Monument != Civilization

Fragment: Monument is not equal to Civilization

As in, “the collapse of Mayan civilization.”

Or, Angkor Vat. Or Egypt. Or any other place the people were able to throw the oppressors off of their backs.

It is more true to say that “civilization” is the art of living in such a way as to not leave traces.

Or at least not huge stone-works celebrating coercion and slavery, mercenary armies, high taxes, and an insufferable elite who tried to pass themselves off as gods.

“Oh, but look, it’s huge . . . they must have enslaved thousands of people to do that.”

I mean, or go ahead and admire it just for its scale, but stop short of equating THAT with civilization.

In Cambodia, the inscriptions of the priests refer to the villagers on whom they wholly depended for their support and sustenance in highly disparaging terms: “dogs,” “loathsome brutes,” “stinking.”

In the Yucatan the elite took (by force) 80% of the corn grown by the farmers.
Peasants have been rebelling for over 5,000 years—sometimes openly and with force, other times passively, with foot-dragging, occasional thefts, or just “Gee, I’m sorry, Boss, I guess I’m just too dumb to do that right.”

As Rousseau pointed out,
——(and YOU, with your half-wit’s education, automatically dismiss, as you have been instructed, “Ah, ha ha, Rousseau, the Noble Savage, right, ha ha,” as instructed, actually, by a racist apologist for slavery.)——

“It is an extremely remarkable thing for all the years that Europeans have been tormenting themselves to bring the savages of the various countries in the world to their way of life that they have not yet been able to win over a single one, not even with the aid of Christianity; our missionaries sometimes make Christians of them, but never civilized men. Nothing can overcome the invincible repugnance they have of adopting our morals and living in our way. If these savages are as unhappy as it is claimed, they are, by what inconceivable depravity of judgment do they constantly refuse to civilize themselves by imitating us or to learn to live happily among us—whereas one finds in a thousand places that . . . Europeans have voluntarily taken refuge among these natives, spent their entire lives there, no longer able to leave such a strange way of life.”
–Jean Jacques Rousseau

The Mayans still inhabit the Yucatan. Without their pompous priest-kings. And are a most highly civilized people.