Rule 1: Be the First to Attack

Around 3000 years ago, one millennium before the birth of the person known in Greek as Jesus of Nazareth, an ancient Mediterranean civilization, fleeing some event (volcanic cataclysm or invasion by central Asiatic peoples), took to their boats and landed along the southern coast of what is today Israel and Palestine.  These people, known by the local Caananites and Hebraic natives as the Philistines (in Hebraic ‘invaders’, in Ionic ‘People of Hestia’), were unwelcome at best by both the Egyptians to the south and the Semitic tribal peoples to their north, despite their highly evolved culture and superior technology.  These presumably Greco-Minoan peoples founded city states including what is today Gaza, and assumed the birthing pains of rebuilding a civilization in an alien land. The Semitic Tribes, supposedly led by a Hebrew ex-mercenary from Philistia named David, defeated the Philistines, and through attrition, eliminated them as a competing culture.

What is the lesson here?  There are two opposing strategies a civilization may pursue in order to succeed as a meme – hegemony via elimination, or cultural supremacy.  Unfortunately for the more cooperative strategy, cultural supremacy almost inevitably falls to the sword of hegemony.  The Philistines were a weak, ruined people fleeing catastrophe, unlike the Phoenicians up the coast with their vast, established naval dominance, ironically, due to a Greco-Minoan influenced armada and trade support.  Competing civilizations must be eradicated utterly for one to be dominant and persist, and the Philistines were the weakest competitor, so they employed the civil-est of strategies, and lost from that compromised position, to a tribal people united by faith, language, and a charismatic figure in David…not to mention far superior recourse, trade dominance, and military might.

The Philistines, likely the people later romanticized by Plato as the culture of Atlantis, gave the ancient world art, technology (including iron smelting, plumbing, and shipbuilding), architecture (e.g. the column, the vaulted archway), and culture that have shaped the underpinnings of modern civilization.  Their culture gave birth to the ideas of the Greeks, and therefore to reason, the republic, individual liberty, philosophy, language, and art.  Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, Epicurus, Plato, Socrates, Aristophanes, Homer….

The point is, even though the Philistines as a people arguably made greater contributions to civilization and humanity; even though they may have won the mimetic contest in the context of useful, positive contributions to the immediate centuries to come and beyond, they are forgotten as a people – lost along the wayside of the road to a mimetic eventuality that will become of all culture.