I have this really good friend with whom I end up discussing just about any topic under the sun (and many far, far away from it...remind me one day to tell you about our discussions regarding folded space and the missing 20 dimensions).

When two people like us get together, naturally the events of the day come up in conversation, and of course, being both East Coast liberals, we end up talking about His Fraudulence, Dubbya.

And this got me to thinking: how did we, not as a society, but as an entire species, decide to rest our fates in the hands of a few who abuse that trust daily, if not hourly? And I'm not just talking about governance; my life and yours are devoted entirely to authority figures.

Think about it: back a few million or even hundred thousand years ago, we were pretty much nomadic and pretty much organized around survival. If I didn't feel like getting up to "work", I didn't. I didn't eat, true, but I couldn't get fired from that job. Even the tribal cheiftains and elders held tenuous grips on their power, which could be wrested from them by an invading army or an internal rival.

In other words, the leaders were responsible to the led.

Absent all the problems inherent in such a system (brute force would win out over clever leadership if that leadership wasn't clever enough, for example), this is a fairly simple system to understand and very easy to work your way up the hierarchy. Kill the bigger meal for the tribe and you get perks. Survival meant a chance for promotion.

And if you didn't like your tribe all that well, you could move off on your own and start another tribe or maybe hook up with one.

Now look at how it is today: someone pays you to do a task for them. They may not be better than you are, but they have been given some measure of authority over you by dint of the paycheck they authorize for you.

No recourse, either: you can't call him or her out to a knife fight (unless you work in a really cool place, or are incarcerated). Yes, you can always look for another job, or even start your own company, but either of those involve hardships that discourage you from initiating that type of action: loss of vacation, loss of retirement vesting, longer commute...

This applies equally to society at large: you can vote, but that's about all your recourse in changing the leadership you have. Not everyone has the opportunity to become a "tribal elder" anymore based on their merits. We can't all grow up to be President (most of us can't even spell it). And forget about leaving the country and renouncing your citizenship! You'll end up investigated by TWO sets of secret police.

Some similarities, but I think you'd agree we've come a long way to get from near-total freedom to a near-utilitarian state.

The more I thought about this, the more I began to realize there were two dynamics at work here: settling down to a "civilization", and the creation of money, as opposed to a barter system.

See, once you stopped moving about the land, you pretty much have to create your food source (agriculture, domestication of livestock, that sort of thing). The most efficient way to do that is a coordination of effort and a division of labor. I plant each field that you've plowed and Uk and his family have irrigated. I weed, you reap, Uk clears the debris.

Meaning that someone has to make decisions regarding who does what, perhaps even judging who's better equipped for what tasks. The tribal council gets together and makes those decisions. It's only a matter of time before other decisions fall into their laps.

Remember, you've been nomadic, which means that property was practically meaningless: what was yours was the tribe's and vice versa. It just made travelling easier. Now, you have land and you have a hut and these things are relatively permanent. Also, you and the tribe are sitting still now, which makes you easier prey for predators of all stripes.

Someone has to choose who takes what guard shift, someone has to judge who has rightful claim to that precious piece of riverbank, someone has to decide who gets to marry your daughter.

Tribal councils are notoriously factional, however. It just makes sense to give someone person the authority to make some of these more mundane decisions by himself, leaving the council free to wrestle with the bigger issues, like how to grab more land around themselves.

And so long as no one citizen can grab a disproportionate share of the resources, then this works fine. In a barter system, that doesn't happen often: individual transactions get valued differently, and one man's rip off is another man's bargain and in the end, everything sort of evens out.

Ahhhhhh, but then someone discovered a novel concept: I don't need to trade you X for Y. If I can have some medium that allows me to directly value ("price") my X, we can negotiate in that same medium for the price of your Y. And by trading in this medium, we've established a price that anyone can find out.

It didn't take long for people to realize that the more "money" you had, the more you stuff you could buy and things you could do.

"Stuff" defined as goods and services, operative word here being services (altho you could classify slaves as goods, and they often were). I could buy land from my neighbors or the tribe. If I didn't have enough family members to work that land, I could hire (or buy) people to do the work for me. Meanwhile, those crops were worth money and if I could sell (or grow) more of my crops, I could make more money.

How long do you think it took for someone to marry the concept of buying goods and services and a central council, in order to discover that money was a corrupting influence? Five seconds?

Yes, I know, there's another two or three thousand years worth in between, but there are the seeds of where we are today. Civilization is a self-organizing system. Money is a self-organizing system. The dynamics between the two systems are harmonic, or the changes in one affect directly the changes in the other.

And so that's why we have to get up in the morning and go work for a paycheck.

Carl Salonen