The Grim Correlation Between Violence And Inequality Over The Millennia
(2017) Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality over the millennia.
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
SCHEIDEL: ... civilization has come at the cost of glaring economic inequality since the Stone Age.... “It is almost universally true that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time,”
EARTH CUSTODIANS: that history has repeated itself since ever and society has not yet learned the lessons is going to cost us dearly. Additionally what he states is a half-truth since the concentration if wealth has strengthened over time nonetheless, because of technology and the means of communication: deception has been achieved on a "grand scale" and even more efficiently... of course that could change if a majority wakes up.
Scheidel said that “the big equalizing moments in history may not have always had the same cause, but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”
The cycles of power always fluctuate, case point, but the outgoing established order is replaced by an incoming one that is much of the same.
Scheidel acknowledges his pessimism about resolving inequality. “Reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible,” he said.
That is exactly where one of the biggest fallacies lies: wealth cannot be created but gets more concentrated, hence the mesmerizing wealth effect. Earth's value -- or energy -- is invariable because every organic particle is recycled. What is happening is that natural resources are merely transferred.
Until we decide to act upon ending this "concentration", by specifically targeting the termination of monetarism completely, things will get worse.
Among the wide variety of catastrophes that level societies, Scheidel identifies what he calls “four horsemen”: mass mobilization or state warfare, transformative revolution, state collapse and plague.
Let's bet that it will be a transformative revolution this time!
A textbook example of mass mobilization is World War II, a conflict that embroiled many developed countries and, key for Scheidel, “uniformly hugely reduced inequality.” As with Europe and Japan, he said, “in the U.S. there were massive tax increases, state intervention in the economy to support the war effort and increase output, which triggered a redistribution of resources, benefiting workers and harming the interests of the top 1 percent.”
We had to read that 3 times.... war increases the output and benefits workers.... Scheidel cannot be taken seriously here, right... can he? As for harming the top 1%, that remains to be seen as there are the ones "staging and fueling" armed conflicts: that very top 1% gets richer from weapons' sales, and then from the reconstruction after the war, which promotes employment. Sure for a while, workers seem to enjoy a rebounding flow of money.
State collapse has also been crucial in the history of inequality. “The rich are beneficiaries of the state,” Scheidel said, adding that “if states fall apart, everybody is worse off; but the rich have more to lose. Their wealth is wiped out by the destruction of the state, such as in the fall of the Mayan civilization or Chinese dynasties.”
The top wealthy class has always succeeded in protecting itself quite efficiently. Their bloodlines evidence this pretty well. Even if losing quite much after a state collapse, (secret) connections are there to help them rise again.
Is change possible? As for whether reducing inequality will ever be possible in peacetime, Scheidel simply said, “History does not determine the future. Things can change, but change is slow.”
Hopefully not, otherwise the predictions carved in the "Georgia Stones" will become the new bible.
For the longer term, Scheidel said, “I am not advocating war, but repeating the same old ideas ignores the lessons of history. Something truly innovative and original may have to happen in order to create lasting change.”
The grim conclusion here is that historians like Scheidel have brought nothing to humanity. But they too are victims of the system rewarding parroting facts that are rearranged and rewritten by the victors. And even worse, we can't even allow ourselves to believe in mainstream history, and it means that many historians will end up being condemned wandering the no-man's land with their books.
And not only historians!
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