The Serfdom Of Time

The First Experience of Being Dominated

As a child, even before a child begins being sent to school, one begins to learn the concept of time, certain things are to be done at certain, and depending on the rigidity of the time regiment enforced upon the child, he`has developed a certain degree of understanding of the  regiments placed upon by time, that will attempt to manage the rest of his life.

Now I do not imagine too many will dispute me if I state that civilization could not exist without the measurement of time, and most of us think of time measurements as good and as a universal truth, a very real thing, an indisputable truth.  

But in fact it is one of the first truths we learn that both belies experience and are discernibly not factual.  It is factual that we measure time, and almost all of the world now uses the same measurement.  What is untrue is that it has always been  measured in the same manner, or even that it has always been measured beyond night-day and seasonal fluctuations.  Certainly many animals measure time similarly. Bears, or any hibernating species, are aware of seasonal fluctuation.  Most species, at least most species that live upon the land (not below, and I am uncertain to the degree animals in the water are conscious of light and darkness) have an awareness of light and dark—night and day.

So the first thing that can be discerned about measuring time is that it was not universal.  The Egyptians were the first to design a 24-hour day but the hours of one day were not equal but varied in accordance with the amount of light and darkness. It might be expected since they did create the shadow clock that it might be otherwise they each hour of their day would be equal, however they divided the descending light reflections into ten equal sections for each “day” which were not exactly equal as of course there is not an equal light on any within each calendar, nor in subsequent years, as  the orbit is not exactly perfect, but even if it were, our division of a year into 365 days is off by approximately so no two years will subsequently even have the same amount of light and darkness as the same day of the preceding year.  The Chinese developed an extremely complex day with hours divided into varying fractions of time to make the amount of light and day consistently equally subdivided (and to some extent similar to the manner of the Egyptians created the same amount of time blocks but the time within the blocks was inconsistent. 

Those who migrated to the far north inevitably measured a year with only two days–one day of light, one day of darkness.  Those in the south Pacific that had less seasonal variation became more astute at measuring years by the movements of the stars (but of course the stars were followed by other cultures as well in designing time, but the method of calculation was dissimilar to the Islanders because the need was more to calculate the effects of the movement of the heavens on the ocean that surrounded them than of the necessity to understand the seasonal effects for crop harvesting and rotation.

Around 3000 BCE the Babylonian empire arose and created a framework for most later mathematical developments.  They liked whole numbers and so they developed a circumference of 360 degrees and a clock with hours of sixty minutes.  I remember when Carl Sagan wrote one of his populist science books and he stated that we would be able to communicate with lifeforms on another planet through numbers—through mathematics—that were universal.  Well of course that is discernibly false and he lost most of his credibility with me.  We built our mathematics based on the Babylonian framework, and in the time of Newton probably could have been accepted as true, because Newton thought all time in the universe operated on the same universal clock, but post-Einstein?  I do not know who credentialed Sagan as a scientist, but if I were on his credentialing board, and without any scientific credentials myself, would not have granted him his credentials because my uncredentialed knowledge is more knowlegable than his, at least in regards to that statement.  Even here on earth, that is a rather absurd statement to make.  We could just as a circumference of 209 degrees, there is simply no fixed about of degrees in a circle except that man designed it so, and it stuck not because it was mathematically correct but because it made further mathematical developments easier than it would have been if the Babylonians had used a circumference of 209 degrees or an hour of 87 minutes.

Similarly the sun does not “rise” at the international dateline.  We only design our 24 hour day to begin there,but when one crosses the dateline one doesn’t suddenly move from a day 24 hours earlier, the time is the same–physically by the position of the sun overhead , we only move our clocks ahead 24 hours.  There is no place where the sun rises “first” other than our measuring of the position in which it does so.  To think otherwise is to assume the sun is a ball of fire being pulled by a chariot and it rises when he wakes up and begins his new daily journey.  

But most of all Sagan should have known about the gravitational time effect. And if anything proves our mathematics are simply human designed it is that.  You can set either a mechanical or a  digital clock to keep the same rhythm to a universal time, but its measurements are only measuring the rhythm and not the passage of time.   Time in Tibet is much faster than time in Death Valley, time is faster in Trump’s suite in Trump Towers than it is on the ground floor; and time on a satellite orbiting the earth and GPS time data that is reflected back to earth will be unmeasurable (off, not the same) and needs to be calibrated to mathematically readjust to measure coincidentally the same in our receivers.  

So if our mathematical measurements only work on earth by calculating necessary adjustments to make them even universally work on earth, how could Sagan even begin to think our calculations could even possibly make sense to sentients  who might possibly live elsewhere in the universe who would have had to use a mathematics that was relevant to their needs.

Why Time is Measured

Well of course if someone is going to survive on the labors of others he needs to regulate those laborers to maintain an expectation of production to supply the needs of the non-laborer.  If there is no way to measure laborer x produce the outcome that is expected of him then there is no way to meet the needs expected by the one expecting the laborer to sustain him. There is no control without the requirement to meet y expectation.  Control is only necessary by measurement.  Of course at first people were probably just marshaled into  fields and told to work and controlled by monitors who observed that they were doing the work to meet the expectations.  But as civilizations and the early kings wanted more than just sustenance he would have increased his workforce which would have required even more monitors.  But the monitors had to be sustained by the king at a higher rate than the laborer to insure the monitors would perform their task of monitoring.  

This would reduce the laborers and increase the monitors which would reduce the surplus, as well increase the potential for the monitors to steal more of the surplus for themselves, or to bind together and remove the king altogether.  So now there was a need for monitors of the monitors  and so the solution to this is to design a structure.  The king sits at the apex with a few top monitors that become the lords over sections of the kings’ lands, and they in return would need fewer overseers of the laborers , increasing the workforce to enable more surplus.  But to make this system work there needed to be a requirement of the king that the lords produce a certain amount to the king.  To insure this was being done the needed to keep a record of what he was receiving and he couldn’t just rely on counting and remembering and so a method of measuring needed to be done and so we can to believe methods of “math” slightly more sophisticated–we needed to development measurements of weight and size and from this it had to be written down and so in these civilized communities both writing and mathematics evolved to insure a steady flow of goods into the king’s coffers and both mathematics and writing evolved because of need to control and regulate the amount of the king’s surplus—what we call taxes.  No taxes, no math and no writing.  And societies that did not develop these “tools” were not inferior, they simply did not tax, and they expected each to contribute to the entire community rather than a few controlling the community to provide their personal needs.  But now in order for the lords to be able to meet their own requirements to the king, to pay their taxes, they need to have their workers provide a regulated amount of produce to them and to do this time was needed to insure the workers met their required tasks.

The absurdity in today’s tax debate is obvious.  The laborers are taxed by the owners who regulate their time and require their efforts to supply the owner’s needs. “Wages” are merely a method to allow the laborer to decide how he wishes to sustain himself and are not profit to the laborer who supplies the work to create the profit for the owner.  Southern planters didn’t expect their slaves to pay taxes beyond their efforts, northern industrialists didn't expect their workers would be taxed beyond their efforts of producing the profit for the owners.  And yet somehow the owners today think they shouldn’t be taxed on their profits but the laborers should be taxed on their labor that produces the owners’ profit.

To School to Learn How to Sustain the System

And so in a system that has been inherited to support the system, we send children to school to learn to be citizens within the system, regulated by the expectations that at a certain time they must learn to know certain things and we tell them this is not the same system that we inherited from the kings because in a democracy if you can successfully navigate your way through the system you have the opportunity to rise higher in the system.  But the system is the same and only twenty percent can achieve the expected outcome because otherwise the structure of the system would be unenforceable as a system because no matter how much adjusting or realigning the system it always remains that no more than one out of five can go upwards.  But the lie to advancing is of course that 20% will not rise to the top because there is already 20% at the top and just not very many opportunities to enter that sphere because the ones already in that sphere have no incentive to not attempt to stay in the 20%.

But nevertheless, the good soldiers we are, we prepare our children to enter into the system of being regulated by time, segregated by age, and allowing them to be classified.

The system is not impaired  because of its inability to teach the system, the flaw is not Johnny Can’t Read, the flaw is Johnny Can’t Think.  But of course, Johnny does think, and he thinks democracy is not too democratic because it assumes he, Johnny Can’t Think, therefore what Johnny Thinks is that there is a fundamental flaw in his being regulated and expected to think that the system is itself beneficial to Johnny.

So Johnny joins a cult of other Johnnys to find companions who welcome Johnny.  The problem is that the cult, be it left or right, is controlled by others attempting to change the authority of the system and not the system.   And we are right back to the conclusion of every other essay I’ve written in these articles on education.  Now I wrote a book, There Never Was… Democracy Freedom Justice and I try to trace the division of that opposition, primarily as a division between producers of food (sustenance) who thought there was not enough individual freedom and producers of goods (laborers) who thought there was not enough community freedom (between the communities). What I propose to do now is continue where the book left off–because many laborers now think there is not enough individual freedom and I would like to go forward now to discuss how the traditional divide between those who viewed the problem as a social lack and wanted more government to equalize the levels of class and those who felt there should less government for communities and more involvement in assuring individuality.  And why the current attack on the system could possibly become the most severe.  Not because there is more or less dissatisfaction by the 80% than in the past, but because the prop of the leg that supports  the system, the prop of education has actually led to both more acute awareness of the system’s flaws, it has enhanced those flaws by continuing to be the prop that supports the flaws by maintaining the system’s flaws by being structured to maintain its compliance by using the very flawed method while attempting to attack the system by diversifying its curriculum.