The Nomadic Alternative – Page 54

of labour," Little boys painstakingly worked at their copybook exercises and learned to despise the manual labourer. "Think of the metal-worker", they scratched away, "his fingers are rumpled as the skin of a crocodile. He smells of fish roe."

Systems of classified information are the means by which a central authority holds down an uneducated populace. The first written tablets in Mesopotamia recorded the productive capacity of the slaves. And, as Lewis Mumford has seen, classified information is now in the hands of those who have access to the computer systems of government departments, and the position of educated and non-educated repeats itself. "Today the language of higher mathematics plus computerism has restored both the secrecy and the monopoly with a consequent resumption of totalitarian control."

Parasitic to the Pyramid were the centres of technical expertise, the "think-tanks" - ministries of irrigation and land control, of production, international trade or war. Rule by academic flunkey symptomatizes the dictatorship. Clusters of experts, the "thinkers of the unthinkable", press rational solutions on the High Command.

"Small robbers are put in prison", said a Chinese recluse, "but the great robbers become feudal lords, and there in the gates of the feudal lords will be your righteous scholars."

"Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State" is Point Six of the Communist Manifesto.

The first step in any attempt to seize or administer authority is to silence rivals and ensure the defence of approaches to the seat of power. "I enlarged the footpaths", boasted a Mesopotamian dictator, 'proud in his loins'; "I straightened the highways; I made sure travel." Self-perpetuating road networks now scar ancient wildernesses, but recent events have shown that the predictability of travel ultimately depends on the vagaries of individuals.

The smooth functioning of the Pyramid demands a centralized agricultural policy. All men must eat, and once a man is dependent on the work of another for his food, he may then be starved into submission. In the earliest civilizations the control of fertilizing