History of conflicts between power systems and organizations in social life networks.
As we have seen in our first two parts, the antagonism between organization in a network of life and a system of power is obvious. Networked organizations develop flourishing civilizations during periods when wars are rare and exchanges between peoples numerous.
Knowledge at the heart of conflicts between victors and vanquished.
We could develop the following simplistic scenario: once this civilization has reached a high standard of living, it arouses the lust of other peoples with whom it has had little exchange until now, and these barbarians organize themselves in a system of military power to defeat and plunder this flourishing civilization.
But the victors cannot simply plunder one day and leave home the next with the spoils: true wealth consists in knowing how to produce these goods and this culture that promotes the development of the group over a long period of time. It is about learning and getting out of the ignorance that has made people live poorer with an inadequate standard of living. In fact, the victors should ask the vanquished for the knowledge to continue to develop ever more the material, spiritual and cultural riches they have just conquered, and so, after a certain time, most peoples should reach a high standard of living and end up agreeing to maximize their chances of enriching themselves or remaining rich without fear of new barbarians who in turn plunder the wealth created.
It is the logical, reasoned and reasonable solution that opposes the cynicism that animates personal interests in systems of power that favor individual property, including the means of production. However, the two organizations sometimes cohabit in the same period among peoples, as was the case during the early Middle Ages and the early days of cathedrals.
The network organization of monks and knights, mainly the Order of the Temple, developed to the point of ruining the power system of the King of France by depriving him of nearly 90% of the wealth derived from land ownership and harvests, not to mention the wealth derived from trade and financial exchanges that the Templars had developed through their banking agencies. We know that King Philip the Fair preferred to plunder the Jews in order to pay himself an army of mercenaries and with the support of the pope he himself appointed, this king committed perjury and treason to destroy the order of the Temple and set up royal absolutism in order to appropriate the wealth of the networked organizations. We have said that this ferocity of destroying the organization of the Knights Templar and of confiscating the common property of the abbeys and commanderies of the Order of the Temple represents the main fracture between the French people and the French rulers, a fracture which the republic has never been able to eliminate if it has ever taken into consideration this fracture and the alternative of the network organization.
Time for dialog and time for action, two moments in conflict.
Both the networked organization and the power system produce immediate results. However, there is a different perception of time: in a network the first work will be a consultation to implement the group’s project. In a system of power, this time of consultation does not exist because it is the group of leaders that imposes its decisions and the time to reduce the opposition can be long.
We have seen that this is a source of the fable about the effectiveness of the system in relation to networked organizations.
There is also a difference in the assessment of results: a thriving society is the result of several generations, while the functioning of a system of power provides immediate results for its leaders.
When everyone agrees to produce and share wealth without squandering it through destructive conflicts, everyone’s standard of living will inevitably rise. That should be the first solution. The second solution is equally logical: when i am able to take power and subdue people to work for my own benefit, i am able to enrich myself very quickly and much more than in the first logic.
Logic and Irrationality in Conflict
Since the 2000s, the takeover of the financial markets in the liberal capitalist economic system has illustrated this frantic search for maximizing profits in the very short term through speculation maneuvers in the financial and monetary markets. A finding at this stage: The first logic cannot eliminate the second logic, and so the question is not a matter of logic but a question that touches deeply on irrational elements, as both Keynes and Freud have admitted. The first irrational question that Freud and Keynes retained was, of course, the question of death, the fear of death, the will to leave a trace behind and thus the will to conquer the most powerful power to impress its presence in the present and especially in the future. At this point, this irrational desire borders on pure madness!
The logical solution to organize into life networks
On reflection, most members of a social group should choose the first logical solution: get along and organize into networks. We have seen that the first peoples, the Moso, the indigenous peoples of the Trobriand Islands, the tribes of the equatorial forests are organized in networks and that they do not know the scarcity of economic goods, but on the contrary they share an abundance when everything goes well and natural cataclysms do not come to prevent harvests. We showed the main reason: Faced with the risks of famine, poverty and violence, the group favors common property and in some cases, as in the Moso, rejects and declares individual property taboo.
Abundance among these peoples is not related to the notion of unlimited individual needs as in our economic system. Individual needs are limited to the physiological survival of the human body, for in these peoples the essential is to live the best possible loves, to educate children in a culture based on love and peace in which generations are united in order to eliminate misery, violence and wars and to develop the most peaceful social ties possible in their people and with neighboring peoples. This is the logic of peace and love, revived stealthily in the 1960s among a certain part of Western youth.
We will not repeat here Marx’s thesis: it is the balance of power between the social classes that determines society’s choice. The popular classes must overthrow the power struggle to seize power. We have said that Marx only reasons with regard to a system of power and that he rejected the alternative of the network organization which he had before him when he became aware of the great law which binds Iroquois nations and when he had to find that the confederation of Iroquois nations provided a much higher standard of living for the peoples of Europe subjected to systems of power, but it is certain that by the 1850s neither Marx nor the other authors used the vocabulary: system or network.
These words follow the structuralism of the 20th century: structure has a major influence on ways of living and thinking; we are under house arrest within the textual scope of the concepts and dogmas that underlie our systems of power, and a real liberating approach is needed to break these contexts and leave our systems of power.
Wars to conquer material wealth
The historical reality is quite different: not every social group freely chooses to organize itself in a network or a system of power. Material wealth is, of course, one of the motives that motivates people to plunder others, but if the first logic, that of the long-term material enrichment of all peoples, is not true, it is that there are other motives that animate the actors of history.
The pleasure of dominating peoples
Among these motives, the enjoyment of power and material wealth, that is to say the pleasure taken in the domination of peoples, occupies the first place among the leaders of the systems of power.
There are many examples of tyrants who have allowed their peoples to be destroyed or ruined or even starve to death, and this is often how tyrannies end when a foreign power fails to deliver these oppressed peoples.
Submission mechanisms
The case of Nazism illustrates this destructive folly in the 20th century. Through Milgram’s experience, we have seen that the mechanisms of domination are greatly aided by the mechanisms of submission which transform human beings into agents of execution of the most criminal orders.
A few autocrats and despots are enough to bring about the submission of thousands of people and, when they use the media, the submission of millions of people.
The continuation of the work of the most advanced civilizations
There is, however, another motive in human history for people to embark on a positive and constructive path: the continuation of the work undertaken in the most advanced civilizations and the preservation of an ancient knowledge of which we have not yet realized. In our first part we discussed this sacred knowledge forbidden by the Roman Catholic religion because this knowledge explains the development of humanity by biological contributions from beings living on another planet.
The survivors of the last great cataclysm and the vestiges of the lost knowledge.
We have shown the connection between Atlantis and the foundation by the survivors of Middle Eastern civilizations with their apogee in Egyptian civilization. These peoples have used the remnants of ancient knowledge that were partly lost in the last great cataclysm, but they have also developed the lessons learned from the initiatory approach, and it is indeed the use of this global knowledge that gives these cultures this human and humanistic dimension that is terribly lacking in our present materialist society dominated by the neo-liberal and financial system of economic power.
We have shown in our first part that the functioning of the networks is based on common ownership, the only one capable of ensuring confidence in the means of preventing and combating natural risks and violence. The wealth produced under common ownership is not cheap, second-rate wealth. On the contrary, the achievements are invaluable because they are the product of the work of thousands of people who have found work by participating in their realization.
The wonders of the ancient world, the masterpieces of the extinct civilizations are still the basis of tourist activity and cultural trips around the world.
So material wealth is not a criterion for opposing systems and networks: looting has always taken place and masterpieces are not reserved for networks: well-known despots enslaved their peoples to build palaces and cities worthy of the pharaohs, with the essential difference that slavery was unknown among the pharaohs and that the peoples who had opposed the pharaohs and who had been defeated were certainly coming into captivity, but they were participating in the local life in which they had to integrate little by little in order to share the high standard of living and culture that did not exist in them before.
Wealth is part of the history of conflicts between systems and networks, but it is not the cause of these conflicts.
The use of wealth may exceptionally be a cause of conflicts within systems when the minority in a system abuses its power to serve its interests and the people separate from it.
This crisis or revolution is all the more likely to succeed if the message brought by the group of insiders has been known and shared and if the use of ancient knowledge and global knowledge can resume its full place in society.
In 2022, political leaders around the world want to tackle the public deficits exacerbated by the 2008 financial crisis, and they are using often brutal ways to impose their claims about economic rigor and reduced social protection by asking people to pay while the wealthiest continue tax evasion and are hardly called upon to contribute.
Economists keep insisting that such austerity measures are a monumental mistake. Yet our political leaders of the capitalist system, in order to save their place, are only able to make these kinds of simplistic and manipulative speeches in their behavior of guilt, even devalorization and contempt for the less well-off categories. Their fierce desire to remain in power in this no longer functioning economic system implies a revolution to eliminate them and to change the political regime in order to remove its inferior ties to the powers of money and windfall profits.
This change will take place without major difficulties when a sufficient group of citizens has understood what the alternative of the network organization is, that it is its intellectual, rational and spiritual origin and how people have used it to develop flourishing civilizations without poverty and without unemployment.
We are in a period where everyone must position themselves: further collaborate with the leaders of this system of power or develop forms of resistance to this political, economic and social oppression. This is why the analysis of the history of conflicts between power systems and network organizations is timely and of fundamental importance.
The use or prohibition of global knowledge to find our reasons for living
The history of conflicts between systems of power and organizations in networks has as its background the struggle of peoples to have the right to use or not to use this global knowledge and, through it, to be able to produce and distribute material and spiritual wealth more equitably.
The way in which wealth is produced, the values of a culture that determine standards and lifestyles, are the cause of conflicts between systems and networks. Death is obviously at the center of everything. The use of global knowledge and the first source of knowledge to provide a spiritual answer to the question of the death of the carnal body and the importance to be given to material goods during our human condition in relation to the need to share our reasons for living and dying found in the encounter with the mysteries of life. The initiatory approach responds to our reasons for living and dying and removes the fear of death. The result is the elimination of the desire to enrich oneself as much as possible and leave a mark on history.
The struggle between private and common property.
Common ownership is not only about making masterpieces, but it is also a sign of solidarity with future generations. Egypt’s pyramids were built to keep track of the calculation of the date of the last great cataclysm so that we can calculate the period in which a new tilting of the Earth’s axis will become highly possible, and it is likely that these pyramids will resist during this tilting so as to be able to calculate the extent of the geological upheaval.
In order to gain people’s acceptance of the legitimacy of maximum personal enrichment, there is only the use of individual property. Conflicts between systems and networks can thus be characterized by the struggle between private and common property. The criteria are therefore irrational and relate to the acceptance or non-acceptance of global knowledge that uses the two possible sources of knowledge for a human being.
The question of the place of religion
Specifically, acceptance of the source of knowledge is dependent on the religion being used: spiritual movements in networks, dogmatic theocracies in power systems with more or less strict prohibition of the individual spiritual approach.
The question of religion has always been at the heart of this conflict between systems and networks, and in our first part we have seen how network organizations and spiritual movements conceive religion and how religious power systems build their dogmas and stories on divine characters that they more or less invent or take over other older religions to build their legends and beliefs.
The history of Western civilization over the past two thousand years has been characterized by the development of systems of power that are in turn religious, monarchical, civil and republican and then capitalist, but also by the often minority and hidden struggle of minds enlightened by global knowledge in order to preserve the alternative of the network organization and to try to put it back in place according to historical occasions. That’s the story we’re going to present.
“The future belongs to the one who has the longest memory”
Friedrich Nietzsche.