Parasites. You see them everywhere. They're under the bark of the trees, in the belly of your dog, they're living in your basement and your attic. They're in your state capital, in your federal capital, in your world government, in your religion, and in your schools. Parasites are in your body and in your mind.
The history of the world, it seems, is the history of exploitation. The most significant aspect of the shift to agrarian society was not, as some tend to think, the loss of our personal initiative. The most important thing about the agrarian life is that it incorporated the principle of one group of people benefitting from the efforts of another group.
History shows that as soon as human beings had "civilization," they had slavery. The two seem to have developed hand in hand. Look at the carvings and paintings on the walls of the Great Pyramid. You'll see how the thing was built: on the backs of countless slaves. The pyramids took incredible amounts of human energy to build. This energy was provided by an unwilling work force, captured in wars we know little about.
But hey, it's not only the Egyptians who built temples to their deities using the labor of their fellow humans. Take a stroll around Europe one of these years. Look at Strassbourg, at Wesmninster, at any of the great and majestic cathedrals that represent the "greatest accomplishment of the age," as one travel brochure puts it. Those cathedrals were built on the backs of peasants whose lives were worth less than nothing to the church whose job it was to take care of them.
Look at the development of our own great nation. Once the deliberate and methodical slaughter of the people who already occupied the place was well under way, our great ancestors proceeded to link two oceans together via a railroad that was built with the blood of thousands of "workers."
And when the mean old men who own the world want to fight among each other over who gets the biggest piece of the pie, how do they do it? Do they go into an arena and duke it out, Mano-a-Mano? No, of course not. Wars are never fought by the old men who create them. Wars are fought by the young, the foolish, the naive, the pliable.
Many of our cultural structures have been created to support this principal of exploitation. Ideas like patriotism, free market economics, and social darwinism ensure that there will always be an exploitable work force. Our media, our music, our art, all help to support the hierarchical nature of our society. Our religion and morality ensure that the most powerful exploitation of all, the exploitation of other people's sexuality, can occur with facility.
The idea of exploitation, however, is only half of the formula, for parasitism. Parasites use, abuse, and exploit. In the end, a successful parasite will destroy its host. With luck, the parasite can jump to a new host. Without luck, the parasite dies with its victim.
The catch-phrase "New World Order" gets bandied about quite a bit these days. Introduced into the mainstream by G. Bush, one of the great parasites of our age, this phrase refers to a centralized world government, an enlightened cartel of old men, a benevolently dictatorial oligarchy which manages the human resource with maximum efficiency.
Sometimes I wonder if this wouldn't be for the best. Would it not be better, given the historically consistent parasitic relationship between societies and their leaders, to reduce the number of leaders to a manageable amount? If we abandon this silly idea of capitalism, with its endless bankers, realtors, marketers, attorneys, and other intermediate parasites, and replace it with a more direct and efficient management system, maybe there'd still be a chance we could maintain some semblance of technologically advanced civilization. Otherwise, it seems sure that we're headed for a major breakdown.
In my weaker, wimpier, most un-warrior-like moments, I think to myself that we should just capitulate to the inevitable, surrender to the new world order, and get on with our development. However, warriors are born, not made, and they can only be killed, not broken. Therefore I have four words for the New World Parasite Cartel:
I Don't Think So.