Controlling people part 1

I'd like to take this week's blogpost to discuss something that is taken for granted. This is the fact that in many ways, your life is controlled whether you know it or not, or even choose to acknowledge it. 10,000 years ago seems like a really long time ago. It is, but it's still only less than one tenth of human existence. Since 10,000 years ago, various developments and strategies happened to allow certain people to have great control over other people. From the beginning of human existence to about 8,000 years ago, the individual human being was free. By this, I define free as freedom to travel to where you are physically capable of going, no taxation, no governmental regulation, no religion, and no jobs. I'm not arguing that it was better then, only that the freedoms of humans have been drastically altered. 

Before 10,000 years ago, everyone in the world was a hunter- gatherer living in a variety of ways. They reaped from the environment what they needed to sustain themselves and left enough so that there would be more for the future. When domesticates and agriculture were introduced, people slowly began to settle down. Agriculture soon became a method of control. While hunters and gatherers communally owned and defended land, agriculture brought about the idea of individual land ownership. People took advantage of this and established themselves as elites or rulers by buying land and letting others work it. They collected taxes and yeah, we can see where all this is going, government entities were formed. If you think about origins of governments, you see how controlling resources and the surplus that people produced allowed certain people to become elites and make others do what they wanted them to do. 

But what keeps people from rising up against these entities that start taking a part of what they produce? The emerging labor class certainly outnumbers the elites and could rise up and overthrow them right. Soon to follow in agricultural societies was creation of cults of the dead and organized religions. Let me make something up for you. The reason that there is evil and good in the world is because there are two supreme beings that represent each. Let's just say that I am divinely born and I serve as the bridge between these two entities on Earth. Because I am so great, you should worship me and my close followers (other elites), give me a share of what you produce and I will ensure that you thrive, and then I want you to build me a burial mound and put all my stuff in it so that I can have it in the next life. By doing all these things, you are sure to have an afterlife like me and you will live eternally. Go against what I say and the good spirit in the universe will cast you down. Thus, religion became justification for control by elites. I don't mean to offend anyone who is religious that reads this. They adopted their religion because of good faith, a genuine concern for others, and hope that they will have a good afterlife because they lived theirs well. It's religious doctrine that was merely written by elites to take advantage of the good nature of those they ruled over.