Early morning light, wooden floor

Where did that day go? I was busy, quite a lot of admin, writing in the morning, lunch with The Yoga Mama and Strider, cooked Mexican for supper. 

Also today was Hobbit Day.

Quote: 
Everywhere, rulers and elites sprang up, living off the peasants' surplus food and leaving them with only a bare subsistence. These forfeited fuel surpluses fuelled politics, wars, art and philosophy. They built palaces, forts, monuments and temples. Until the late modern era, more than 90 percent of humans were peasants who rose each morning to till the land by the sweat of their brows. The extra they produced fed the tiny minority of elites - kings, government officials, soldiers, priests, artists and thinkers - who fill the history books. History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.”


Yual Noah Harari, Sapiens

Great book.  And there it is again. That word “elites”, used appropriately here by Noah Yuval Harari, but when used elsewhere, it is probably the single most valuable weapon in the conspiracy theorists’ lexicon. It was used in the last week by both Rupert Murdoch and supporters of Russell Brand to discredit their detractors. The irony of course is that the accusation comes from people who are themselves elite. Brand is a wealthy self styled outsider who lives in a £4m house and was garnering £1m per year from his YouTube videos alone until his channel was suspended. Murdoch’s business empire which he has passed over to his son to run is worth over 17 billion pounds, although it punches far above its fiscal weight in terms of toxic social and political output and has brought mankind such great benefits as the election of Donald Trump, Fox News, and a decade long telephone hacking scandal.


Sapiens is worth a read and a regular re-read as it debunks, in very simple language, our self-image as a species. We are not as clever as we think we are, and we are definitely the worst thing that ever happened to planet earth and its other inhabitants. Nearly everything we have invented in the last few millennia since becoming farmers, from religion to the global corporation, has the single function of sustaining an elite and controlling the masses. So yes the conspiracy theorists are right. But they too are firmly entrenched in the ranks of the elite and doing very nicely out of it, thank you. What we really need now is someone to start a conspiracy theory about how conspiracy theorists are actually part of an organised global network that helps sustain the existing world order by appearing to attack it when they are in fact helping to sustain it. Alice in Wonderland, eat your heart out.