And we said: "These are the questions that we hope to answer, not with answers but with more questions."
So, in response to the above questions, here below, are more questions.
When exactly did this took place? When did it all begin? And how? And we'll add, where?
Did it happened when nature stop providing people of the Natufian culture in the Mediterranean region of the Levant with enough resource to sustain them? Or was it the people of this culture who decided that they did not have to rely on nature to provide for them; when they decided that they can or must already provide for themselves? When they started tending their own flocks and herds, plant and learn to store their food? When they decided to establish more permanent settlements? When they begun to show cultural creativity?
Did it begin when they started to depend on agriculture for subsistence? When they begun to cultivate wheat and barley? When they started to grow food on farms that resulted in a surplus of food? When they started to use intensive agricultural techniques such as irrigation and crop rotation? When they discovered that grain can be stored for a long time, resulting in food surplus permitting some people (artisans, priests and priestesses, and other people with specialized careers) to do things besides produce food for a living?
Did it all begun when civilization started forming in this region -- and from this initial cradle, spreading its influence to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Sumer, and beyond? Did it all begun when it was institutionalized in the Hammorabi code? Later on, this influence reaching the entire Middle East, and much later, Europe when the Roman Empire included Egypt, the Middle East, the whole Mediterranean region?
Is this when the concept of property started? When the word "mine" is given a more salient meaning? When the "I" begin to assert itself more? When the mechanism of the preservation of oneself begin to have more preeminence? When "you" begun to separate from "me"? When fear from nature took less importance -- and the fear of the other became predominant? Did it occur when the people of these areas became "civilized"?**Or did it begun much later? when different families and clans formed common communities that became cities and later on, city states? Did it begun when the state became the administrator, law making body, law enforcer, and provider of its citizens' security from external and internal threat? its tax collector?
But it did not stop there. Fear begins to dominate his inner soul.
He began to be more aware of the future, preoccupied with the future. He began to imagine what could happen in the future. He began to discover new ways of doing things. He began to invent. He began to advance science and technology. He began to produce tools and machines to compensate for what was not available to him. But also, he began to be insecure about the same future he had worked long and hard for, to cultivate and manage. He began to fear the future. He began to be fearful. He began to suffer.
"If life is but pursuit of security for those who fear the future, self-affirmation for the disoriented, the desire for revenge for those frustrated with the past—what liberty, what responsibility, what commitment can be held aloft as an unvanquished banner?" –Silo, The Internal Landscape, http://siloswords.blogspot.com/2009/03/silo-internal-landscape.html
**"Economically, civilizations display more complex patterns of ownership and exchange than less organized societies. Living in one place allows people to accumulate more personal possessions than nomadic people. Some people also acquire landed property, or private ownership of the land. Because many people in civilizations do not grow their own food, they must trade their goods and services for food in a market system. Early civilizations developed money as a universal medium of exchange for these increasingly complex transactions." --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilization•••
