12-29-2021, 07:48 PM
It takes a leader of extreme competence and callousness to preserve a Crisis era or to return to one once the Crisis has abated and a recovery seems underway. Such a leader is Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong (Hitler may have been that, too, but he bit off more than he could chew and offed himself as his world collapsed around him, so it may not be Marxists alone that can do this. Think also of Trotsky's concept of Permanent Revolution). If all human life is 100% expendable and one has no responsibility for public welfare, then a despotic leader might be able to overpower the generational cycle. I can easily imagine a 75-year-old Stalin initiating nuclear warfare except that the Grim Reaper got him.
The better sort of Idealist leader... Garibaldi, Juarez, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR, Mannerheim, or Adenauer ... recognizers the grave human cost -- literally the full graveyards -- of a Crisis Era. They want to win their Crisis because they cannot imagine a desirable alternative to victory (OK, Adenauer was handed a defeated fraction of Germany) or at least a tolerable settlement at the conference table. The Enemy can go to Hell, but the genuine proof of victory isn't so much a line on the map as a better world. These people have enough knowledge of history to recognize culpability of businessmen, politicians, figures of mass culture, and wayward academics (some of them good friends of a score years earlier or even fewer) but enough decency to decide that the end of the bloodletting is the desired end. Maybe murderers who have ordered mass death must die, but that is the norm with those who commit armed robberies and kill someone in the process. The better world is an economic order built more upon investment and work than upon speculation that resembles (3T) gambling, a political pattern better described with justice instead of vengeful populism, and a revival of small-scale institutions. That implies peace, and no new apocalypse. One apocalypse is one too many, but sometimes that is what one gets.
Stalin and Mao, as I understand them, had no use for any social complacency. When things started to get excessively individualist and placid, they saw horror. They needed to destroy real and imagined opposition and break down any New Order that had anything other themselves as the focus. Thus came forced collectivization and purges. They had some ideological beliefs that held that revolution in the service of Marxism-Leninism was nigh elsewhere, but it seemed not to happen in the 'decadent' capitalist countries. International war would force such a 'revolution'.
For this to be a matter separate from a contemporary ideology one must look to another time. The Crusades? One great victory mandated another, and with such a victory would come mass persecutions of heretics and infidels. Maybe that is the unspoken predecessor of Trotsky's "permanent revolution" or the continuing struggles of Stalin and Mao. For history to go there must be self-correcting respites (1T) from apocalypse, the intellectual challenges to ossifying institutions by smart outsiders (the 2T or awakening), and then the small-scale and often desperate gambles of a 3T to establish what works and what doesn't before a saeculum to sort everything out in a Crisis.
We are learning a few things the hard way in this Crisis. "Anything goes" means that all sorts of horrible things from AIDS to COVID-19 are possible. Institutions are necessary, but some are too corrupt to save. Sometimes we discover the hard way the harsh truth that getting one's way means self-harm. "Every man for himself" means that all too many people end up broke and isolated.
Crisis Eras are dreadful, but remember well: getting rid of bad habits is usually well worth the personal cost -- and the delights that came with indulgence in those old bad habits.
The better sort of Idealist leader... Garibaldi, Juarez, Lincoln, Churchill, FDR, Mannerheim, or Adenauer ... recognizers the grave human cost -- literally the full graveyards -- of a Crisis Era. They want to win their Crisis because they cannot imagine a desirable alternative to victory (OK, Adenauer was handed a defeated fraction of Germany) or at least a tolerable settlement at the conference table. The Enemy can go to Hell, but the genuine proof of victory isn't so much a line on the map as a better world. These people have enough knowledge of history to recognize culpability of businessmen, politicians, figures of mass culture, and wayward academics (some of them good friends of a score years earlier or even fewer) but enough decency to decide that the end of the bloodletting is the desired end. Maybe murderers who have ordered mass death must die, but that is the norm with those who commit armed robberies and kill someone in the process. The better world is an economic order built more upon investment and work than upon speculation that resembles (3T) gambling, a political pattern better described with justice instead of vengeful populism, and a revival of small-scale institutions. That implies peace, and no new apocalypse. One apocalypse is one too many, but sometimes that is what one gets.
Stalin and Mao, as I understand them, had no use for any social complacency. When things started to get excessively individualist and placid, they saw horror. They needed to destroy real and imagined opposition and break down any New Order that had anything other themselves as the focus. Thus came forced collectivization and purges. They had some ideological beliefs that held that revolution in the service of Marxism-Leninism was nigh elsewhere, but it seemed not to happen in the 'decadent' capitalist countries. International war would force such a 'revolution'.
For this to be a matter separate from a contemporary ideology one must look to another time. The Crusades? One great victory mandated another, and with such a victory would come mass persecutions of heretics and infidels. Maybe that is the unspoken predecessor of Trotsky's "permanent revolution" or the continuing struggles of Stalin and Mao. For history to go there must be self-correcting respites (1T) from apocalypse, the intellectual challenges to ossifying institutions by smart outsiders (the 2T or awakening), and then the small-scale and often desperate gambles of a 3T to establish what works and what doesn't before a saeculum to sort everything out in a Crisis.
We are learning a few things the hard way in this Crisis. "Anything goes" means that all sorts of horrible things from AIDS to COVID-19 are possible. Institutions are necessary, but some are too corrupt to save. Sometimes we discover the hard way the harsh truth that getting one's way means self-harm. "Every man for himself" means that all too many people end up broke and isolated.
Crisis Eras are dreadful, but remember well: getting rid of bad habits is usually well worth the personal cost -- and the delights that came with indulgence in those old bad habits.
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.