The Recipe: How to Create an Eternal Empire
Mesopotamia fell and Persia made a rise to shake us off it, before Athens came along to show us how to possess an empire through godlessness and the knowledge movement.
The Romans instead gave us those tall beautiful cathedrals, and proved that the Supreme Being could bear a space in us while divinely purging the greater part of the earth. All that not until the many carnages of provincial bloodbath battles, and the lives of hopeless slaves had been sacrificed in the bloody theatres of prize arenas.
How sorry it feels for the British, who first brilliantly used the implements of taming religion and devious commercial charters to create a global empire unlike ever seen before. They would have lasted longer than the Industrial Revolution, except that the empire's reach was too evidently physical.
So the Americans, the excellent Americans happened on the scene and demonstrated how to unconsciously build an eternal empire: it should have been built in the minds of humans, and not in war chariots, domes, royal edicts, commercial charters, military occupation (the last regime in White House missed out on that one), cheap privileges of relationship (so much for the revelations emanating from the Wikileaks files), commissioned religions and its sprawling missionaries, human rights abuses, ideological, political, racial, religious and tribal oppression (virtually every human system has been guilty of this one).
Why can't we live and let the Anonymous, the atheists, the godly, the Copts, the Kurds, the Irish Catholics, the Tibetans, the homos and their sexual orientation, the Palestinians and their viewpoint, the Indian low-caste and their simple nature, the Negroes and their dark skins, the Jews and their Moses be?
For all the sense of self, dignity and identity lost by Africans, South Americans, sub-Asians and much of the Third World, please, Arabs and Europeans, the next time you want to construct an enviable empire, learn from the Americans.
What exactly do we need to have an empire that lasts into the longest eternity? Freedom as a commodity sold on the pages and conduits of influential newswires and syndicates like Wall Street Journal and the CNN(sharp irony intended); the wealthiest people, their leftist children at Ivy League colleges, all the Harvards, Princetons, Stanfords and MITs of this world, to give us the best of biotech and high-tech industries as obtain in New England and the Golden State.
Oh! never mind Hollywood and its vanity. Even Sin City Las Vegas and its brothels and casinos. The Bible Belt already canceled out that factor in the equation. And if you don't want to believe in anything, just work smart enough to afford a humble house in Delaware and take a walk in Cooch's Bridge every weekend while trying to finish a book on any topic that appeals to your conscience.
In that meantime, you can just be a waiter or shop clerk to get butter and bread. At least, that weekend walk around that place should remind you of the monumental cost of freedom. There, the Stars and Stripes for the first time went up mast after a terminal battle for liberty from British colonial oppression.
Make sure, though, you sell your little conscience book through new digital devices like the Amazon Kindle or the E-Reader. It's not a promotion for these devices. It's more about your cost of publishing and distribution. Efforts to cut down and process trees for lack of handsome reward to factors of production are getting rarer, and technology is leveraging increasingly on its powerful potential platforms to turn everything into a surface for communicating any form of media. That's science fiction for today's electronic machines. When that tomorrow comes, today's devices like the Kindle or E-Reader will look like IBM's monoliths in the early 1980s.
But you might not be a writer. You might just be any kind of professional. Matter-of-factly, any Everyman who doesn't, wouldn't or might not be able to live in Delaware. Regardless of who or what you are, you would need food to go from a day to the other. Any of us in this world can only do religious fasting or dieting for a varying degree of limited time. Food is attached to survival. And survival is deeply unconsciously connected to any system of belief.
The people who have always been busy building empires around the world know this with all certainty. It's why those of them who lost theirs to lack of finesse and defining strategy are now busy fighting back at those of them who are sitting on top of today's model empires. Yesterday or now, they all know survival is contrivedly attached to the belief system. It might be ideological, political or religious. But they've always sold it across hundreds of years, missions and colonies through force or persuasion.
If anything, it is why the only commodity Revolutionary America has sold for close to 235 years has been the best-seller of a kind. Again, it is called Freedom. More than any other belief system, it guarantees private ownership, free enterprise, right of insurbodination to autocracy, right to believe in anything except having the power to take the life of a fellow human without the incidence of first mortal attack from that fellow.
It is not known if the Revolutionary Americans consciously or unconsciously did it for the food-survival connection. However, whatever was the motive, throughout the history of man that has been the most brilliant move in this chess game called human relations.
Once in a while, their descendants get it wrong, too. Just good enough, too, they also to learn from their mistakes, even if that comes with many lifetimes of noisy foolishness. Like segregating blacks from whites, later realizing it was a wrong move and correcting it (that was almost late, and would have dealt a death-knell). Like telling gays they didn't have a chance until realizing again that it was a wrong move and putting things right (hey, grandma, I don't see anything wrong with Alex hanging out with sissies and coming to church to share a word or two about how much happiness that affords his life). Like fighting the wrong wars in the Middle East and backtracking their steps. And the clock is ticking on that, they've not cleaned all the mess.
Unfortunately, we don't need Time, the Newsweek and the FOX Network to sell America in the way they subconsciously do much of the time. Silicon Valley is sufficiently enough. Freedom of thought as a consequence of the American Revolution brought that about. And the people in those media firms might not realize it, but that is too conveniently obvious for the rest of the world.
There is no certainty this reigning empire would last forever because of economics. But there is certainty that any individual can have an eternal empire with constant food. Maybe it's okay to get along with that psychology theory that posits manipulation of one human by another is normal for as long as it does not disturb the economic order. Yet, it has never ceased to be so. There is thus every normality in throwing away all the faith in any belief system and finding your own path through your relations with other humans.
I agree with Isaac Assimov, "Never let your sense of morals get in the way of what's doing right." Do what you think is right to others, so long as it is such as would help your wellbeing and you would wish others do unto you at the same time. Big cracker, right?
Maybe there is even no such thing as an eternal empire. So there is no how to create one. So in truth I never meant to write an essay about how to do that. But we all must eat. And for that, here's expressing my heartfelt emmpathy for all the evil pillages, economic dependence by design, low quality of life and endless famine the empire builders past and present around the world have caused people and places like sub-Saharans, Amerindians, low-caste Indians, the vanished Nubians and Kushes, sub-Mongoloids, Micronesia, Polynesia, Africa, eastern Europe and Latin America.
In those places, people are either dying or not living well because of systemic poverty caused by the worst of governments mostly helped into positions of authority by Western democracies and their capitalist corporations. The intelligence communities, the Big Pharma and the Black Gold Giants know too well what it's all about.
Given the instance, most of these grounded people would like to migrate to the Western countries. These countries enjoy the rush at them except that they would be reluctant to help them in. Much of the time, it is the plunderers and their booty that get needled in. Whoosh! This thing about sprinkling water drops onto famished tongues!
You can't even blame the Western democracies and their capitalist corporations that much. And you know why? They are just playing their part of the manipulation game for survival. It's very much up to their targets to resist the manipulation.
There's just nothing like helplessness in this game. Brazil, India, China, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel are such adept players currently playing great hands at the game, even with all the ever-present problems bedevilling them.
Most of all, the empire builders should stop telling the rest of the world that they are stupid by displaying benevolence while being malevolent. Evolution or something else like the Information Age is helping others catch up with the masquerade show.
You are not "good". It is not your fault. You have some manipulation to do for the survival of your own country. You are no statesmen. You don't have peace in your pouch when you come to the diplomacy table.
All you want is their oil and gas to power your grid and factories, and their diamonds to adorn your clueless mistresses. No one is blaming you anymore for that. What is very annoying and what they blame you for is hiding your real intentions.
Please, Southern Sudan, Congo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burundi, Rwanda, Chechnya and Iraq, please bear with all the agony. How much of a wishful thinking if only you've had thoughtful people in positions of leadership the first time out. Playing the game would have been so freaking cool.
Notice: Mr. Mugabe, please don't feel so lonely, just start a night-time school online (yes, it's far cheaper and most efficient) to teach young people how not to sleep for so long with vultures in human skin. Teach them to make the world a better place, by believing enough in themselves to want to entrust leading their nations to others who are equally charismatic and more selflessly ready to serve.
Idi Amin and Mobutu would have sent you an email, if they were around, on why that should be the most important item on your agenda right now. Saddam Hussein, in a sentence from an SMS, would have expressed his regrets for those secret lethal missions for foreign powers in Egypt in the early days. It started his infamous ascent and disgraceful downfall.
Mr. Mugabe, hope your brothers-in-perpetuity, Ben Alli and Mubarak, do get in touch. Please send our regards, and tell them to work with you on making everything right for that poorest continent in the world. Ghaddafi, their little nephew in Libya, and your own big dark-minded cousins in West Africa, have lost direction even after raping public coffers dumb naked and showering their subjects with tears and sorrow. They can't speak it or can't bear the weight of admitting it, but like you they desperately need all the help anyone can bring in the way of moral salvation.
Really, until now it never seemed real the magnitude of psychological calamity the Cold War brought on Western regimes and the Russians. The satellite governments they tried to set up around the world are turning up in throes of anarchy and stark madness. Come on, Russia, the Soviet Union is gone. Just lick your wounds and let go of the Chechens. Strongly suggested, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and the Capitol Hill should visit the Internet to read about what happened to the Roman Emperors after besieging everywhere with armies, puppet satellite governors and propaganda managers.
So much for man's inhumanity against man.
I'm so sorry, Dick and Joe and every other guy 30 days away from the streets, for taking your time for all that I really set out to say: That the eternal empire is in the food we wake up every morning to look for by working our asses out. How to have it? Open your window if you have one, throw away the belief systems. Believe most in yourself. There's nothing like it under the sun.
Like how the Revolutionary Americans found their own paradise, work the hardest for your own freedom from anything that seeks you out in everlasting bondage. Anything! The unrewarding job; regular, obligatory and anguishing payments to political and religious authorities (seriously, it shouldn't cost anything but food to belong to a society and believe in God); that unfaithful marriage or relationship (no matter from what angle you look at the bitch godess these days, it is about the number one reason for all the lovers' goodbyes, broken homes and cold friendships); that same old schooling for nothing (what the heck is that even about? All the static certifications and exams, and varsity degrees to earn nowhere near the sweats of the great hustler in Harold Hamm); just everything that is such as anything; and yet, even if anything means this essay is one of them! Just be free!
Understand that other humans would take advantage of you. Stop complaining about that. It's why the story of man would only have this single original version as we have it since the beginning. Just deal with it by allowing them to, only for as long as there's something for you now or later in the advantage. Honestly, in retrospect you should find yourself to have helplessly treated others the same way through the course of life. And I mean no matter how holy you think of yourself.
Try hard enough to make a living from a decent thing. Even if you don't believe in Heaven and Hell, it would make you feel so good about yourself. Acknowledge your stupidity when it comes back shitting off the good show before others. You are just as human as they would be anytime. Never take any advice or join a cause or berth with a position that does not bring you the optimum benefit. Don't consult the cleric, the soothsayer, the yoga pinkhead or the voodoo witch-doctor about solutions to your problems. They don't have solutions to theirs, too.
In the end, make sure you do something most important with your life. Most important means contributing to the world by leaving it a changed place other than how you met it. It might come from a career, a hobby, loving someone else or giving life to your solitude. No one besides you has the ability to tell you what that is. Not the self-help books. Not the author of this essay. He thinks there are stuffs he left out and those he shouldn't have touched. He is about erasing everything and starting all over. But before then, he wants to quote Dave Gardner:
"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."
So much for man's inhumanity against man.