Ouch.

A group of eunuchs. Mural from the tomb of the prince Zhanghuai, 706 AD.

It's hard for me to look at the seeming collapses of both amerika and the ad industries and not think about some political entities or institutions that lasted way way longer.

The Egyptian dynasties lasted for something like 3,000 years. The next most-successful geopolitical entity was that of China. amerika likely won't make it to 300 years without causing some sort of holocaust or global calamity. Our current politics will make Vietnam look like a game of retirement community canasta.

Back to the Chinese who persisted for about 1000 years. They led the world in technology. They led the world in exploration. They had rich farmland and an abundance of wealth. 

In the year 1000, China had a population of one-hundred million people--about forty-percent of the two-hundred and fifty million people on the planet. Only twenty-percent of the world's population lived in Europe and only ten-percent lived in the Americas. Another twenty-percent lived in Africa.

No civilization in history has ever surpassed China’s record of technological achievement. They invented paper, printing, movable type, cast iron, the compass, rudders, saddles, trousers, suspension bridges, wheelbarrows, blast furnaces, matches, mechanical clocks, paper money, rockets, and gunpowder.

The Chinese millions were ruled by a small coterie of elite Mandarins. (Not oranges.) The Mandarins then are like our business and political and military Mandarins today. Bezos. trump. musk. etc. It's been estimated that Jeff Bezos makes $2,000,000 an hour, or $50,000,000 a day. 

I'm old enough that I remember when that was considered a lot of money.

In 1945–1973, the top one percent in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth, but in the following two decades the richest one percent gobbled up the majority of U.S. growth. The combined wealth of the richest four hundred Americans now exceeds the total wealth of 185 million of their “fellow” citizens. 

Being outnumbered 185,000,000 to 400 must scare the wealthy. So despite the massive amounts of power these Mandarins, like ours today, had amassed, because they were hugely outnumbered by the masses, they took measures that semiotically remind me of the measures our business leaders use today.

They kept women down in what you might consider very modern ways.

Because tiny feet were considered attractive for women,  around age five, girls would have their feet bound with silk or cotton bandages to deform their bones. The foot would "fold in half as it grew," curling the toes under until the women were knuckle-walking on their feet. A length of three inches was considered ideal. Women wound up with a painful, mincing gait. Or worse, they couldn’t walk at all and had to be carried to their masters’ bedchambers on stretchers. 

I'm sure if you think about it, you can find a modern-day parallel.

Men had it just as bad. Many were castrated and became [non-threatening] servants: Eunuchs.

The victims were held down by grown men or bound to chairs with a hole in the bottom. A surgeon called a “knifer” would smear pepper paste onto their genitals to numb them. Then he made a quick, clean stroke with a curved knife. The penis and testicles were set aside for pickling. 

Many eunuchs carried their "junk" around with them in a "bao purse." They believed if they were buried with their bao when they died, in their afterlife they would be made whole again.

Again, I'm sure if you think about it, you can find a modern-day parallel.

Especially the need to cripple women and remove the cojone threat from men.

Like I said, ouch.

Think of that the next time you're forced to accept all cookies, or agree to Apple's "terms and conditions." (To use iTunes, the App Store, or Apple Music, the terms and conditions are 7,135 words long, roughly fifteen times the length of today's post.)

Today, for some reason, I feel especially gloomy.

As I said, ouch.