The Great Devaluation

[Kinser79]

(03-13-2017, 03:08 PM)Galen Wrote: This is the correct view of the matter.  Once the logic of violence had changed then the institutions which depended on that had to change.  You can always tell when the preeminent institution is bankrupt which at the time was the Church which is very significant in a world saturated by religion.  The widespread use of the printing press also aided in the dissolution of the Church's monopoly on religion.

Fast forward five-hundred years and what do we have.  It would appear that defense is regaining the upper hand since it would appear that it is becoming increasingly harder to project power from the center.  Consider that in 1914 the number of nations in the world compared to the number that exist now.  Then there is the small matter of computers of which the internet is only one small facet of that technology.  It is not only the internet but 3-D printing and other manufacturing technologies that are derived from computers which are going to change the economy is ways that the state will find hard to control.  Then there is the small matter of living in a world saturated with politics and preeminent institution, in this case the state, is bankrupt.

Sounds like a very similar set of conditions to those of the sixteenth century now exist.

I thought it most correct to take a look at the Reformation. In my thread Wheels within Wheels I have discussed how the Reformation was the major event of the Mega-Awakening. From he nailing of his theses on the door down through the end of the mega-saeculum in the French Revolution the whole period was filled with religious violence and an obsession with Protestantism vs Popery.

It was mostly contained within the Reformation and New World saecula, but by the Enlightenment the two had been at stalemate long enough for a new order to take shape. That new order of course required much blood letting to be set up in the years between 1789-1815.

Galen Wrote:This is a good analogy and you are right about how troops are likely to react.  A more important question is does the twenty-first century mark the demise of the nation-state in the way the sixteenth did to the Church?

I'm not entirely sure. The Catholic Church still exists though in a much diminished form. As for Europe, Nation-States are formed on the basis of Nations (See Stalin's Marxism and the National Question), and it is unlikely that mankind has evolved to a point where a state is no longer necessary so I doubt it.

Will the nation-state be greatly diminished? Probably.

(03-13-2017, 08:10 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Revolutionary changes bring to an end social orders with serious weaknesses. I'm thinking that the political orders that do least well in meeting basic human needs are most likely to die. I'm guessing that the most vulnerable countries are in sub-Saharan Africa, where national boundaries are colonial boundaries set at the latest in the aftermath of World War I with no reference to ethnic divisions. 

Sub-Saharan Africa is most likely to revert to its natural state of tribe, tribal warfare and subsistence agriculture. At the risk of being accused of being racist, civilizations typically only advance as far as they need to. In Africa, there was little demand to advance past subsistence agriculture and working with iron tools.

In the West the current order arose out of labor shortages caused by the black death. And as is their general disposition, Whites pushed those solutions to the furthest extreme. In short I think it likely that without a demographic winter Western Countries are doomed to collapse. That they are choosing to try to avoid that by importing incompatible persons to their countries will result in the demise of the current nation states.

That assumes of course the populist movements don't turn violent.

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Quote:We are going to see big changes in economic practices. I can imagine much of retail becoming irrelevant, limited to items of high perishability (groceries), hazards that make personal storage inappropriate (motor fuels -- unless car go all-electric), fragility (some housewares)  and need for a close fit (clothing -- I certainly wouldn't buy shoes on-line).

Retail is already largely irrelevant. I don't go to the store if I can avoid it. Which means I'm limited to grocery shopping, farmer's market for veg (I get better deals there), cloths purchases (need to fit the kid--still growing, but I could buy my cloths online since I know my size) and shoes.

I imagine some housewares would remain in retail as would motor fuels. All electric cars are a fantasy--by the time they are implmented there won't be enough oil energy to manufacture them, and unless the Boomers suddenly die off we're not setting up new nuke stations any time soon. I suppose we could use coal for a while but that's a stopgap at best. Coal is very dirty and people don't like the particulate.

Quote:... back to the military: ruses have worked in the past. Soldiers are obliged to follow orders to retreat, too.

They do. And orders come from an established chain of command and are typically written except for orders given close in field. In which case the radio operator is expected to learn the voice of the other radio operators. In order to do such a ruse one would have to practically kidnap at least one radio operator, ideally one close to the general in the field. They are well protected.

Quote:I can imagine an enemy army creating false orders even down to faking the voice and image of commanding officers and heads of state.

You could imagine it sure. But imagining something and doing something are two different creatures.

Quote: Jam the communications within an army and that army might even start firing on its own, let alone quit shooting. If the Soviets could jam Radio Free Europe, then why could they not jam communications within NATO?

Jamming radio communications only causes the radio frequency to become filled with static. The military would change to a different predtermined frequency (and the enemy even with good spies can't know all of them).

Jamming only works so far. For example in Florida they used to be able to jam Radio Havana but if you go four miles out into the Atlantic you can pick it up clear as a bell. Even then, they didn't jam it all the time. Radio Havana would broadcast in English and Spanish on bouncing frequencies. Often the air force targeted the wrong frequency.

Since normalization of relations has started, they're no longer jamming Radio Havana.