We spend our very selves

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Our stupidity may be clearly proved by the fact that we hold that "buying" refers only to the objects for which we pay cash, and we regard as free gifts the things for which we spend our very selves. These we should refuse to buy, if we were compelled to give in payment for them our houses or some attractive and profitable estate; but we are eager to attain them at the cost of anxiety, of danger, and of lost honour, personal freedom, and time; so true it is that each man regards nothing as cheaper than himself. 
Seneca - Epistulae morales ad Lucilium c. 65 AD

Any reasonably complex society seems to be built on a mountain of expendable human life. It appears to be an essential profligacy of hierarchical societies, a need for stark contrast between high and low. Otherwise what’s the point of aiming high if not to waste the lives of those who never made it?

So previous ages had all those futile wars plus millions of lives spend in worthless servitude, endless drudgery and toil from which there was rarely any prospect of escape. Rule by waste where countless millions of human lives are the waste. 

The expendable many have always supported the less expendable few because that’s the only system we ever devised. Or rather, that’s the only system the few ever devised. Managing vast numbers of people is just too damned difficult even for the rarest of rare geniuses. And elite geniuses are pretty rare so there is much waste.

Moving on to the present day, we have for some time attempted to correct this appalling waste of human life. Well sort of – to a degree. Except we still have the original problem, the problem of hierarchy and we’ve made it worse. Global control-freaks gibber and plan while crazy wars sputter and flare as madness stalks the land.

What’s the answer?

Much stronger local government presumably. Local government where the basic political unit is local enough to tackle local complexities, to find out what works and what doesn’t, small enough to reject a thousand vain political fantasies. 

Many of those vain political fantasies are dreamed up by the big to control the small by wasting their lives in endless futilities, thus preserving the precious hierarchy. But the small can usually control and direct themselves and if they don’t, then at least they suffer the consequences without dragging down everyone else.

It’s called trial and error and it’s how we learned everything from throwing spears to launching satellites. Yet somehow we’ve drifted into a lunatic state of affairs where we must have trials on a vast scale but dare not notice the correspondingly vast errors. Will it work out for the best in the end? What do you think?