Discussion
We all like a bit of oppression. Dishing it out I mean, though there are a few odd souls who like it the other way, forget them, they wear pinafores anyway.
Oppression is in us all I think. Not you? Did you ever do any bullying at school? Any? Right you're an oppressor. (or a pinafore.)
I started bullying at school. Trying to establish playground credentials I suppose, but I was no good at it. There was a tall, thin faced, immaculate (we were rag bags) child at my school, he was called Robert. It was the job of the toughs to take the mickey out of him because he was 'slow'. After witnessing a dinnertime session of this from the rough boys I went up to him and said. 'Has your Mother got any dripping?' This was a favourite bullying phrase. It seems perfectly innocuous now and I have no idea what connotations it may have had. It was just after the war, dripping was a luxury. Robert appeared to take no notice at all of my jibe and I slunk off ashamed at this gratuitous verbal violence. I didn't bully much thereafter. That I still remember abusing Robbie now indicates how it made me ashamed. I was not the type to do it. The other boys would still encircle this tall bemused, smart boy many a day with 'Robbie, Robbie, Has your Mother any dripping?' I bet they don't remember it with shame like I do.
Being no good at all at dishing it out I was hereafter bullied myself. I was puny but in a scuffle I had accidentally but painfully bent a boys hand back. This became the 'Death Grip' and I was left alone most of the time for fear of this terrible retaliation. What small things we place reliance on.
Oppression is unfortunately part of our human nature. It is in one of those genes, just where it looks like a ride at Alton Towers. It's a similar undesirable characteristic to being glad to see the misfortunes of others.
Pubescent boy gangs do a bit of oppressing. Rich kids, or kids with proper blazers, or new bikes, etc, would at least be shouted after. They were a bit frightened of us, that was good enough, that counted as oppression. Oddly enough when there was only one rich kid and one rough pubescent, like me, there was no oppression. It's more a collective phenomenon.
We get married and then oppress the new wife. Well we might try to for a day and a half, then their secret weapon, whatever it is, is triggered off and we skulk about defeated, wondering about our Mother's dripping for the rest of or lives.
At work, when we are very junior, the oppression of the playground is repeated. We know by now who is our intellectual better or inferior. It is the latter who oppress most. When we ourselves reach a position of authority we can oppress a bit. Get your own back on some special few who had ‘come it’. And a bit of gratuitous oppressing when you feel miserable or have done something wrong yourself. The bad thing is that, without being a one man plumbing firm (and it is quite possible to oppress yourself) we never reach the top. There's always someone bringing up the ‘mothers dripping’ question.
Top oppressors are Nations. They are the experts. Colonialism it was called. There's the dripping with no death grip for natives to fall back on. We did it, Britain, and many other top nations. Two hundred year oppression of anybody at all, provided they had something we wanted and they weren't tough. Top oppressor was a little old lady dressed all in black living in a very old house. Sounds like your granny.
As soon as we could get about with the British Navy, sail then steam, off we went to shoot the Zulus in their Impi's in Africa. All they wanted was to get on jumping up and down and eating biltong. (Dried meat, something like eating your belt) At the same time we oppressed the Indians and made them all 'wallah's'. There was a wallah for everything. Shoe cleaning wallah, ironing the newspaper wallah. I hope there was a spitting in the soup wallah. The central philosophy of oppressors is that they know best, whether you like it or not. Can you imagine a boat load or two of gentle brown chaps, with a sprinkling of orange fakirs, coming here and making us 'garland maker for the God Shiva wallah.' It didn't happen, we had the guns, but I think they had the nicer personalities.
We oppressed by religion, the very thing that should be left alone. What flat nosed aboriginals made of the parting of the Red Sea and the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, heaven knows. We set about to convert them anyway, they'd been OK for thousands of years but we were just in time to stop the rot. Unfortunately many died in the process, but civilising saved a few. Nearly all the Tasmanians died. Indians in America died in possibly the greatest oppression in history. Europeans did it and Britain was well represented among these frontiersmen. The worst oppression was slavery of course, an aspect of which is that oppressors will willingly oppress their own.
We are back to the playground. Today we are part of the gang taking the mickey out of Robbie. Tomorrow we are on our own, up against the fence, crying, the shrill red ugly faces close to ours, howling, ‘Has your mother got any dripping?’
We, the British, or the Germans, or the French, or the Portugese, etc imposed our way of life, religion and customs on other races, because we knew better. This is a very arrogant point of view but in the oppression gene it is very marked in all of us. We can see that in our own lives, we are not short of people itching to tell us how to do something. They won’t actually do it for us but as soon as the baking dish or the workmate come out they save us from disaster by advice. Sometimes very forceful, oppressive. It’s awkward because the supposed motive is good. But it is not exclusively that, it is mixed with baser matter. If we do it, (baking, carpentry) their way they can gloat and it is almost as if they had done the whole job themselves. They can also run down your own ability, however good it is, ……’I put him right.’ …… ‘Disaster, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you, I saved him at least fifty pounds on wood alone.’
Know-alls, the ‘advice gratis’ brigade, generally prey on friends and relatives. Incredibly, there are people who take this ‘helpful’ philosophy further a-field seemingly oblivious to the danger, as follows:- Call next door, friendly advice, 'Jack, when you wash your car, put a bit of vinegar in the water, it cuts the diesel.' or 'I saw your little Johnny going to school, poor little mite, if you stitch a strap at the back that satchel won't drag on him.' Do not accept such advice or you will be waylaid with the follow up for ever, ‘Did you try the vinegar Jack?’ then you’ve got to prevaricate and none of this is your fault. It’s good and subtle oppression. Advice is generally said to be ‘well-meaning’, this is a euphemism for un-requested, un-required, and a bloody cheek. If you can, and even if you botch the job, reply to advisors in the same way as you would to wide trousered evangelists, i.e. ‘pxxx off.’, and a few suggested anatomical contortions.
Remember though, if the advisor has behind him half a dozen tall blokes with guns pointed at you, you will be well advised to vinegar like billy-ho and swathe Johnny in satchel straps.
Oppression by force, that's the way we did it in the old days and it's a source of great shame now. Times were different though, history is appropriate to its time, it has a sort of inevitability and chronological rightness. The swinging of a pendulum between extremes, until this pendulum, with time comes to rest at the point of sweet reason.
Colonies are ousting their old masters quicker than stone flowers close in the dusk. Soon there will be none and all the feathered hats will be history.
Also being consigned to history is the oppression of virtually the whole population of these islands. Witness houses of two hundred rooms, peopled by staff who were subjected to an authoritarian and unforgiving regime as severe as any sugar or cotton slave across the Atlantic. It was called the ‘proper order of things’ and was anything but. Many a little housemaid drank laudanum in the attics of many a great house, not appreciating the benefits of 'service' Many a man worked all year for less than the Lord would pay for one urn in his garden.
There has been the quiet revolution now. The pendulum is swinging much less. The ‘levellers’ of the seventeenth century would be pleased to see it. The aristocracy will disappear eventually but for the present we may chose to work for them for reasonable pay and conditions. Most often we have our own homes and owe allegiance to no-one. If we are eating the korma or watching ground force and the lordliest earl there ever was came to call, we needn’t even get up, never mind them making us go to church on Sunday.
It’s a peaceful revolution, fortunately. Plenty of French 'Aristos' would have given the urn money straight to Jaques and never mind the garden vista if they'd known that the comrades were taking poverty and servitude quite the wrong way and had no cake anyway. The Tzar might have had one marble palace less and saved himself a nasty scene at Ekaterinburg.
Our country houses are now toured by people whose forebears lived under its shadow and were in constant fear of dispossession and the workhouse. They are a monument to oppression I suppose, (One roll of wallpaper equals a ladies maid for a year.) notwithstanding which, we should knock them down. Don't make anything else of them, they are unsuited to it being solely monuments of power over others, and they cost much to keep up. Better, with the money, to build a nice clutch of new three-bed houses for ex-serfs.
We know it's getting better now, thank goodness. We are not oppressed much. We shan't need a revolution like France and Russia. There are no great country houses now with servants numbered in the hundreds, and ‘tied’ cottages for ten miles in any direction. At best the Lord and Lady may live in a part of it with half a dozen staff. What a change, it's been slow but another hundred and fifty years will probably see it all levelled out. That's a long time but not as long as 'oppression' has been in force. To go back a thousand years domestic oppression was getting under way. Look at the Domesday Book, Lords and Earls and Manors were in their early stages, and the hoi polloi were given very unattractive names, like serfs and villeins, and were oppressed because there were landowners then. These landowners had not yet enclosed the commons but they had their eye on them and made the serfs work for them one day a week. I bet these emerging underclass often wished they were hunter gatherers again, eating salmon, and nobody owning anywhere.
During the last millenium, nearly every country had a King or Queen. That must therefore be the natural progression of civilisation and in terms of keeping the country safe and governed, fair enough, but why it invariably happened that they cultivated their blue blood to such an extent that they regarded everyone except their mates as scum simply to be used, I don't know.
The King couldn't be everywhere to remind everyone all the time how great he was, and how scummy you were. He couldn't put down every uppity woodcutter personally, so in return for allegiance he gave chunks of Great Britain and the people it contained to his esteemed circle. They could be esteemed for many reasons. When you've got the whole country it's easy to give someone Much-Binding-In-The-Marsh for telling you a dirty joke at Hampton Court.
At home in the nineteenth century at the great houses, housemaids could sit in their attic rooms after another fourteen hour day and reflect on their good fortune. Like the Widow who kept the empire in her palm with affectations of benevolent difficulty, the Great Lords had the dreadful misconception that they were good for the people they owned. The Lord had such a rent-roll he must have found it difficult to spend it. He managed it somehow and the lavishness of great houses is gawped at now by descendants of the tweeny, with no thought of the mean degradation that servants suffered. Imagine it now, I'm sure there are some sycophants left in service at stately piles and ‘The London House’ but none of them have to do it. Our mien towards the titled rich is now of a different cast. We have houses ourselves now, independence, and if Lord High Nosebridge came round there would be no bowing and scraping. We now know it means nothing much, they are ‘elevated’ by accident of birth. They may think they can still have special treatment (without paying for it). We know they can’t. We don't live in their cottages any more and if a Lordship came to our house, or pushed in our queue in Tesco’s, the said Lordship can, with equanimity, be told to Fxxx Off, just like anyone else.
Oppression is in us all I think. Not you? Did you ever do any bullying at school? Any? Right you're an oppressor. (or a pinafore.)
I started bullying at school. Trying to establish playground credentials I suppose, but I was no good at it. There was a tall, thin faced, immaculate (we were rag bags) child at my school, he was called Robert. It was the job of the toughs to take the mickey out of him because he was 'slow'. After witnessing a dinnertime session of this from the rough boys I went up to him and said. 'Has your Mother got any dripping?' This was a favourite bullying phrase. It seems perfectly innocuous now and I have no idea what connotations it may have had. It was just after the war, dripping was a luxury. Robert appeared to take no notice at all of my jibe and I slunk off ashamed at this gratuitous verbal violence. I didn't bully much thereafter. That I still remember abusing Robbie now indicates how it made me ashamed. I was not the type to do it. The other boys would still encircle this tall bemused, smart boy many a day with 'Robbie, Robbie, Has your Mother any dripping?' I bet they don't remember it with shame like I do.
Being no good at all at dishing it out I was hereafter bullied myself. I was puny but in a scuffle I had accidentally but painfully bent a boys hand back. This became the 'Death Grip' and I was left alone most of the time for fear of this terrible retaliation. What small things we place reliance on.
Oppression is unfortunately part of our human nature. It is in one of those genes, just where it looks like a ride at Alton Towers. It's a similar undesirable characteristic to being glad to see the misfortunes of others.
Pubescent boy gangs do a bit of oppressing. Rich kids, or kids with proper blazers, or new bikes, etc, would at least be shouted after. They were a bit frightened of us, that was good enough, that counted as oppression. Oddly enough when there was only one rich kid and one rough pubescent, like me, there was no oppression. It's more a collective phenomenon.
We get married and then oppress the new wife. Well we might try to for a day and a half, then their secret weapon, whatever it is, is triggered off and we skulk about defeated, wondering about our Mother's dripping for the rest of or lives.
At work, when we are very junior, the oppression of the playground is repeated. We know by now who is our intellectual better or inferior. It is the latter who oppress most. When we ourselves reach a position of authority we can oppress a bit. Get your own back on some special few who had ‘come it’. And a bit of gratuitous oppressing when you feel miserable or have done something wrong yourself. The bad thing is that, without being a one man plumbing firm (and it is quite possible to oppress yourself) we never reach the top. There's always someone bringing up the ‘mothers dripping’ question.
Top oppressors are Nations. They are the experts. Colonialism it was called. There's the dripping with no death grip for natives to fall back on. We did it, Britain, and many other top nations. Two hundred year oppression of anybody at all, provided they had something we wanted and they weren't tough. Top oppressor was a little old lady dressed all in black living in a very old house. Sounds like your granny.
As soon as we could get about with the British Navy, sail then steam, off we went to shoot the Zulus in their Impi's in Africa. All they wanted was to get on jumping up and down and eating biltong. (Dried meat, something like eating your belt) At the same time we oppressed the Indians and made them all 'wallah's'. There was a wallah for everything. Shoe cleaning wallah, ironing the newspaper wallah. I hope there was a spitting in the soup wallah. The central philosophy of oppressors is that they know best, whether you like it or not. Can you imagine a boat load or two of gentle brown chaps, with a sprinkling of orange fakirs, coming here and making us 'garland maker for the God Shiva wallah.' It didn't happen, we had the guns, but I think they had the nicer personalities.
We oppressed by religion, the very thing that should be left alone. What flat nosed aboriginals made of the parting of the Red Sea and the fifth Sunday after Pentecost, heaven knows. We set about to convert them anyway, they'd been OK for thousands of years but we were just in time to stop the rot. Unfortunately many died in the process, but civilising saved a few. Nearly all the Tasmanians died. Indians in America died in possibly the greatest oppression in history. Europeans did it and Britain was well represented among these frontiersmen. The worst oppression was slavery of course, an aspect of which is that oppressors will willingly oppress their own.
We are back to the playground. Today we are part of the gang taking the mickey out of Robbie. Tomorrow we are on our own, up against the fence, crying, the shrill red ugly faces close to ours, howling, ‘Has your mother got any dripping?’
We, the British, or the Germans, or the French, or the Portugese, etc imposed our way of life, religion and customs on other races, because we knew better. This is a very arrogant point of view but in the oppression gene it is very marked in all of us. We can see that in our own lives, we are not short of people itching to tell us how to do something. They won’t actually do it for us but as soon as the baking dish or the workmate come out they save us from disaster by advice. Sometimes very forceful, oppressive. It’s awkward because the supposed motive is good. But it is not exclusively that, it is mixed with baser matter. If we do it, (baking, carpentry) their way they can gloat and it is almost as if they had done the whole job themselves. They can also run down your own ability, however good it is, ……’I put him right.’ …… ‘Disaster, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you, I saved him at least fifty pounds on wood alone.’
Know-alls, the ‘advice gratis’ brigade, generally prey on friends and relatives. Incredibly, there are people who take this ‘helpful’ philosophy further a-field seemingly oblivious to the danger, as follows:- Call next door, friendly advice, 'Jack, when you wash your car, put a bit of vinegar in the water, it cuts the diesel.' or 'I saw your little Johnny going to school, poor little mite, if you stitch a strap at the back that satchel won't drag on him.' Do not accept such advice or you will be waylaid with the follow up for ever, ‘Did you try the vinegar Jack?’ then you’ve got to prevaricate and none of this is your fault. It’s good and subtle oppression. Advice is generally said to be ‘well-meaning’, this is a euphemism for un-requested, un-required, and a bloody cheek. If you can, and even if you botch the job, reply to advisors in the same way as you would to wide trousered evangelists, i.e. ‘pxxx off.’, and a few suggested anatomical contortions.
Remember though, if the advisor has behind him half a dozen tall blokes with guns pointed at you, you will be well advised to vinegar like billy-ho and swathe Johnny in satchel straps.
Oppression by force, that's the way we did it in the old days and it's a source of great shame now. Times were different though, history is appropriate to its time, it has a sort of inevitability and chronological rightness. The swinging of a pendulum between extremes, until this pendulum, with time comes to rest at the point of sweet reason.
Colonies are ousting their old masters quicker than stone flowers close in the dusk. Soon there will be none and all the feathered hats will be history.
Also being consigned to history is the oppression of virtually the whole population of these islands. Witness houses of two hundred rooms, peopled by staff who were subjected to an authoritarian and unforgiving regime as severe as any sugar or cotton slave across the Atlantic. It was called the ‘proper order of things’ and was anything but. Many a little housemaid drank laudanum in the attics of many a great house, not appreciating the benefits of 'service' Many a man worked all year for less than the Lord would pay for one urn in his garden.
There has been the quiet revolution now. The pendulum is swinging much less. The ‘levellers’ of the seventeenth century would be pleased to see it. The aristocracy will disappear eventually but for the present we may chose to work for them for reasonable pay and conditions. Most often we have our own homes and owe allegiance to no-one. If we are eating the korma or watching ground force and the lordliest earl there ever was came to call, we needn’t even get up, never mind them making us go to church on Sunday.
It’s a peaceful revolution, fortunately. Plenty of French 'Aristos' would have given the urn money straight to Jaques and never mind the garden vista if they'd known that the comrades were taking poverty and servitude quite the wrong way and had no cake anyway. The Tzar might have had one marble palace less and saved himself a nasty scene at Ekaterinburg.
Our country houses are now toured by people whose forebears lived under its shadow and were in constant fear of dispossession and the workhouse. They are a monument to oppression I suppose, (One roll of wallpaper equals a ladies maid for a year.) notwithstanding which, we should knock them down. Don't make anything else of them, they are unsuited to it being solely monuments of power over others, and they cost much to keep up. Better, with the money, to build a nice clutch of new three-bed houses for ex-serfs.
We know it's getting better now, thank goodness. We are not oppressed much. We shan't need a revolution like France and Russia. There are no great country houses now with servants numbered in the hundreds, and ‘tied’ cottages for ten miles in any direction. At best the Lord and Lady may live in a part of it with half a dozen staff. What a change, it's been slow but another hundred and fifty years will probably see it all levelled out. That's a long time but not as long as 'oppression' has been in force. To go back a thousand years domestic oppression was getting under way. Look at the Domesday Book, Lords and Earls and Manors were in their early stages, and the hoi polloi were given very unattractive names, like serfs and villeins, and were oppressed because there were landowners then. These landowners had not yet enclosed the commons but they had their eye on them and made the serfs work for them one day a week. I bet these emerging underclass often wished they were hunter gatherers again, eating salmon, and nobody owning anywhere.
During the last millenium, nearly every country had a King or Queen. That must therefore be the natural progression of civilisation and in terms of keeping the country safe and governed, fair enough, but why it invariably happened that they cultivated their blue blood to such an extent that they regarded everyone except their mates as scum simply to be used, I don't know.
The King couldn't be everywhere to remind everyone all the time how great he was, and how scummy you were. He couldn't put down every uppity woodcutter personally, so in return for allegiance he gave chunks of Great Britain and the people it contained to his esteemed circle. They could be esteemed for many reasons. When you've got the whole country it's easy to give someone Much-Binding-In-The-Marsh for telling you a dirty joke at Hampton Court.
At home in the nineteenth century at the great houses, housemaids could sit in their attic rooms after another fourteen hour day and reflect on their good fortune. Like the Widow who kept the empire in her palm with affectations of benevolent difficulty, the Great Lords had the dreadful misconception that they were good for the people they owned. The Lord had such a rent-roll he must have found it difficult to spend it. He managed it somehow and the lavishness of great houses is gawped at now by descendants of the tweeny, with no thought of the mean degradation that servants suffered. Imagine it now, I'm sure there are some sycophants left in service at stately piles and ‘The London House’ but none of them have to do it. Our mien towards the titled rich is now of a different cast. We have houses ourselves now, independence, and if Lord High Nosebridge came round there would be no bowing and scraping. We now know it means nothing much, they are ‘elevated’ by accident of birth. They may think they can still have special treatment (without paying for it). We know they can’t. We don't live in their cottages any more and if a Lordship came to our house, or pushed in our queue in Tesco’s, the said Lordship can, with equanimity, be told to Fxxx Off, just like anyone else.
Have you thought of sending your article 
Oppression is the experience of repeated, widespread, systemic injustice. It need not be extreme and involve the legal system (as in slavery, apartheid, or the lack of right to vote) nor violent (as in tyrannical societies). Harvey has used the term "civilized oppression" to characterize the everyday processes of oppression in normal life.[1] Civilized oppression "is embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules. It refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions which are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms."[2]
We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or by making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. While specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression.
Prior to the development of agriculture, the hunting-gathering-fishing societies were mainly egalitarian and cooperative. Since these very early nomadic societies generally did not accumulate and preserve food, all of the physically able members of such societies had to participate in securing the basic necessities of life. Whatever divisions occurred within these groups was mainly based upon sex, age, and individual physical and social abilities. The distribution of food, work products, and services tended to be egalitarian except during extreme scarcity, when survival of the group required giving priority to those who could contribute most to its survival. The aged and infirm would often have low priority.
Levels of conflict and oppression within such societies appeared to be low. Conflicts with other similar societies mainly occurred as a result of one group's encroachment on another group's territory. Such conflict resulted from the need to expand one's territory as a result of population growth or because one's territory was no longer productive of food and the other resources needed for group survival.
The simple technologies of hunting-gathering-fishing societies did not allow them to accumulate a surplus of food. As such groups experienced a growth in their populations, the balance between them and their environment was upset. To overcome the threats to their survival, about 12,000 years ago, some of these societies developed agriculture and animal husbandry.
This development led to two revolutionary consequences, which fostered social inequality and oppression: differentiation within societies and warfare between societies.[3] The accumulation of a surplus of food led to the emergence of new occupations -- such as traders, merchants, administrators, artisans, soldiers, and rulers; not all the members of the society were required to be involved in the production of food. One can speculate that social hierarchies developed as some food growers were more successful than others because of skill or luck. To obtain food, the unsuccessful peasants became dependent upon the successful ones and had to offer their land and services -- often as a worker, priest, or soldier -- to the more successful ones. For the successful ones, the result was increased wealth, increased godliness, support from the priests, and increased support from soldiers with the resulting power to appropriate the land and control the services of those who were weaker. Contests among the powerful would increase the power of the winners to exploit those who were weaker, as would alliances among the more powerful.
Another way of increasing power was through successful warfare against weaker societies. Success would lead to the expropriation of much of the wealth of the weaker society as well as enslavement of some of its population.
In summary, one can speculate that the need for the relatively egalitarian hunting-gathering-fishing societies to have stable sources of food led to the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. Small inequalities in luck or skills among the peasants within an agricultural society, or between societies, could lead to social inequalities and power differences that, in turn, could lead to increased power, social inequalities, and oppression of the weak by the strong.
CTRL-C and CTRL-V are fun!
We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or by making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. While specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression.
Prior to the development of agriculture, the hunting-gathering-fishing societies were mainly egalitarian and cooperative. Since these very early nomadic societies generally did not accumulate and preserve food, all of the physically able members of such societies had to participate in securing the basic necessities of life. Whatever divisions occurred within these groups was mainly based upon sex, age, and individual physical and social abilities. The distribution of food, work products, and services tended to be egalitarian except during extreme scarcity, when survival of the group required giving priority to those who could contribute most to its survival. The aged and infirm would often have low priority.
Levels of conflict and oppression within such societies appeared to be low. Conflicts with other similar societies mainly occurred as a result of one group's encroachment on another group's territory. Such conflict resulted from the need to expand one's territory as a result of population growth or because one's territory was no longer productive of food and the other resources needed for group survival.
The simple technologies of hunting-gathering-fishing societies did not allow them to accumulate a surplus of food. As such groups experienced a growth in their populations, the balance between them and their environment was upset. To overcome the threats to their survival, about 12,000 years ago, some of these societies developed agriculture and animal husbandry.
This development led to two revolutionary consequences, which fostered social inequality and oppression: differentiation within societies and warfare between societies.[3] The accumulation of a surplus of food led to the emergence of new occupations -- such as traders, merchants, administrators, artisans, soldiers, and rulers; not all the members of the society were required to be involved in the production of food. One can speculate that social hierarchies developed as some food growers were more successful than others because of skill or luck. To obtain food, the unsuccessful peasants became dependent upon the successful ones and had to offer their land and services -- often as a worker, priest, or soldier -- to the more successful ones. For the successful ones, the result was increased wealth, increased godliness, support from the priests, and increased support from soldiers with the resulting power to appropriate the land and control the services of those who were weaker. Contests among the powerful would increase the power of the winners to exploit those who were weaker, as would alliances among the more powerful.
Another way of increasing power was through successful warfare against weaker societies. Success would lead to the expropriation of much of the wealth of the weaker society as well as enslavement of some of its population.
In summary, one can speculate that the need for the relatively egalitarian hunting-gathering-fishing societies to have stable sources of food led to the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. Small inequalities in luck or skills among the peasants within an agricultural society, or between societies, could lead to social inequalities and power differences that, in turn, could lead to increased power, social inequalities, and oppression of the weak by the strong.
CTRL-C and CTRL-V are fun!
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