R.K.: So how does that work? Are there examples of it where it's been done? Where centralized countries or places have been decentralized intentionally?
K.S.: Well, I'll tell you, there have been a couple of places in Europe in the 30's where this is reasonable successfully done, but it did not last, but the best form of that would be secession and I've already explained to you how that has been accomplished throughout the world.
R.K.: Okay, so that's your answer to how to decentralize?
K.S.: Well, that would be one answer, but again in terms of governments which you asked me, that would be the best answer.
R.K.: Okay.
K.S.: There are different ways to decentralize power and decentralize organizations as many corporations have discovered, that they are just more efficient if they decentralize power to units which feel that they have control over their lives and their jobs. So there are plenty of forms of decentralization, but in my eyes they all work.
R.K.: Okay. Now, that's good. I appreciate that. Now when we got, we got disconnected you were talking about domination, about how humans became dominators and you started talking about how it began about twenty six thousand years ago and I think that's about when we got disconnected. Can we get back to that? The evolution of human domination.
K.S.: The domination of humans over animals began seventy thousand years ago"
R.K.: No, no, no, go ahead, I'm sorry.
K.S.: And as of twenty-six thousand years ago when we find these burials, there are burials of just a few people in this tribe in what is today Russia, and those were obviously the upper class of this society, or else they wouldn't have been buried with such grandeur and they had to waste all that grandeur by putting it under the ground. So that suggests that at least in some places there became hierarchies.
I doubt that they had significant amounts of power, but it's possible and if you have religion you're likely to have shamans, or some other figures of that kind and that's part of a hierarchy as well. So what happens though is not really until we settle down in communities that it becomes necessary to organize villages and villages into cities and in that organization you need to have people who are going to be willing to dig the canals for the group and people who are going to be over those diggers to make sure that they do the job.
And then the growth of military force to get people to do the things that they have to do and then some class over the military to make sure that they are under control and hence you develop the hierarchies that begin to create the empires from about six thousand years on that proliferate around the world.
R.K.: So, do you think that attachment to land is a key aspect of domination by humans over humans?
K.S.: Well, attachment in the sense of agriculture, domination of agriculture. Domestication is a form of domination over other species of plants and animals and once you have that, that becomes a necessity in your life and you can't do anything to change that. You don't have to grow into empire, but that's one way that a lot of people grew.
But mind you, while there was an empire in one place, in most of the other parts of the world there wasn't. The empires would grow up and die down in the Middle East and Eastern Asia, but not everybody lived in empires. People found lots of other ways to organize their lives without empires.
R.K.: Absolutely, it's only the last couple of hundred years of the industrial era and maybe since Columbus that the majority of people are a part of civilization.
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