A Revisionist View of History

There is no change for the better until people can see what is wrong with the world. Until people can see that this is not "normal". As long as they think this is how things should be, they will remain. Things are as it is now because we let them be for the longest time. And they will remain, and be repeated in cycles, as time washes away the fickle memories of the ignorant and apathetic.

We think we can buy time. Given enough time, we can fix things. Or perhaps things will take care of itself somehow. How i wish it was so. But wishes don't always come true.
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When Frank Baum made his witch-vanquishing hero a defenseless young girl*, he probably wasn’t thinking about the gender ramifications of economic systems; but Bernard Lietaer has given the subject serious thought.  In The Mystery of Money, he traces the development of two competing monetary schemes, one based on shared abundance, the other based on scarcity, greed and debt.  The former characterized the matriarchal societies of antiquity.  The latter characterized the warlike patriarchal societies that forcibly displaced them.

The issue wasn’t really one of gender, of course, since every society is composed half of each.  The struggle was between two archetypal world views.  What Lietaer called the matriarchal and patriarchal systems, Henry Clay called the American and British systems – cooperative abundance versus competitive greed.  But that classification isn’t really accurate either, or fair to the British people, since their own economic conquerors also came from somewhere else, and the British succeeded in withstanding the moneylenders’ advances for hundreds of years.  The “American system” devised in the American colonies was actually foreshadowed in the tally system of medieval England.  Lietaer traces this archetypal struggle back much farther than seventeenth century England.  He traces it to the cradle of Western civilization in ancient Sumer.

[...] Modern schoolbooks generally portray the Middle Ages as a time of poverty, backwardness, and economic slavery, from which the people were freed only by the Industrial Revolution; but reliable early historians painted a quite different picture.  Thorold Rogers, a nineteenth century Oxford historian, wrote that in the Middle Ages, “a labourer could provide all the necessities for his family for a year by working 14 weeks.”  Fourteen weeks is only a quarter of a year!  The rest of the time, some men worked for themselves; some studied; some fished.  Some helped to build the cathedrals that appeared all over Germany, France and England during the period, massive works of art that were built mainly with volunteer labor.  Some used their leisure to visit these shrines.  One hundred thousand pilgrims had the wealth and leisure to visit Canterbury and other shrines yearly.  William Cobbett, author of the definitive History of the Reformation, wrote that Winchester Cathedral “was made when there were no poor rates; when every labouring man in England was clothed in good woollen cloth; and when all had plenty of meat and bread . . . .”  Money was available for inventions and art, supporting the Michelangelos, Rembrandts, Shakespeares, and Newtons of the period.

The Renaissance is usually thought of as the flowering of the age; but the university system, representative government in a Parliament, the English common law system, and the foundations of a great literary and spiritual movement were all in place by the thirteenth century, and education was advanced and widespread.  As one scholar of the era observes:

"We are very prone to consider that it is only in our time that anything like popular education has come into existence. As a matter of fact, however, the education afforded to the people in the little towns of the Middle Ages, represents an ideal of educational uplift for the masses such as has never been even distantly approached in succeeding centuries. The Thirteenth Century developed the greatest set of technical schools that the world has ever known. . . . These medieval towns, . . . during the course of the building of their cathedrals, of their public buildings and various magnificent edifices of royalty and for the nobility, succeeded in accomplishing such artistic results that the world has ever since held them in admiration."

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* Could the famous work 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz' or better known as 'The Wizard of Oz' be an economic allegory of money and its place in modern society?

"The Wizard of Oz" . . . was written at a time when American society was consumed by the debate over the "financial question," that is, the creation and circulation of money. . . . The characters of "The Wizard of Oz" represented those deeply involved in the debate: the Scarecrow as the farmers, the Tin Woodman as the industrial workers, the Lion as silver advocate William Jennings Bryan and Dorothy as the archetypal American girl.

GO HERE for the full article.