18 July

Kings and other high status individuals exist because status hierarchies control the spread of imitation, and therefore violence. Imitation produces rivalry, rivalry produces violence. That’s the fundamental law of history, people copying each other in rivalry is the cause of all evil. Not any of the other things like the -isms, or patriarchy, or the ‘Left’ or the ‘Right’, or all of the other causes we list which are only really team names for social groups fighting each other for status, in imitative rivalry. Nuclear weapons suppressed violence by their enormous power making it suicidal for anybody to use them. In the same way a king controls social status games by making their pinnacle completely out of reach for everybody else. Royal families operate by succession, you can see the 3 generations here. That’s also a tool to suppress violence, because succession removes the rivalry over who gets the top job. No voting or fighting can change who becomes king, it just passes to the next in the family instead. In the present day it always looks like unfair prestige and oppression. Just as ‘oligarchs’ do. But humans don’t control history, just as living things don’t control evolution. These are emergent forms, which create history itself. Without them history (and we) wouldn’t exist. There’d just be violence and destruction.