We begin with a caveat. In this thesis, noble is a noun meaning a social class, not an adjective meaning a person of surpassing virtue. Throughout all of recorded history, there have been always stratified societies and there have often been uprisings of the lower classes within those societies. Between 209 B.C. and 1946 A. D., there were over 30 significant rebellions, the most widespread and violent of which was the English Peasants Revolt of 1381. The castle the peasant forces occupied was the Tower of London. This initial success was temporary. The revolt failed and its leaders paid with their lives. This, the victorious upper classes believed, was the will of God.
Religious beliefs underpinned the iniquities of the feudal system. The status of individual persons, their wealth or poverty, pleasures and pains, was ordained by God.
To oppose what the Divine Will proposed was a sin. In 2011, the only powerful and technologically advanced Western nation in the world where this old, fallacious doctrine still poisons the political scene is in the United States of America.
Think of your name and its origin. Five hundred years ago, common people took their family names from their craft or trade. Almost invariably, peasants took their names from the feudal manor where they were born. For example, my maternal grandmother's family name was Chipchace, after the castle owned by one of William the Conqueror's favourite sidekicks. In a feudal manor, the lord, unless in disfavour with his king, was supreme. Through my grandmother, I might have kinship with a Norman lord. In those faraway days, knights errant rode forth to protect noble ladies from dragons, but there was nobody protecting peasants' daughters from noble knights.
The lords and pretenders to thrones wasted the lives of peasants in their struggle for power. My first recorded ancestor was in the Jacobite army of Bonny Prince Charlie. He never went to the slaughter at Culloden. In Yorkshire, he was attracted by the neatly turned ankles of a comely lass and promptly deserted, abandoned his faith and settled down to raise a tribe of Protestants. In my view, the man was a hero. If he were alive today, he would probably be occupying Wall Street.
Nothing has changed much except the terminology. The exploiters have different names. The craft and trade guilds have become the unions, which have lost strength and are still under attack both in the United States and Canada. Modern pirates don't swashbuckle. They wear Gucci shoes and Armani suits, drive beamers and have castles and vaults filled with money in faraway places where all the tax collectors have been made to walk the plank.
I can't understand it. The real riches of a nation, the wealth of land and sea, are a national heritage. Our heritage doesn't belong to the pirates. Money is a medium of exchange. When there are empty factories, idle machinery and unemployed workers, the world economy falters. All that is lacking is investment funds. Where did the money go?
Black Friday (another fiction of the consumer society) is the day when we are all expected to begin spending like drunken sailors to save the world economy from ruin.
How can we spend what we don't have? Where did the money go?
The activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement are fighting new skirmishes in a war that began a long time ago. If they win a victory, so does everyone who cares about the survival of the human race.
