Saturday
Human evolution has not been a series of natural and incremental improvements, one little step at a time, spanning the millennia. Improvements have been dictated by dramatic factors that appeared out of the blue and shattered the status quo. A meteor strike, sudden climate change or contact with a previously unknown and more advanced culture would be examples of such system destabilising events.
In a 1972 paper, Palaeontologists Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould named this situation of long stasis followed by sudden upheaval, Punctuated Equilibria. Humanity must be forced out of its complacency. Change is not the norm; for millennia, humanity plodded along with no discernible changes at all. Today, ‘what is, will always be’ remains the belief of 99.999{781366457d9c05ca9285c5eb3e04ac75968647e24436986cab65f74e6f4b3aad} of humanity.
The emergence of Gold from the temples circa 1500BC was the ultimate punctuation of the equilibria. It was the event that changed mankind more profoundly than any other. It dragged humanity out of a primitive state and cast it in the modern mould. Gold’s stability of value brought certainty to transactions, which produced the reality and realisation that trading was more profitable and more conducive to a long life, than war and theft. Gold converted savage thugs into social beings more surely than any evangelist.
Gold is not just the one and only money that there has ever been or ever will be, it is the glue that binds humanity into a civilised whole. Gold’s unique blessings have been, and continue to be, not even up to the level of being misunderstood, they have been entirely overlooked.
Human society is based on the use of Gold as money. When Gold is removed, all societies dissolve back to their constituent, tribal parts. In the 21st century, that process is already well underway. Thus it has been since Gold first emerged into circulation in 1500BC. There have been no exceptions.
The current views on the rise of civilisation are wrong. It had nothing to do with a Protestant work ethic or the superior reasoning of Christianity, or the harsher European climate forcing more adaptive thinking, and certainly not superior genes. It had everything to do with circulating Gold.
The monetary experiment that saw Gold withdrawn by governments in the 20th century, and discarded like yesterday’s fashion will, unless quickly and intelligently reversed, lead to catastrophe.