The 7th century china's empress, Wu Zhe Tian, the vicious ruler, was once asked by a court official how could she expect her subjects to pledge their allegiance to her if she slaughter them off at her whims and fancy? She then invited the court official to her chamber one evening for the answer.
Fearing for his life, the official entered the dark chamber expecting an executioner to be waiting for him. Instead, he found the empress holding up a fire touch.
As he drew closer, he saw moths flying towards the torch and one by one the moth marched to their death.
Immediately, it dawned on the official that people are drawn like flies to the bright lights of power and wealth - even if it cost them their lives. And those who hold the torch can do anything they want.
This is the cold, raw reality of dark power and wealth in this world.
The truth is, those who hold and wield it hold and wield the lives of people subjected to it.
We are all suckers for power and wealth and, just like poverty, it is all a product of civilization. This is in fact the story of mankind and it's evolution. Let me trace our evolutionary footprint...
It all started with the strive to survive. We hunt, we scavenge, we kill, we reproduce, all of which were to ensure our survival and the propagation of our species.
Then, as the hunting groups grew, we started to organize.
From savage beasts that we are, we became social animals. With better equipments, better food and bigger brain, we launched the agricultural revolution.
Essentially, we became farmers who held on to our land. Here, we develop a primitive form of property ownership. That was about 10,000 years ago.
Since then, tribes grew bigger, rules formed, justice institutionalized, leaders emerged, empires flourished, dynasties thrived, and democracies entrenched.
In lockstep with civilizational growth, comes territorial conquests for scarce resources.
It is essentially a bloody history of tribal rivalries, dynastic feuds and nation-states' wars. Just as in life, death has always been a part of us. Killing, murdering, massacres, pogroms, genocide, executions, and torture became as natural to us as the oxygen that we breathe. As life renews, death recycles.
In the course of this ugly human history, swath of land became more valuable, surplus harvests were exchanged, trade developed, merchants converged, money as a medium of exchange facilitated commerce and industry, technology and inventions accelerated modernity, and lending institutions sprouted to cradle the mercantile system into a global social and economic behemoth.
This is where we are today. This is all evolutionary happenstance.
It evolves from dispersed groups of agrarian-hunter-gatherers to complex nation-states with nuclear capacity. And it seems like diversity is itching to unsuccessfully integrate once again into one political singularity under a governing head.
The above example of Wu Zhe Tian's ruthlessness is just an example of how a small actor in our long enduring evolutionary history monopolized and manipulated power to ensure self-survival. The world may have changed but the rules are everywhere the same: kill or be killed, enrich or be enslaved, live long or die young.
The malevolent empress may think that she is at the center of the universe, wielding absolute power.
But, in the context of our evolutionary timescale, she is just a blip that faded off when her time came; thereby making way for other ruthless dictators to take her place, to perpetuate his reign at the expense of others, and to prosper for as long as time permits before he too return to the dirt where he came from.
This is the ugly truth of our lives on earth. This may also be why king Solomon lamented, "all is meaningless, all is futile." So, the next time we are tempted to toy with the idea of our own self-importance, it helps to stay grounded with the above narrative.
Let me end with this Latin phrase, "Memento Mori". It means, "remember you too will die."
When a roman general returns from a victory battle, a slave would be tasked to run alongside to remind him of his mortality by repeating, "memento mori! memento mori!"
Imagine this, a slave reminding a general the fragility of life in the midst of a victory celebration! Talk about being a wet blanket.
Indeed, we will all die one day and in the larger scheme of things, in a world where the greatest love co-exists with the vilest carnage, where defeat is just a flip side of victory, where success may be the beginning of one's failure, it helps to be told that death awaits. For isn't it true that life starts on the other side of despair?
So, let's always be mindful to do what matters most in the here and now. Cheers!
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