Just a track of everyday musings. I was compelled to put this down because of how quickly it led to rats and their evolution. It went like this.
We're all in the race to buy a flat, land, a place to stay. Yet historically almost every nation has been built on usurping a region, its people and its resources.
When did 'encroachment' become an issue? In the past, people went somewhere and if they found it convenient, they stayed there. If it was not convenient, like nomads or Bedouins, they moved on till they found something suitable in their context. Migrants-poor or rich do the same thing. So when did this become encroachment? When did laws regarding land ownership originate?
So one person owned a wee bit of land... 10 persons owned some land 100,000 people owned a lot of land and so at some point of time 100s of thousands of people and few of them, who owned most of the land became afraid of standard usurpation procedures :D. So they created a new set of procedures to protect their interests. It became you cannot take away my land but I can take away yours. It depended on who that I was: a powerful individual, a powerful family or clan or a powerful nation.
Now these bits of land can be traded for slavery of an individual or their families to a company, whose primary aim is profit. And that is in the interest of society? Forget the last thing I said.
So the increase in the numbers of people lead to laws governing civilised living. (This may not be a fact. But it is a plausible thought that went through my head.)
When I think of large numbers of living things, I think of rats in the cities around garbage, decadence. I have read stories of rats and their numbers. But the most persistent image in my mind is my view of a gutter located at the edge of a slum, which was on the road. When I saw it, it was day and I was on a bus on that road. As the bus waited at a bus stop for less than a minute or so, I saw 50... 100 rats in a space of 2 meters.
There are more rats than human beings in this world and probably several times more. So it is possible that their space and population dynamics led to a civilised rat society with more sophisticated laws than we humans have? Could they be more evolved than us?
We're all in the race to buy a flat, land, a place to stay. Yet historically almost every nation has been built on usurping a region, its people and its resources.
When did 'encroachment' become an issue? In the past, people went somewhere and if they found it convenient, they stayed there. If it was not convenient, like nomads or Bedouins, they moved on till they found something suitable in their context. Migrants-poor or rich do the same thing. So when did this become encroachment? When did laws regarding land ownership originate?
So one person owned a wee bit of land... 10 persons owned some land 100,000 people owned a lot of land and so at some point of time 100s of thousands of people and few of them, who owned most of the land became afraid of standard usurpation procedures :D. So they created a new set of procedures to protect their interests. It became you cannot take away my land but I can take away yours. It depended on who that I was: a powerful individual, a powerful family or clan or a powerful nation.
Now these bits of land can be traded for slavery of an individual or their families to a company, whose primary aim is profit. And that is in the interest of society? Forget the last thing I said.
So the increase in the numbers of people lead to laws governing civilised living. (This may not be a fact. But it is a plausible thought that went through my head.)
When I think of large numbers of living things, I think of rats in the cities around garbage, decadence. I have read stories of rats and their numbers. But the most persistent image in my mind is my view of a gutter located at the edge of a slum, which was on the road. When I saw it, it was day and I was on a bus on that road. As the bus waited at a bus stop for less than a minute or so, I saw 50... 100 rats in a space of 2 meters.
There are more rats than human beings in this world and probably several times more. So it is possible that their space and population dynamics led to a civilised rat society with more sophisticated laws than we humans have? Could they be more evolved than us?
This article always reminds me of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy...where Douglas Adams makes a similar proposition though the context is completely different!
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