11-05-2019, 05:07 AM
(11-04-2019, 11:45 AM)John J. Xenakis Wrote: ** 04-Nov-2019 World View: Democide and population growth
The generational cycle is very general, and and any catastrophic event
that affects the entire population creates its own generational cycle,
with unique behaviors related to the catastrophic event. Events like
this that I've discussed in the past include the 1918 Spanish Flu
epidemic, and the 1929 financial panic. The most visible effects of
the resulting generational cycles occur as I've described with the "58
Year Hypothesis," when a panic occurs 58 years after the event -- in
these examples the false swine flu panic in 1976 and the false stock
market panic in 1987, respectively.
Scares may happen 58 or so years later, but near-repetitions typically happen about 80 years later because the generational cycle results in the last people with childhood memories of undesirable trends from the analogous turning are no longer around to check others. What goes really bad one time creates people who have memories, even if those are from childhood, of the cause. I see the speculative boom rife with corruption in the Double-Zero Decade as an analogue of the 1920's. Who was disappearing from the scene in time for the speculative boom of the Double-Zero Decade? The GI Generation, the last to remember a speculative boom going catastrophically wrong. Even children had to see some absurdity in people making big money by exchanging paper replicas of wealth... and after the Crash of 1929 the GI's stood for constraints on financial institutions. Bankers got special breaks, but they were the ones to connect savers with borrowers. They were not allowed to let people gamble on inflation. Loans had to be designed so that a defaulting borrower got burned, and that such was bad for the career of a lending officer. In short, the banks had to be the people to say NO to what Robert Ringer calls "LSD deals".
Quote:So when we're talking about something as drastic as a fall in
population, or even a sharp fall in population growth, then it really
has to be associated with some event -- a huge famine, a huge
pandemic, or a huge war. And if it's a war, then it would have to be
tied into the major generational cycle generated by a crisis war.
Huge drops in the population have involved war, genocide, famines, and pandemics. Overpopulation makes people more vulnerable to all of those because overpopulation cheapens the value of human life or makes people more vulnerable. Reductions in population growth or child-bearing lower than replacement? Such results from expectations. Population growth is highest in places just coming out of extreme poverty as death rates from disease and hunger fall, but habits of having large families remain intact. To be sure, the prospect for a child born in Tokyo is far better than that of a child born in Port au Prince, but it is clear that Japanese parents expect a certain level of economic privilege that Haitian parents don't have. This said, economic prospects in Japan have budged little from what they were in the depression of the 1990's.
I am tempted to believe that all advanced-industrial societies eventually get to the point in which further increases in productivity do not result in improved lives for people. When many people had no stoves, it was possible to get rich by producing stoves to sell to those who lacked them. What remains as a market for stoves is either population growth or replacement. But such is so for just about everything.
Quote:I had assumed for years that the fall in population was caused by war
deaths during a generational crisis war, but I was never able to find
data to support that assumption. The introduction of the effects of
"democide" still tie the fall in population (growth) into the war's
generational cycle, but not directly into the generational crisis war
that spawned the generational cycle.
Democide is not a certainty. There are circumstances, largely that people are angry and looking for scapegoats that some demagogue offers as veritable sacrifices for the satiation of anger. Any successful, visible minority that seems to so be prosperous
that any fool can see it as exploiters is vulnerable. German Jews went quickly from being a model minority to pariahs. I can think of groups in America who could experience such treatment if the economy fails.
Quote:There is still speculation involved in this, and obviously a lot more
research is needed, but the democide concept really is like a missing
puzzle piece that completes the jigsaw. I really am pleased by how
much it ties together the other theoretical pieces, particularly when
democide occurs after a generational crisis war which was an ethnic,
racial, tribal or class civil war. The democide occurs because the
leader of the tribe that won the civil war keeps killing people in the
opposition tribe for decades after the war ends, resulting in a loss
of population through "democide."
Democide goes beyond a settling of accounts against culpable people. War criminals, perhaps including profiteers, may be obvious culprits. I do not consider the prosecution of fascist war criminals a sort of democide. Blaming whole populations?
Driving out people without food and with slow transportation to the new demarcation line is obviously a way to kill people. Such allegedly happened to Germans in some countries after World War II. Massacres are usually democide.
The times that instill the most hatred are the ones most likely to create tragedy on the grandest scale. So regiment the society, control the media so that there is no meaningful way of opposing harsh measures, and define people as enemies. But also worth noting is that democides come to an end, often due to military defeat.
Quote:There are other population effects that appear to occur around a
crisis war: delays in marriage and having children before and during a
crisis war, increase in suicide rate before and during a crisis war,
and then a baby boom after the crisis war.
Fear, despair, and overall pessimism. Ordinarily the sunnier mood of a prosperous (or at least economically-resilient) 1T creates jobs rebuilding what was destroyed.
Quote:There's still a lot of stuff to be figured out here, such as how a
regional democide affects neighboring nations, and how regional
democides affect the global population as a whole. But I really see
this as answering some major questions, and pulling together pieces of
the Generational Dynamics theory into a whole picture.
Well, Nazi Germany exported its democide to countries in which Jews reasonably thought themselves safe, including such countries as Greece and the Netherlands in which antisemitism was rare.
I suspect that depopulation for any reason creates a vacuum that attracts population seeking to fill the vacuum. It is arguable that the English were able to settle the eastern coast of North America from Maine to Georgia because the First Peoples had largely died off in epidemics. Establishing a farm seems not to require great sophistication, so farm laborers and marginal farmers settle where people used to be. The promise of a better life encourages people to seek out better.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
