pire and generally throughout western civilization.

Every civilization known to history has had its priestcraft as well as
its statecraft. Statecraft spawned its bureaucracy. Priestcraft spawned
its theocracy. Both patterns have inter-penetrated entire civilizations.
Each locality, region and district has had its representatives of state
and of church. In some instances the church took precedence. In others
the state was supreme. As the civilization matured, using war as the
chief instrument of policy, the state in the person of military
dictators has tended to predominate. In every civilization the state has
collected its taxes and the church has collected its tithes.

The net result, in every civilization, has been a ruling oligarchy,
self-appointed and self-perpetuating, which has shaped policy, planned
and directed administration, exercised authority and lived comfortably
and at least semi-parasitically on the backs of the underlying urban and
rural masses, sharing its sinecure with its middle class handymen. In
some times and in certain localities the oligarchy has maintained a
representative front. Elsewhere it has functioned arbitrarily. In
extreme cases one man has ruled for a brief period. Generally the
oligarchy has held the reins of authority.

Each phase of human society has had its oppositions, its confrontations,
its conflicts, proportioned to its magnitude, its specialization and the
interdependence of its component parts, its ratio of change to stability
and its foresight, plans and preparations for dealing with changes when
they occur. Since civilization, of all known forms of human association,
is the largest, most specialized and most interdependent, it is in
civilization that we should expect to find the most intensive and
extensive contradictions, confrontations and conflicts.

Among the many oppositions of civilized association five are
outstanding: the we-they relationship; rural versus urban life;
subsistence versus acquisition and accumulation; hard work versus ease,
luxury and parasitism; poverty versus wealth.

Civilization is not only complex and interdependent in form, it is
avowedly competitive in its functioning. Politically, nation building,
empire building and the establishment and maintenance of each
civilization is a competitive struggle between declared rivals to gain
and keep place and power. Economically, the efforts to get and keep
natural resources and labor power and to use