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

[David Horn]

(09-13-2018, 03:16 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(09-13-2018, 08:22 AM)David Horn Wrote: S&H based a lot of their theory on patterns established during the 12,000 year long Agricultural Age that seemed to be less reliable after the transition to the Industrial Age.  Now we're in the Information Age, so more change makes perfect sense, but it does raise the question: what is core to the theory that still stands?

I guess we'll see soon enough.

If we assume the Information Age kicked in with the end of World War II, certainly by the Consciousness Revolution, if we look primarily at patterns established in the Information Age, and trends are apt to be weaker if they are further in the past, and sort of remembering that one sample does not a pattern make...

The cycle of change does not generally feature the earlier all out crisis war in the Information Age.  Quite simply, with nukes, it is no longer cost effective to declare war against another power that has nukes.  The elites will become weaker, not stronger.  

In democracies, the transformation is more through the democratic process, and the transformation more resembles the Consciousness Revolution than a religious awakening.  Democracies can attempt to use war to change things abroad, but so long as a major autocratic power is willing to act, the result is likely to end in stalemate.  Domestic change is not apt to involve a military catalyst, a war, or the planet Uranus.

Wherein comes the rub.  Democratic change is always delayed when it can be.  This is a feature of the system -- especially n the US, where change was intended to be hard.  Since the middle is shrinking, in pretty much all respects, and the political fringes are getting noisier and less willing to compromise, the inevitable clashes, will be more pronounced.  I still fail to see a war or massive civil unrest building in the US.  That may be less true in Europe.

Bob Butler Wrote:In autocratic countries, the resolution is through some combination of guerrilla war and migration.  The autocracy is almost by definition conservative.  Any attempt at an awakening resolution, accepting democratic values and methods, is kind of useless if the dictator cares more about power than about his people, and the people's values are not loaded with a democratic tradition.  If loyalty to the group outweighs equality and the Enlightenment tradition, as is apt to happen in a Agricultural Age tradition, the rebellion as apt to fail.  

So long as there are autocratic major powers willing to back autocratic minor powers, the war will tend to favor the dictator, who however ends up weaker than before due to perpetual conflict and the exodus of refugees away from the conflict zone.  If foreign powers attempt to intervene the result is more apt to be stalemate.  It is that much easier to not loose than to win in a guerrilla conflict.

This is the military version of the political stalemates suffered by democracies -- more below.  

Bob Butler Wrote:After a  conflict resolution, it would be primarily up to the conservatives to determine what comes next.  I have come up with three alternatives: a high where the changes are accepted, a compromising unravelling if the change is not accepted, and a see saw if the compromisers attempt to govern as if with a mandate when they do not have a mandate.  See saws are too fast for the Agricultural Age, and seemingly for the Industrial Age. They were not typical.  The future?  We’ll see.

This is a less deterministic pseudo cycle.  With only one time around to base your samples on, any attempt to be certain is apt to fall short.  We will see about how varied the conservative response is.

It also doesn’t count as much on generation dynamics, on the assumption that the generations have personalities which govern how they will act politically.  One could add that and come up with other predictions.  One such is an alternation between the high resolution and the others.

But it provides something to throw rotten fruit at.

I guess we’ll see soon enough.

I can accept an ongoing see-saw non-solution in a democratic state, but that seems far fetched in more autocratic ones.  For autocracies, degradation to a state of chaos seems much more likely -- similar to what occurred in Somalia.  The other alternative, is a state of war that heats and cools but never resolves.  That's the worse case, and the entire middle east may be the test ground for that model.

Of course, the ever-war model cannot be sustained without constant replenishment of war materials.  That makes it a byproduct of other disputes by powers capable of supporting that model: the US, Russia (but not forever), China and Western Europe.  Other than China, I see the others growing weary, so the next round may go to China's proxies by default.