“People with power understand exactly one thing: violence.”
Noam Chomsky
“For thus says the Lord God: How much more when I send upon Jerusalem my four sore acts of judgment, sword, famine, evil beasts, and pestilence.”
Ezekiel 14:21
Published in 2017, The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century by Walter Scheidel is a detailed scholarly study that shows what forces are necessary to level economic and social disparity between those with power, wealth, and resources and those without.
The author identifies four forces that alone have the power to reset a tribe, kingdom, nation, or civilization to a level of equality. Scheidel calls these forces, The Four Horsemen. They are: warfare, revolution, state collapse, and pandemics.
His exhaustive data-backed premise is that peaceful leveling has been an exceedingly rare phenomenon that can only occur to a marginal degree in a very limited scope, requiring a smaller homogeneous population and an elite that willingly accepts gradual policies aimed at reducing their income and social wealth inequalities. Even then, it will only be a relative state of economic equality versus true equality, and one that will not be sustainable. (Finland is cited as an example where over a period of 200 years the gap was improved, not closed, but merely improved).
To explain why this is so, the research shows that, from the Stone Age to the modern era and following a leveling event (the Black Plague, war, etc.), inequality quickly reasserts itself because, from the author’s perspective, it is essentially a defect in the human condition. There are innate human inequalities that will always create disparity: physical strength, superior intelligence, or someone possessing cunning and a will to power.
A primitive example the author cites for how quickly and naturally this process occurs is the successful hunter who recruits a few men to help him protect a particularly abundant kill in return for a share of his excess. This quickly leads to other small but incremental leverages that, measured in mere months, can create distinct unequal “classes” that become permanent.
And this is the problem. Because some will seek power and most are accepting of it, natural hierarchies always emerge and always lead to wealth and power disparity that magnify over time. When the gap is too great, violent leveling alone can correct this.
In spite of this knowledge, every generation still believes the utopian goal that equality is attainable and it is only that the right combination of policy and propaganda to peacefully correct man’s natural state hasn’t been dialed in yet.
Peacefully Submit…Or Else
Research like The Great Leveler is extremely relevant for our time because the author, a well-known Austrian historian and Stanford University professor, is representative of a class of leftwing leaning influential academics that inform those with power and those that surround those with power.
People like Scheidel use their interesting and important research as a platform to interpret history and then provide the ruling class with the moral and pragmatic justification for pursuing “improved” and ever more extreme ideological change to “peacefully” fix economic, social, and racial equity, while also making it clear violence is the regrettable option and always on the table.
The starting point for these people is that in spite of the historical record that proves that lasting equity of any kind is an impossibility, the primary motive for all governance must nevertheless be the pursuit at all costs, and by any means necessary, of fixing injustice because it is the gravest sin and the one that most cries out to heaven.
We should take Scheidel and like-minded bureaucrats at face value when they say they want peaceful leveling to work. They make it clear, however, this will only be possible if the collective radically embraces the change and their stern policies are allowed to be enforced “for the common good” with impunity.
But, let us also take them at face value when the same academy and wonky policy makers openly concede that “peacefully forcing change” will inevitably fail and what they desire has only happened by the appearance of one or more of the Four Horsemen of violent leveling: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolutions (such as communism), state collapse;, and plague and pandemic episodes.
The people that rule us are true believers and have the hubris to believe that maybe this time the utopian riddle has been solved. It appears they are summoning the appearance of not one, but all four of the great levelers.
‘Cause down in Alabama, you can run, but you sure can’t hide.
They are definitely willing to put us in ditches. No question about it. And many of our enemies hate us viscerally, which means the “desire for peace” is just a pretext and that in reality they are chomping at the bit for a chance to slay us.
Also, don’t discount the fourth possibility mentioned. Plague in the near future is a very real threat, increasing each year as the world population increases. We should take that threat very seriously and plan accordingly. If we are well prepared for it then we get to come out on top, effectively having the Lord to fight the battle for us. Alas, I don’t think very many of our people are taking the plague threat seriously. They are too busy proving they are not afraid of COVID. What about the one that comes after COVID, and the one after that, and so on.
Good article, thanks for sharing it. Now the next step is taking things like this, identifying the suspefic people and institutions that represent which of the four indicators, exactly, precisely them. Next identity every tenacle reaching from them and into our society. We then can cross reference that with the other ways that we have learned to view this all consuming plauge of the Communist Utopia that they push and develop strategies based off of that to combat them each as if they were different fronts in a war, because they are. We have to map it allowed, in detail, remove their cloak of shadows. We need to have a system in place that allows for us to crowd source all of this, then to codify that understanding into workable and actionable solutions. In other words, we have to be organized enough to do things like that and we are far from it. Thanks for sharing this, I hope one day we can make use of it.