The following is written upon request.
The origins of civilization and centralization go hand in hand. The word civilization comes from the Latin word civilis, which is where we also get the words civil, citizen, and city. As mentioned in the previous post, after Noah’s flood, the people gathered together in one place to build a city. Those who participated in this project could have been referred to a citizens, as that would be etymologically correct.
This application of the word citizen to those people would be different than it is used today as that first city was governed as a monarchy, as Nimrod was the central authority figure. In a monarchy, everything is the property of the monarch. This includes the people, which is why they are more accurately referred to as subjects. And as mentioned in the previous post, when people are afraid, they are more willing to live as subjects in exchange for security.
In essence, the history and development of civilization throughout the world has been about the ownership of property. Property is defined as that which a person possesses, owns, and more specifically, is able to exercise their will over. When man was first created, he was given dominion over the earth (see Gen. 1:26). In other words, man was allowed to exercise his will over the earth, and its creatures, despite the fact that he didn’t create it. When man agreed with the adversary, he lost his dominion, and has been trying to get it back ever since seeing that it is a fundamental aspect of his being.
One of the ways of attempting this was to create countries. Although people are conditioned to believe that their country inherently possesses substance, the fact is, all countries are only ideas whose only substance is the agreement of those who are partakers of the idea. The more afraid of “terrorists” people are, the more they are willing to receive the protection that imaginably comes with belonging to a country. Throughout most of history, countries revolved around monarchs who were revered as being connected to the divine, and that supposedly added to their ability to provide protection to their subjects. One of the few exceptions to this was a brief experiment with democracy in ancient Greece.
It wasn’t until the 16th century AD that the subject of citizenship, and private property independent of a monarch started to be considered, and written about by people such as John Locke, who was a rock star to America’s founding fathers. And while the American experiment started off as a successful means of private property ownership, the United States Constitution has since been amended in a way that has thwarted this, and has made America the most centralized, centrally minded country in the history of the world while imagining it is the most liberated. This is a whole other subject that can written about in another post.