Priestly Rule (I)

Democracy is very young. Real democracy—one person, one vote—did not exist in the U.S. Deep South until the late 1960s. People who have power don’t easily give it up. Because even absolute rulers cannot run countries on their own, elite rule is the historic norm. Rulers cut the elite in on power, and collectively, rulers and their elite function to convince the masses they benefit from elite rule.

Civilization is roughly 6,000 years old, having begun in Mesopotamia, current Iraq, with stable agricultural communities leading to the founding of villages and even cities such as Uraq (Iraq?), which eventually housed 80,000 within its walls. Civilization also brought the development a priesthood, their temples (ziggurat pictured), and their invention of writing.

In Maoist China, the elite was dominated by "reds," the beefy enforcers, and experts, the brains. Mao needed both. Mao’s pattern continued that of the emperors, who held power by playing off eunuchs against scholars. A similar division characterized almost any court. The Soviet Red Army which ruled after the Bolshevik revolution had its commanders (warriors) and commissars (thinkers), and a similar division defined the Kaiser’s German General Staff.

The “priests”—for that’s how intellectual rule began in Mesopotamia, with priests—don’t rule alone. They share power with the warriors. “Priests,” however, have always believed things go better when they are in charge.

In the U.S., the warriors who saved the Union gave way to captains of industry after the Civil War, and the business of America was business until the Crash of 1929. When the New Deal picked up the pieces the crash left behind, it put brains in charge of the country as never before. Roosevelt's brain-driven government harnessed the military and industry through World War II, and Truman’s and Kennedy’s muscular anti-Communism perpetuated intellectual control over the apparati of U.S. power until Vietnam.

America was a democracy in 1963 run by its best and brightest, in the dawn-of-civilization tradition of Urak’s ziggurat-dwelling priests.