The Next Warrior Age - Right Under Our Noses?

[pbrower2a]

(06-26-2020, 09:52 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(06-26-2020, 03:08 PM)Isoko Wrote: This happens to all democracies eventually. If the rot grows too deep, they become like Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire that switched to long term Caesarism. If it is just a crisis but society itself relatively intact, then the Caesarism runs on the scale of Lincoln and Churchill, that is short term affairs.

Looking at the current prognosis for the West, I would say that we are in for a long period of Caesarism these time around. The societies in these countries are starting to fragment and slowly collide into major civil strife, meaning that this is going to be a long, drawn out affair requiring strong leadership in order to turn society back around again into something more functional.

Now whatever happens after the Caesar period, whether classical democracy returns to full point or the eventual civilisation collapses is another question entirely.

By Caesarism you seem to mean strong and competent leadership.  Yes, you have to be strong and competent to solve a crisis.  This is necessary for the duration of the crisis heart, but has recently relaxed with the cycles over the following turnings.

Strong leadership with constitutional and ethical restraints is good enough -- and perhaps better. Consider Sir Winston Churchill in Britain during the consummate danger of the Blitz: he got nearly dictatorial powers, but not those to kill rivals and dissidents or to rob his country blind. Churchill had bigger concerns that either enriching himself or suppressing potential opposition once things got normal. 

Beyond any question Trump falls far short of what most of us consider strong and competent leadership. The only good thing to say about the Trump Presidency is that it shows us what can go wrong and why the normal assumptions of our political tradition remain valid. Trump may be the most despotic personality that we have ever had as President, the classic right-wing authoritarian who causes the world to blow up if he gets his way, but along come the checks and balances. Having lost credibility, he is in command of nothing.     

Quote:It seems the prototype Grey Champion has to be willing to listen to his experts, who are in many past cases generals, but who may this time be doctors or police chiefs or city mayors.  He must have a vision of how it has got to end up, what the new birth of freedom must include.  He must have the ability to communicate that vision, that his people will contribute to it.

The common thread is "smart, knowledgeable people whom we can trust with such authority as they get". The best Presidents are typically attorneys, and before you say "Truman" or "Eisenhower", then consider that Truman is exactly the sort of person who would have gone to Law School had he been born sixty years later, and Eisenhower would have been a fine attorney... except that we are fortunate to have had him planning D-Day so that there would be room for appellate courts in an America that conquered Tojoland and most of Hitlerland instead of being conquered by them. Eisenhower at the least knew who the experts were on the biggest issues of his Presidency, and he deferred rightly. 

The attorneys are the generalists, but they at their best know their limitations. They can do many things, but they know enough to leave generalship to generals, accountancy to accountants, engineering to engineers, research science to research scientists, medicine to physicians and officials of public health, agronomy to agronomists (and farmers!), marketing to business, and the arcane areas of academia to academics. They may be able to arbitrate between conflicting visions. Attorneys and courts are expensive ways to get things done, but they are at least definitive.     

Quote:I will note Caesar lived in the Agricultural Age.  Autocracy was the norm.  Yes, a few Greek city states and Rome under the senate flirted with variations on democracy, but for the most part kings or autocracy was the norm.  Lincoln and Churchill lived in the Industrial Age, in culture where democracy was much more the norm.

...and we may be entering a post-industrial age. But that is no excuse for pathological leadership. 

Trump is nearly the antithesis of a Grey Champion, someone unable to mitigate disputes between people with conflicts. He stifles vision instead of seeking it, and he really has no vision other than his primitive drives. To be sure, most great leaders have some level of narcissism, and that is true of Lincoln, FDR, and Churchill. Trump is simply off the chart with his narcissism, so far that he has entered the dark zone of sociopathy.     

Quote:Your leader must be strong and competent enough to handle the crisis, but the government is not so strong or competent again until the next crisis.

Unless COVID-19 mutates into something even more insidious (more contagious or lethal), then the Crisis of 2020 is much closer to its end than to its beginning. Of course it is easier to see into the past than into the future. I well have known people as old when I was born (1891) as I am now, and I do not well know the current infants. I hope that I will live long enough that infants born in 2020 will get to know me and get to have a positive image of me... the latter is less certain than the first, by the way. Based on all but one of my grandparents and both parents living into their eighties (the other was a diabetic who somehow lived to age 67 -- and she had it bad), people born in 2020 may know me in 2084 as they do not know the infants of 3084. But back to this Crisis Era. After Trump (and he will not be re-elected), we will have leadership far more competent. If Joe Biden isn't barking out commands like a Grey Champion he will be able to get several Grey Champions to establish themselves in their areas of expertise and competence. That may be the best that we can ask for -- and that may be adequate. When the answers to the Crisis are provably adequate and the wider community accepts those, then the Crisis is clearly in its end stage. 

Today the lethal enemy isn't Hitler or Tojo. It's a damned virus. Forcing Hitler and Tojo out of office (by driving the latter to suicide and making Tojo a failure even to his own clique) is adequate for the denouement. Defeating SARS-2 (the technical name for the virus) will require extermination of the virus -- which may be trickier. This said, we can all see behaviors likely to  kill or cripple people and behaviors that stop the spread of SARS-2. No noble and necessary deed spreads SARS-2. In principle we are all warriors in a struggle against what I predict will be the "Entity of the Year" of 2020, an insidious and dangerous disease: 

Just don't contract or spread it!       

Nobody must charge any machine-gun emplacements. No Rangers need climb Pointe du Hoc to get mowed down by Nazi machine-gun fire until the Nazis run out of bullets and must then surrender. Nobody needs work an oil tanker with the knowledge that he will be burned alive if the tanker is struck by a torpedo. Nobody needs face anti-aircraft fire that can cause one's fighter or bomber aircraft to crash and burn. Nobody needs fear being worked to death on starvation rations on the Burma Railway on behalf of Japanese thugs trying to consolidate their short-lived conquests. Nobody needs fear, if Jewish, that if captured by the Wehrmacht that he will be turned over to the SS for summary execution or shipment to a murder camp.

Yes, the COVID-19 world is a lonely, boring, frustrating world. But we all know what is worse: getting COVID-19 and being scared of a horrible and pointless death. The last large living group of American soldiers -- those of the Vietnam era -- now face a danger far greater than what the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Army ever posed. Viruses do not kill as quickly as mines (and that accounts for many of the "missing in action) or bullets... but they are more subtle in their kills.      

Quote:Now I have used ‘autocracy’ much as you have used ‘Caesarism’.  To me it means a culture has not fully grown out of the Agricultural Age and taken full advantage of the Enlightenment values of human rights, equality and democracy.  They have not really grown into the full Industrial Age format.  They are still addicted to the old pattern, leadership of, for and by a few elites.

Note well that Germany and Japan were industrial societies in the 1930's, and they repudiated the virtues of the Enlightenment. I am cutting no slack for the Japanese, who did get a strong exposure to the western Enlightenment, even getting a taste of liberal democracy and accepting the relevance of Western art (actually the Japanese had an influence upon Western art) and classical music while adopting European- and American- style industry. 

Germany and Japan both reverted to the Enlightenment values that their leaders rejected in the Crisis of 1940. I can say this: I would trust the Germans and Japanese on the whole far more than I trust those Americans 



who just three years after America defeated the gangster leadership of Germany and Japan showed their similar contempt for Enlightenment values. Yes, I have far more in common with a Japanese liberal than with an American fascist. Better the sutras of Buddhism than the Kloran of the KKK, let alone a kimono than a KKK robe.

Quote:And autocracy is a bug, not a feature.  It means the culture is behind.  It will struggle to compete against other cultures.

The autocratic bug does not go away. It returns, and it can exploit the economic stresses of a post-industrial world in which the comforting certainties of the industrial world are no longer available. Just think of Donald Trump in the last country in which one would expect a dictator. 

Quote:But this does not imply that during a crisis one doesn’t or shouldn’t do what you have to do.  We will for a time have a strong and competent crisis government.  We will handle the crisis.  If not we will keep getting stronger and more competent until we do solve the crisis.

The generational cycle brings us as a society out of the rut that we cannot stay. Those who stay in the rut contrary to the collective that sees no viable alternative become irrelevant and eventually die off. 3T ways will absolutely not lick COVID-19. Freeing ourselves from COVID-19 will take Crisis-style behavior, including economic regimentation, structural reforms, and great personal sacrifices. Just think of what might have befallen us had we not done what was necessary for defeating Hitler and Tojo:



(Auschwitz)

perhaps translated from German Newspeak to English Newspeak  as "WORK FREES YOU", but as usual words transformed into lies in their own right. Orwell learned as much about Newspeak from the Nazis as from the Stalinists... Work no more freed inmates of Nazi concentration camps than did labor on a plantation in the slave-era South. This said, the slave-masters of the antebellum South never pretended that toil would ever free a slave. Nobody got freed from Auschwitz until the Soviet Army reached it.

Quote:And then, thus far, we have relaxed into the high mentality, and we are not so strong and competent again until the crisis comes around.

I beg to differ -- it looks more like an attempt to revive the 3T mentality. It's when people recognize that the 3T mentality leads only to more or worse Crisis that we are headed into the 1T and can soon let our guard down in a time that operates under very different rules that everyone recognizes are different and necessary. 

Quote:I would just watch yourself basing your pattern of how things work on the Agricultural Age.  As a progressive, I view the cultures of the time as badly flawed, and most of the crises that have happened since removed flaws that used to be an accepted common practice.  It was a struggle to get rid of kings, slave owners, dictators, etc…. Don’t assume that it is a nature of civilizations to revert to the bad old days.  We are still growing out of it.  The rejection of racist violent policing is a example of how and why elements of the old days will suddenly be focused on and removed.  That is what ‘a new birth of freedom’ is about.

No culture is without its flaws. No subculture (just think of people with Asperger's syndrome who have a subculture of their own, and it is definitely not for any other people -- and who would ever want to join it! It is lonely, inscrutable, and frustrating... and offers only one positive, to wit that we are less likely to be dependent on drugs or alcohol) is perfect. 

It is safe to assume that the Germans and Japanese are not reverting to the Bad Old Days. The problem here is that Donald Trump seeks to lead us into Bad New Days. He is as much a revolutionary as Samuel Adams...  but Samuel Adams at least had more rationality and more virtues. Trump offers the wrong revolution for America.

Quote:  
Autocracy and being like Caesar are bad signs.  They have to be stomped on when the chance comes round.

If we do not stop autocracy here, then someone else will need to extinguish it here with great loss of human life -- perhaps greater than the loss of human life in World War II. We are responsible for our political choices in a representative democracy. Mercifully we have checks and balances that we have used against a would-be despot.