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The
question of whence capitalism, is also a question of where to humankind? Even at
the finish line of the demise of the Western economic system, capitalism does
not appear to accept “learning from experience” as the answer, but chooses to “push
the gas pedal to the floor” as the way of its reason.
The
African proverb mentioned in the previous blog: “They are our enemies; we marry
them”, appears the only choice that capitalism offers to those who not only
disagree with them, but think of them as people who believe that being
“killers” is the way of humankind.
Whence
this stubborn determination to cannibalize the planet?
One
possible answer is that it arises from an adventurous spirit and an inadvertent
overstepping of human limitations. Such a situation may have arisen when animal
herders (caribou, reindeer) in the area now known as Siberia ,
but anciently known as Tartary, failed to make a timely return south, and were
trapped in the northern region and had to endure the winter there.
Those who
survived the winter, could not return to their original homes, because their
way was blocked by a sea (the Baltic), and they had no boats. The resolution to
the problem was not a matter of a season or a year, but one of many years. When
the herders finally had boats, they probably had also eaten the last of their
reindeer and other game that was an easy catch. In short, by the time the
herders discovered the solution, they had become fishermen, were destitute,
desperate, and hungry.
At this
point, they also had a bit of luck. The Baltic Sea
in harsh winters could be crossed, but then again in milder winters it could
not. The Baltic Sea is also known for having
very shallow shorelines. The latter factor contributed to the fact that the
Vikings built shallow boats that later proved as if made to order for
navigating far up river of other countries. Since the herders and survivors
were mostly men, their first use of the boats during the navigable season was
to go in search of women.
Known as
Vikings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vikings,
the name these men originally called themselves was probably entirely something
other. Nevertheless, the word closely parallels the English word ‘hiking’. At the above link, under Etymology, we read
that: “The word víking
derives from the feminine vík, meaning ‘creek, inlet, small bay’”. If we shift our mind into paradolia
mode, we can readily imagine ‘vik, creek, inlet, bay’ as words symbolic of female
genitalia. Thus, to go viking or wading upriver may go back to the ancient
custom of wife stealing or for the male to take for himself a woman through an
act of rape.
However,
when rape is no longer limited to the experience of one woman, but symbolizes
the experience of many villages, the reaction to the violence of Viking raiders
was not limited to a scream, but led to a series of earthshaking cultural
changes. For example, what had been but herder’s switch or pole, metamorphosed
into a sword and spear. When the ‘treasure house’, then the temple of the
tribe, was robbed of its precious objects, the tribe felt that not only had it
suffered a loss and humiliation, but its very being (a temple commemorates also
one’s ancestors) had been attacked. Worse, the acquisition of a wife evolved
into acquisition of slaves, even enslavement in situ, by taking the whole tribe prisoner and occupying lands
that formerly had belonged to it.
Needless
to say, going ‘viking’ put an end to subsistence economies and popularized
enslavement and acquisitiveness. In due course this led to taxation (animal
furs at first), which led to money and global dependency on enslavement as a facilitator of human
‘development’.
One may
go on to speculate that the word ‘capitalist’ derives from the name of the
Capetian dynasty. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capetian_dynasty,
which derives its name from (in words of the link): “…the Capets, which ruled the Kingdom
of France from 987 to 1328, was the most senior line of the Capetian
dynasty – itself a derivative dynasty from the Robertians.” Hmm: Robertians? The source for the
word “robbers”? Another hmm: “bright fame”? Yes, contradictory, but not for
paradolia. Robin Hood?
The sole
opposition to this materialist trendline came from the sacred: the sensibility
that life and consciousness is something special, a movement which unlike that
of a river can chose a path of its own. This is perhaps why water was
supplanted by the wind as a symbol for spirit and soul. No matter how
ephemeral, the sacred was sufficient to empower the mind to discover (imagine)
the story, that everything is sacred (the past, the present, the future, all
nature and humankind itself) consequent to having been created by a Creator or a Creatrix, who upon completing
the act of creation had so exhausted themselves as to be thought of as sacrifices. This act of sacrifice necessarily put an
obligation to His-Her highest creation, humankind, to learn and be able to
imitate it.
Apparently
this obligation is so integrated in the very being of humankind that only
extreme violence and brutality may succeed in repressing it. Because repeated
violence is an onerous and brutalizing endeavor of Self, the materialist powers
(the latter tribal leaders, barons, and princes) began a globalizing ‘reform’
movement.
Since the
story about the sacrifice of the creator Gods disturbed the Vikings and Roberts,
their agents made attacks on and questioned the authority of the Sacred King,
whose role was to imitate the Creator Gods. The attacks were successful: the
Sacred King (often of a young age and not ready to die) felt compelled to
accept the Viking ways, thus losing authority in the eyes of the people.
In a
remarkable book called “Communities of Violence”, Professor David Nirenberg,
describes the agonizing process that led to the creation of capitalist society http://press.princeton.edu/titles/5827.html.
Though none of the reviewers of the work that at I have read emphasize
‘capitalism’ or ‘taxation’, given a perspective that does not feel obliged to
fall in line with historians of the academics of the West, I take the point of
view that the book nicely describes the consequences of fiscals at an early
stage of the capitalist economic phenomenon.
Indeed,
the manipulation of the Creation story by the Franks rewrites the Basil Iahn/John
story into what we now know as the story of King Jesus Christ, who contrary to
the first named is accepting of tax collectors http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+19%3A1-10&version=NIV
and an unrestrained ‘free market’.
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