“Unlocking Humanity: The Surprising Secret Behind What Makes Us Truly Human”
While modern humans have existed for at least a few hundred thousands years, we didn’t really start massively progressing from our earliest ancestors until we began forming large and very complex societies after transitioning away from small hunter-gather groups for various reasons. Critical to all this being able to happen was creating sets of rules which members of each society agreed to live by. As John Wick’s Winston Scott so sagely stated, “Rules. Without them, we live with the animals.” While what specific laws these earliest agricultural societies functioned under has been largely lost to history outside of things we can infer from archaeological evidence, over the ensuing 10,000 years or so, humans have had a lot of ideas on what the best ways for societies to function are, and what sets of fundamental principles and laws to implement to get there. Perhaps not coincidentally, our biggest leaps in recent centuries came on the back of a major shift in such societal rules and government structure in many prominent nations- not only away from a system of hereditary elite who everyone and the system is meant to serve on some level, but also to systems where those who would abuse such power when given it are kept in check as much as possible and, in theory, those placed in power also are meant to serve the system and those very people who put them there, not wholly the other way around.
Of course any system is rife for abuse, and, for example, the Soviet Union had just such a system setup which included in their latter two constitutions giving its citizens the rights of freedom of speech, the press, religion, and the right to assemble peacefully. In reality, however, if citizens used these constitutionally guaranteed freedoms in a way the authorities didn’t like, being imprisoned or even executed for it was a thing. Thus, even in clearly defined systems, if safeguards aren’t put in place to ensure these principles are enforced regardless of who is holding the positions of power, then the paper they are written on would perhaps more usefully be used to wipe one’s backside after doing their necessaries.
