The Past is an invention of the present and so is the future. Oh sure we have an oral and written history, some of it documented, and there are dreams and a lot of plotting around our future.
But what was the actual experience of something like Feudalism. It wasn't a hierarchical triangle with a king at the top, better to think of it as a constantly flowing movement of agreement and disagreement around a series of mental constructs or definitions which can be illustrated by a triangle with a king at the top and a host of peasants along the bottom.
Same today as it was in the time of King John, or Charlemagne. But there is a difference between now and then. Back then, outside the drama, the system was based on personal relationships, regional custom and practice, long held local traditions in one location, go ten miles north and things were done differently. These personal relationships in Europe were increasingly informed by the Christian Church, which was more like a single institution with a shared belief system that was both taught and written down.
Overtime, as the size of a society increased, personal relationships as a basis for unity were increasingly thought of as unreliable. You get a sociopathic war lord becoming a megalomaniac who makes a habit of ignoring tried and true custom and practice, you just don't wear sandals with white socks, rather than persuasion a tyrant reverts to force, which is both risky and expensive. The more successful stable systems, particularly with respect to wealth creation developed institutions that encouraged individual initiative in free and equal associations, along with a rule by law, not by passion or wealth or who you knew and/or could bribe. The successful stable system has agreed upon and enforced standards of behavior that apply to all, not a random collection of dos and don'ts, depending upon who your uncle might be.
The dream of course is one thing, the reality another. An agile mind can detect unfairness, and into the fore comes some such thing as Critical Race Theory to set so many hearts to furious blistering, and those blisters go back in time and place to the power of personal relationship, that moment of like that sees an unshared entitlement being taken away from the souls of the self chosen ones and freely given to the unworthy other.
Here in the USA we are currently in danger of losing our myth of free and equal association to a coterie of retarded wolves the Chinese Revolutionaries once referred to as the Running Dogs of Imperialism. Of interest too is the origin of the Chinese reference to Running Dogs. The dogs were used to hunt, their fate was certain, an old saying Mao enjoyed went this way: "When the rabbits are killed, the running dogs are boiled."
