I did not get the shots and do not regret it

[Sadre Spinegnawer]

The biggest one-two punch in history is when the scientific revolution coupled with the rise of capital power. Over the course of little more than two centuries, we would largely map the entire globe, colonize a backward evolutionary splinter on a whole fresh new continent, extract its wealth, and then light the fuse on the industrial revolution with the invention of the steam engine.

During this period we evolved from an animistic divine right of kings social ideal to a philosophical Enlightenment, that argued that all that is needed for human beings to progress, is for citizens to be granted freedom to think and converse and debate.

This concept led to political revolutions that formed the first of what is still the ascendent form of political organization, representative democracy.

1600-1800. You rocked.

1800-2000. Holy shit!

The industrial revolution sparked by the invention of the steam engine, and many ancillary inventions, drove poor John Henry into his grave. It also caused French peasants to throw their shoes (called "sabots") into the machinery in factories, to jam up their works, angry at how this new way of work was eating everything around them. This is where the term "sabotage" comes from.

But you can't fight machines, they always win. So, human beings aggregated into urban rural divides, with the urban division itself forming entire new social systems, a kind of economic court system. The best people live in these specific places in the urban conglomeration, and then, maybe only a few blocks away, another distinct class lives. The Feudal system with its demand for class structure refracts on itself in each city, each a castle with no peasants in the Feudal sense at all.

This overcoming of the inherent total divide of the Feudal system -- in which the peasant and the court of the Lord existed in two separate worlds -- was finally surmounted by the invention of baseball. Everyone loves baseball. By the end of the 19th century, baseball would have done what no natural fondness could ever accomplish: sit the rich and the poor in one place.

Marx feared religion, as an opiate. What he really should have feared is baseball.

But the 20th century was looming. Even more strange beasts were hulking about. More inventions. More engines. More power. Power to fly. Power enough to travel to the Moon and back.