I don’t have a lot of time to go into the details or tie things into neat little packages, but the fact that I’ve finally tunneled down to the root of all evil has been a revelation to me. I sure wish that I had had this depth of understanding many years ago – it would have saved me endless gnashing of teeth!

Hierarchy. What is it, how does it work, and how does it get unbalanced so that it results in the daily atrocities that we see on TV, read in the newspapers, and experience in our daily lives? I’m just beginning to gather information on this central conundrum so that I can tie events together more clearly. I don’t know enough and am not clear enough about the subject, so I can’t write clearly about it. But as time goes on, I intend to make hierarchy the lens that I look at the world through. I think that everything will make much, much more sense when I do that.

I read an utterly fascinating series of blog posts on empire at John Michael Greer’s site, The Archdruid Report. The series starts with this post and continues for about 6 posts. The later ones are not as interesting as the first ones, though.

What struck me while I was reading the series is how similar the mechanisms used to create empire are to those that operate at the individual level. But that should make perfect sense, shouldn’t it? Why should humans behave differently at the impersonal level than they do at the personal level?

It all goes back to my favorite saying, taken from Procul Harem’s song, In Held Twas In I, when the seeker asks the guru for the meaning of life and is told, in reply, “Life is like a beanstalk, isn’t it?” In other words, we strive to grow, often at the expense of others, because that is what life is, isn’t it?

To be continued ….