This might seem like a random history-based article, but considering what’s going on these days, I think it’s more than a little relevant to what goes on.
How familiar are you, dear reader, with the Sassanid Empire? Probably not a lot, I would imagine. Perhaps you ought to, because from what I gather, it was a pretty nifty place as far as the Dark Ages go—indeed, not a dark age at all, but a golden age for the Middle East. While Europe was mired in its post-Roman doldrums, the torch of civilization in Eurasia during the 1st millennium AD was largely carried by the Sassanid Empire—even that other old reliable Old World Empire (China) was mired in civil war at the height of the Sassanid Empire (ah, the Cycle of Heaven…)
This was the last pre-Islamic empire of Persia, and if you’re at all familiar with it, you’re probably familiar with the locales described by fevered, absinthe-addicted Romantic poets: Samarkand, Balkh, Bukhara, Khwarizm, etc, etc. Indeed, much of the Islamic Golden Age of the later 1st millennium was basically drawn wholesale from the works of Persian polymaths from this time period.
But we’re not actually going to talk about the Islamic conquest at all today: No, we’re going to talk about something that occurred about a century before that.
Around the year 500 or so, a fellow by the name of Mazdak arose in the borders of this empire: He was a religious preacher and reformer; a somewhat heterodox Zoroastrianm who has been considered by many to be a “proto-socialist”—and that he was, both in the traditional sense and the modern leftist sense…and you know what that means!
Mazdakism was, on paper, a sort of “Gnostic Zoroastrianism”, but where it greatly differed from the typical Mazda worship was in its ethical and social principles: it advocated things such as property redistribution and…wife swapping.
Needless to say, this got most of society in a bit of a panic—as it should. Of course, I have gone on record many times saying that a society in which everybody is running around having sex pointlessly and casually becomes chaos pretty soon…and wouldn’t you know it, the ancients knew this too!
The emperor reigning at the time Mazdak was preaching (Kavadh I) did something truly ingenious: he deliberately adopted the Mazdakian doctrine specifically to demoralize and weaken uppity aristocrats that threatened his power. And upon consolidating his power (which involved, among other things, temporarily being overthrown), he and his son Khosrow purged the Mazdakites, according to some traditions executing 3000 of them by upside down burial.
Ruthless? Perhaps, but after the execution of Mazdak the Sassanid Empire surged to its highest point, and would be the dominant power in the region until the Islamic Conquest in 651. And since the conquest happened almost 2 centuries after Mazdak’s dumbfuckery, I don’t think it was a factor.
Now, consider what’s going on around us, in the United States and elsewhere. Compare the preaching of Mazdak to it. Think about how every corporation and every bank is loudly proclaiming its bonafides in terms of brazen sexual activity (bear in mind that I’m not against homosexuality or anything of that ilk, just the brazen “HEY LOOK AT ME PUTTING THINGS IN MY ASS” attitude—and I would be just against brazen heterosexuality.) Think of how America is pretty objectively in a state of decline. While brazen sexuality is likely not the only cause of this, it’s undoubtedly a symptom.
Now, think about Kavadh’s usage of Mazdak’s wife swapping degeneracy: could it be that our societal leaders are deliberately doing this to weaken us?
I’m usually an advocate of Hanlon’s Razor (which is to say, never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity)…but maybe in this case, malice really is the answer!