From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   QUORA: WHAT IF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION HAD STARTED 2,000 YEARS AGO RATHER   
   THAN 200?   
   answered by Susanna Viljanen, Knows Finnish, Oct 26, 2023   
   It actually did.  Unfortunately, there is this thing called van Loon’s law.   
   It dictates: The level of technological progress in any society is inversely   
   proportional to the number of slaves in the said society.   
      
   So you have to first get rid of slavery before any technological advancement   
   will happen. In a slave-owning society, all technology will remain as mere   
   curiosities and gadgets.   
      
   Van Loon’s law reflects the observation that slave-owning societies are   
   averse to any technology and labour-saving machines. Already the Roman Emperor   
   Titus executed the man who claimed to have invented a machine which does the   
   work of 100 slaves. It    
   would have disrupted the societal order.   
      
   So first you had to get rid of slavery. The only way to get rid of slavery is   
   a religion which prohibits slavery. There have historically been five of them:   
   Christianity, Judaism, Sikhism, Buddhism and Zoroastrianism. So the   
   technological revolution    
   could have begun only in those cultural spheres.   
      
   Slavery ended in Europe with Christianization - first in the Roman Europe by   
   the Dark Ages and then in the Northern Europe at the end of the Viking era.   
   This dictates the earliest point when technological evolution can begin for   
   good.   
      
   Why religion? Because of oxytocin. We humans are b@stards. Actually we are   
   b@stard-coated b@stards with b@stard filling. Oxytocin is the pleasure   
   hormone. And we get nowhere as great kicks than from subjugating, tormenting,   
   bullying, enslaving and    
   abusing our fellow human beings. It is about domination. This is why bullying   
   happens in the schools - the bullies get their kicks from it. Slavery is   
   domination primarily and economy only secondarily. Domination gives us an   
   incredible oxytocin surge. Do    
   you think I hadn’t enjoyed abusing my power as a leader in the military? I   
   mean, I am not exactly innocent myself either.   
      
   Only religion can cut that vicious circle. Religion is the most profound   
   leverage point in the Donella Meadows’s 12 leverage points theorem, and   
   religion can and will change a society in a far more profound way than   
   anything else, because it is the    
   power to transcend the paradigms.   
      
   And don’t come telling me Bible allows slavery. It sure weren’t the   
   Secular Humanists who ended slavery in Europe in the Dark Ages, and most   
   Christians are not Biblical literalists.   
      
   Once you get rid of slavery, you need to invent rudimentary technology - i.e.   
   harness the forces of the nature - wind, tide, water etc. You need to develop   
   metallurgy and chemical engineering, and material sciences. Anything which   
   saves human labour, as    
   the price of human labour is now the bottleneck. The Dark Ages were actually a   
   serious period of gadgeteering, and laid the basis for the real technological   
   revolution.   
      
   I mean, as fun as it is to whip the woman who is your sex slave in the night,   
   to grind the quern-stones at the day, windmills and watermills are just far   
   more efficient to produce flour.   
      
   Once you have gotten rid of slavery, you have to get the rule of law. It is to   
   ensure that no instance with enough violence potential can seize your valuable   
   assets by just like that. If the only law in the country is a religious law   
   and the ruler’s    
   whim (vis et voluntas) there is absolutely no warranty of property and   
   ownership - and no incentive to develop any kind of technology. If, however,   
   the law is above the ruler himself, and the law recognizes both the sanctity   
   of ownership of both material    
   assets and intellectual property, the road is open. This is why Russia has   
   always been a technologically backwards despotism, whose economy is based on   
   extraction of natural resources, and all its attempts to found its own Silicon   
   Valley are always bound    
   to fail.   
      
   The thing with science fiction writers is that most of them are engineers, and   
   the heroes have open budgets and do not need to worry about economy. But to   
   develop technology, you need a stable economy. You need to develop Capitalism   
   first. Sorry, no such    
   thing in the bazaar economies. And Capitalism began to evolve in Italy by   
   1200, and was fully developed by the 17th century. Before that, only   
   gadgeteering.   
      
   The third requirement is the rise of sciences. That began with the emergence   
   of universities in the 11th century. To develop sciences, you need a religion   
   which separates between mysticism and philosophy and which recognizes an   
   objective reality, to    
   discover the connection between philosophy and mathematics, to discover the   
   connection between mathematics and engineering, and to develop a system where   
   all these things merge. This happened in the Late Middle Ages.   
      
   The Industrial Revolution happened just at the right moment. It could not have   
   happened any earlier, because nobody met the required secondary powers   
   earlier. You need to get all the required secondary powers in action first -   
   only then can the real    
   thing happen. The 200 years of Industrial Revolution was preceded by 2000   
   years of Religious, Philosophical, Societal, Technological, Scientific and   
   Economical Evolution.   
      
   Conversely, it didn’t need to have happened in England. It could have   
   happened anywhere if the required secondary powers had been attained there,   
   and it could have happened earlier if those required secondary powers had been   
   attained earlier. Sweden    
   was well on its way already in the 17th century - Christopher Polhem is   
   considered as the father of Swedish technology. Unfortunately Sweden did not   
   possess true Capitalism, and its economy did not enable industrialization.   
   True capitalism happened only    
   in the era of Anders Chydenius. He is also considered as the father of the   
   Swedish welfare state.   
      
   China was a strong contender - they had most of the required secondary powers.   
   Buddhism prohibites slavery, they had rule of law (instead of Emperor’s   
   whim), they had a lot of innovations and they had a stable society.   
   Unfortunately Confucianism    
   loathes commerce - they never developed Capitalism, and the Chinese sciences   
   lagged behind Europe - they didn’t even know Earth is a sphere until the   
   Jesuits taught them. But is it surprise to anyone that once China acquired all   
   the required secondary    
   powers, it has now become the powerhouse of the world?   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)