Historical Cases:
Spartacus's Slave Revolt:
In 73 BCE, a group of slaves under the command of a Thracian called Spartacus revolted against their masters and set themselves up for a fight for their freedom. Trained in gladiatorial arts, the slaves did considerable amounts of damage to the Roman Republic before, finally, being subdued in 71 BCE by eight full legions of Roman troops, commanded by the professional general, Marcus Licinius Crassus. What was remarkable about the slave revolt, for the purposes of this paper, was that it was an entirely unnecessary consequence for the Romans, had they not been in the practice of buying and owning people as slaves and gladiatorial combatants.
The slave army did not win ultimate victory over the Romans. Militarily, it was remarkable that they lasted as long as they did against the legions of Rome. What is significant here, is that you have this reaction from human beings against repression and subjugation, ineffective and non-benevolent treatment, even before human rights were articulated and conceptualized on a universal scale. In short, this was simply how human beings reacted to being treated in such ways without their consent and ability to articulate their personal needs. We see it time and time again throughout the history of the Roman Republic and Empire, indeed, throughout the history of the human species, in all times and in all places. This suggests then, that these are universal principles by which human behavior acts and reacts to these kinds of repressive and oppressive conditions, by means of every revolt, rebellion, overthrow, breakaway and election loss, regardless if they were ultimately successful from it or not. This is a theme that will repeat itself throughout history. And it is a testament to this paper's thesis statement that policy, if done for the benefit of the leadership itself, is more of a benevolent science and practice of medicine unto the people, rather than a practice of interest, opinion, subjugation and dominant repression. Failure to do so, results in conditions and situations like Spartacus's example. That costs money, lives and peace of mind, for somethings that they could have done without, again, for their own sakes and their own well beings. Spartacus is only one of several that will be looked at and examined over the course of this paper, in order to demonstrate a pattern of action that's in effect within the universe. And we begin here, at a time in our history before anything of the sort regarding formal human rights were articulated and executed in governing practice.
The Protestant Reformation:
To date, there have been few powers on Earth that could have rivaled the power and influence of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. It didn't hold land, per se, as traditional empires have done. But it wielded considerable influence over the rational and non-rational minds of Europeans. Yet through a couple of distinct miscalculations and doctrinal flaws, it has ceded much of its influence and power in the world over to not only the Protestant churches, but to a myriad of secular and non-religious teachings and schools of ethics. To this day, the power of Rome continues to fade in the light of scandal and continued doggedness towards old ways of being. But for now, we'll focus on what is, perhaps, the biggest collapse of power the human world has arguably known.
The Catholic Church grew out of Western Roman Christian institutions and schools of belief stemming from its members' interpretations of the Nicene Creed of 325 AD. As a religion, it teaches that it is linked directly to Jesus through his blessing of the the Apostle Peter to found his church.1 Peter was taught to be the first Bishop of Rome, also known as, the Pope, who was said to have supremacy over the entire Christian community. Over the years, authority was consolidated under the Bishop of Rome in the West while the Christian communities of the East together, formed what would be later known as the Eastern Orthodox churches in the eastern half of the old Roman Empire under the Patriarch of Constantinople and other prominent religious figures.
One of the key features that distinguished Western Christianity from Eastern Christianity, was the claim made by the Popes that they were the infallible transmitters of the word of God and the personage through which the Holy Ghost was said to come through. This is a key point in the undoing of Rome and the Catholic Church, and we will see this play out later as times begin to change underneath the Church's authority and, even with the Church's own aid and participation.
The Church's presence was everywhere during the Middle Ages and was central to the lives of the population of Western Europe. The Church controlled marriages between political elites and peasants alike, maintained the power to excommunicate anyone it chose to do so and maintained the air of legitimacy to control in all aspects of life.ii The Popes were infallible, and they made it very clear that contradicting their word and doctrinal teachings were unacceptable. In the 15th and 16th centuries, however, things began to slide away from underneath the papacy while the Catholic Church, remained true to the tried medieval formulas of the past. Unadapted to the changing conditions in European societies at the time, and clinging to it's own sense of self-righteousness, it would soon be faced with extreme breaks in its power, control and authority. People were beginning to see beyond the Church and the Church's influence and teachings. And it all came to a head in 1517 with a man named Martin Luther.
The Catholic Church was already on the ropes by the time Martin Luther had come along. There had been previous schisms within the Church over the location of the Papacy, and the Black Death had shaken people's faith in Rome. Meanwhile new discoveries in science and geography in the West were calling in to question the written doctrines of the Popes.2 The Americas were discovered by the Europeans, and there was a new boom in trade and economics that created a new class of wealthy merchants and town manufacturers that questioned the old order of the religiously ordained nobility who oversaw affairs and issues in government3. New inventions, such as the printing press allowed humanity to communicate ideas faster and more easily than ever before. And these new ideas about the human condition and human nature were beginning to spread out of Italy in contrast to the dogmas of the Catholic Church.
But that was not what Luther was complaining about. At the heart of Luther's complaints against the Church were the practice of indulgences (people paying priests for forgiveness), the practice of simony (selling Church offices for money), the infallibility of the Pope, mistranslations of the Bible from the original Aramaic by the Latin writing priests of the Church and the official status of the Church and Church officials in the official catechism of the Catholic teachingsiii. The combined total, created a picture of a corrupted Church using its assumed power inappropriately and abusing those who worshiped to it through false teachings of Jesus and scandalous actions. Attempts were made in the 14th century by John Wycliffe and Jan Hus to reform the Catholic Church, but both attempts were defeated by the military supremacy of the established Catholic Church and their political followers. In spite of the triumph of arms of the Catholic factions, dissent continued to exist and spread amongst European societies. Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses were, by the end of the day, only the tipping point of a long building anger against the Church and the Church's practices. To this day, Catholicism has never recovered from the blow that was dealt to it by Martin Luther. And judging by how things are working out as it is, it's not likely that they're ever going to gain that ground back again, judging from external circumstances and continued internal practices of the Catholic Church.
What's amazing about this, for this paper's sake, is not that Luther managed to pull off something spectacular in successfully challenging the Catholic Church. Indeed, Luther can be seen as just another one protestor against the existing practices of the Catholic Church in a long standing and long building line of them. What's amazing about this, for this paper's sake, is how the Church lost as badly as it did, with all the perceivable advantages it had on its side.
The root of this power vacuum for the Church, seems to come from the Popes' claims of infallibility and the chosen actions of Church officials when it came to interacting with the world outside and inside their realms of authority. They claimed too much and did too little to work with those who had placed themselves in their hands. In the end, the Church lost almost half of Europe in the Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded much of the religious fighting in central Europe that resulted from Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. And it would continue to lose authority in countries where new ideas and popular bitterness against the Church had taken root amongst the general public. In the end, the Church came out a shadow of its former power. And, as we will see later on in this paper (and in history), it will continue to lose ground, again, due to its own excessive claims and poorly chosen internal actions.
Notice, how it was not a mighty army that defeated the might of the Roman Catholic Church. It was one individual person, out of a line of several individual people, which permanently upset the status of the Catholic Church and ended its primacy in Europe entirely. Might and wealth did not help the Church. In fact, it proved to be a hindrance for it in areas where the new brand of Christianity, Protestantism, established itself. And it still proves to be a sticking point, even in Catholic societies where the Church's influence remained intact. The difference came ultimately in the quality of the brains of the societies that were in question, and how they interacted with the world. But that will be discussed more at the end of the paper. For now, we have seen the undoing of one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known, as a result of its own actions, it's own decisions and its own doctrinal beliefs.
The American Revolution:
The American Revolution did not begin as a grand call for human equality, social justice and other high ideals of the so called Enlightenment Period of Western Culture. It started out, simply as a political dispute between an imperial nation and thirteen of its colonies over the right to representation before taxation. It is a point that's easily mistaken in the grandiose calls of the American Founders. But it nevertheless is actually the case that the big idea of America, the country and society, began as a dispute over whether or not one political entity had the legitimate ability to levy a tax on others without the prior consent of those being taxed being had in the first place.
Following the French and Indian War (what was known as the Seven Years War in Europe) between England and France, the English had come off with most of the French colony in North America, but with a considerable amount of debt to be paid. In order to pay for their enormous war debt, the English Parliament decided to raise taxes from their American colonies, which their taxpayers in England had paid to defend. They felt that their colonial subjects should pay for a portion of the cost of garrisoning and deploying troops on their behalf. However, there had never been a tax from the imperial mother country on the colonials before, and furthermore, they were not represented in the English Parliament. The English in Parliament chose to go ahead with the taxes anyway, without the consent of the American colonials. Protests ensued in the colonies, with colonial officials petitioning the English Parliament to allow for representation before enabling taxation of the colonies. Eventually a back and forth started to ensue, with colonials protesting the English government's actions, and the English not addressing the key issues that were at stake, despite other attempts to placate the colonial populace. Eventually English troops were sent to the colonies to maintain order while being garrisoned in private colonial housing (again, all without colonial representation in Parliament). Shots were exchanged on April 19th, 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and war was on between the colonies and the United Kingdom of Great Britain. By 1783, the colonials had managed to fend off the onslaughts of British troops, and a peace was reached in Paris, ceding the American colonies over to a new country: the United States of America.
What was at the core of the colonials' complaints against the United Kingdom was the fact that the taxes were being levied without the consent of the colonies. For a long period of time, the English government took a back seat to colonial affairs and allowed them to function on their own. As a result, they had come to different organizational methods than the historically entrenched English systems across the Atlantic. While you can talk about these different subjective perspectives of legitimate authority, one can notice this very clear trend that spans across the two worlds of perspectives. The English stubbornness at dealing with the colonies, and their apparent inability or unwillingness to listen carefully to the complaints of the colonies, caused the ultimate conflict which would cost them thirteen of their overseas colonies.
In terms of government action, they technically could have allowed for the colonies to have their representation while collecting the tax they were looking for as well. That would have prevented the conflict and enabled both sides to get what they were looking for. That would be using the principles that I have talked about. And that, is clearly not what was done in the conflict between the United Kingdom and its colonies in America. It would have gone down differently. But it's not enough to speculate on such things. We've only the present to make choices. And this is only an example from the past which could help influence our present and our future. It shows, precisely what I talked about earlier in this paper, but completely the opposite of what should have been done in order to avoid conflict and preserve relations between the United Kingdom and the American colonies. In the end, we saw what happened. And that is not something we need to speculate on for long.
The French Revolution:
Nothing epitomizes the impacts of poor governing practice more than the French Revolution. The American Revolution blossomed into a revolution for the essential equality of humanity (at least, male humans) and their rights in government, under government and over government. But the pollen from that flower carried over across the Atlantic, and spawned a different type of revolution in France.
The French system of government had changed little since the feudal period of the Middle Ages. The landed aristocracy and clergy still lived decadent lives under the French King and Pope, who then depended on the peasant class to support all of them through their efforts in the field and in industry. To pay for their lifestyles, the French aristocrats took it out of their peasants in the form of taxes. It was the most direct kind of abuse of power; concrete exploitation at some of its worst.
No doubt, anger and resentment was already present before the time of the American Revolution. But it was only a small step that was taken in 1789 when the Revolution began, that led to decades of upheaval and political complications, that led to the undoing of the clergy, the aristocracy, the monarchy and the ideals that they espoused for their own sake and their own benefit. The entire system of monarchy and its adherents were wiped out or cast into exile due to the perceived lack of connection and care that the aristocracy had for the rest of the population and the destitution brought on by poor harvests and high taxes on the peasantry.
We can afford to step back from the big analysis of the complicated events of 1789 through 1799 and the consequences of them to see a very simple truth lying at the front of it. In the end, it was the monarchs', the clergymen and the nobles' own choices and own decisions that ended their period of time in office, and that all stemmed from their own attitudes, behaviors and perceptions of the world around them and their place in it. This is what it was in objective reality. This is what the objective effects were from their objective actions, attitudes, behaviors and perspectives.
If the nobles had simply given up some of their lavish lifestyles and taken better care of their population, would they have been stuck with their sticky fate at the executioner’s guillotine? Who knows. Historical analysis does not permit using “what if” scenarios to describe history. Suffice it to say, that you had one group having everything, and another having nothing. And the French Revolution is what you got out of it. It was not a great mysterious event whose origins are obscured by time and mythology. It was pretty clear what the people were rebelling against and what they were initially opposed to.
The Revolution violently meandered for some odd decades after the initial storming of the Bastile in Paris. But the causes that led to that fateful day are as clear as ever in the collective conscious of the French people, and the world of humanity itself. And the nobility didn't just lose the excesses that were being gleaned off from the peasantry either. Such is one lesson of history. And there are many more that follow this same pattern that need to be attended to.
The Haitian Revolution:
Like the French Revolution, is another example of the principles of this paper, not being put into practice. You can bog yourself down in the complicated affairs of Toussant L'Overture and his lieutenants. But to do so, you'd miss a very critical fact of the Haitian Revolution. Like the French Revolution before it, and the American Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, a revolution ended up taking place against a regime that was misusing and abusing its power and privilege over other human beings, with force of arms eventually being used against the upper classes responsible for the oppression. What made Haiti different from the other slave revolts that occurred throughout the Americas (and there were plenty that did actually happen with lives lost on both sides of the disagreement), was that it was successful in turning out the oppressive class and preventing it from re-establishing itself.
Revolts were a common fear in slave holding societies and for good and obvious reason. What is being asserted in this paper, is that that fear was unnecessary and limiting to the societies in question. If they choose instead to rely on paid and humanely governed labor, they could have avoided a lot of the problems that a slave holding society has to offer. Chief among these problems, is the problem of violent insurrection against the slave masters. It's not a value judgment, as much as an observation of function akin to having one's hand stuck in a pickle jar (the pickle representing human well being and survivability). You can continue holding the pickle with your hand, and not be able to get it out to enjoy. Or, you can let go of the pickle, get a fork and eat it in a different and more effective manner.
Haiti is just a bloody example of the problems with exploitative systems of governance and government. It, like the previous examples, is just another example of how bad government and poor governance leads to problems for the elites who perpetuate them. It ultimately spells their doom at the end of the day. The Haitian attempt was just one out of many slave revolts, and it was the only one that was genuinely successful at overthrowing the regime. But everyday, slave owners would have to ask themselves when the next one was coming and how successful it was going to be at accomplishing its end. Haiti is just another example of what happens when the principles of government are not put into action, and another part of the overall pattern that is being revealed throughout time and space. It makes you wonder, how worthwhile it all is to do in the first place, for the leadership's sake and the leadership's actual benefit, when push comes to shove.
The Socialist Movements in Europe and the Labor Movement in the United States:
Karl Marx is famous for two things. The first, was to describe the fatal flaws in Capitalism through his book Das Capital. The second, was to found a lasting social movement in the world's conscious, arguably, creating the most powerful rivalry to Capitalism the world has seen and likely will know. Socialism as a concept and a systematic way of thinking did not start out of a vacuum. Indeed, there were causes to its development and spread. And all of it was because of the treatment that the workers of Europe and the United States were being subjected to at the hands of the new Capitalist class of individual elites.
People who were formerly farmers were kicked off the land, and forced to emigrate to the cities to find work. Conditions were abysmal in the early industrial cities, with people living together in cramped conditions surrounded by their own filth. Sewers weren't designed to handle the flow or waste that entered into them, and many of them were actually open air with shared latrines to boot.iv Conditions in the factories weren't much better, as work days were long and grueling, and the work dangerous and deadly. Children were employed with adults, wages were scant and barely able to provide for the earners and benefits that we take for granted today, were unheard of as Capitalism took its first steps in the world.
. Now, it was not the squalor itself that would end Capitalism, in a Marxist view of the world. It was the overproduction of capital through dangerous means, the scarcity of resources and the reduction of everything to capital terms that would. Most of this, is actually proving to be correct as we enter into the twenty-first century. But for now, we are going to focus on the living and working conditions of the workers, that lead to the inspiration for Marx's Das Capital, and his more inflammatory piece, The Communist Manifesto.
The conditions that the workers were left in, were what arguably led to the creation of the Socialist movement in Europe and, indeed, around the world. Again, you see where exploitation and negative treatment of others, leads to calls against it from amongst the species, causing further changes to occur. Unions were formed against the Capitalists to stand for the workers' rights as human beings, which led to clashes between the two, which eventually produced changes in the ways that the Capitalist class treated and worked with its workers. Again, it's only speculation to think what would have happened if the Capitalists had begun from a point of treating their workers as human beings like themselves. But would there have been a need for the confrontation to happen in the first place? That I cannot answer. But I can note that, this is again, another example of how things work out in the world beyond what we'd hope for or expect to have happen, like all of the other examples before this one. Unions are still around to this day. And their influence on the working and personal lives of individual workers is still palpable. Politicians in the early twenty-first century have attempted to get rid of unions in the United States through various mechanisms. But in general, the concept remains in practice, and is not going to be undone by any amount of legislation or political action on the behalf of the elites.
One's got to wonder, again, what the point of trying to take these kinds of exploitative steps against humanity actually is. Each time it's ended, and it's the people who thought they actually had everything who ends up paying the highest cost and the end of the day, literally and figuratively as well. But that will be discussed in a later portion of this paper. And we'll again, bring our focus back to another instance in history to show this pattern, again, playing itself out in the world beyond our hopes, actions, wishes, desires, and contrary perspectives.
The Russian Revolution:
There was no singular start to the Russia Revolution. Indeed, agitation against the Tsars had begun as early as the 1900's and only continued on to culminate in the February and October Revolutions in 1917. There's also the impact of World War One on Russia and the mishandling of the campaigns by the generals and the Tsar himself. The consequences were sapped morale at home and on the front, and a populace that was destitute and desperate for change within their society and polity. Suffice it to say, that the mismanagement by the Tsars, the desire amongst Russians for a more representative and responsive government in their interests and the social and economic fall out from World War One, all played critical roles in the eventual overthrow of the Tsars in February 1917 and the conflict with the Bolsheviks starting in October of that year.v
Once again, you have a case where there is a combination of constant and consistent abuse and mismanagement of affairs, a desire amongst the people for something different, and conditions of extreme poverty and economic inequality that lead to an popular overthrow of the regime and the establishment of a new order. In spite of the military superiority of the Tsars and the White Army and the backing of Western countries against the Bolsheviks, the old order was undone and put into a place where it could not be redone again.
You may draw comparisons between the emergent Soviet Union and the Tsarist regime. But notice how a) the Tsar and his family and ministers were exterminated and driven off, and b) that the Soviet Union itself only lasted a scant seventy-four years before collapsing under its own unresponsiveness, inefficiency and barbarism. We'll consider this case later in the paper. But suffice it to say that this is, again, another example of history repeating itself with the same conditions present and the same basic sets of factors leading up to the events which bring about the change. And notice how poorly the old order and its supporters tend to fare once the corrupt system goes through its cycle and collapse, in spite of its own successes and its own accomplishments to the contrary.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States:
Even though the slaves were freed in the American South following the end of the Civil War, African Americans still faced enormous amounts of racial bigotry and hatred in the country from amongst the white populations. Jim Crow laws kept blacks and white separate down to the minutest detail of drinking fountains and theater entrances. Civil disobedience and revolts against these systems of inequality and exclusion were not uncommon in the South.vi But the defacto punishment of the era was the lynching of those who stood out against the system and against others associated with the individual(s) in question. None of that show of force, however, prevented one Rosa Parks from refusing to give up here seat on an Alabaman bus and touching off what would be an ongoing movement for the fundamental change of American society and the way it integrates people of color into its midst.
Granted, the movement's complete success was never realized. Racism and bigotry remain within American society, indeed, all of human society. But the regime of Jim Crow in the South was defeated through the efforts of activists, political and judicial figures alike. The overt offense to the dignity of other human beings was what was lost in the struggle. The fears of the segregationists proved to be unfounded and life continued on from there. The success of the Civil Rights movement may be questioned nationwide, beyond the legal victories of Brown v. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But the legacy lives on in the present day with no one's currently held rights having been harmed in the grand scheme of things, in spite of the caterwauling to the contrary. Everyone actually benefited from such a movement, because it technically brought us all that much closer together as a society and as a species, even if others refuse to look at it from that perspective.
The principles of do no harm are alive and well in this example from history. And the lesson is clear about the level of intolerance that people are willing to take under a regime that's perceived as oppressive and unjustifiably positioned in the world. In the end, only some people were able to share the same rights and privileges as other people, without the latter being harmed by the former. Notice how the two are not mutually exclusive things, and can exist together in harmony and peace on this plane of existence.
The Iranian Revolution:
Few revolutions have genuinely generated something unique in the world. And the Iranian Revolution certainly is one of these examples. Following the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1952 by American CIA and British MI-6 operatives, the Pahlavi dynasty was restored to power and immediately set up a tyrannical regime in the place of democratic governance. With the aid of their infamous secret police service, SAVAK, the Shah established dictatorial control over Iran and the Iranian people. However, this was only to last a little more than a couple of decades, before people began to grow weary of the regime and started acting out for change.
The Iranian Revolution lasted some two years before the Shah was deposed formally. Yet the legacy of it proves its valid point. If you misuse and abuse your position within a social context, you're more likely to end up having it taken away from you. Military support is not a guarantee, in terms of soldier support on the ground. And even if it is, we've already seen countless examples of these military forces being overwhelmed by the number of people to begin with. Like nature itself, change finds a way from happening. And while even the Iranian Revolution ended in corrupted ends, one is already hearing the low grumble of change lurking beneath Iranian government and within Iranian society. The mountain is being primed, and the pressure is building up under the volcano. When it erupts or how it erupts is anyone's guess. But "will it erupt" has, arguably, already been answered through our look into history. And the answer is simply "yes."
The Fall of the Soviet Union:
We've returned from the Shah of Iran to the Soviets in Russia. Even though they had successfully overthrown the Tsar and the Kerensky government in Moscow they still had a lot that needed doing that they ultimately failed to do. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they got off on a poor footing under Stalin's cult of personality regime. But even more unfortunate for the Soviets, they failed to pull themselves out of the megalomaniaical, overly idealistic and callously cruel regime that they got started off as.
If one were to look into the Soviet Union in the 1960's or 70's, you would already see the decay happening in the streets.vii Centrally planned economics had proven to be disastrously ineffective and inefficient and quality of life was brought down by it and the constant threat of repression by the NKVD/KGB secret police units of the regime. The lack of vision, comprehension and care by the Soviet leadership was, arguably, ultimately what did the regime in in 1991, following a disastrous war in Afghanistan and uprisings from amongst their satellite republics in Central and Eastern Europe; traceable to the repression and ineffectiveness of their Moscow oriented regimes. Once again, in spite of military advantages against the protestors, and in spite of the use brutal intimidation and control techniques to subjugate the populace, the regime crumbled and eventually fell. Like all the others before it.
It's not that these systems and exploitative power functions are not necessarily bad ideas, to begin with. It's just that they don't work. And it's only in our brains that we're going to be able to overcome and ignore these kinds of issues. So one's got to wonder about these kinds of premeditated or accidental undertakings in the first place, as well as the brains that are or end up being behind them in the first place. How connected are they to the world that actually is around them? And how well do you think that their priorities are based from the absolute start of the accidental or purposeful undertaking?
These are questions that are not going to be answered in this paper. But given the historical record of events, as events, they are, I think, questions that are entirely worth answering. And indeed, can be answered using modern medical diagnostic technology, methods and techniques. Like the Civil Rights Movement, it would be doing the least amount of actual harm (since the object of this would be to get people into medical care rather than depose them through other methods), while doing the most amount of good for the rest of the world through such an intercession. Everyone would be able to live as best as possible a life as they can, and should, be able to manage, again, coming back to the doctor's ethic of doing the most amount of good by doing the least amount of actual harm. There are other modern examples of this going afoul in our world, which I will continue with in a moment. But there are also positive examples of this actually working out. And we're able to see the effects of this positive function of government in action in the rest of the world around us.
Again, this is not a value judgment for one thing over the other. This is an observation of cases and how they ended up panning out. One way or another, the negative acting government ended while the positive aspects continued on elsewhere in what has been, historically, a haphazard fashion, unobserved. This happens in spite of what we do to make it be otherwise, and in spite of all other hopes, dreams, plans and visions that we could possibly have while accidentally or purposefully conceiving these ideas and practices in our world. I will now continue on with the more modern era examples and cases, which continue to show that these concepts and principles are still in effect, even in this present day, and in spite of actions taken to make them be otherwise.
Spartacus's Slave Revolt:
In 73 BCE, a group of slaves under the command of a Thracian called Spartacus revolted against their masters and set themselves up for a fight for their freedom. Trained in gladiatorial arts, the slaves did considerable amounts of damage to the Roman Republic before, finally, being subdued in 71 BCE by eight full legions of Roman troops, commanded by the professional general, Marcus Licinius Crassus. What was remarkable about the slave revolt, for the purposes of this paper, was that it was an entirely unnecessary consequence for the Romans, had they not been in the practice of buying and owning people as slaves and gladiatorial combatants.
The slave army did not win ultimate victory over the Romans. Militarily, it was remarkable that they lasted as long as they did against the legions of Rome. What is significant here, is that you have this reaction from human beings against repression and subjugation, ineffective and non-benevolent treatment, even before human rights were articulated and conceptualized on a universal scale. In short, this was simply how human beings reacted to being treated in such ways without their consent and ability to articulate their personal needs. We see it time and time again throughout the history of the Roman Republic and Empire, indeed, throughout the history of the human species, in all times and in all places. This suggests then, that these are universal principles by which human behavior acts and reacts to these kinds of repressive and oppressive conditions, by means of every revolt, rebellion, overthrow, breakaway and election loss, regardless if they were ultimately successful from it or not. This is a theme that will repeat itself throughout history. And it is a testament to this paper's thesis statement that policy, if done for the benefit of the leadership itself, is more of a benevolent science and practice of medicine unto the people, rather than a practice of interest, opinion, subjugation and dominant repression. Failure to do so, results in conditions and situations like Spartacus's example. That costs money, lives and peace of mind, for somethings that they could have done without, again, for their own sakes and their own well beings. Spartacus is only one of several that will be looked at and examined over the course of this paper, in order to demonstrate a pattern of action that's in effect within the universe. And we begin here, at a time in our history before anything of the sort regarding formal human rights were articulated and executed in governing practice.
The Protestant Reformation:
To date, there have been few powers on Earth that could have rivaled the power and influence of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. It didn't hold land, per se, as traditional empires have done. But it wielded considerable influence over the rational and non-rational minds of Europeans. Yet through a couple of distinct miscalculations and doctrinal flaws, it has ceded much of its influence and power in the world over to not only the Protestant churches, but to a myriad of secular and non-religious teachings and schools of ethics. To this day, the power of Rome continues to fade in the light of scandal and continued doggedness towards old ways of being. But for now, we'll focus on what is, perhaps, the biggest collapse of power the human world has arguably known.
The Catholic Church grew out of Western Roman Christian institutions and schools of belief stemming from its members' interpretations of the Nicene Creed of 325 AD. As a religion, it teaches that it is linked directly to Jesus through his blessing of the the Apostle Peter to found his church.1 Peter was taught to be the first Bishop of Rome, also known as, the Pope, who was said to have supremacy over the entire Christian community. Over the years, authority was consolidated under the Bishop of Rome in the West while the Christian communities of the East together, formed what would be later known as the Eastern Orthodox churches in the eastern half of the old Roman Empire under the Patriarch of Constantinople and other prominent religious figures.
One of the key features that distinguished Western Christianity from Eastern Christianity, was the claim made by the Popes that they were the infallible transmitters of the word of God and the personage through which the Holy Ghost was said to come through. This is a key point in the undoing of Rome and the Catholic Church, and we will see this play out later as times begin to change underneath the Church's authority and, even with the Church's own aid and participation.
The Church's presence was everywhere during the Middle Ages and was central to the lives of the population of Western Europe. The Church controlled marriages between political elites and peasants alike, maintained the power to excommunicate anyone it chose to do so and maintained the air of legitimacy to control in all aspects of life.ii The Popes were infallible, and they made it very clear that contradicting their word and doctrinal teachings were unacceptable. In the 15th and 16th centuries, however, things began to slide away from underneath the papacy while the Catholic Church, remained true to the tried medieval formulas of the past. Unadapted to the changing conditions in European societies at the time, and clinging to it's own sense of self-righteousness, it would soon be faced with extreme breaks in its power, control and authority. People were beginning to see beyond the Church and the Church's influence and teachings. And it all came to a head in 1517 with a man named Martin Luther.
The Catholic Church was already on the ropes by the time Martin Luther had come along. There had been previous schisms within the Church over the location of the Papacy, and the Black Death had shaken people's faith in Rome. Meanwhile new discoveries in science and geography in the West were calling in to question the written doctrines of the Popes.2 The Americas were discovered by the Europeans, and there was a new boom in trade and economics that created a new class of wealthy merchants and town manufacturers that questioned the old order of the religiously ordained nobility who oversaw affairs and issues in government3. New inventions, such as the printing press allowed humanity to communicate ideas faster and more easily than ever before. And these new ideas about the human condition and human nature were beginning to spread out of Italy in contrast to the dogmas of the Catholic Church.
But that was not what Luther was complaining about. At the heart of Luther's complaints against the Church were the practice of indulgences (people paying priests for forgiveness), the practice of simony (selling Church offices for money), the infallibility of the Pope, mistranslations of the Bible from the original Aramaic by the Latin writing priests of the Church and the official status of the Church and Church officials in the official catechism of the Catholic teachingsiii. The combined total, created a picture of a corrupted Church using its assumed power inappropriately and abusing those who worshiped to it through false teachings of Jesus and scandalous actions. Attempts were made in the 14th century by John Wycliffe and Jan Hus to reform the Catholic Church, but both attempts were defeated by the military supremacy of the established Catholic Church and their political followers. In spite of the triumph of arms of the Catholic factions, dissent continued to exist and spread amongst European societies. Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses were, by the end of the day, only the tipping point of a long building anger against the Church and the Church's practices. To this day, Catholicism has never recovered from the blow that was dealt to it by Martin Luther. And judging by how things are working out as it is, it's not likely that they're ever going to gain that ground back again, judging from external circumstances and continued internal practices of the Catholic Church.
What's amazing about this, for this paper's sake, is not that Luther managed to pull off something spectacular in successfully challenging the Catholic Church. Indeed, Luther can be seen as just another one protestor against the existing practices of the Catholic Church in a long standing and long building line of them. What's amazing about this, for this paper's sake, is how the Church lost as badly as it did, with all the perceivable advantages it had on its side.
The root of this power vacuum for the Church, seems to come from the Popes' claims of infallibility and the chosen actions of Church officials when it came to interacting with the world outside and inside their realms of authority. They claimed too much and did too little to work with those who had placed themselves in their hands. In the end, the Church lost almost half of Europe in the Treaty of Westphalia, which concluded much of the religious fighting in central Europe that resulted from Luther's Ninety-Five Theses. And it would continue to lose authority in countries where new ideas and popular bitterness against the Church had taken root amongst the general public. In the end, the Church came out a shadow of its former power. And, as we will see later on in this paper (and in history), it will continue to lose ground, again, due to its own excessive claims and poorly chosen internal actions.
Notice, how it was not a mighty army that defeated the might of the Roman Catholic Church. It was one individual person, out of a line of several individual people, which permanently upset the status of the Catholic Church and ended its primacy in Europe entirely. Might and wealth did not help the Church. In fact, it proved to be a hindrance for it in areas where the new brand of Christianity, Protestantism, established itself. And it still proves to be a sticking point, even in Catholic societies where the Church's influence remained intact. The difference came ultimately in the quality of the brains of the societies that were in question, and how they interacted with the world. But that will be discussed more at the end of the paper. For now, we have seen the undoing of one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known, as a result of its own actions, it's own decisions and its own doctrinal beliefs.
The American Revolution:
The American Revolution did not begin as a grand call for human equality, social justice and other high ideals of the so called Enlightenment Period of Western Culture. It started out, simply as a political dispute between an imperial nation and thirteen of its colonies over the right to representation before taxation. It is a point that's easily mistaken in the grandiose calls of the American Founders. But it nevertheless is actually the case that the big idea of America, the country and society, began as a dispute over whether or not one political entity had the legitimate ability to levy a tax on others without the prior consent of those being taxed being had in the first place.
Following the French and Indian War (what was known as the Seven Years War in Europe) between England and France, the English had come off with most of the French colony in North America, but with a considerable amount of debt to be paid. In order to pay for their enormous war debt, the English Parliament decided to raise taxes from their American colonies, which their taxpayers in England had paid to defend. They felt that their colonial subjects should pay for a portion of the cost of garrisoning and deploying troops on their behalf. However, there had never been a tax from the imperial mother country on the colonials before, and furthermore, they were not represented in the English Parliament. The English in Parliament chose to go ahead with the taxes anyway, without the consent of the American colonials. Protests ensued in the colonies, with colonial officials petitioning the English Parliament to allow for representation before enabling taxation of the colonies. Eventually a back and forth started to ensue, with colonials protesting the English government's actions, and the English not addressing the key issues that were at stake, despite other attempts to placate the colonial populace. Eventually English troops were sent to the colonies to maintain order while being garrisoned in private colonial housing (again, all without colonial representation in Parliament). Shots were exchanged on April 19th, 1775 in Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, and war was on between the colonies and the United Kingdom of Great Britain. By 1783, the colonials had managed to fend off the onslaughts of British troops, and a peace was reached in Paris, ceding the American colonies over to a new country: the United States of America.
What was at the core of the colonials' complaints against the United Kingdom was the fact that the taxes were being levied without the consent of the colonies. For a long period of time, the English government took a back seat to colonial affairs and allowed them to function on their own. As a result, they had come to different organizational methods than the historically entrenched English systems across the Atlantic. While you can talk about these different subjective perspectives of legitimate authority, one can notice this very clear trend that spans across the two worlds of perspectives. The English stubbornness at dealing with the colonies, and their apparent inability or unwillingness to listen carefully to the complaints of the colonies, caused the ultimate conflict which would cost them thirteen of their overseas colonies.
In terms of government action, they technically could have allowed for the colonies to have their representation while collecting the tax they were looking for as well. That would have prevented the conflict and enabled both sides to get what they were looking for. That would be using the principles that I have talked about. And that, is clearly not what was done in the conflict between the United Kingdom and its colonies in America. It would have gone down differently. But it's not enough to speculate on such things. We've only the present to make choices. And this is only an example from the past which could help influence our present and our future. It shows, precisely what I talked about earlier in this paper, but completely the opposite of what should have been done in order to avoid conflict and preserve relations between the United Kingdom and the American colonies. In the end, we saw what happened. And that is not something we need to speculate on for long.
The French Revolution:
Nothing epitomizes the impacts of poor governing practice more than the French Revolution. The American Revolution blossomed into a revolution for the essential equality of humanity (at least, male humans) and their rights in government, under government and over government. But the pollen from that flower carried over across the Atlantic, and spawned a different type of revolution in France.
The French system of government had changed little since the feudal period of the Middle Ages. The landed aristocracy and clergy still lived decadent lives under the French King and Pope, who then depended on the peasant class to support all of them through their efforts in the field and in industry. To pay for their lifestyles, the French aristocrats took it out of their peasants in the form of taxes. It was the most direct kind of abuse of power; concrete exploitation at some of its worst.
No doubt, anger and resentment was already present before the time of the American Revolution. But it was only a small step that was taken in 1789 when the Revolution began, that led to decades of upheaval and political complications, that led to the undoing of the clergy, the aristocracy, the monarchy and the ideals that they espoused for their own sake and their own benefit. The entire system of monarchy and its adherents were wiped out or cast into exile due to the perceived lack of connection and care that the aristocracy had for the rest of the population and the destitution brought on by poor harvests and high taxes on the peasantry.
We can afford to step back from the big analysis of the complicated events of 1789 through 1799 and the consequences of them to see a very simple truth lying at the front of it. In the end, it was the monarchs', the clergymen and the nobles' own choices and own decisions that ended their period of time in office, and that all stemmed from their own attitudes, behaviors and perceptions of the world around them and their place in it. This is what it was in objective reality. This is what the objective effects were from their objective actions, attitudes, behaviors and perspectives.
If the nobles had simply given up some of their lavish lifestyles and taken better care of their population, would they have been stuck with their sticky fate at the executioner’s guillotine? Who knows. Historical analysis does not permit using “what if” scenarios to describe history. Suffice it to say, that you had one group having everything, and another having nothing. And the French Revolution is what you got out of it. It was not a great mysterious event whose origins are obscured by time and mythology. It was pretty clear what the people were rebelling against and what they were initially opposed to.
The Revolution violently meandered for some odd decades after the initial storming of the Bastile in Paris. But the causes that led to that fateful day are as clear as ever in the collective conscious of the French people, and the world of humanity itself. And the nobility didn't just lose the excesses that were being gleaned off from the peasantry either. Such is one lesson of history. And there are many more that follow this same pattern that need to be attended to.
The Haitian Revolution:
Like the French Revolution, is another example of the principles of this paper, not being put into practice. You can bog yourself down in the complicated affairs of Toussant L'Overture and his lieutenants. But to do so, you'd miss a very critical fact of the Haitian Revolution. Like the French Revolution before it, and the American Revolution and the Protestant Reformation, a revolution ended up taking place against a regime that was misusing and abusing its power and privilege over other human beings, with force of arms eventually being used against the upper classes responsible for the oppression. What made Haiti different from the other slave revolts that occurred throughout the Americas (and there were plenty that did actually happen with lives lost on both sides of the disagreement), was that it was successful in turning out the oppressive class and preventing it from re-establishing itself.
Revolts were a common fear in slave holding societies and for good and obvious reason. What is being asserted in this paper, is that that fear was unnecessary and limiting to the societies in question. If they choose instead to rely on paid and humanely governed labor, they could have avoided a lot of the problems that a slave holding society has to offer. Chief among these problems, is the problem of violent insurrection against the slave masters. It's not a value judgment, as much as an observation of function akin to having one's hand stuck in a pickle jar (the pickle representing human well being and survivability). You can continue holding the pickle with your hand, and not be able to get it out to enjoy. Or, you can let go of the pickle, get a fork and eat it in a different and more effective manner.
Haiti is just a bloody example of the problems with exploitative systems of governance and government. It, like the previous examples, is just another example of how bad government and poor governance leads to problems for the elites who perpetuate them. It ultimately spells their doom at the end of the day. The Haitian attempt was just one out of many slave revolts, and it was the only one that was genuinely successful at overthrowing the regime. But everyday, slave owners would have to ask themselves when the next one was coming and how successful it was going to be at accomplishing its end. Haiti is just another example of what happens when the principles of government are not put into action, and another part of the overall pattern that is being revealed throughout time and space. It makes you wonder, how worthwhile it all is to do in the first place, for the leadership's sake and the leadership's actual benefit, when push comes to shove.
The Socialist Movements in Europe and the Labor Movement in the United States:
Karl Marx is famous for two things. The first, was to describe the fatal flaws in Capitalism through his book Das Capital. The second, was to found a lasting social movement in the world's conscious, arguably, creating the most powerful rivalry to Capitalism the world has seen and likely will know. Socialism as a concept and a systematic way of thinking did not start out of a vacuum. Indeed, there were causes to its development and spread. And all of it was because of the treatment that the workers of Europe and the United States were being subjected to at the hands of the new Capitalist class of individual elites.
People who were formerly farmers were kicked off the land, and forced to emigrate to the cities to find work. Conditions were abysmal in the early industrial cities, with people living together in cramped conditions surrounded by their own filth. Sewers weren't designed to handle the flow or waste that entered into them, and many of them were actually open air with shared latrines to boot.iv Conditions in the factories weren't much better, as work days were long and grueling, and the work dangerous and deadly. Children were employed with adults, wages were scant and barely able to provide for the earners and benefits that we take for granted today, were unheard of as Capitalism took its first steps in the world.
. Now, it was not the squalor itself that would end Capitalism, in a Marxist view of the world. It was the overproduction of capital through dangerous means, the scarcity of resources and the reduction of everything to capital terms that would. Most of this, is actually proving to be correct as we enter into the twenty-first century. But for now, we are going to focus on the living and working conditions of the workers, that lead to the inspiration for Marx's Das Capital, and his more inflammatory piece, The Communist Manifesto.
The conditions that the workers were left in, were what arguably led to the creation of the Socialist movement in Europe and, indeed, around the world. Again, you see where exploitation and negative treatment of others, leads to calls against it from amongst the species, causing further changes to occur. Unions were formed against the Capitalists to stand for the workers' rights as human beings, which led to clashes between the two, which eventually produced changes in the ways that the Capitalist class treated and worked with its workers. Again, it's only speculation to think what would have happened if the Capitalists had begun from a point of treating their workers as human beings like themselves. But would there have been a need for the confrontation to happen in the first place? That I cannot answer. But I can note that, this is again, another example of how things work out in the world beyond what we'd hope for or expect to have happen, like all of the other examples before this one. Unions are still around to this day. And their influence on the working and personal lives of individual workers is still palpable. Politicians in the early twenty-first century have attempted to get rid of unions in the United States through various mechanisms. But in general, the concept remains in practice, and is not going to be undone by any amount of legislation or political action on the behalf of the elites.
One's got to wonder, again, what the point of trying to take these kinds of exploitative steps against humanity actually is. Each time it's ended, and it's the people who thought they actually had everything who ends up paying the highest cost and the end of the day, literally and figuratively as well. But that will be discussed in a later portion of this paper. And we'll again, bring our focus back to another instance in history to show this pattern, again, playing itself out in the world beyond our hopes, actions, wishes, desires, and contrary perspectives.
The Russian Revolution:
There was no singular start to the Russia Revolution. Indeed, agitation against the Tsars had begun as early as the 1900's and only continued on to culminate in the February and October Revolutions in 1917. There's also the impact of World War One on Russia and the mishandling of the campaigns by the generals and the Tsar himself. The consequences were sapped morale at home and on the front, and a populace that was destitute and desperate for change within their society and polity. Suffice it to say, that the mismanagement by the Tsars, the desire amongst Russians for a more representative and responsive government in their interests and the social and economic fall out from World War One, all played critical roles in the eventual overthrow of the Tsars in February 1917 and the conflict with the Bolsheviks starting in October of that year.v
Once again, you have a case where there is a combination of constant and consistent abuse and mismanagement of affairs, a desire amongst the people for something different, and conditions of extreme poverty and economic inequality that lead to an popular overthrow of the regime and the establishment of a new order. In spite of the military superiority of the Tsars and the White Army and the backing of Western countries against the Bolsheviks, the old order was undone and put into a place where it could not be redone again.
You may draw comparisons between the emergent Soviet Union and the Tsarist regime. But notice how a) the Tsar and his family and ministers were exterminated and driven off, and b) that the Soviet Union itself only lasted a scant seventy-four years before collapsing under its own unresponsiveness, inefficiency and barbarism. We'll consider this case later in the paper. But suffice it to say that this is, again, another example of history repeating itself with the same conditions present and the same basic sets of factors leading up to the events which bring about the change. And notice how poorly the old order and its supporters tend to fare once the corrupt system goes through its cycle and collapse, in spite of its own successes and its own accomplishments to the contrary.
The Civil Rights Movement in the United States:
Even though the slaves were freed in the American South following the end of the Civil War, African Americans still faced enormous amounts of racial bigotry and hatred in the country from amongst the white populations. Jim Crow laws kept blacks and white separate down to the minutest detail of drinking fountains and theater entrances. Civil disobedience and revolts against these systems of inequality and exclusion were not uncommon in the South.vi But the defacto punishment of the era was the lynching of those who stood out against the system and against others associated with the individual(s) in question. None of that show of force, however, prevented one Rosa Parks from refusing to give up here seat on an Alabaman bus and touching off what would be an ongoing movement for the fundamental change of American society and the way it integrates people of color into its midst.
Granted, the movement's complete success was never realized. Racism and bigotry remain within American society, indeed, all of human society. But the regime of Jim Crow in the South was defeated through the efforts of activists, political and judicial figures alike. The overt offense to the dignity of other human beings was what was lost in the struggle. The fears of the segregationists proved to be unfounded and life continued on from there. The success of the Civil Rights movement may be questioned nationwide, beyond the legal victories of Brown v. Board of Ed and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. But the legacy lives on in the present day with no one's currently held rights having been harmed in the grand scheme of things, in spite of the caterwauling to the contrary. Everyone actually benefited from such a movement, because it technically brought us all that much closer together as a society and as a species, even if others refuse to look at it from that perspective.
The principles of do no harm are alive and well in this example from history. And the lesson is clear about the level of intolerance that people are willing to take under a regime that's perceived as oppressive and unjustifiably positioned in the world. In the end, only some people were able to share the same rights and privileges as other people, without the latter being harmed by the former. Notice how the two are not mutually exclusive things, and can exist together in harmony and peace on this plane of existence.
The Iranian Revolution:
Few revolutions have genuinely generated something unique in the world. And the Iranian Revolution certainly is one of these examples. Following the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh in 1952 by American CIA and British MI-6 operatives, the Pahlavi dynasty was restored to power and immediately set up a tyrannical regime in the place of democratic governance. With the aid of their infamous secret police service, SAVAK, the Shah established dictatorial control over Iran and the Iranian people. However, this was only to last a little more than a couple of decades, before people began to grow weary of the regime and started acting out for change.
The Iranian Revolution lasted some two years before the Shah was deposed formally. Yet the legacy of it proves its valid point. If you misuse and abuse your position within a social context, you're more likely to end up having it taken away from you. Military support is not a guarantee, in terms of soldier support on the ground. And even if it is, we've already seen countless examples of these military forces being overwhelmed by the number of people to begin with. Like nature itself, change finds a way from happening. And while even the Iranian Revolution ended in corrupted ends, one is already hearing the low grumble of change lurking beneath Iranian government and within Iranian society. The mountain is being primed, and the pressure is building up under the volcano. When it erupts or how it erupts is anyone's guess. But "will it erupt" has, arguably, already been answered through our look into history. And the answer is simply "yes."
The Fall of the Soviet Union:
We've returned from the Shah of Iran to the Soviets in Russia. Even though they had successfully overthrown the Tsar and the Kerensky government in Moscow they still had a lot that needed doing that they ultimately failed to do. Unfortunately for the Soviets, they got off on a poor footing under Stalin's cult of personality regime. But even more unfortunate for the Soviets, they failed to pull themselves out of the megalomaniaical, overly idealistic and callously cruel regime that they got started off as.
If one were to look into the Soviet Union in the 1960's or 70's, you would already see the decay happening in the streets.vii Centrally planned economics had proven to be disastrously ineffective and inefficient and quality of life was brought down by it and the constant threat of repression by the NKVD/KGB secret police units of the regime. The lack of vision, comprehension and care by the Soviet leadership was, arguably, ultimately what did the regime in in 1991, following a disastrous war in Afghanistan and uprisings from amongst their satellite republics in Central and Eastern Europe; traceable to the repression and ineffectiveness of their Moscow oriented regimes. Once again, in spite of military advantages against the protestors, and in spite of the use brutal intimidation and control techniques to subjugate the populace, the regime crumbled and eventually fell. Like all the others before it.
It's not that these systems and exploitative power functions are not necessarily bad ideas, to begin with. It's just that they don't work. And it's only in our brains that we're going to be able to overcome and ignore these kinds of issues. So one's got to wonder about these kinds of premeditated or accidental undertakings in the first place, as well as the brains that are or end up being behind them in the first place. How connected are they to the world that actually is around them? And how well do you think that their priorities are based from the absolute start of the accidental or purposeful undertaking?
These are questions that are not going to be answered in this paper. But given the historical record of events, as events, they are, I think, questions that are entirely worth answering. And indeed, can be answered using modern medical diagnostic technology, methods and techniques. Like the Civil Rights Movement, it would be doing the least amount of actual harm (since the object of this would be to get people into medical care rather than depose them through other methods), while doing the most amount of good for the rest of the world through such an intercession. Everyone would be able to live as best as possible a life as they can, and should, be able to manage, again, coming back to the doctor's ethic of doing the most amount of good by doing the least amount of actual harm. There are other modern examples of this going afoul in our world, which I will continue with in a moment. But there are also positive examples of this actually working out. And we're able to see the effects of this positive function of government in action in the rest of the world around us.
Again, this is not a value judgment for one thing over the other. This is an observation of cases and how they ended up panning out. One way or another, the negative acting government ended while the positive aspects continued on elsewhere in what has been, historically, a haphazard fashion, unobserved. This happens in spite of what we do to make it be otherwise, and in spite of all other hopes, dreams, plans and visions that we could possibly have while accidentally or purposefully conceiving these ideas and practices in our world. I will now continue on with the more modern era examples and cases, which continue to show that these concepts and principles are still in effect, even in this present day, and in spite of actions taken to make them be otherwise.
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