M.J.RumyantsevA Lighthearted Social History ofthe World

M.J.RumyantsevA Lighthearted Social Historyof the World

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places or incidentsdepicted in it are the product of the author’s imagination or are usedfictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons(past, present or future) is entirely coincidental.

First published in 2012

Publisher: JerInchttp://www.harmoniacaeli.com

Copyright © 2012 M.J.Rumyantsev

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyrightreserved above, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproducedor utilised in any form or by any mechanical, electronic or othermeans, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopyingand recording, or in any information storage or data retrievalsystem, without the prior permission in writing from the Publishers,representing the author.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the GermanCatalogue of Available Books (VLB) www.vlb.de

ISBN 13: 978-3-9814560-1-1 (E-book)

This E-book is distributed by XinXii. If you liked the book, thenplease recommend it to your friends, asking them to download theirown copy on www.XinXii.com. Thank you very much for respectingthe work of the author.

Dedicated to Toto and Nick.

Metamorphosis1:A Lighthearted Social, His Story of the WorldA Lighthearted Social, (His) Story of the WorldA Lighthearted Social (HisStory) of the WorldA Lighthearted Social Hi(sS)tory of the WorldA Lighthearted Social Hi(ss)tory of the WorldA Lighthearted Social History of the WorldA Lighthearted Social Historyof the World

1 or what a single pair of braces, freely moving around, can do to a literary work. This ishow we have come to our current book’s title... And the morphing process is stillongoing...

Contents

Meet your friendly book (g)host ................................. 3

Preface...................................................................... 5

Time without Earth and any life at all......................... 8

Time without any life on Earth ................................. 10

The appearance of first life forms ............................ 11

Nick’s slight digression from the subject.................. 13

Observations on plankton........................................ 17

Observations on several other species forming idealclassless societies................................................... 19

Shells .................................................................................. 19Snails .................................................................................. 19Earthworms......................................................................... 20Fish ..................................................................................... 20

Observations on species in which signs of socialinequality slowly start creeping in ............................ 23

Ants..................................................................................... 23Crocs (representing crocodilia) ........................................... 24Lions (representing non-vegetarian mammalia) .................. 25Primates (those hairy, apelike creatures)............................ 26

An observation on all previous observations ........... 27

How it all started...................................................... 29

A visit to Ngh’s social group ................................................ 29A very short story about five brothers.................................. 32

Reflections on further important developments ....... 33Strength, wealth and cunning.............................................. 33

Strength ................................................................................... 34

Wealth ..................................................................................... 34

Cunning ................................................................................... 35

We group and then regroup, only in order to group again .. 35Meet human greed and its two companions........................ 37Wars – byproducts of greed and its companions ................ 38Public opinion...................................................................... 39Lying to the public ............................................................... 40A practical example............................................................. 41War gangs........................................................................... 45Distribution of work in social groups.................................... 46Exchange of products and value tokens ............................. 48Speculations, here we come ............................................... 51Work gangs......................................................................... 52

Universal principle of negative selection .................................. 56

Work gangs of prostitution ....................................................... 57

Payback time (an extremely unpopular thing) ..................... 57Games ................................................................................ 59

Performances .......................................................................... 60

Nick is back on stage .............................................. 61

Social history and politics ........................................ 63Party gangs......................................................................... 65

Human social groups with no party gangs................................ 65

Human social groups with only one party gang ........................ 66

Human social groups with many party gangs ........................... 67

Practical examples of social behavioural patterns inpolitics ..................................................................... 68

Our Beloved Permanent Leader ......................................... 6820 years later... ........................................................................ 70

Story ending 1.......................................................................... 70

Story ending 2.......................................................................... 71

Beloved Permanent Leader’s story about himself ............... 71The story about the great pretender a.k.a. ‘BelovedPermanent Leader’ ............................................................. 73Our Beloved Elected Leader ............................................... 76Beloved Elected Leader’s story about himself .................... 77The story about the crooked leader of the criminal oppositiona.k.a. ‘Beloved Elected Leader’........................................... 80

Nick’s short discourse on the above ........................ 82Too much power does corrupt ............................................ 83

Social history and matters divine............................. 84

Social history and every day life in a social group ... 88Grand ideas ........................................................................ 89

Beloved Leader’s grand idea, written by one of his many fans . 89

Beloved Leader’s grand idea – an extract from his private diary

................................................................................................ 90

Beloved Leader’s grand idea, written by one of his opponents. 90

Grand social groups............................................................ 91Memories about Dummkopfia, the best country in the world .... 91

Grand human (e)motions .................................................... 94Politics - Dummkopfian mocracy and save the poor children.... 94

Economy - a blissful short story about all those things one simply

has to have .............................................................................. 97

The age of great discoveries and news ................... 99A revolutionary scientific discovery ..................................... 99Another revolutionary scientific discovery ........................... 99Another socially conscientious news item ......................... 100

A view from very high above... .............................. 102

Epilog.................................................................... 103

Appendix ............................................................... 107Live performance 2.5 million years ago............................. 107Addendum to the first No.1 in the charts ........................... 108

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Acknowledgment

The author of this book would like to sincerely thank Mr.Abbot Milot, the author of the book ‘The Ancient and NewHistory From the Beginning of the World till Present Time’.

His opus magnum inspired us to build further on his work -something we have done here in a slightly unorthodox manner(we hope he would not mind, as due to the time lapse betweenthe two of us, we have been unable to contact him).

M.J.Rumyantsev, August 2012

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Meet your friendly book (g)host‘Given the choice, to be ridiculed today and admired in 500 years oradmired today and ridiculed in 500 years, I would go for the former. Thetruth is though, we are all likely to be forgotten anyway in less than 50 or soyears – so why bother then about either ridicule or admiration – let us usethis now and have a good laugh at things and at ourselves. Now is all wehave...’ M.J.Rumyantsev

Greetings stranger! My name is Nick and I am yourcompanion on your voyage through this book. I do hope youdo not mind? No? There you go…

I am quite sure that by the time our ways part, we’ll be thebest of friends and that you will keep fond memories of me formany years to come. You can think of me as being a kind ofspirit, bound to this book, for lack of a better word.

All books have their spirits. It is true that some of us want toremain anonymous but I belong to the other, a rather moreoutspoken group. After all, life is only one and I wonder whyshould one keep a low profile, permanently hiding in booksbehind the words and letters comprising them? Why not justshow up and talk to people?

I was born yesterday, on the 2nd of October 2011, when mycreator, Mr. Rumyantsev, decided that his next work shouldhave an intelligent being in it, accompanying the reader - thatis you, my friend.

We book spirits are born already as grown-ups and there is notime wasted on our upbringing and education, somethingwhich is in stark contrast to many higher animals whoseyoung have to spend many months (if not years) growing upand learning. In this respect we book spirits are more similarto single cell organisms – ready for life from the very firstsecond of our existence. This is how I came to be… And now -here I am, looking at a hundred or so blank pages in front ofme. I will be the only witness of this book’s creation and as

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such will be able to provide you, as its reader, with some extracomments and insights later on.

I will not be boring you to death with empty chatter andclatter, with things like “Nick said this, and Nick said that” – Ileave that to other, less educated books spirits. No Sir, not onmy watch!

You can of course skip over the places where I appear, but onthe other hand – if you decide to hear me out, it can only workto your advantage, as you will also hear another point of view.In the end, it is ultimately your choice alone how you willinterpret a story, but it is always nice to hear a secondopinion.

Anyway, I’ll have to dash off the rest of this chapter now, as Ihave a feeling that the author would like to start writing thebook instead of having me here, talking forever. As all bookspirits usually do, I’ll just hide behind the random letters onthe last page (I’ve got a feeling that it is going to be the page112, as we book spirits are very good at predicting the future).I bet you that no one will ever notice me hiding there!

Oh, here he comes. I’ll catch up with you folks later!

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Preface‘When it comes to social behavioural patterns, on my voyages thus far Ihave witnessed many a blatantly stupid thing, accepted as being ‘natural’and ‘the way to go’ by the society of the day. The best way to handle suchphenomena is to mock and laugh at them. Eventually, they will be buriedin-and-by the Past anyway, but our laughter will continue resounding in theair long after we are gone....’

All life on Earth is of the same kin – regardless of itscomplexity level. Whether we like it or not, all things livingare, loosely speaking, our relatives, either distant or very closeones (this definition excludes our mothers-in-law, no offencemeant of course)... and to make it all even more interesting,some things living form groups, usually comprised ofindividuals belonging to the same species. Whilst being part ofa group, they may also interact in various ways – and this ishow we come to the concept of a social group. Any socialgroup by necessity evolves in time and therefore has itshistory.

This book deals with one specific aspect of our social historyin particular – that of various social behavioural patterns tobe found in us humans, and many of our animal relatives.

We will discover some amazing similarities between us andmany ‘higher’ animals, whilst we attempt to provide an answerto that ever-intriguing ‘Why do we do it the way we do?’question.

It is not said in vain that laughter is the best medicine, andwe will be applying it very liberally as we go along, as the onlycure to such phenomena.

The book is intended primarily as a literary work with somesociological observations thrown in for a good measure. It cannot be seen as a work belonging to any of the exact sciencesknown to date, nor was that indeed the author’s intention.

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The book’s title ‘A Lighthearted Social History of the World’was chosen with a great deal of care – and we emphasise theword ‘lighthearted’ in it. ‘Lighthearted’ is by no means to bemistaken for ‘light-minded’, which it is not. Far from it, as youwill shortly see.

In order to accommodate many important social-historyreflections made in just one reasonably short book, the authorhad to resort to some compromises and to deploy some quitesophisticated data-compression techniques throughout thiswork, in an effort to present the discerning reader with thepure quintessence of things2.

This might be in stark contrast to the exuberant writing stylesof some authors, who seemingly enjoy elaborating at greatlength on all kinds of subjects. In doing so, they think neitherof their readers nor of dire ecological consequences of suchopulent writing styles. Let us just ponder for a second on howmany trees have to be fallen, in order to provide raw materialfor all those useless extra pages... Not to speak of their poorreaders being tormented and possibly (god forbid) bored todeath...

As already hinted above, this is a book about many socialphenomena and behavioural patterns. And, there is no betterplace to start than at the very beginning, providing ouresteemed reader with a complete account of things, as shouldalways be the case. Unfortunately, in real life one hardly ever

2 The reader is strongly encouraged to read all the footnotes found in this work, as oneoften finds quite some thought-provoking and revealing truths hiding in the small print.Indeed, in order to emphasise just how important the small print is in our lives, theauthor has made an effort to use it quite liberally throughout. ‘One should always readthe small print.’ – Let this be one of the morals our valued reader will no doubtremember, having read this work.An extra benefit of having footnotes in this book is to provide our reader with someeye-exercise, in order to prevent the onset of eye-strain that our reader wouldotherwise experience, were he to read uninterruptedly, the main text only, withouthaving to refocus his eyes on the small print, every now and then.

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gets a ‘complete account’ of anything. Let us just remember‘complete accounts’ made by so many politicians, lawyers,financial advisers and news reporters – but luckily for thereader though, this book is not under the influence of anysuch persons of such dubious moral quality.

Before we begin though, we would like to ask our discerningreader to try to perceive this book as if it were a painting, inits entirety. Should some of its chapters appear to be perhapstoo simple at first glance, our kind reader should simply skipthem and revisit them later, once he has completed readingthe book. Then, these ‘obvious’ passages might appear in atotally new light.

Rewinding the pointer of history to the very beginning now....

So, after the famous words ‘Let there be light’, all the photonsand other subatomic particles enjoyed a long blissful period ofabsolute equality, which lasted for billions of years as evermore complex manifestations of material objects were beingcreated, leading us right up to our next chapter, to...

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Time without Earth and any life at all‘Inorganic objects have no worries and problems whatsoever. Living organicbeings, on the other hand, have plenty of things to be concerned about. In away, the root cause of all social evils can be traced back to the fact that weare living beings to start with, belonging to Kingdom Animalia, which onlyaggravates the problem’.

No one can really remember that time, I suppose. The timewhen countless rocks (asteroids) were orbiting the Sun,randomly colliding with one another. We can make areasonable assumption though that with no living beingaround - well, everything was really very simple, from thesociological point of view.

This was the time of the absolute equality of all rocks3, big orsmall, and a perfect example of an ideal society - of thingsdead. If one takes the famous Marxists slogan:

‘From each (rock) according to its ability4, to each (rock)according to its needs5’,

as a baseline for judging the quality of social harmony in thispetrified society – we come to some pretty amazingconclusions.

Bearing in mind that rocks generally do not have any needs atall, and that they were contributing the only thing they had inabundant quantity – their mass, to this stony society - thereemerged a rare situation of the oversupply of contributionswith no one to consume them. No wonder then that thissociety was eventually destined to become the victim of itsown evolutionary success. It literally crushed itself to death,

3 solid objects floating seemingly aimlessly in space, with most diverse chemicalcompositions – from solidified gasses and ice to metals and their chemical compounds.Basically, everything our Earth is made of.4 The capacity of an individual, belonging to a particular social group, to activelycontribute to the social group he/she/it belongs to.5What such an individual gets back from the social group, in return for its contributions.

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due to gravitational attraction and accretion, forming as abyproduct, many planetary bodies, including our home planetEarth.

The astute reader will no doubt also notice that we havedevoted only one reasonably short chapter in this book to thelongest period in the evolution of our planet.

This is only because this was such a perfect time from asociological point of view and there is nothing more to be saidabout it. Hence we end this chapter right here, in accordancewith our promise previously made in the book’s Preface.

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Time without any life on Earth‘Air, water, earth, with some fire added to get the things moving – we are allmade out of this primordial mixture’

Well – no one can remember those blissful days either. Therewas a long reign of things dead on this planet. Rocks on thesolidified Earth’s crust continued to play an important rolebut this time there were also other players – water in theoceans and gases in the atmosphere.

Electrical discharges in the atmosphere, accompanied bythermal phenomena, such as winds in the air and currents inthe oceans, combined with lava material from volcaniceruptions, were all in plentiful supply. They acted as uniquemixers and catalysts and led to the creation of the firstchemical soup in Earth’s oceans.

The eventual appearance of amino acids and simple proteinson the stage of history changed hardly anything when it cameto the equality of things dead. So we still had many a perfectsociety of rocks, gases and organic molecules in the oceans.

True, it can be argued by some that the roots of all social evilsand inequality were already present in these first organicmolecules – but this might be a far-fetched thought. Almost asif trying to attribute original sin to these initial building blocksof life. This is of course a lot of nonsense, as even the biggestvillains in the history of human kind were made of the sameintrinsically innocent building blocks of life as all otherorganic beings6.

Amino acids did not remain isolated molecules forever, as theystarted uniting into more complex molecular units. And nowon our accelerated, down-to-the-point journey we now cometo...

6 What made them monsters is to be found elsewhere, as we will show later on in thechapter ‘Wars – byproducts of greed and its companions’

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The appearance of first life forms‘I can see life on the event-horizon, my Lord! O brother, there is no peace forthe wicked! We are really in deep trouble. I think we should better turnback, now!’Extract from the book ‘ The Time Vagabond’s Log’ by M.J.Rumyantsev

The appearance of first life forms around 3.8 billion years agoduring the era of Paleoarchean, whether by decree comingfrom a higher force or by mere coincidence7, did not make thisvery simple state of affairs, described in the previous chapter,any more complex. The principle of equality of all things deadinitially continued to be applicable to the simplest of livingthings – the very first organisms.

The only notable difference between them and what wepreviously called ‘things dead’ can be summed up in thefollowing sentence:

“All things living have three and only three common urges:they want to eat, excrete and replicate."8

Indeed, life can be thought of as nothing more than self-replicating matter - absorbing and excreting other matters inorder to live and replicate. These three basic urges (orinstincts) are combined in the so-called EER principle andthey govern the underlining social behavioural patterns of allindividuals belonging to any species9.

For the next 1.3 billion years or so, anaerobic10 one-cellorganisms continued to dominate life on Earth. Some of themorganised into colonies but it must be emphasised that at no

7 From the sociological point of view this intriguing ‘how-did-it-all-happen’ is actuallyirrelevant.8 Excerpt from the book Matryoshka Infinities by M.J.Rumyantsev, chapter Sphere ‘TheEER principle’9 A species in the context of this book is a collection of individual organisms with similarbiological properties.10 Not requiring oxygen to support cellular respiration.

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time there was any inequality amongst individuals comprisingthem. We can readily see this even today when we studyorganisms belonging to various successor species of theseearly anaerobic pioneers of life.

The appearance of first cyanobacteria capable ofphotosynthesis, around 2.5 billion years ago, led to a smallevolutionary setback - the extinction of almost all anaerobicbeings, due to the increased levels of oxygen in the Earth’satmosphere, having poisonous effects on their metabolism.

For the first time in history, the statement ‘one social group’sprosperity spells another social group’s demise’ proved itsvalidity on the global scale. Sometimes this happens withoutany evil intent, as in this particular case. It just happens...

Luckily for us though (as otherwise there would be no one lefttoday to either write or read this book), there evolved new lifeforms founded on oxygen-based metabolism. For the next 1.9billion years the Earth was inhabited by many species ofaerobic single cell organisms, joined during this time by firstmulticellular organisms and fungi.

Hence we can conclude that, from the strictly sociologicalpoint of view, we now had on our planet many differentspecies coexisting as perfect societies made of equals for atleast 3.2 billion years. Pure communism with no greed, envyor wars fought.

All of these small ideal societies had two notable commoncharacteristics:- they all just lived the basic EER principle, i.e. they were

very simple societies;- interaction levels between individuals comprising them

were very low.

The pointer of history is now set to the time approximately580 million years from today.

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Nick’s slight digression from the subject

Hi there! It is me, Nick again. Now that Mr. Rumyantsev hasstarted his discussion on early life on Earth in earnest, withits many single-cell-organism species and the initial primitivesocial structures accompanying them, I would like to add afew words of my own.

I take it that you are a well-informed, scholarly person. Youshould then no doubt be aware of the fact that some ofcontemporary biological theories recognise up to six kingdomsof living beings on Earth (Bacteria, Protozoa, Chromista,Fungi, Plantae, and Animalia).

In this book we will concentrate mostly on Kingdom Animalia.The reason for this is very simple really – all humans are partof it, as much as some of them would like to distancethemselves from this fact (and their true origins), by claimingthat they are something special. They could not get it morewrong than that, if you ask me.

We book-spirits on the other hand, are indeed somethingspecial. Once created, we live on and on, eventually evolvingto become part of this Universe’s background noise. Yes Sir,we are part of it and live on forever. But let us get back toanimals, poor ephemeral things...

One of the distinctive features of Kingdom Animalia is – thatall living organisms belonging to it use other life forms as asource of sustenance to satisfy the first E aspect of the EERprinciple mentioned above, something which is by necessitylinked to taking life of other (eaten) organisms. One notableexception to this are parasitic animals, which only take part oftheir hosts’ life’s juices.

Both E aspects are obviously related to the metabolism andself-protection of individual organisms comprising a species,

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whereas the R aspect is related to the preservation of thespecies as a whole.

Organisms belonging to more advanced animal species havean additional urge built into them – that of self-protection, theability to defend themselves against attempts to make themfood of other animals. Although this urge is actually based onthe three above-mentioned basic urges, it stands in its ownright, especially so in the case of more complex animalspecies, where it can often take a precedence over the threebasic aspects of the EER principle11.

Hence, in the case of Kingdom Animalia, the original EERprinciple applicable to all living forms, is extended to the so-called SPEER principle, which is relevant to higher animals(where SP stands for self-protection of course).

One of the privileges we book spirits have over ordinary mortalbeings is the ability to ‘peek ahead’ in the still unwrittenchapters of any book. I can tell you that in the chapters thatare about to follow, the author will be frequently relying uponthe SPEER principle, whilst discussing social characteristicsand behavioural patterns of various (mostly animal) species,especially so, when he comes to his final goal - human socialbehavioural patterns.

But I think I should better hand over control to Mr.Rumyantsev now and do something useful in the background.Talk to you later! Should you need me - you know where tofind me.

Previously we stopped about 580 million years from today...

11 Although an animal has to kill other living beings for food by necessity, it willdesperately resist becoming food to other animals itself. An animal is happy andcontent as long as its E(at) food intake equals its E(xcrete) output, less the amount oforganic material absorbed by the animal’s body, as part of metabolic processes.Basically, what comes in has to come out, less the absorbed good stuff. Very simple stuff