Kings
In the first half of the movie It's a Wonderful Life, a pair of talking galaxies share snippets from a man's life with a developmentally disabled angel from the nineteenth century. Early on, an ornate carriage is seen carrying a plutocrat who will later go on to drive the man to contemplate suicide and (spoiler alert) never suffer any consequences for it.
"Who's that, a king?" asks the angel upon seeing the carriage.
"That's Henry F. Potter, the richest and meanest man in the county," replies one of the talking galaxies.
It was as good an answer as you could expect from an anthropomorphic celestial body talking to a cognitively challenged spiritual being, but it could have just said "Yeah, basically."
In the old days, kings wore gold on their heads, and when you saw one you were expected to remove your hat and bow or you'd be tortured to death in the town square. Then along came the printing press and people got better at sharing ideas with each other, and pretty soon everyone started to connect the dots and realized that kings were just regular people with gold on their heads. Once everyone started agreeing that they didn't much like being tortured to death in the town square for not groveling before some schmuck with a shiny hat, kings went out of style.
But they didn't go away.
As long as there have been humans, there have been humans trying to dominate and control other humans. As societies became larger and more complex it went from trying to become the alpha human in the tribe to the alpha human of the village to the alpha human of an entire country to the alpha human of an empire, but in each case the impulse to try and dominate as many other humans as possible was the same. When kings went out of style, that impulse didn't leave with them; it simply found a different way of manifesting.
The new alpha dominators of the literate world couldn't wear gold on their heads and couldn't torture dissidents to death in the town square. The ones who rose to the top were the ones who figured out that they could still function as kings as long as they weren't such egotistical cunts about it. They could no longer sit on thrones and make everyone grovel before them, but with a little bit of cleverness and a whole lot of money, they could have all the power of a king and more. All they had to do was keep the people from realizing they were being ruled.
It took them a while to get that last part down and there were a few false starts, like in France where everyone started grabbing them and slicing off their heads with French head slicing contraptions. The new breed of kings which emerged from the chaos and upheaval were ones which understood how to control everyone from behind the scenes without drawing much attention to themselves.
They learned to give the people an official government to create the illusion of freedom and democracy, and they learned to use their money to dominate every important aspect of that government. They learned how to buy up media so they could control the stories the people tell themselves about what's going on in their society, beginning with newspapers, then radio stations, then television and eventually online media as well. They learned to control the very economic infrastructure which determines how money works. They passed these secrets on to their heirs along with their vast fortunes in exactly the same way kings used to pass down their crowns.
Today's kings rule not with brute force and claims of divine right, but with manipulation and with money. They rule from the shadows, never sticking their heads out into the light for fear they'll start getting chopped off again. They weave happy stories into public consciousness of freedom and democracy while wielding far more military and economic might with far more control than the kings of old ever dreamed possible. They have used this power to turn humanity into a funnel which pours ever increasing amounts of wealth into their treasuries, and thus ever increasing amounts of power. The earth itself is being stripped bare to quench their insatiable lust for more and more control over more and more humans.
But the weakness of the new kings is the same as the kings of old: information. We can share ideas and information and point out what the kings have been doing to us, what they are doing to our planet, what they are doing to our minds. We can point to their lies, point to their hiding places in the shadows. Because these new kings cannot torture us to death in the town square. All they have is lies and money, and we can see through lies and collectively change our minds about how money works. When we do that we can get rid of the new kings just like we got rid of the old kings, only this time we can choose to evolve beyond the urge to dominate and control and enslave.
And then, our eyes freed from the lies and manipulation and delusion, we can all be kings. And we can heal our planet together, and we can place a crown upon its head, and a new humanity can be born. A humanity that works in collaboration with itself and with its ecosystem. A harmonious humanity. A natural humanity. A humanity the angels and the galaxies can be proud of. And that would be truly wonderful.
The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. My articles are entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.
Great and inspiring writing there Caitlin. It is true we have more information, more tools to spot the shysters and frauds as our networking technology improves. The trouble is that the rogues get better at covering their tracks and inventing new ways to game the system. We seem to have gone to a lot of effort to stand still. As Tony Benn once said:
Every single generation has to fight the same battles again, and again and again. There is no final victory, and there is no final defeat.
He also said.
I think there are two ways in which people are controlled. First of all frighten people and secondly, demoralise them.
So lets take the strong view. I don't know if we will ever reach the nirvana on earth you describe but I don't see any fault in working towards it. If you read carefully Tony's first quote there you will see he is telling us we will always have something to do and we will never be beaten.
"They learned how to buy up media so they could control the stories the people tell themselves about what's going on in their society...." That is one of the biggest problems. The press, as it stands today, is not a check on the system. Even a hundred years ago, when it was owned by rich individuals (Hearst, Pulitzer, etc), they had their own interests which did not always align with the Government and would say so. They would even war with each other and create differing opinions. The uniformity of the MSM today is frightening.
Amen, Sister as they would say in church, that I don’t go to, just for the record. Makes me think of the quote, "Let us control the money of a country and we care not who makes its laws." Why would they say this? One reason would be that like rock, paper, scissors, money dominates laws. Laws would be subservient to money? To this I say, Let the people control the honest conclusions of society and I care not who prints the money. Can you imagine a day when the people of Earth reach conclusions they can build their lives and their societies upon through what I will call a Collective Intelligence; a collective intelligence moderated by human logic. The kings of old had their equivalency. It just had nothing to do with human logic. It was called the church, absolute word, absolute truth, conclusion, end of story. Can you imagine a time when the royal family is too embarrassed to come out of their palace. A time when human logic and Collective Intelligence is transforming the world and they themselves are museum pieces, living museum pieces. Artifacts from some time when men and women ate with their hands, never bathed and made outrageously illogical and irrational statements through court or religion that set the world on fire.