We be Mega-3T; we are entering a Mega-4T.

[David Horn]

(07-28-2020, 04:37 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:

(07-27-2020, 09:32 PM)Einzige Wrote: The fact of the matter is that we're in the Crisis of a Megaunraveling. This entire saeculum has been an enormous Third Turning; it follows logically its Crisis will feel like a continuation of the Unraveling, though it is qualitatively different in content and tempo, just as World War II felt like an Awakening war of ideology and the Civil War like a High war of regime consolidation...  (Snip.)

The Crisis will be the final Crisis of American civilization. Around 2110, the era of liberal capitalism ushered in by the first bourgeois revolution will draw to a close, in the midst of genuinely apocalyptic social and environmental upheaval.

The above is heavily Marxist.  It presents the capitalist - democratic cultures as having failed, and the only solution is violence.  Most people have looked at the autocratic rulers such as Lenin, Stalin and Mao and said no thank you.  The approach is generally rejected as having poor results.  

Now the problem Marx identified early is a real problem.  Many cultures have a huge division of wealth.  Many have expressed concern in different ways which echo Marxi’s concern but avoid Marx’s solution and language.  I don’t care if you call them the robber barons, the Military Industrial Complex, the elites, the one percent, or the owners of the means of production, the division of wealth in many cultures remains a problem.

But that does not mean Marx found the right solution.  Again, Lenin, Stalin, Mao.

Let's not put our ink in Marx's pen. He fully identified the problem, even though the problem was still in its infancy. He postulated a response that may (and only may) have sufficed in the 19th century, but probably won't work today ... or any future day for that matter. But credit where it's due, He did the essential and meaningful work that the Bolsheviks mangled beyond recognition. It's hard to fault Marx for that. Hegel, maybe.

Bob Butler 54 Wrote:Rather than the a mega turning analysis, I have gone with the ages of civilization theory.  Among other things, it says that whatever you learned from one age has to be taken with much salt in another.  If the pattern of civilization changes at age boundaries, what you thought you knew by observing one age becomes junk in another.  This is especially true if your theory has anything to do with the technologies that caused the age change.  This time around we have nukes, insurgent proxy war and computers.  If your theory has anything to do with such things, you must verify that what you observed in the previous age is still true in the next.

And since the mega turning theory and marxism is based on Industrial Age observations, they have to be confirmed with things that have happened since the age switched.  I put the border at World War II.

The big shifts include…

Nukes.  Major powers are much less apt to start a crisis war.  Thus, violent triggers of crisis war are much more rare.

Insurgent proxy war leads to perpetual chaos and fragmented control by autocrats.  Violence doesn’t solve anything.  It just makes the situation worse.  Look at the Middle East for examples.

Here we agree nearly in full. Prior to the Industrial Age, the world we call 'civilized' was agricultural, period. Since then we've cycled through industrial dominance to information dominance, with no reason to assume that some 'other thing' isn't out there in the future.

Bob Butler 54 Wrote:While the democracies can transform and change through protest, non-violence and legislation, many autocrats are tone deaf to their people.  They will cling to power and not recognize the push to change and improve.  It is not clear that this will change by non violence, which might make violence necessary.  Protests like Tiananmen Square and the more recent demonstrations in Hong Kong illustrate this.  I do not see clearly how they will resolve, but the Autocrats have more of a problem than the democracies improving their culture.  It is too tempting to cling to power.

An exception might be Franco.  While he remained a dictator though his lifetime, he took quiet steps for Spain to become a democracy after he died.  He is the exception, though.

Thus my view is that the democracies can change and adapt but it is not clear that the autocracies that remain can.  These transitions are more likely to occur by legislation than crisis wars where democracy has taken hold.  What has got to occur in the remaining autocracies is unclear.  I just have this feeling they are running on borrowed time.

I haven't had the opportunity to read her book yet, but Anne Applebaum's Twilight of Democracy seems to be an attempt to understand the attraction of autocracy to otherwise sensible people. We're in the throes of a mass movement in that direction, but where it ends and how is still TBD. Until we have some data on a soft exit (Franco being noted as an exception) we have to assume the exit is violent. Is Trump athreat or a buffoon? Also TBD.