Reclaiming Cooperation in a Civilization Built on Dominance
WE THE PEOPLE
Reclaiming Cooperation in a Civilization Built on Dominance
By Janet Kira Lessin and Sasha Alex Lessin, Ph.D.
Aquarian Media
The Struggle Between Cooperation and Domination
Human civilization has long struggled with a fundamental tension between cooperation and domination, between systems that allow people to support one another and systems that concentrate power in the hands of a few. Across cultures and centuries, societies have wrestled with questions of class, hierarchy, wealth, authority, labor, war, competition, and the distribution of resources. Yet conventional histories often devote far more attention to kings, generals, governments, corporations, and ruling elites than to the ordinary people whose labor, suffering, ingenuity, and cooperation actually sustain civilization.
We the People, an Aquarian Media series, examines history and society from a broader perspective, asking not merely who ruled, who conquered, or who accumulated wealth, but how human beings organized themselves, how power became concentrated, how cooperation survived within systems of domination, and whether humanity can create something better.
At the heart of the series lies the question of balance. Giving and taking are both necessary aspects of social life, just as cooperation and competition can each serve constructive purposes. The problem arises when one side overwhelms the other and competition becomes exploitation, hierarchy becomes domination, and authority becomes a means by which a small minority controls resources, institutions, political decisions, and the historical narrative itself.
History From the Perspective of Ordinary People
Sasha Alex Lessin approaches this inquiry through the lens of anthropology and ethnology, drawing upon the study of many cultures, including societies that mainstream historical traditions have often ignored, marginalized, or dismissed. His perspective parallels the tradition of historians such as Howard Zinn, who sought to recover the experiences of ordinary people and place them alongside the actions of presidents, generals, industrialists, and political leaders.
From this vantage point, cooperation appears not as an idealistic exception to human behavior but as one of the most fundamental mechanisms by which communities survive. Families raise children, neighbors exchange labor, farmers share knowledge, workers collaborate, artists and writers enrich cultural life, caregivers sustain the sick and elderly, and countless people perform essential tasks that rarely receive the prestige or financial reward granted to those who control institutions or capital.
A viable society must recognize the value of these forms of contribution. Raising a child, tending soil, composting waste, maintaining infrastructure, caring for another person, writing poetry, teaching, inventing technology, repairing machinery, producing food, or organizing a community all serve the larger social organism. A civilization that assigns extreme rewards to those who control wealth while undervaluing those who perform the work required to sustain everyday life creates an imbalance that eventually carries social, economic, and political consequences.
Competition Without Exploitation
The purpose of We the People is not to argue that all competition must disappear. Competition can stimulate creativity, innovation, excellence, and discovery. The deeper question is whether competition can exist without producing a permanent hierarchy in which winners accumulate the power to control everyone else. A healthy civilization can encourage people to excel while ensuring that success for some does not require deprivation, humiliation, or servitude for others.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
This question has become increasingly urgent as artificial intelligence, robotics, and automation transform the nature of work. Humanity now approaches a technological threshold at which many repetitive and physically exhausting forms of labor can be performed by machines. Such a transition can create mass unemployment and unprecedented economic inequality, or it can offer humanity an opportunity to rethink the relationship between work, survival, creativity, education, family life, and personal development.
As technological productivity increases, society no longer needs to organize human life around the assumption that nearly everyone must spend most of their waking hours performing labor simply to obtain food, shelter, health care, and security. Artificial intelligence can become another instrument of concentration and control, or it can help create conditions in which people have greater freedom to develop their abilities, pursue meaningful work, care for their families, participate in their communities, and explore intellectual, artistic, scientific, and spiritual interests.
The Anunnaki Overlay
We the People examines these modern questions within a much deeper historical framework.
Janet Kira Lessin brings to the series the Anunnaki perspective that has shaped decades of research by Janet and Sasha Lessin. Within this framework, human systems of kingship, hierarchy, warfare, ownership, and domination did not emerge in isolation. They reflect patterns that can be traced into the ancient world and, according to the Anunnaki interpretation of human origins, into the civilizations and political structures of the beings who influenced early humanity.
The series therefore examines history on two interconnected levels.
The first explores the visible historical record: civilizations, governments, religions, economies, wars, technologies, social classes, revolutions, political movements, cultural traditions, and the daily lives of ordinary people.
The second examines what may be called the Anunnaki overlay, tracing recurring patterns of hierarchy and domination into the much older narrative of humanity’s origins and asking whether human beings inherited, learned, or culturally reproduced systems that began long before the rise of the civilizations recorded in conventional history.
Nature, Nurture, and the Origins of Violence
This approach raises one of the central questions of the series: Is human violence primarily a product of nature, nurture, cultural conditioning, inherited biology, or some combination of all four?
Human beings clearly possess the capacity for aggression, competition, territoriality, and violence, yet they possess equally powerful capacities for empathy, attachment, cooperation, sacrifice, caregiving, and collective problem-solving. The historical record contains examples of both. The challenge lies in determining why certain societies emphasize one set of tendencies while suppressing another, and why systems of domination so often reproduce themselves even after the rulers who created them have disappeared.
Rome as a Model for the Series
An episode on Rome, for example, can explore the Roman Empire through the lives of emperors, citizens, enslaved people, soldiers, farmers, merchants, women, families, foreigners, and conquered populations. It can examine wealth, class, military expansion, law, religion, citizenship, slavery, political spectacle, and resistance before stepping farther back to ask whether the Roman model repeated much older patterns of kingship, conquest, tribute, divine authority, and centralized control.
The same method applies to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, medieval Europe, colonial empires, the United States, modern corporations, global finance, contemporary warfare, and the emerging technological order.
War and the Machinery of Domination
War occupies a central place in this inquiry because warfare reveals the consequences of domination in their most extreme form. Political leaders may declare wars, generals may design campaigns, and industrial systems may produce the weapons, but ordinary people bear most of the suffering. Soldiers kill strangers whom they may have had no personal reason to hate, while civilians die from bombing, famine, disease, destroyed infrastructure, displacement, and economic collapse.
Societies frequently demand absolute loyalty during wartime, treating resistance to government policy as betrayal while simultaneously asking citizens to participate in the destruction of people they have never met. The resulting contradictions raise difficult questions about authority, obedience, propaganda, class, nationalism, and the mechanisms by which populations are persuaded to accept violence that would otherwise be considered criminal.
The history of war also demonstrates how the actions of elites can reshape the lives of millions. Political rivalries, territorial ambitions, economic interests, ideological conflicts, and struggles for power can produce consequences borne disproportionately by people who had little role in creating the dispute.
Revisiting the Official Story
For this reason, We the People includes a degree of historical revision and recovery, not in the sense of rewriting evidence to fit a predetermined conclusion, but in the older and more necessary sense of looking again. The series revisits familiar events from perspectives that conventional narratives often neglect and examines the decisions, interests, and power structures operating beneath the official story.
Sasha Lessin’s previous writings, including material developed for Enki Speaks and his reflections on historians such as Bruce Catton, provide one foundation for this approach. The goal is to bring the experiences of ordinary people back into the center of history while examining the institutions and elites whose decisions have repeatedly led entire populations into war, deprivation, and social upheaval.
History as a Guide to What Comes Next
The larger purpose, however, is not simply to criticize the past.
History matters because humanity is still making choices.
The accelerating development of artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, communications, and automated production means that civilization now possesses capabilities unimaginable to earlier generations. Those technologies can reinforce the most extreme forms of hierarchy ever created, allowing a small number of institutions to control information, wealth, labor, surveillance, and political power on a global scale.
They can also provide the material foundation for a more cooperative civilization.
The difference depends on the values, structures, laws, institutions, and cultural assumptions humanity chooses to carry forward.
Beyond the Dominance Model
We the People begins with the premise that domination is not the only possible organizing principle for civilization. Cooperation does not require the destruction of individuality. Equality does not require uniformity. Competition does not require exploitation. Personal achievement does not require that someone else remain powerless.
Human beings have always possessed the capacity to create relationships, families, communities, alliances, institutions, and cultures based upon mutual assistance. Those capacities have persisted through slavery, empire, colonialism, economic inequality, dictatorship, war, and social collapse because cooperation is not peripheral to civilization. It is one of the reasons civilization exists at all.
The task now is to understand how humanity became trapped within recurring systems of dominance, how those systems were transmitted across generations and civilizations, and whether the technological and social transformations now underway provide an opportunity to break the cycle.
What Kind of Civilization Do We Choose?
We the People explores that question across history, anthropology, economics, politics, technology, culture, and the Anunnaki narrative of human origins.
The series asks not only where humanity has been, but what kind of civilization people can create once they understand the forces that shaped the one they inherited.
