We see how people organized in the past and we understand that it sustained and protected them for millennia. And we may wish to re-create it. But how do we actually go about re-forming our Gentilic System? How do we come back together?
Finally, the understanding of all this may be arduous, but doing it is easy.
Think of your mother’s mother. What was her maiden name? In my case it was Crome.
So my name becomes Eshman Crome Smith.
Crome is also the name of my mother, my brothers and my sisters. It is also the name of my sister’s children, Simply put the children always take the mother’s name. The constant changing of names under the current system separates us from each other, rendering us into a world of apparent strangers.
We can see that my children take their mother’s name. But I retain my own. I am plainly still their father but my last name is different. And the same with my brother – his children take the name of the Gens of his wife.
Crome is also the name of my mother’s sisters – the people who under the current system I call my Aunts. And it is the name of their children, the people that I currently call my cousins.
But in a Gentilic System, the name that I call my mother’s sister is not aunt. She is also my mother. And in the Gentilic System, my aunt’s children are not my cousins – they are my brothers and sisters.
So, on the one side we see that all my mother’s sisters are my mother. And it is also the case that all my father’s brothers are also my father.
We start to see how the Gens, expands. We will explore and understand the full details of this system in the next chapter.
The Ancients used this system for tens of thousands of years. It was felt unnecessary to treat your cousins differently, with a different title. They are as close to you as your birth mother’s other children. There is no need to divide and to possess. Instead we gain the advantage, and power, of security through a wider and closer network.
Returning to the family tree. My Grandmother had sisters, and they had children. And all the girls had children. We currently call these second cousins. But they are Cromes too.
To bring this to life, think now who those people are in your own case.
Say their names. They are your Gens. You do not have to create it. It has been there all along. You do not have to join it. You have been in it since the day you were born. You may not like your siblings or some of your other relatives but the beauty of the gens is that there are many more who you never knew, but with whom you may find that you do have a lot in common. And putting personal differences to one side, the point is that we are now together developing the power to act. We retain the capacity to disagree with each other on small matters but far more importantly we are gaining the ability to act on the big picture – the large matters that we broadly agree on. For example, how many of us would disagree with the idea of more affordable housing?
I find myself in a Gens called Crome, and there are 20 of us. In my family we were 5. In my immediate Gens we are 20.
The power and the unity is just starting to grow. A seedling is rising from the ground.
Then we can take another couple of steps. We can go back to the Great Grandmother and the Great Great Grandmother. And find out the maiden name of the Great Great Grandmother.
Then the Cromes realise that they are not the Cromes. They are actually part of a much, much bigger group called Warner. And there are 500 of us.
My name is evolving. I have not yet found my final gentilic name, but for now I am Eshman Warner Smith.
And we find each other, the wider Gens. The family that we never knew we had, but that was there all along. I will lay out how we find each other and systematise the arrangement later.
There is a great interest these days in genealogy – looking back up the family tree to find our ancestors. But then we should look around and back down again to find our living relatives. Not just where we come from, but who we, the living, are now.
So we find them. And we start to meet. Not just to shake hands and to shoot the breeze and to gaze, seeking a family likeness. Now there is a purpose to this.
We look at the rights and responsibilities of the Gens as laid out everywhere from the Athenians to the Iroquois. And we take this blueprint to arrive at the methods by which we finally establish our mutual safety and security from the predatory State.
We feel our connection. And we all take the name of the Gens as our middle name. And we look for Warner’s Mother, and her Mother’s mother. And we find that we are not Warner. In 1801 we were Alman.
And my name has evolved again. I have my final gentilic name. I am Eshman Alman Smith. And now there are 2,000 of us.
Can you feel the anticipation? Can you feel the power starting to grow? The seedling has become a tree.
If everyone had retained their mother’s name then we could see all our relatives all around us. The current system atomises our relationships to each other, and our bonds. Every time the line of descent goes through the female, the name changes.
As we can see above, in our new system the woman’s husband has a different name, taken from his own mother. And so his Gens is joined at this intersection with ours. We can see that every Gens will have multiple connections to other Gentes. Wherever those strongest connections lie we can then unite the Gentes into Phratries.
We find strong and multiple family connections with another Gens, called Bond. And another called Clark. And another called Davis. The 4 Gentes agree to coalesce into a Phratry. A Fraternity that we agree to call Tiger. And we are 10,000 in number.
The Power is growing. Soon we will be free, finally in a position to make our demands into reality.
And here is my next name. I am Eshman Alman Tiger Smith. 1 of 10,000 tigers. All equal. I am bound by blood to the members of my Gens. And bound by honour (and multiple connections by marriage) to my Phratry of 10,000.
Eventually again, it becomes clear that there are strong family connections between my Phratry and another. We associate with another Phratry. Then another. And when we are 4 or more Phratries we combine to form a Tribe of 50,000. A tribe called Jupiter. And that is my final name.
I am Eshman Alman Tiger Jupiter Smith. And my Tribe is big enough to fill a football stadium. But these are all no longer anonymous strangers, these are my true tribe and I know exactly who I am. And I am part of a vast group.
Remember that feeling you had the last time you joined a demonstration, a march of thousands for a cause that you all believed in? That. But now this time permanent.
And so our Tribe realises the dizzying number of family connections with other Tribes and forms a Nation. The first Nation may form in the North West. 10 Tribes have united to form a Nation of half a million people. In this region alone, we have more members than the largest existing political party has nationwide.
But it is not a Nation in the sense that we understand it. It is a binding together of people in a rough geographical area. They live in an approximate territory but without exact national boundaries. It is a Nation defined by people not by property.
In North America before the European Invasions we have an Iroquois Nation, a Cherokee Nation etc. And then upwards from here the Nations of North America had coalesced further to form a Confederacy of Nations. They had arrived at a Confederacy by the time they were discovered in the late 15th Century. It took Europe another 500 years, and two World Wars to finally arrive at the same point – a Confederacy of Nations called the European Union.
When the Iroquois formed a Confederacy, they created its Constitution. The United States at its formation, used it as their own Constitution. Now we may use it as the blueprint for ours. It worked for them for millennia. It can be adapted for the modern era but it should never be lost.
And this new Nation of ours. It is not a Nation under a Monarch… and Dukes and Lords and Knights in dirty armour. People who have no other interest but keeping what is ours and keeping us down. In doing the above we have rolled all that back. We are under no-one. Finally once more we are again, after two and a half thousand years, a Nation of Equals. And we are not a Flash Mob, we are permanent, never again to be divided from each other.
We lost 150 generations to the cause of greed. And we brought a Planet to its knees, and now it is turning on us. Let us not lose one more generation to this. Maybe we cannot afford to.
We are re-united. Now we may make all our demands heard. We can stop dreaming in our individual family homes. We can act in vast numbers, together, always. The internet serves us, to help us make connections with each other in a group that is no longer nominal, but that finally has coherence and power.
We are not just tied by mutual interest on marches, demos, strikes, acts of civil disobedience… then home – maybe never to see those friendly faces again, but yearning to be part of something wider and without a limited lifespan. Movements come and go but our wider family was always here and is here forever. It fell from grace 150 generations ago but its beauty is that it can never disappear. Its ties are not only much stronger than in a Union or a Political Party but they are also permanent. We are tied by blood and honour.
We should not be wary of such terms as blood and honour. They have become such that they have a sniff of the extreme Right about them, but why should that be? There is no shame in being a blood relative of someone. And there is no shame in the concept of honouring a group of people with whom your family have made an alliance of mutual protection.
Every living parent understands the power of connection by blood. It is why a family is strong. It is why a Gens is much, much stronger. The family and the gens are not mutually exclusive. We can have both. And on top of these we can of course retain all other structures that we have devised to create unity – labour unions, voluntary organisations, charities, non-governmental organisations, social enterprises, worker-owned companies etc.
When we walk the streets of the towns and cities they will no longer be full of strangers, separated from each other by hostility and suspicion. We look around and see fellow members of the Confederacy, numbering in the millions. Suddenly, we do not live in a culture that sets us against one another, competing against all the enemies that surround us. Instead we all related, sharing power.
Needless to say, there are those who will have only their own interests at heart. They will not join us and they will retain their family name only. They are the ones who will say no thank you to equality and sharing. Let them be. If they don’t join us eventually, their children probably will.
So they can have their Government. The one whose every declaration suggests that they act in our interest, and whose every action shows that they act only in theirs. Springing from our own Confederacy, we will now have our own Government. Beyond the House of Lords and the House of Commons there will be brought forward from the Confederacy, a House of Equals. It can run alongside the current system, but it will rise with increasing legitimacy, just as the existing government withers through the lack of it.
People, find your place where before you thought you had none. Find your gentilic name and pass it to your Grandchildren. This single word will be the greatest gift you can give them – the gift of power to control their future.