Towards New Paradigms
Written by Alfonso Elizondo
While human society was evolving over hundreds of thousands of years, all the animals existing on the Planet underwent a very complex and very variable adaptation process in which climate change played the most important role. It could be said that another fundamental element of anthropological, biological and neurological adaptation was the development of a language in the human being which differed completely from other animals that were still using gestures. Added to this one could consider the great influence of agriculture coupled with the rearing of edible and domesticable animals.
It could be said that the stage of sedentarism and the creation of urban society and its political and religious myths began just 9,000 years before Christ. The most remarkable events of protohistory were, without a doubt, those that shaped a large part of modern mythology and social and political life the world over.
The creation of empires maintained by religious beliefs and old myths about divinities became the basis of the new human civilization which culminated in the Persian, Jewish, Chinese, Greek and Roman empires. In the second period empires of lesser importance emerged, especially in countries with less significant food reserves, commodities and culture, such as the case of India, Islam, Japan, the Soviet Union and some countries in the Middle East and Africa.
However, the world’s most successful social and political development in the last two hundred years was Western democracy that emerged towards the end of the eighteenth century after the fall of the most important monarchies of that era, such as France, Spain and England. Perhaps the most important element of that 18th-century political and social revolution was the emergence of the bureaucracy that served to control the middle and popular classes. It ended up in control of the largest number of citizens and to this day its continues to be the institution that provides most jobs in all the nations of the world, regardless of the political ideology that they practice and regardless of the religious beliefs and the myths that prevail there.
It was at this stage of historical modernity that industry developed the most, which is why control of the working class was the basis of the economy, of trade and of finance. Marxist ideas about egalitarianism prevailed in the ideological world after the beginning of the 19th century, since slavery, the fundamental feature of the major monarchies, had already been banished from the politics and economy of the most developed Western nations led by Abraham Lincoln in the United States.
This profound transformation of Western society led to significant changes throughout the world, with the emergence of radical doctrines opposed to democracy, as was the case with Nazism and Mussolini’s extreme right, as well as the first manifestations of Tsarism and other radical political doctrines, both on the left and on the right. But perhaps most serious aspect of all this was the beginning of the transatlantic wars planned by the US War Department that ended up bringing about an imbalance of economic power in the world. It has not yet been possible to understand or reverse this, and at present it is the greatest geopolitical problem, the end of which is nowhere in sight.
It seems incredible that the current global problem is that the world’s great billionaires, who barely amount to a few dozen, do not know what to do with their wealth, and they have led to the stagnation of the world’s major financial institutions and although the number of poor people in the world has declined, the condition of their domestic life is still deplorable and it seems that it will continue that way for several more decades until there is a wider distribution of wealth in the world, either by intelligent methods or through a great global conflagration which would be apocalyptic.
Addendum: Apart from this complex geopolitical situation that today’s world is experiencing, the most serious problem of human society is still unpredictable climate change which is what happened at the end of the Neolithic period.