The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, Revised and Updated by Thom Hartmann

Author:Thom Hartmann
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307422132
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

The birth of class differences and power structures

They were the first people infected with wétiko, the origin of our Younger Culture, and because of this they became more efficient at increasing their own numbers.8 They had more sunlight under their own personal control. (I say “infected” because Younger Culture is contagious: people who are attacked by Younger Cultures have few choices, and those who survive have most often become Younger Culture themselves.)

Of course, there was a price to pay for this. While the San, Kogi, Ik, and other Native peoples may spend less than two to four hours a day gathering food and attending to the needs of life (and do to this day), in Younger Culture societies this balance was radically shifted as “average people” must work longer and harder just to survive. Those who were the dominating individuals in the culture, however, could live luxuriously and work less and less.

So for every person who only worked an hour or two a day, another person would have to work four or eight or ten hours a day or more. Without massive exploitation of resources or theft from others, for every person with ten times as much wealth, ten people must have only a tenth as much. Social and economic classes were born, and the first governments came into being to define, order, and control the socio-economic structure, and help the wealthy maintain and increase their riches.

Whether they knew it or not, these governments—mostly kingdoms in the early days—transmitted Younger Culture values to all citizens, rich and poor. The power brokers of this time “programmed” the consciousness of their subjects, just as our governments, educational institutions, and mass media do today.

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