HALF LIFE OPPOSING FORCE ENDING HOW TO

There was no attempt to defend this ideologically. This was done on a purely opportunistic basis. It abolished royal or civic authority, shifted the fiscal burden onto the lower classes, and ran the population and industry into debt. In creating what became the Roman Empire, an oligarchy took control of the land and, in due course, the political system. What did not seem likely 2500 years ago was that a warlord aristocracy would conquer the Western world. The major religions that emerged in the mid-first millennium BC, those of Buddha, Lao-Tzu and Zoroaster, held that personal drives should be subordinate to the promotion of overall welfare and mutual aid. Royal power was backed by temples and ethical or religious systems. There was no “democracy” in the sense of citizens electing their leaders and administrators, but “divine kingship” was obliged to achieve the implicit economic aim of democracy: “protecting the weak from the powerful.” The most basic function of Near Eastern kingship was to proclaim “economic order,” misharum and andurarum clean slate debt cancellations, echoed in Judaism’s Jubilee Year. Rulers who behaved selfishly were liable to be unseated, or their subjects might run away, or support rebel leaders or foreign attackers promising to cancel debts and redistribute land more equitably. Chieftains, kings and temples were in charge of allocating credit and crop-land to enable smallholders to serve in the army and provide corvée labor. That is why rulers were imbued with enough power to protect the population from being reduced to debt dependency and clientage. That protection is what rulers were expected to provide in serving the gods. Avarice and greed were to be punished by the justice goddess Nemesis, who had many Near Eastern antecedents, such as Nanshe of Lagash in Sumer, protecting the weak against the powerful, the debtor against the creditor. The Greek concept of hubris involved egotistic behavior causing injury to others. Individuals and families indulging in conspicuous consumption tended to be ostracized, because it was recognized that wealth often was obtained at the expense of others, especially the weak. The moral values of most societies opposed selfishness, above all in the form of avarice and wealth addiction, which the Greeks called philarguria – love of money, silver-mania. All antiquity recognized that the drive to acquire money is addictive and indeed tends to be exploitative and hence socially injurious.

HALF LIFE OPPOSING FORCE ENDING HOW TO

The greatest challenge facing societies has always been how to conduct trade and credit without letting merchants and creditors make money by exploiting their customers and debtors.

THE COLLAPSE OF MODERN CIVILIZATION AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY. Paper presented on Jto The Ninth South-South Forum on Sustainability. Why it lacks resilience, and What will take its place

Half life opposing force ending