It’s a feeling that, once upon a time, I could not survive without a tribal identity and place.
In Babylon and Persia they demanded that you give proper respect and commitment to the leaders of the empire to bring cohesion and coherence to the functioning of the nation of communities. It was to meet the demands of living—administering provision for the collective social structure and the individuals it encompassed.
Babylon has been viewed historically as corrupt, perhaps in similar ways as we are today. Looking at ordinary values of people in general, in their expectations of comfort, distraction and ease through the acquisition of wealth; the power to gain it and sustain its grip and in so doing losing any focus on other visions, dreams, beliefs, or observations of purpose and meaning. Meaning itself being a distraction to accommodate yet another tyranny of dominant distraction, whether it be power and control for wealth and exclusion, or the escapism of religious fantasy and distraction.
The Israelites, at another primitive level of early human evolution, found themselves objecting to, and not fulfilling, the conditions of their existence with The Persian Empire. They were herded out of Israel and marched to Babylon to provide the labor needed in Babylonia.
Not unlike what continues to this day where Latin Americans—less than respected human beings—are being driven to migrate. They are fleeing from violence and extreme poverty to North America, seeking to find jobs and occupations that the average citizens of North America do not want to do. The majority of these occupations are found in the agricultural and livestock industries. The migrants who are doing the dirty work of slaughtering animals in immense numbers are providing the basic food supply for those who have the financial means to purchase it. These are the people who have grown accustomed to having low paid workers do the jobs they don’t want to do for themselves—like killing and cleaning animals every day in order to eat. (A lot of compromise and injustice is accepted for normal people, us, to avoid this essential function of killing, that lives throughout the life process, past and present.
Perhaps this is the primal foundation and reference of status—the distance you can create from the daily tasks of living in reality.
This is all exacerbated by the demands for food that are made on the communities of the world by the relentless increase of populations. How do we meet this daily demand, providing for massive levels of daily consumption and waste?
Right along with this question is one of “who” then is going to do these tasks when everyone would choose other ways of making a living if they could? This is part of the low self esteem and psychological aspect of disregard for those who are without other choices.
“No one wants to go to college to become a butcher.”
Circumstance forces people to meet the demands of survival at all levels of status. But who is forced to meet the nature and character of this struggle?
It’s easy to see how this process has evolved over time into a social hierarchy—the delusion of power and self importance via control of providing the basic needs for the collective existence. The self importance of egotism that it produces in those who seek to remove themselves from the foundational struggle of doing, with wealth and power, and to dominate those who are forced through circumstance, to live in oppression and servitude in order to survive.
I would speculate this character of dependent feeding to be at the core motive of the biological imperative of wealth, power and its exclusion from direct connection to organic basics.
The rejection of tyranny, power, and domination by those living in a parallel and opposite life experience of poverty and dependency is understandable. A kind of resentment and envy of those who do live above and beyond the direct struggle, while themselves, needing to survive within difficult circumstances with limited access to resources amid the abundance of the leaders of the elite others who dominate the state, nation or empire.
This is also the foundation for the concepts of control, the character and motives of the social order. These are created by those who have special interests in propagandizing concepts of social duty and patriotism, alignment with faith, creating images and then sanctifying themselves in order to maintain “the distance of leaders” from the harsh and crude smell of slaughtering for their food.
Leaders invent myths and illusions as needed to convince the ignorant many who have little knowledge and choice to do otherwise—they are bullied into a false and arcane work ethic.
I can see where the coherence of belief is very important in controlling and pacifying those who are forced to carry out the actual work of living—they are to be doing it for the sake of all. In reality it only applies to those in a working-class-separation, leaving the “dirty” work to immigrants and low income slaves, a requirement in order to sustain all and everyone.
It may well be that we have come to the end of an unjust construct of economic life that is no longer serving our survival— making it possible to live a long life in a distraction from reality. Natural forces, in an exchange of feeding and maintaining that has become so corrupted, can no longer maintain any reasonable concept of the good life for the masses—whose demands we are organically unable to meet. We have compromised our ability to feed ourselves in a nutritionally sustainable way. Rising into a mythology of religious spirit will not slaughter the meat necessary to eat and dispose of the waste that the creation and consumption of 7.6 billion meals leaves behind after the feast.