https://imagesofoldhawaii.com/caste-social-structure/
Snapshot of pre-KamehamehaIII caste system in Hawai’i. The presentation of the high Hawaiian system’s etiology is muddy because its generative conditions aren’t readily appreciable by Hellenistic Weltanschauung - the “modern secular” dead-materialistic gaze has massive blind spots. There was likely no external causus to yoke communities to serfdom in Hawaii. No barbarians at the gate, as the commenter notes.
The Hawaiian caste system does make more sense if understood by animistic analysis. The kapu came first in the context of collective mana cultivation, not last as a social adaptation. Kapu pre-date the feudal Hawaiian state, and only *predate* on the populace when turned to lever for elites. In both cases, the cash and fuel is mana. The former kapu were good faith for commensal ends, the latter kapu estate was a bad faith justification for mana exploitation. The first case was in healthy communal exchange with 社祇。 In the second stage, the exchange by the community was with ali’i elites who captured all routes for immediate communion to themselves. The line was probably not seen when it was crossed. But it surely must have been felt when commoners no longer could enter heiau in the name of resource conservation.
Similar to Rapa Nui, the Hawaiian social crisis which stimulated feudalism was predicated most likely by overpopulation pressures on a chain of formerly isolated autonomous communities. The horizon of clan chiefdom to tribe is easily reached if a society has no overarching kapu to prevent the slide down from band level to agrarian chiefdom. The precipitating issue was no doubt “resource management”, but this must always be viewed with an animistic understanding of the immediacy inherent in 氣／mana to human ecology. Mana is the baseline given to human community and ecology. That is, in the context of Hawaii, mana is not the ideology per se but the ontologically and organically legible communal context for the elites’ new kapu ideology justification. The ali’i must have established an ideological coup, through the reforms of Pa’ao, by the argument that a new kapu system was needed to prevent human mediated ecospiritual crisis.
In this way, elites justified their parasitism on the community *to* the community - as one of harmonious coördination of people with the microbioregions. The static code worked as all hegemonies truly do, because it was endemic and organic to some community mine of mana. Even in their extreme abuse, serfs are never quite “innocent”. The enserfed populace was not only subjected to the system, as if from the outside, but approved of it for mahalo, aloha, &c. - a restoration of apparent ecodynamic harmony to the social world of the ieylands. The irony is that Hawaiian empire mayhaps originated in mining of mana for the sake of protecting the local fund of mana for the local community. This analysis better respects the agency (or rather, complicity) of the people within the framework of the new kapu. The revolution was likely ecoconservative in its justifications, otherwise mako districting would not have been so relentlessly ecocentric to the various microbioregions as they were.
Such ecological protection rackets are likely to be offing on a global scale again. I say again, as urbanism and empire itself was likely predicated on such crises during the extreme climate shift from ice ages ~12kya. Recent finds in Anatolia underscoring the mass movements of forager populations to build megalithic ritual centres is diagnostic of the issue. This is known now. Agriculture wasn’t first, nor domestication, nor any such utilitarian superficiality as the high moderns believed… Ecological crisis came first, then the human ritual response via novel *religio*, then in came the vulture demons like Iao and their psychopathic parasites in nascent elites. For all contexts of empire’s genesis, the issue was religion.
Psychosis is the default mode of an insectile society. Empire by necessity is always insectile. This because the small band level forager egalitarianism healthy for the human ecology has never yet evolved a way to harmoniously coördinate large scale relationships with land and the coordination of local energy flows without resort to presidents. Traditionally these executive offices were temporary by the election of the band, for some communal project like hunting or defense. Bands were highly permeable because of forager economy and lifeway. The Earth was wide and people did move, often without seeing other humans for years. A psychopath who attempted dictatorship would swiftly find him and his running dogs alone.
With *density* came permanent ecological crisis requiring the permanent institution of coordinators who swiftly metastasized into elites. The psychosis started with the ecological ineptitude of peoples overshooting carrying capacity. Hungry prisoners are often callous people, more likely to rape and enslave and forget the spur of the heart’s native compunction. And so hungry prisoners enslaved other prisoners, human and beast and weed. The problem for the society is that permanent management regimes can work, for a while, at the cost of dangerously pressurizing 社會之毒氣。 And I mean 社會 in the elder, deeper sense. That’s the dark side of aloha, which in many Polynesian tongues means “suffering” or “passion”. Politeness culture both masks and stimulates aggression. Ask any samurai.
The disciplined complicity with exploitative hegemonies we see to-day had to precipitate from horizontally enforced popular acclaim long ago. New kapu spread, in the name of mana conservation. Kings were always presidents first. Presidents were always temporary first. Kings must be installed by demonically inspired popular delusion or they will be seen for their nakedness.
But the roots don’t just go away so quickly. Preventing such slips into wanton hierarchical gangsterism requires, above all, a religious adjustment of population kapu at the level of actual 社稷。 This is shown over and over in those few societies into historical times which managed a more or less good faith ecodynamic kapu toward communion with the land gods. The best permaculture is ever shamanically mediated and matrifocal, and it is proven to be humanly possible.
The devilry often comes from heroic-epic singers who leverage the bombast of mythic spectacle against the intimacy of inquisitive and contemplative mysticism. The former become the kahuna priests, handmaidens to power, and often cast the shamans to burn on the altar to the brutal tutelary deities of the new order.
By this token, Helleno-Semitic society is too spiritually bankrupt and willfully amnesiac of the Earthly powers to effect such needful condition of deeply immanent _religio_. Its pathology goes deeper than elite parasitism. It is currently justified by mere veils of discipline at an ecospiritual level of energy extraction by scientistic complicity and technological production. That is, modernity (capitalist or otherwise) is rationalized by a post-feudal STEM cargo cult. Cargo cults are built on desperation and doubt more than honest sacrifice. Capitalism is productive because its ali’i are parasitic on an ethically mercenary Scientistic Magisterium who play the kahuna. But they do this less by kapu to centralise mana than on the basis of willful disregard of ontological necessities. This becomes a kind of alienation, as is oft noted, but tends to a spiritual amnesia. Science qua religion is indeed opium; and opiates are about fatigued abandonment. That is the game because it has to be. There are almost no more shamans left to sacrifice. The mana is quickly mined out. The geese laying golden eggs are slaughtered. But the interior logic of the hegemony still rolls along, like Juggernaut.
In most empires, perception of imminent meaning is made subject to gross power ambition. They try to farm mana. This still allows for some ecodynamic negotiation by better intentioned communities, hopefully by preserving productive subalterns. Such is the native fear of Heaven and Earth even amongst psychopathic elites and their generative insectile societies that they may allow this. Best not to upset the 天命 whilst you have it.
However in the NeoHellenistic hegemony, perception of meaning is amputated from the human through the glorification of gross mind. (Virtually all Helleno-Semitic institutional posterity worship the heroic intellect with totalitarian zeal and blasphemous abnegation of the Earthly principle. This hegemonic condition unites all supposedly oppositional mimetic dichotomies under the system.) Scientistic kapu are human alienations from qi, alienations necessary to preserve modernistic anomie and ecological blindness. This alienation aims for totality, constantly refines itself toward the totalitarian ideal. Modern NeoHellenisticism operates a Mephistophelian form of ontological lobotomy for the populace; the *panem et circenses* are mere window dressing for the central operations of anthropocentric alienation, atomism, and serf fatalism. It’s not really about the gods. The system mines the bodies of gods. The heart of modern empire is the denigration of matter - a morally cancerous hatred of life - a demonic and pseudodemiurgic attempt to destroy organic Nature through ontological vacuum.
The essential nature of Hellenistic empire is thus forever ecologically Stygian. The demon kings ultimately cannot abide intimacy of communion in any form, least of all between human and autonomous patterns of unsubordinatable Heavenly and Earthly principle. Elites in this hegemony are forever drowning in narcissistic fear of displacement by the intimate and unmanifest feminine, as were Uranus and Zeus. The excision of ontology from the human is compelled by insectile discipline; but ultimately this excision is at the behest of demonic inspirations perceived by the regimented populace. Hence the situation is a karmically tragic Catch 22 for elites and their subtle inner masters. No matter the hermetically sealed crafting of an insectile serf’s vacuous mind as tool of elite feeding. Yaldabaoth / Iao, the reigning demon king of the West in this dispensation, still must inspirationally stoke the barbarous layers of religiously endorsed fear and positive hate for lack of a Confucian or Hawaiian option. “War is the health of the state”. But war is first a symptom of power’s mortal terror. A power centre which dare not admit it’s own terror even to its tutelary inner god is ultimately doomed.
For all these reasons, thr currently hegemonic global empire likely has no interior resources to be reformed toward commonwealth. And because of its hermetically sealed ontological poverty, Neohellenistic hegemony is so far the ultimate distillation of empire’s central operations of bad faith and psychopathy. It’s little wonder that colonized local elites flock to it with Quisling abandon as their model. Remove the winkers of anomie and the Hellenistic hegemon cannot function. But the human insectile beasts so winkered would falter first in total befuddlement, like a city dweller who dare not sit in silence in a forest for the fear. The demon kings who inspire the system are very foolish, as is natural for a local planetary node of 須洛場。 It has left itself even no Hawaiian-Egyptian-Han ideological options beyond gross compulsion to peonage. It has no more adaptive vectors to realign in ecological crisis. But the serfs cling to their demonic kapu, convinced in their hearts by superhuman disciplines of unrelenting domestication.
Hence we can expect likely planet death from a globally complicit humanity. Such healthful human subalterns which remain productive are very thin muscle to do the immediate needful in this crisis. Ain’t much mana left for it. Empire will recuperate and subvert all systems of meaning it can by hook or crook, right to the very global eschaton. If no other proof of demonic inspiration for this muddle satisfies, this lemming’s truth must indeed suffice. We must pray for immediate miracles, weird wendings, news from abroad, mana supped from outside our homely gates.
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