It's the system, sweetie pies. ----Episode 1

      And in the Beginning, There Were Aristocrats and Peasants


   Did we humans start living in communities, growing and capturing food, forming governments, making laws, following various religions, killing one another in wars, and blaming and hating those in the other group only a few hundred years ago ? Nope, it started more like 6, 215 years ago [ Okay, that's a tad specific, but it was somewhere around then] in the Mesopotamian Tigris-Euphrates valley and probably a little later in the Egyptian Nile valley. That is the point where civilization began, if we define civilization primarily as structured society, organized government, and specialized economy over a large area. Humans were no longer all gatherers or all hunters.  They became kings, priests, soldiers, farmers, or craftspeople. 

   The earliest civilized communities of the ancient Near East were dominated by a small, self-sustaining aristocracy{No, camel breath, NOT democracy.} as early as 3000 B.C.E. The nobility, or elite, of these Egyptian and Mesopotamian societies controlled nearly all the economic resources of these societies. [ Hmm, sounds familiar.] One of the noble families appeared from somewhere and became the ruling dynasty. From these families and from the ranks of the bureaucrats who served the monarchy were drawn the priests who controlled the temples. Thus the ideology of the ruling religious group sanctioned the prevailing government and social structure. { Hey, pay attention : certain powerful forces determined THE SYSTEM, even way back 6,000 years ago, and THE SYSTEM has been creating the structure of government, law, religion, and society ever since. } 

    In these early societies there were, in essence, only two social groups or classes. One class was the elite : the aristocratic group that that controlled both rural and urban wealth and dominated the religious institutions, the government[ Hey, that's just like the 21st century in the US ], and the bureaucracy. The other class was a mass peasantry, who may or may not have been slaves, , but in any case existed solely to serve the ruling elite class. [ Just a tad more inequality of income and wealth, and we 'mericans will have returned to Square One.] 

   It is said in the Hebrew Bible that the Hebrews were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt.The point here is that almost everybody was a slave (legally or empirically) unto Pharaoh and unto a small elite. It could be said, indeed, that these were one-class societies. Only the aristocracy had any real consciousness of its identity, its rights, or its destiny. The aristocracy held a monopoly of power, learning, and culture, and they alone had a sense of their special and privileged place in the world. [ Well, things are that way now, except business entities called corporations have replaced long-forgotten Pharaoh. ] 

   In the social history of premodern western civilization --- whether the modern era is designated as beginning in 1500 or in the late eighteenth century---a series of elitists have perpetuated control over the resources of society. It is a history in which successive challenges were made on moral and ideological grounds to the aristocratic control of society and its resources. Obviously, there is a substantial pattern of change and development in premodern social history, and these changes are highly significant and deserve close examination. Nevertheless, the factor of continuity --- of the perpetuation down to the modern industrial world of a one-class social structure, or, stated differently, of the domination of a minority aristocracy --- is one of the fundamental facts and continuing conditions of the history of western civilization. 

          How in the Hell Did An Aristocracy Come into Existence 
                                     in the First Place ? 



    This is a toughie. We don't have records to examine and find the answer. Literacy did not begin in Mesopotamia and Egypt until the late part of the fourth millennium B.C.E. , and in the first written records the aristocrats had already emerged and the forms of government and social control had already been established. The frigging SYSTEM was in place before there was a single written record generated.  Archaeological evidence, which is piss poor evidence for determining how aristocracies came into existence, is all tat historians ever found to work with. Archaeologists work with material objects, and the process of prehistorical change has therefore been established according to the materialistic bias. Archaeologists are bound toattribute social changes to alterations in the means of production because their evidence only discloses such alterations.  Artifacts alone, without written records, cannot reveal great changes in human values or ideological unheavals that may have dtermined social change.   Some dumbass historians have speculated a great intellectual  revolution, some tremendous shift in human consciousness, behind the emergence of the first ancient civilizations, but in the absence of written records, this explanation can be no more than a wild guess.