OUR INDO-EUROPEAN WAY OF THINKING
(Rodrigo Peñaloza, Dec. 11th, 2014)

Our culture and our view about the world are deeply rooted in our Indo-European heritage. This is so deep a substract in our mind, that I don’t hesitate to claim that we are closer to our ancestors than we consciously think.

It is well known by Mythologists and Philologists alike that the Proto-Indo-European people had a tripartite society, whose social strata were given by priests, warriors and herder-cultivators (in the sense of being the common people). It doesn’t matter if such a perception was brought out to light by a particular school. Durkheim’s functionalist school is the example in point, though the same was also advanced by other great thinkers such as Mircea Eliade. In India we had the brahman, the kṣatriya and the vaiśya; in Greece we had the hieropoiós (ἱεροποιός, the inspector of sacrifices), the phýlax (φύλαξ, the guardian), and the geōrgós (γεωργός, the peasant). Even Iulius Caesar, in his “De Bello Galico”, comments on the Gauls by dividing their society into the classes of druides, equites and plebes. No need to mention Rome herself. This tripartition reverberated in the Middle Ages as well, where the same system appeared in the form of oratores, bellatores and laboratores. In other words, the priests, the warriors and the peasants.

We still manifest this ancient view today. In this aspect, our society is no more modern than Rome and Greece and India. What we consider to be the apex of social evolution and what differentiates us from the barbarian societies of the past, Montesquieu’s tripartition of the federalist democratic system into judiciary (the priest), executive (the warrior) and legislative (the common people), is nothing more than another concrete manifestation of our Indo-European way of thinking.