MINDLESS MUSINGS

“Poor man wanna be rich

Rich man wanna be king

And a king ain’t satisfied

‘Til he rules everything”

Badlands – Bruce Springsteen

What a man wants and what he is willing to do to get it are two very different things. There weren’t any lotteries in ancient times. If you wanted to live the high life and weren’t born into it, you had to earn it. Getting to the top in this era was a treacherous task indeed. People literally fought their way up. Lying, cheating and betraying were the soft options. If your manoeuvrings weren’t successful, murder was always a viable option.

Once you had crossed the line with your scheming, getting busted was a death sentence, so you were all in. Well, that’s what I reckon anyway. Think about it though, we are now multiple generations thick with some of these hierarchies. The spoiled brats who are born into nobility honestly believe they deserve it. Imagine what that does to your ego. To truly consider yourself to be King Shit. Or the heir apparent to his Shittiness.

Bet your ass they aren’t giving that title up lightly. So, if you wanna make a play you better succeed. Inherited crown or usurped, once you have gathered all the toys in your playground, it’s not a huge leap that you might start looking around at what the other bullies have.

I know my word choices are scathing, but these rulers did not get their positions via popularity contest and the adoration of their followers. What I am getting at is that ‘nobility’ is just a synonym for ruling class. Any noble leaders would be few and far between and constantly avoiding the knives aimed directly at their backs (as would the bastards mind you). They wouldn’t last very long without some effective venom and cunning of their own.

This game was dominated by the ruthless. Nice guys finished very quickly.

So, you have conquered your patch of turf. You’re the top dog.

What now?

What else?

MORE!

Its conquest time! Why should those peons be divided up and ruled by inferior, tin crowned wannabes? All fighting for scraps like barbarians. I shall unify them and peace will reign across the land – after my blood drenched subjugation is completed obviously.

Everyone will worship and adore me (they fucken better!). This is going to be awesome!

And so it went. I suspect it was rather easy in the beginning. Whoever came up with the idea first had the element of surprise and would have smashed many an unsuspecting village. Probably had a rather impressive mini empire going before anyone else caught on. Although I do believe that most of the great empires were separated by much distance and time.

Some did clash of course and all of them eventually fell; often rotting from within long before an outside power toppled them. Hubris seems to work like rust on empires. They start to drink their own Kool aid and imagine themselves invincible. The inner intrigues take centre stage and the powers that be invest all their strategic energy trying to climb the lofty heights, foolishly neglecting the maintenance of the empire itself.

Corruption and in-fighting eventually end with some silly looking gronk standing atop a dilapidated shell of an empire. Cue the next one. The ‘backward’ tribes keep getting pushed further and further to the edges. Although the most intrepid had ventured so far away by now that it would take centuries before ‘civilisation’ caught up with them.

The barbarians would rebel and defend their independence valiantly. Many would fall; some would rise and become the next empire. That’s the thing about us humans, we don’t seem to play well with others and we’re good at making others.

There are quite a few threads I would like to explore here, so for the sake of brevity I will end this here.