Humans need to be ruled. We’re the only creatures who, to survive, require supervision. Crime is a uniquely human invention, evidence evidently of our oft-extolled genius. Remove supervision and before you know it Cain kills Abel, Romulus Remus, and we’re back in the soup. You sometimes wonder what God was thinking when He designed humans. He’d had a long week, I guess.

Rule these days comes in two flavors. In earlier times, humans governed themselves by custom or tribal agreement, but these informal systems gave way to either Force or Law. Either we’re whacked into line by an uber-boss or submit to rules we’ve agreed upon to keep ourselves in toe. Tyranny or Democracy.

You might think humans would like a say in their management. For half a dozen centuries, humans seemed to be moving away from the rule of Force, which demeaned to minions all but the Big Guy, onto the rule of Law, which empowered those who participated in the formation of laws. This felt like progress. In America, as it evolved, nearly every adult had a say in Law-making – an equal say. In anthropological terms, this was a wow. But much as new toys turn tiresome as they age, the recipients of this privilege began getting bored of it. Let somebody else rule, they shrugged, returning to their X-Box and tacos.

Thus it was, Americans selected an uber-boss, and their sages, in their sagacity, permitted this paragon to do what he pleased, screw the rules. This surprised many who considered Democracy a precious achievement not an irksome chore. The salvation of Democracy, these silly-Billies assumed, merited at least a brief intermission from X-boxes and tacos. “Attention,” they groaned, quoting a famous American play, “must be paid!”

The difference between Force and Law is the dignity of the individual. In a Tyranny, you and I don’t matter, only the big guy, to hell with what we think. This (and too many tacos) induce a sluggishness of soul, a who-the-fuck-cares indifference to the management of being. We bow our heads to the yoke because who needs trouble. This results in dramatic decreases in human invention, innovation, enterprise, expression, those eruptions that heretofore energized existence. The uber-boss wanted everything the way he liked it, no use trying anything new, you’d just get your head handed to you, figuratively or literally. Slo-mo, Joe, was the way to go.

A pall settled over once peppy America. The fatcats rejoiced, now there’s more for us, but they proved mistaken. They were permitted their plunder only if they nodded like bobble-head dolls to the uber-boss’s every inanity. They had their comforts, sure, but comfort with no control isn’t comfortable. They chafed in their chains but so what, they’d given away their Democracy, there was no getting it back.

Investigators from external solar systems have puzzled why humans, who seemed so clever, would surrender, almost without a whimper, the Rule of Law to the Rule of Force. Democracy took some doing, granted, but wasn’t the dignity and zest it afforded infinitely preferable to the drudgery of Tyranny? Not to mention the risk of human extinction when the remaining tyrants started whacking one another, which soon occurred.

The occasional buried vestige of humanity – the finger of a Pieta, a scrap of this guy Shakespeare – hint at the persistence of furtive resistance to the uber-boss for several decades. Life without freedom, these hideouts would sing-song, was hardly worth living; return us, o God, to the Rule of Law. Their pathetic isolation recalled the story of Masada. Some, we hear, read the Good Morning Project, whatever that was.