Before going further in this series, it is important to recognise that once the social practices and purposes of hierarchical mass society structures are accepted by its elite members as valid, then certain logical outcomes follow. It does not matter whether the acceptance was obtained either voluntarily or cohersively, or whether the rational for acceptance of those practices and purposes is that they are considered a) the best, b) the least worse or c) the only sensible form of human socio-economic association. In order for those elites to maintain their privileges and retain the hierarchical mass social system which is designed to support their privileged elite existence within it, the elites must at all times hold on to power. Power is the glue that keeps hierarchical mass societies together and allows them to continue to control, exploit, (and if necessary eliminate) those members of their own system, who resist or rebel against the system.

Even non-elite members of hierarchical mass societies, who enter into or are born into them must learn to live with and accept these social practices and purposes and therefore find themselves logically impelled to support the elite in general if not in all their particular actions or circumstances. In Part 1 of this series, it was established that the 20th and 21st century elites of these modern hierarchical social systems had enthusiastically retained and in some respects, enhanced the historically pioneered methods of power and control, whilst also adpting the necessary elite mentality in order to exercise the type of control, exercised by the above noted ancient examples of such societies. Despite the fact that these methods and the mentality needed to enforce them were extant long ago in ancient Sumer, Babylon, Egypt, Greece and Rome, they have also been consistently exhibited in every hierarchical mass society form from those beginnings to modernity.

Those methods and mindsets of elite control are not naturally or biologically transmitted through generations, but are socially created, transmitted and reinforced by traditions and training. Among these traditions are regulations, punishments, declarations of war and human species reduction by genocides and other assorted crimes against humanity. The evidence that modern elites are effectivly socialised and conditioned in essentially the same way as their ancient predecessors in order to develop an inhumane disregard for their own species, is overwhelming. The evidence lies not only in the fact that 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st century elites have perpetrated such crimes against humanity themselves, but that so few elites in the 20th and 21st centuries have spoken out and denounced the crimes perpetrated by themselves or by rival elites, as the cover up of the Epstein files reveals. For a further example, the silence and hidden support by advanced country elites over the entire seven decades of Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people, is a well documented fact in the UN archives.

Moreover, the repeated abscence of criticisms or condemnations by global elites, during the attempted 21st century Zionist Final Solution to their Palestinian question in Gaza, and the West Bank, metaphorically speaks volumes, about the dehumanisation of non-elite people within hierarchical mass societies. Furtheremore, the two world wars and numerous genocides during the 20th century were only different in both size and scope from ancient examples, but not in their core essence. Although both the 20th century wars and genocides were – for the first time in human history – extreme total-war examples of the hierarchical mass society characteristic of conquest, expansion and annihilation of those other elites controlling wanted resources, the purpose of ethnic cleansing was in essence the same.

In these more modern violent outbreaks, all citizens on each side, military or non-military, were assigned to some form of war associated task and the tasks were centrally directed to securing valuable assets and killing as many of the human species on the other side as possible. In fact the 20th century was the first century in which the technical ability of each hierarchical mass society side had been deliberately increased at the military industrial level during peacetime to the point that it was capable of exterminating other human communities. Moreover, its dehumanised elites were willing and prepared to use those resources to try to exterminate the other sides communities – completely! The symptoms of mass annihilation and systematically perfected practices of torture in order to obtain the resources they desire, which has emerged within the human species (and which has not appeared among any other species) raises the question of – why!

Why is it that the elites of the one species, which has the most intellectual levels of consciousness of itself and of other species, has exhibited over successive generations this phenomenon of torture, murder and genocide of members it’s own species? Very few of our hierarchical mass society intellectuals seem to ask this question or to venture a sociologically based answer. This abundantly evidenced failure, along with the more recent well evidenced fact, that elite members of the most intelligent and technologically advanced species knowingly continue to damage and destroy the very biological multi-species biosphere in which our own human species lives. With a 21st century scientific level of biological understanding this individual human and species level of self-destructive and eco-destructive development makes no rational sense. However, without such a level, it makes enough rational sense for elites to have been engaged in war crimes against humanity and the mass destruction of forests, herd animals, and all life forms characterised as pests.

So although all generations previous to the 20th century lacked the means to understand anything other that the surface phenomena of life on earth, that is no longer the case, yet the environmental degradation and destruction continues. It is now well known – among those who want to know – that there is an interconnected web of life-forms, that provides the only material basis for, the essential breathing, eating, drinking and sheltering activities, that are the foundations upon which all life on earth depends and has existed for millions of years. In contrast, the hierarchical mass society system has resembled a slow, unintended form of multi-species suicide. But how and why? The clue to understanding and answering this pressing existential contradiction of ecocide destruction, I suggest, lies in the practical and theoretical dualistic bifurcation of life on earth. There has been a long standing clash between humanities necessary socio-biological material existence and humanities current social and intellectual form of existence.

In retrospect, the social detour humanity made by departing from one predominantly biologically determined, egalitarian social existence and adopting a predominantly hierarchical sociologically and intellectually determined existence, was doubly profound. However, this transformation was not simply a change in the mode of ensuring the biological necessities of living for the human species, as most intellectually focussed humans have persistently assumed, something changed qualitatively. In the transition from hunter-gathering to settled agriculture, a number of alienations of human beings occurred from their original natural essence as biological entities. Unlike other ape and mammal species, which remained at peace with each other and with nature, the human species commenced a career of being at war with it’s own species and at war with nature.

What occurred to those being recruited to join the hierarchical mass society form was not only a complex change in humanities mode of production, but also in their mode of being and modes of thinking. Having made themselves different and successful by their mode of production, it only needed a further thought or two to reach the conclusion that they were not just different, but also special. This in turn introduced an altered self-perception of their hierarchically organised selves as a uniquely privileged sub-species of humanity and as having a privileged relationship over the rest of the natural species around them. As noted above, this altered self-perception of uniqueness and privilege culminated in origin myths of supernatural creation and blessing, by invisible all powerful gods, and their human kings and priestly agents.

All current mass religions were founded as a result of this hierarchical mass socio-economic transition. The double nature of this socio-economic change and its implications is something that was never adequately understood or articulated by any of the ancient or modern trends of anthropocentric thinking, hence it never went further than perpetuating, refining and moderating the basic monotheistic myths of that ancient period. This general intellectual inadequacy extends to the dialectics of anticapitalist thinking pioneered by Karl Marx and upheld by subsequent anti-capitalist trends. It remains exclusively a socially and anthropocentrically created form of dialectical thinking, which even at its best continually sidelines the biological dimension of life on earth and at worst – permanently excludes it.

The intellectual path to understanding the wayward results of this millennia old practical and conceptual bifurcation between humanities biological levels of living and understanding and humanities late stage sociological/hierarchical forms, is far from straightforward. The path back to living and thinking of ourselves as part of the biology of life on earth, is convoluted and strewn with practical and intellectual obstacles. The dualistic frameworks of thinking accepted by all types of anthropocentric tendencies amount to a series of dead ends and cul-de-sacs, which lead nowhere. I suggest it has become necessary to consider the 19th century practices which underlie Marx’s concepts of Estrangement, Alienation and Dehumanisation and how his 19th century lucid level of social and economic understanding unavoidably lacked a strong and detailed biological foundation and which led him to perpetuate a version of the common sociologically derived anthropocentric inversion of reality.

Estrangement, Alienation and Dehumanisation.

When considering the the initial and later intellectual developments of Karl Marx (and his and later generations), it is useful to recognise what had taken place within the economic and social context of 19th century Europe. The European landmass by that period of history, had been dominated by the capitalist mode of production for several centuries. Therefore, the capitalist mode of production by that time, was moderately well advanced in terms of science, technology and industrial levels of socialised production. This (by then) the most modern mode of production was therefore, regularly creating ever new ‘wonders’ of mass produced building, manufacturing, transport and storage, and it was doing so on an international basis.

In 1851 a ‘Great Exhibition’ was held in London at which these so-called ‘wonders’ of industrial craftsmanship and technical expertise, from most European nations, were displayed at a dazzling and spectacular venue self-confidently named ‘The Crystal Palace”. The bourgeoisie epitomised the extreme forms of narcissistic, uncritical self-love that humanity had cultivated about itself since Babylon and the Seven Wonders of the world, and flatteringly invented the myth that a supernatural being had created their species and that some of their species were ‘chosen’. However, this much lauded technological and scientific progress in Bourgeois forms of production, simultaneously came at tremendous social and ecological costs.

The openly visible socio-economic conditions of this industrial system were creating not only extreme wealth for the bourgeoisie, but alongside this conspicuous glitter, euphoria and conspicuous consumption, grew the extreme poverty, degradation and deprivation of a new labouring class whose survival had been freed from their former rural cottages, allotment gardens and common land gleanings, and were now not metaphorically chained to the land or each other, but to need for a weekly wage or monthly salary. The labouring populations had been ‘freed’ from rural living by the demolitions of their cottages and the enclosures of the common land by elites and these now sturdy – homeless – beggars became by various means the industrial working classes.

This redundant agricultural labouring class was then available to be employed in the ‘dark satanic’ mills and deep, dark mines of those countries which became dominated by the bourgeois classes in Europe and elsewhere. These bourgeois classes were the elites who by means of an industrial revolutiontransformed products into commodies and human skills into wage labour and whose future wealth came from possessing money rather than possessing land. Human conditions became so stark within these new ‘advanced’ (sic) system of industrialised production that a point had been reached where thes conditions could no longer be gnored or tolerated by the non-elite masses. Forms of resistance to these conditions became varied and persistent.

Marx, for example, along with a number of other middle-class intellectuals and some workers became focussed upon two aspects of the capitalist system. First, was the task of understanding how these contradictory extremes had materialised and intensified. Second, how these extremes might be alleviated or removed. Some of those among the 19th century social activists sought to persuade the ruling bourgeois class ‘to voluntarily’ reform the worst aspects of capitalistic working procedures; yet others, and among these Marx, sought to force a reform’ of the worst features, by supporting working class strikes and revolutionary challenges to this system.

Marx also decided to thoroughly analyse the functioning of the capitalist mode of production in order to understand its strengths, weaknesses and the future possibilities of this prolific method of human production, once it had been taken out of the control of the capitalist classes. The main results of his lengthy economic studies, were eventually published in a three volume analytic work entitled Das Capital, together with three further volumes of notes on ‘Theories of Surplus Value. That was not all. During more than several decades of research on economics and politics, he made extensive personal notes and comments, that eventually led to his later published writings. Some of which will be referred to in this lengthy four part article.

However, in the following critical examination of Marx’s intellectual progress whilst analysing the capitalist mode of production, and in understanding the conclusions he eventually reached, it is important that the reader broadly understands the period in which he lived. The 20th century socio-economic and cultural background was still limited in its breadth and depth of carefully considered knowledge and the visual perceptions available to humanity. In systematically considering life on earth during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, it needs to be remembered that researchers had extremely limited instruments to assist them. It was also a time in which economic and financial booms, slumps, and economic crises became frequent and predictable. Both created barriers to the development of critical thinking concerning life on earth in general and in particular areas.

There were limited technical aids available in order to closely study any practical phenomenon that lay below the immediate surface appearances of organic and inorganic materials. Consequently, the billions of complex and varied microscopic cells and molecular particles, that we now know exist within the organic structures of life forms and the structural composition of inorganic materials, were practically unknown. It is important to recognise and understand the implications of this for the development of thinking and communicating that life on earth in the form of the human species, that as with all other species, their bio-chemically evolved sensory organs did not evolve to perceive the underlying complexities and intricacies living and functioning below the surface phenomenon of inorganic materials and the surface phenomenon of other organic species.

The human eye and its optic nerve connections to the central processing/storing systems of the brain complex, over millions of years of biological evolution, had only evolved in response to the things around our species that were large enough to be useful, neutral or dangerous to the hominid and Homo sapien species. That was all that these species had needed for millions of years in order to become successful enough to evolve into a vocally articulate human species with significant physical adaptations, but none which could penetrate well beyond surface phenomenon. Consequently, it is obvious that intellectuals and explorers of the pre-and post 19th century periods of human history could only discuss, understand, evaluate and accurately record what they could see or identify with their senses.

Human eyes in particular are devoid of assistance to see below the surface of things even when glass ground magnifying glasses, became available. The microscopic complexity and sheer volume of different cells, particles and distant galactic bodies within the disciplines of Biology, Geology, and Cosmology, lacked sufficient technical magnification to reveal its complexity and sophistication to the human eye and thus to be contemplated by the human brain. Indeed, the astronomical number of cells, dendrites and synaptic gaps within the various sections of the human brain that stored and processed the continuous sensory inputs recieved from eyes, ears, touch and sound were totally unknown.

The microscopic organic Prokariotic and Eukariotic cells, their minute, self-replicating internal organelles, its self-replicating lipid membranes, DNA enclosed nucleus and other internal symbiotic functioning clusters within all living organisms and the self reproducing cells in all organisms had to wait until the 20th century development of the scanning electron microscope for any human being to be able to see, consider and to eventually begin to comprehend, the detailed complexity, sophistication and inter connective biological essence of all species of life forms evolved within the planets biosphere.

How and why this naturally evolved visual limitation, particularly to the observation, contemplation and understanding of 19th century biology, has been instrumental in contributing to the 21st century outcome that humanity now faces. Multiple levels of economic, financial, social, ecological and climate change, are not the direct results of the activities of cells, but their complexity needs to be understood in considering larger issues. In short due to this visual limitation in understanding the amazing sophistication, complexity and the extent of earths interconnected species-rich biosphere, humanity had placed it’s own species social technology on a higher level of complexity and sophistication than the rest of nature and to its detriment.

Just how this inversion of reality occurred and how the resulting symptoms of this inversion falsified the intellectual understanding of life on earth, will become much clearer as we continue to trace the development of Marx’s 19th century level of understanding of nature in general. This development will also indicate how by those knowledge limitations Marx, like many intellects before him and many after him, considered that the true essence of humanity was to be industrially productive and that the true essence of nature had been to produce humanity. More evidence on the how and why this inversion of the reality of life on earth took place, will be continued in part 3 of this series on the ‘Final countdown of Hierarchical Mass Societies’?

Roy Ratcliffe (March 2026.)