The world was very different three thousand years ago. Yet there are some things that never change, no matter how advanced we are. Of course, the local view of history theory helps us a lot because it says that a lot of things are simply cyclical (for example, one could argue that the Roman civilization right before its collapse was very similar to the American culture right now — hung up on instant gratification. It’s almost as if some properties governing our lives increased in frequency until the frequency is so high that it begins to interfere with the stability of the system!), but even without that, there are some things we can point out that will always be around in a pretty much just as complex a form as they have always been.

It may sound corny, but one such property is love. Relationships have been complicated thousands of years ago, they are complicated now and they will be in the future. This is, presumably, why the best timeless stories have to do about love, and why good science fiction touches on the concept of love (2046 is a good example).

Death (not taxes) is also a good concept. A large component of the human culture, but also civilization, revolves around the beautiful truth that we will never know what happens to us after death. A lot of money was made out of that truth (Catholic church in the mediaeval times, just to point out one example). Hell, the whole idea behind the American nation (pursuit of happiness — why? — because no matter what your belief is, life after death is still just a possibility) is based on the uncertainty around death.

Another concept that’s inherent to civilization is one of hierarchy. Civilization implies specialization, which implies exclusivity, which implies hierarchy. The notion of hierarchy creates a kind of “brownie point” system which keeps people motivated — together with the expectation of upward social mobility, it is probably the reason why the American society is so stable — 90% of people think they can ultimately be in the top 10% of wealth in the country. This can only be beat by the notion that happiness is this impossible to define quality that can’t be quantified and has interesting properties, such as apparent zero correlation to any measure we can think of (which means that, say, rich or powerful people can get away with being rich or powerful because, as it is common knowledge, wealth or power does not make you happy!).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 07:08 and is filed under origins, principles, reductions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.