#3 The Hidden History They Didn't Teach You About the Last Five Thousand Years–The Second Turning

     The birth of civilization and the seeds of patriarchy: around a large inland sea bordering the northern edge of our home continent, groups of hunting and gathering nomads became larger and more numerous and there was less room for them to hunt and gather successfully. They found once plentiful resources depleted by other groups like themselves and found themselves more often in competition with these groups. Fighting became more frequent as did hunger and disease.      These challenges grew slowly, of course, as did our solution—gardening. With the advent of agriculture, food requirements could be met within a much smaller area and a sequence of events rapidly occurred. Teach humans the power of seed germination, wait a few thousand years, and a number of extraordinary things will happen. First, because of the ability to provide adequate food within a vastly reduced territory, population increased. Groups grew larger and no longer needed to compete to the same degree for food with similar groups. People had more time to specialize in specific crafts and art forms. Because they were no longer constantly on the move, they could begin to acquire more possessions. Social and economic inequality increased.      Within roughly five to ten thousand years, humans, who had for two hundred millennia roamed in small groups, found themselves living in the first cities, ruled by kings, owning property and relying on the written word. This was the Second Turning, the advent of civilization. A little later, first on the great flood plain of eastern Asia and then on the isthmus connecting the American continents, the same thing happened. After several millennia of gardening at increasing scales, former hunter-gatherers became literate urban dwellers with a high degree of social hierarchy.      Take a look around you. Where do you live? In a city? Working in a pyramidally organized organization? Depending on your facility with the written word to determine your place in the existing social hierarchy? Worried about how much you have (or don’t have)? This socio-economic form—so small and rare when it first appeared—now surrounds the world and threatens the planet’s survival with its basic precepts—the unquestioned importance of wealth and social status. Our accelerating advancements of the last two hundred years (fossil fuels, computers, AI) have only made the original pyramidal construct bigger and faster. They have not elevated us to another level of social organization and behavior the way fire and language did, the way agriculture did. Our basic priorities and motivators have not changed.      While we live in a world that looks very different from the one inhabited by the first urban dwellers, if you took people from any social class in that long-ago world and put them in a room of modern people of the same class, they would understand each other perfectly: my boss is a jerk; it’s impossible to find capable subordinates; I will do anything to maintain my grip on power. Although enormous intellectual and technological leaps lay millennia ahead of Sumer and Egypt, the basic paradigm for modern urban-based life was set. The fundamental preoccupation with wealth and status would continue to be the primary drivers of human society for the next five thousand years. It is precisely these ancient and near universal drivers which are making our myriad crises impossible to solve. As the saying attributed to Einstein puts it, “The level of thinking which created a problem (or set of problems) will, by definition, be unable to solve this problem.” A new level of thinking is required. This new level of thinking will drive the Third Turning. 00:00 Summary of First Turning-Origins of fire and language 01:24 Motivators for Second Turning/agricultural revolution 01:45 Learning to germinate sees the next major paradigm shift after fire and language 02:18 Neolithic revolution, Larger sedentary groups living in smaller areas 02:45 Ancient writing, cuneiform--increased grain supplies and population catalysts for new form of communication 03:18 Ancient writing first used to keep track of grain supplies 03:25 First cities in Mesopotamia and Egypt; first pyramids, kings, armies, slaves, writing; template for how we live today; at first only 3 or 4, each with a population of a few thousand 04:20 Today, there are more than 10,000 cities with a combined population of over four billion; appetites and waste products leading to 6th Mass Extinction 04:50 Humans have capacity for making paradigm shifts in face of serious threats. We have been here before. 06:47 Wealth and status primary motivators of our current paradigm. Accumulation did become a goal until humans became sedentary. 07:22 Second Turning ending; time for a paradigm shift