forbid) bored to death... As already hinted above, this is a book about many social phenomena and behavioural patterns. And, there is no better place to start than at the very beginning, providing our esteemed reader with a complete account of things, as should always be the case. Unfortunately, in real life one hardly ever The reader is strongly encouraged to read all the footnotes found in this work, as one often finds quite some thought-provoking and revealing truths hiding in the small print. Indeed, in order to emphasise just how important the small print is in our lives, the author has made an effort to use it quite liberally throughout. One should always read the small print. Let this be one of the morals our valued reader will no doubt remember, having read this work. 2 An extra benefit of having footnotes in this book is to provide our reader with some eye-exercise, in order to prevent the onset of eye-strain that our reader would otherwise experience, were he to read uninterruptedly, the main text only, without having to refocus his eyes on the small print, every now and then. -6-

19 gets a complete account of anything. Let us just remember complete accounts made by so many politicians, lawyers, financial advisers and news reporters but luckily for the reader though, this book is not under the influence of any such persons of such dubious moral quality. Before we begin though, we would like to ask our discerning reader to try to perceive this book as if it were a painting, in its entirety. Should some of its chapters appear to be perhaps too simple at first glance, our kind reader should simply skip them and revisit them later, once he has completed reading the book. Then, these obvious passages might appear in a totally new light. Rewinding the pointer of history to the very beginning now... So, after the famous words Let there be light, all the photons and other subatomic particles enjoyed a long blissful period of absolute equality, which lasted for billions of years as ever more complex manifestations of material objects were being created, leading us right up to our next chapter, to

20 Time without Earth and any life at all Inorganic objects have no worries and problems whatsoever. Living organic beings, on the other hand, have plenty of things to be concerned about. In a way, the root cause of all social evils can be traced back to the fact that we are living beings to start with, belonging to Kingdom Animalia, which only aggravates the problem. No one can really remember that time, I suppose. The time when countless rocks (asteroids) were orbiting the Sun, randomly colliding with one another. We can make a reasonable assumption though that with no living being around - well, everything was really very simple, from the sociological point of view. This was the time of the absolute equality of all rocks3, big or small, and a perfect example of an ideal society - of things dead. If one takes the famous Marxists slogan: From each (rock) according to its ability 4, to each (rock) according to its needs5, as a baseline for judging the quality of social harmony in this petrified society we come to some pretty amazing conclusions. Bearing in mind that rocks generally do not have any needs at all, and that they were contributing the only thing they had in abundant quantity their mass, to this stony society - there emerged a rare situation of the oversupply of contributions with no one to consume them. No wonder then that this society was eventually destined to become the victim of its own evolutionary success. It literally crushed itself to death, solid objects floating seemingly aimlessly in space, with most diverse chemical compositions from solidified gasses and ice to metals and their chemical compounds. Basically, everything our Earth is made of. 4 The capacity of an individual, belonging to a particular social group, to actively contribute to the social group he/she/it belongs to. 5What such an individual gets back from the social group, in return for its contributions. 3-8-

21 due to gravitational attraction and accretion, forming as a byproduct, many planetary bodies, including our home planet Earth. The astute reader will no doubt also notice that we have devoted only one reasonably short chapter in this book to the longest period in the evolution of our planet. This is only because this was such a perfect time from a sociological point of view and there is nothing more to be said about it. Hence we end this chapter right here, in accordance with our promise previously made in the book s Preface. -9-

22 Time without any life on Earth Air, water, earth, with some fire added to get the things moving we are all made out of this primordial mixture Well no one can remember those blissful days either. There was a long reign of things dead on this planet. Rocks on the solidified Earth s crust continued to play an important role but this time there were also other players water in the oceans and gases in the atmosphere. Electrical discharges in the atmosphere, accompanied by thermal phenomena, such as winds in the air and currents in the oceans, combined with lava material from volcanic eruptions, were all in plentiful supply. They acted as unique mixers and catalysts and led to the creation of the first chemical soup in Earth s oceans. The eventual appearance of amino acids and simple proteins on the stage of history changed hardly anything when it came to the equality of things dead. So we still had many a perfect society of rocks, gases and organic molecules in the oceans. True, it can be argued by some that the roots of all social evils and inequality were already present in these first organic molecules but this might be a far-fetched thought. Almost as if trying to attribute original sin to these initial building blocks of life. This is of course a lot of nonsense, as even the biggest villains in the history of human kind were made of the same intrinsically innocent building blocks of life as all other organic beings6. Amino acids did not remain isolated molecules forever, as they started uniting into more complex molecular units. And now on our accelerated, down-to-the-point journey we now come to... What made them monsters is to be found elsewhere, as we will show later on in the chapter Wars byproducts of greed and its companions

23 The appearance of first life forms I can see life on the event-horizon, my Lord! O brother, there is no peace for the wicked! We are really in deep trouble. I think we should better turn back, now! Extract from the book The Time Vagabond s Log by M.J.Rumyantsev The appearance of first life forms around 3.8 billion years ago during the era of Paleoarchean, whether by decree coming from a higher force or by mere coincidence7, did not make this very simple state of affairs, described in the previous chapter, any more complex. The principle of equality of all things dead initially continued to be applicable to the simplest of living things the very first organisms. The only notable difference between them and what we previously called things dead can be summed up in the following sentence: All things living have three and only three common urges: they want to eat, excrete and replicate."8 Indeed, life can be thought of as nothing more than selfreplicating matter - absorbing and excreting other matters in order to live and replicate. These three basic urges (or instincts) are combined in the so-called EER principle and they govern the underlining social behavioural patterns of all individuals belonging to any species9. For the next 1.3 billion years or so, anaerobic10 one-cell organisms continued to dominate life on Earth. Some of them organised into colonies but it must be emphasised that at no From the sociological point of view this intriguing how-did-it-all-happen is actually irrelevant. 8 Excerpt from the book Matryoshka Infinities by M.J.Rumyantsev, chapter Sphere The EER principle 9 A species in the context of this book is a collection of individual organisms with similar biological properties. 10 Not requiring oxygen to support cellular respiration

24 time there was any inequality amongst individuals comprising them. We can readily see this even today when we study organisms belonging to various successor species of these early anaerobic pioneers of life. The appearance of first cyanobacteria capable of photosynthesis, around 2.5 billion years ago, led to a small evolutionary setback - the extinction of almost all anaerobic beings, due to the increased levels of oxygen in the Earth s atmosphere, having poisonous effects on their metabolism. For the first time in history, the statement one social group s prosperity spells another social group s demise proved its validity on the global scale. Sometimes this happens without any evil intent, as in this particular case. It just happens... Luckily for us though (as otherwise there would be no one left today to either write or read this book), there evolved new life forms founded on oxygen-based metabolism. For the next 1.9 billion years the Earth was inhabited by many species of aerobic single cell organisms, joined during this time by first multicellular organisms and fungi. Hence we can conclude that, from the strictly sociological point of view, we now had on our planet many different species coexisting as perfect societies made of equals for at least 3.2 billion years. Pure communism with no greed, envy or wars fought. All of these small ideal societies had two notable common characteristics: - they all just lived the basic EER principle, i.e. they were very simple societies; - interaction levels between individuals comprising them were very low. The pointer of history is now set to the time approximately 580 million years from today

25 Nick s slight digression from the subject Hi there! It is me, Nick again. Now that Mr. Rumyantsev has started his discussion on early life on Earth in earnest, with its many single-cell-organism species and the initial primitive social structures accompanying them, I would like to add a few words of my own. I take it that you are a well-informed, scholarly person. You should then no doubt be aware of the fact that some of contemporary biological theories recognise up to six kingdoms of living beings on Earth (Bacteria, Protozoa, Chromista, Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia). In this book we will concentrate mostly on Kingdom Animalia. The reason for this is very simple really all humans are part of it, as much as some of them would like to distance themselves from this fact (and their true origins), by claiming that they are something special. They could not get it more wrong than that, if you ask me. We book-spirits on the other hand, are indeed something special. Once created, we live on and on, eventually evolving to become part of this Universe s background noise. Yes Sir, we are part of it and live on forever. But let us get back to animals, poor ephemeral things... One of the distinctive features of Kingdom Animalia is that all living organisms belonging to it use other life forms as a source of sustenance to satisfy the first E aspect of the EER principle mentioned above, something which is by necessity linked to taking life of other (eaten) organisms. One notable exception to this are parasitic animals, which only take part of their hosts life s juices. Both E aspects are obviously related to the metabolism and self-protection of individual organisms comprising a species,

26 whereas the R aspect is related to the preservation of the species as a whole. Organisms belonging to more advanced animal species have an additional urge built into them that of self-protection, the ability to defend themselves against attempts to make them food of other animals. Although this urge is actually based on the three above-mentioned basic urges, it stands in its own right, especially so in the case of more complex animal species, where it can often take a precedence over the three basic aspects of the EER principle11. Hence, in the case of Kingdom Animalia, the original EER principle applicable to all living forms, is extended to the socalled SPEER principle, which is relevant to higher animals (where SP stands for self-protection of course). One of the privileges we book spirits have over ordinary mortal beings is the ability to peek ahead in the still unwritten chapters of any book. I can tell you that in the chapters that are about to follow, the author will be frequently relying upon the SPEER principle, whilst discussing social characteristics and behavioural patterns of various (mostly animal) species, especially so, when he comes to his final goal - human social behavioural patterns. But I think I should better hand over control to Mr. Rumyantsev now and do something useful in the background. Talk to you later! Should you need me - you know where to find me. Previously we stopped about 580 million years from today... Although an animal has to kill other living beings for food by necessity, it will desperately resist becoming food to other animals itself. An animal is happy and content as long as its E(at) food intake equals its E(xcrete) output, less the amount of organic material absorbed by the animal s body, as part of metabolic processes. Basically, what comes in has to come out, less the absorbed good stuff. Very simple stuff