What does it mean to be civilized? The word is related to the Latin civitas, or city. Per the National Geographic Society, “…the most basic definition of the word civilization is ‘a society made up of cities.’” It definitely does not mean that we’re decent people. Though some of us may be, others are a murderous, thieving lot.

Humans have always been killing each other, but we didn’t have major wars until we developed agriculture and began to settle on farms rather than wandering about hunting and gathering. Now the surplus that we could store in granaries allowed us to build our cities—and to structure our societies into rigid hierarchies. The surplus produced by the peasants was appropriated to feed those who don’t plow and plant: kings, nobles, priests, professional soldiers, merchants, artists, and artisans.

In this way, we get what we call “civilization.” On the positive side, those of us with at least some education and leisure can enjoy Mozart and Puccini, Shakespeare and Dostoevsky, Hitchcock and Kurosawa, the Dome of the Rock and the Sistine Chapel. These benefits of civilization are less available to the illiterate, or those who can’t afford to travel or even go to the movies, such as undocumented immigrants harvesting tomatoes in California, women sewing fast fashion in Bangladeshi factories, and child laborers in United States slaughterhouses.

What we also get, with civilization, are kings who want to be emperors, who always want more wealth, more power, and more followers willing to kill for a share of the spoils.

The pattern is always the same: a tribe led by an egomaniacal mass murderer invades the territory of another tribe. They slaughter the inhabitants or reduce them to slavery, declare themselves the rightful owners of the land they seized, and declare the new order to be the will of the gods. The ruler’s policies are much the same as those of tyrants throughout the ages and around the globe, including in the United States today.

The earliest known empire was the Akkadian, founded by Sargon in 2334 BCE.  Sargon bragged that he tore down the protective walls of the Sumerian city of Uruk, and brought its king “in a dog collar to the gate of [the god] Enlil.” He established the world’s first standing army, supported by the labor of the peasantry. Sargon’s grandson, Naram-Sin, proclaimed himself a “living god.”

In the wars of Sargon’s time and in those described in the Bible, a victory was usually followed by the almost wholesale slaughter of prisoners. Those who were spared were carried off as slaves.

Modern America is quite different. After slaughtering 1-2 million people in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, we carried off only some of the children—remember “Operation Baby Lift”?—and apparently treated them reasonably well, apart from severing their connection to their families, their home, and their Vietnamese identity.

The ruthless warrior Shi Huang conquered rivals to form the earliest Chinese empire (Qin dynasty), consolidating his rule in 221 BCE. He enslaved peasants and convicts for his massive construction projects. Here in the United States, according to a 2022 report, we rely on the forced labor of around 800,000 convicts to produce $11 billion in goods and services, sometimes in hazardous occupations, while paying them only pennies or nothing at all.

The state of Qin introduced a registration system for its population, which initially collected the names of individuals and later began keeping track of entire households. Modern China does much better, employing over 700 million AI-powered surveillance cameras, centralized police cloud databases, and behavioral tracking networks. Cities in other nations around the world are catching up, though, including Lahore, Kabul, Singapore, London, Istanbul, New York, Los Angeles, and various cities in India, Russia, and South Korea. George Orwell would be blown away by today’s technological achievements!

Like so many kings around the world, Shi Huang claimed that he had the Mandate of Heaven. One of the titles of Egypt’s pharaohs was “the good god;” from 3,000 BCE up to the Ptolemaic period ending in 30 BCE, pharaohs were considered divine. European rulers insisted on what they called the “divine right of kings.” Even after most of Europe discarded kingship, the concept of that divine right persisted. Hitler said that he was “fighting for the work of the Lord” and that Nazism was “divinely ordained.”

And on April 12, 2026, here on the other side of the Atlantic, another egomaniacal murderer posted an image of himself as Jesus.

*          *          *             To be continued…