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OUR FUTURE LIES IN THE PAST
By Kurt Saxon
The Text & Illustration For This
Web Page Were Taken From
THE SURVIVOR; Volume
It
s quite possible that civilizations greater than ours existed thousands of years ago on Earth. Moreover, I believe we are the descendants of people who left civilizations among the stars.
The further back you go in history the more complex and technical civilizations were. Egypt, Crete and Sumer had remnants of glories in their own past unexplained by today's scientists. Maybe ancient civilizations degenerated after cataclysmic polar shifts. Maybe they were brought down by surplus populations ignorant of their own science, technologies and the social laws of cause and effect.
What Is important, however, is that whole peoples tend to forget technologies which made their ancestors great. From periods of riches and freedom, nations sink into periods of poverty and servitude. This is because they allow science and technology to pass from the intelligent and independent laymen and into the control of rulers, generals and gods.
Rulers, generals and gods have ever been the enemies of Liberty. They are always self-serving and destructive, plunging the mightiest works of superior men into ruin followed by ignorance and savagery.
Nearer our own time was Rome. Her degeneration led to the Dark Ages wherein Europeans even forgot the Earth was round.
Then let Rome serve as our example. She began with vigorous individualists who became legends even as they borrowed the legends of their own ancestors. The early Romans were small leagues of men who delegated authority only to the best among them. They kept the groups small enough so that every man could have his say and exert his will in matters of importance to himself and his family.
"And that's the way it was 200 years ago today."
Every man was conscious of and responsible for his local environment. He controlled his
This simple system of strong individual responsibility applied even to the primitive agriculture of ancient Rome worked and even created a surplus. The surplus went to buy slaves so that the citizen was free to specialize. Free also were the congenitally unfit, who would have perished had there not been a surplus created by their betters and an even greater surplus created by the slaves.
As Rome developed and slaves took over most of the labor, the better citizens specialized in trade, manufacturing, etc., and soon knew nothing outside their narrow specialties. Then there were the masses of unskilled and useless rabble called "proletarians". They were useless mainly because slaves did most of the work. Also, since there was little work to measure a man by, the mental defectives and the psychotics reproduced their own kind unnoticed. Thus, in time, the citizenry of Rome was genetically devitalized past the point
earning to do it. Thus, a good street sweeper is too valuable to run for office. This is left up to his inferior, who does so with a vengeance.
Roman politicians were mainly idle sons of the rich, often appointed as Army officers. If their
With their political offices they favored the Military and the big land owners who were the agribusiness of that day. That's where the accumulated wealth and power was. The votes of the proletariat simply secured for the political pigs, their place at the public trough.
These ignorant aristocrats could better identify with the, by how, degenerate masses. They learned the language of the masses, promised them anything, gave them bread and circuses and inevitably the shaft.
They turned their sports arenas into nightmares of carnage known as gladiatorial combats. Such shows sickened vigorous foreigners but delighted the effete and worthless voters, the proletariat. The politicians competed with each other in who could put on the sickest shows; leopards raping women, lions eating children, etc. Therefore, the vilest politicians got the most votes.
The surplus population finally bankrupted the nation. Rome's barbaric neighbors, looted of their resources and crops, finally revolted and cut off Rome's supplies. So Rome came apart. The slaves left for their tribal lands. The free tradesmen and specialists, wiped out, wandered the known world looking for rich sponsors among the barbarians. The aristocrats were looted by the proletariat and the proletariat reverted to a barbarity more primitive than that of their ruined neighbors.
The Romans had libraries, teachers, philosophers. Why didn't the men of reason pull the state together? With Italy's resources used up, its croplands depleted, its Army units fighting each other as well as foreign invaders, its population an undisciplined, riotous rabble, how could reason prevail? Result? Almost a thousand years of Theocracy known as the Dark Ages.
In the U.S. machines are our slaves. Our most powerful personalities know practically nothing outside their narrow specialties, unless you count their expertise in sports events. The same goes for our corporation owned scientists. Our skilled workers are wholly dependent on a stable society with easily available energy and resources. They also know more about baseball and football than how to raise chickens. To learn how to maintain a survival homestead would be akin to treason. To doubt that the American way of life is eternal is unthinkable and altogether unpleasant,
Unemployment is rising. There are millions of first through the fourth generation welfare recipients and even thousands who are fifth generation ;
welfare recipients. Our resources are depleted, our cropland is declining in productivity. There is drouth from the Dakotas down through Texas. California's present
drought is the worst in 72 years. Our foreign sources of supply are raising their prices and may soon refuse to sell their precious resources at any price.
Barring a nuclear war with the soon to be starving Russians, America's
irreversible collapse should be apparent to anyone by 1980. By then it will be too late for city dwellers to 30 back to the land. All they will find will be armed Survivors treating them like the improvident, ignorant refugees they will be.
What is to prevent us from sinking into another Dark Age after the collapse of our own civilization? Given the same conditions as Rome, our savagery seems inevitable.
But we have an accelerating back to the land movement and the Romans didn't. Our Survivors know the extent of the collapse and can prepare, whereas the Romans had no TV or international news agencies. Also, our collapse will be quick enough so that this generation will experience it. Rome's final collapse was gradual over several decades so the individual really didn't know which way to jump until it was too late. Had the surviving Romans reverted to the system of their vigorous and
creative ancestors, they could have built upon the ruins and there would have been no Dark Ages. The world of Star Trek would be a reality in our time. But they didn't. We must!
We can drop out and recreate the system of our own vigorous and creative ancestors. We can start with 19th Century science before it got away from the individual craftsman and innovator and was taken over by the accumulators of wealth and power. We can take up where our own ancestors left off in the development of sun, wind and steam power. Instead of letting the oil and utility companies sell us energy we can harness our own in community life-support systems. Throughout this paper, issue by issue by issue, you will see the possibilities for independence from the bigness which has put us all in so much danger.
We can survive, maintaining our vigor and developing our independent life-support systems. By developing our ancestor's science, and keeping it in the control of laymen, we can forever reject the beauracracy and Military-Industrial Complex which shattered Rome and is swamping Western Civilization.
The world's cities will perish but there need not be another Dark Age. Instead, we can go from our Survival Homesteads on to the stars.
Prepare For The Worst & Prosper
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