Todeswalzer wrote:
(...) True, any such system must necessarily be anchored to an equally arbitrary theoretical Year 0 (in our case the birth of Christ), but, importantly, it allows us to orient ourselves within a sequence of events as well as the relationship of that sequence back to a single Big Event. Which event we choose to relate back to says a great deal about us and our society.(...)Todeswalzer.
This reminds me of William S. Burroughs and his concept that - in order to really change a social system - one should also change the calendar, or something along those lines. I looked it up, and I found "1) PROCLAIM A NEW ERA AND SET UP A NEW CALENDAR" (upper case in the original text), the first of the "five steps" that are necessary in order to "achieve independence from alien domination and consolidate revolutionary gains" in the novel on cassettes "The Revised Boy Scout Manual"* which also contains the passage:
"Consider how present day revolutionaries are being
Che Guevara'd back into the nineteenth century to repeat the mistakes of Garibaldi and Bolivar. Bolivar liberated a large section of South America from Spain. He left intact the Christian calendar, the Spanish language, the Catholic church, the Spanish bureaucracy. He left Spanish families holding the wealth and the land."
Then it mentions the "familiar pattern: ''the oppressed love the oppressors and cannot wait to follow their example''" (italic in the original text) etc., and it all gets stranger and stranger, but that's the only quote I found on the subject:)
I know it's not the same thing, but illustrates the importance of a calendar for a social system.
*from an excerpt of "The Revised Boy Scout Manual" (described as "a novel in the form of three one-hour cassettes", the excerpt being from the cassette #1, copyright William S. Burroughs 1970) published in RE/SEARCH #4/5, "A Special Book Issue: William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Throbbing Gristle", 1982, p. 5