Thoughts On Where We Are, and Where We're Going

[Eric the Green]

(09-13-2018, 07:07 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(09-13-2018, 10:21 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: 4Ts do not indicate or represent a united country. That is the point that I made in my previous post, and Bob seems to not get. It is very clear, though. The country united only in the final defeat of the enemy at the climax and end of all previous 4Ts, when consensus develops as we move into the 1T.

Industrial Age 4Ts at maturity do not indicate a lack of opposition, just that the conservative faction cannot stop the overwhelming majority.  There were Tories in the revolution.  Lincoln actually wrote a letter around Gettysburg where he took the blame for the war.  There were a few points where the martial progress was low, and if the election had occurred at the right moment, history would have been very different.  Even in World War II FDR had to fight opposition to invading Japan.  There were movements to end the war early.

But in the three American crises at least, the elections did not occur at the right time for a failure of the 4T.  It could have been different, but it was what it was.

Bush 43 gives us an example of a failed regeneracy, new values which just don’t work.  He had a military catalyst in September 11.  He had an idea in serial unilateral preemptive nation building.  He had an idea in that technology overcomes boots on the ground, which was more or less true for conventional war, but less true of guerrilla war.  He had a climax with the surge.  The idea just took too much mobilization for Bush 43’s taste and ran into guerrilla opposition.  It failed.  The values of that war did not merge with long term US values.  There is a vast reluctance to put large numbers of boots on the ground.  I imagine the massive bases and embassy that Bush 43 built for his ambitious plans sit empty.  It takes a good idea that works to drive a successful cycle.

I try to use scientific values to work a theory.  If the existing theory does not fit the data, come up with a better fitting theory.  But I also have political values.  I am a Whig.  Democracy, rights and equality become constants, a common theme across many transformations.  However, the transformations are entirely different across history.  Different things occupy the most repugnant position, and are the target of a given transformation.

I am not seeing the immediate triumph of my political values.  In that I seem to be different from many who post here.  Progress, maybe, but progress that can be blocked by autocratic dictators controlling a people with autocratic ideas.  There are limits to what can be achieved, and it might well be good to recognize them.

I do find the military progress more easily influences values than non military.  What could have helped or hurt the Consciousness Revolution?  Some say the Manson killings hurt the hippie movement, but they occurred well after the Summer of Love.  Some note the legend of Woodstock in promoting the best of Hippie values, but that the next rock concert featured Hells Angels as security, and pulled rock festivals away from the hippie ideal.  Was that inevitable?  Was sustaining the Woodstock ideal impossible?

Anyway, your use of astrology steps away from my current areas of interest.  I will not comment on your ‘theory’.

There would have been no regeneracy during Bush 43; it was still the 3T. The military needs for his program were throwbacks to the 1T and a failed 2T unpopular war, and not a forward-looking regeneracy program.

I agree progress is often blocked; we saw that in the Arab Spring, especially in Syria. Often it has been blocked in the USA. The hippie culture had it reversals, which exacted a price, I agree. You being of the Orange/Uranus meme, hold to those Whig values, and in some respects the Uranus element moved forward into the more socialist concerns for equality, beyond the purely early Whig aspect of democracy and rights, across the further transformations. In your preference for scientific analysis, you go back into its roots in the early modern pre-industrial Renaissance and early Enlightenment eras, but I agree it is always useful to base our views of the data, as long as we also maintain our values and ideals for progress beyond what the data indicate as having happened thus far.