We can’t imagine life prior to the time of Noah. All we know is that folks weren’t what we now call “civilized.” Civilization is defined as a social structure sufficient to allow living in cities. That structure would include both customs and a government.
Regular readers are aware of my insistence we are hard-wired in our current human state to live in the tribal society common to Noah’s day, and common to most of human history until relatively recent times. The content of the culture is not the point here, but the order maintained by a tribal structure. Not only have all other social and government systems failed the test of time, but you simply cannot live God’s justice — according to revealed Law Covenants — in any other society. The Laws of God require a tribal society to work; everything else is abject failure. Nothing else will bring the optimal existence that is possible.
Intrinsic in that structure is the image of government as your elder family head ruling in the fashion of a shepherd. In the Ancient Near Eastern tradition, that means a truly minimal interference in personal behavior. Not anything like our Western individualism, but we should see a reliance on those closest to you to keep your behavior on track. Social pressure is assumed and is known to work rather well. Not in Western strictness, but in the ANE fluidity of give and take, of passionate noise and lots of wasted time negotiating and keeping people as the central concern. Meanwhile, your higher status elders give themselves to truly long-term contemplation of what this or that choice means in terms of cosmic justice.
Regular readers also know I am promoting bringing back some of that as we move into a new civilization. It’s not enough to catalog all the ways Western Civilization has done it wrong. We have to provide a corrective, something that drives humans to leave behind what is dying and take up what is aborning. It has to match the reality of the new organizing principle. To gain full advantage of God’s divine blessings, we have to discern how we can implement His divine justice in the new system. We have to renew what it means to be a civilized people in a way that fulfills divine moral imperatives.
So we note in passing what is totally wrong with the current system particularly where it confronts the rising new system. Discerning the clash is highly instructive. We have in place a system of governing that encourages evil. The means to deciding who gains the privileges of power simply cannot provide any useful barrier to psychopaths. Instead, it encourages them and discourages good people. We end up with a government that is highly secretive and abusive, with abuse that runs inevitably to extremes. It would be hard to have a government more evil than what naturally arises from our current civilization.
We should understand that in any given context, the majority of humanity will always act like sheep. That’s intrinsic in the model of referring to a just government as shepherding. It’s not a good human trait, but it is what we have and effectively impossible to change. We cannot pretend we are going to fix human behavior once and for all with some finely tuned system. It will always be messy and our system has to allow for that, and if possible, take advantage of that. Something inherent in the virtual world offers grand opportunities in this direction.
It’s not for me to lay out expansive details. The whole point is helping people think for themselves as much as they will. Shepherding humanity includes a little prodding now and then to make a significant portion of them alert to predation. We need the flock salted with a few goats. Goats are more alert and combative than sheep. What goats produce isn’t quite as useful on the whole as what sheep produce, but it does protect the sheep when ornery goats range alongside them. The image is not what is in the full nature of the difference between them, but the limited application of how they act differently in the same context. Don’t make the parable walk on all fours.
The definition of “predator” in this parable includes our current Western governments. That is, within the offices of government we have a dominant presence of people who do not love the sheep. It shows up in how the plutocrats seek to build a false impression of what is safe and what is harmful. We have wolves dressed as sheep and shepherds who utterly fail to embrace the noble calling. More noteworthy, the plutocrats are attacking the one means most likely to take away their power: the network. As with most things in Western government, TPTB demand that we expose ourselves to every predator, because they are the least competent of all predators and cannot operate in the presence of resistance. Remaining open to government predation means most certainly being open to all others. The line dividing ruler and crook is that real crooks don’t need government power to get what they want.
I would encourage everyone to be a little more of a goat when it comes to the Network.
