(08-26-2022, 10:19 AM)sbarrera Wrote:(08-25-2022, 10:45 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: So... the founders are nomads who take over the decrepit, depraved community in which the potential leaders wallow in "wine, women, and song", kill off such people because they are no longer needed, and establish their own dynasty. The new dynasty begins in austerity, recognizing that the "wine, women, and song" (OK, orthodox Islamic societies aren't havens for wine, but there are plenty of other distractions such as ornament, gems, fine silks, and the like. The founders find those seductive but scary, for they know why they were able to overthrow the previous kings. Their sons find them occasional diversions from the austerity that they do not fully understand, and might find them good for divide et impera. It is obviously far more difficult to plot overthrow of the dynasty if otherwise capable of doing so when one pays attention to the music coming from the oud and the lyrical poetry chanted or sung in its presence. Grandsons have largely lost their distinction from the populace, and great-grandsons who have never met the founders are fully assimilated into the ways of superficial indulgence yet gross neglect of the security of the State.
Personal austerity is one way to be above the social depravity and lassitude. Surely you have seen my thread on dictatorial leaders and suchlike (including mobsters and drug kingpins, and one pop musician). They take little time to go from the austerity that they may have known in childhood to the overweening indulgence that marks them as powerful figures. There may be ways to preserve the institution, such as deeding it to a charitable trust upon death. So it was with Carl Zeiss, Howard Hughes, J. Paul Getty, and (apparently) Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. If one is Hermann Goering, Nicolae Ceausescu, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein, or Moammar Qaddafi, (or Carlos Lehder, John Gotti, Donald Trump, or Michael Jackson, then there might be practically no transition from being a non-entity to being a self-indulgent creep.
The United States is not and never has been a dynasty, and it has never been close. ibn-Khaldun might find a social cycle more than a leadership cycle here in the Good Old US of A, which has generally done well at mitigating tendencies toward depraved, self-indulgent leadership.
It's a stretch, I know, to apply Khaldun's ideas to a modern society with its democratic forms of government and complex industrial capitalist economy. But it's hard (for me) to resist given that he speaks of a progression of four generations, and describes a process by which "royal authority," which I equated with institutional authority, is established and subsequently decays. This is obviously similar to S&H theory.
I have seen it applied to business entities in which the founding owners can get away with all sorts of stuff so long as they turn a profit for shareholders. The founders make great sacrifices to establish a firm and often are never rich enough to indulge themselves like sultans until they are too old for wine, women, and song... or sports cars. Their kids find themselves putting in work to make the business succeed, and are middle aged before they can live like sultans. They are able to get the Maserati at age 45. The grandkids are sent off to college to study business administration because at age 18 to age 25 they would be bulls in a china shop. Hope that they outgrow a lust for vehicular speed before they are able to drive. Great-grandchildren get to know the founders when the founders are very old, if at all. Because they never know any hardships in life they are unable to restrain themselves economically. Those are often the ones around when the company goes bankrupt while they simply 'play office'. Business ownership is often dynastic.
Quote:Certainly there's a great hope that by its nature a Constitutional Republic is protected from the effect of the "leadership cycle," where a leader's inheritors end up with lesser qualities than their forefathers. Wasn't that part of the intent of the founders of the United States? To avoid this flaw in monarchical government? But still Khaldun's idea of "group feeling" being a prerequisite for government of any form to have authority seem to apply even to the Good Old US of A.
We do not have dynasties for the Presidency. The Presidency was an altogether new institution in history, and the closest analogies are the elected "kings" of ancient Judaea and Israel and doges of some Italian city states. We do not have Presidencies for Life. I have no idea whether FDR would have run for a fifth term of office had he lived to 1948.
It is questionable whether the constitutional monarchs have more than ceremonial power. Should Queen Elizabeth II leave any memoirs we might have a great trove of history.
...the Founding Fathers were thinking of their own time and not deep into the future. They might be surprised to find that the United States of America is now one of the oldest existing political systems on Earth. Until 1975 the oldest had been the Empire of Ethiopia (about 700 years ending in 1975). Next was the Hanoverian dynasty in the UK. Fourth and fifth are the Kingdom of the Netherlands and the Helvetic Republic in some order. They would be surprised to find that their project is about as durable as the Qing Dynasty of their time already, and that the United States will have the duration of the Romanov dynasty in 2088 (should the USA last that long, and it would be unwise to bet against the USA); some people reading this might be around then. Durability was not an objective, but the USA has it.
At the time of the founding of the United States, the Capetian monarchy in France, the Holy Roman Empire and the Republic of Venice were very old, yet all would be gone in 30 years. Ottoman Empire? The arguable successor of the Byzantine Empire (through absorption) would be gone in less than 150 years.
Creating a good system that promotes competence at the top is one way to get staying power. Dreadful as Donald Trump was, he may soon lose all relevance in American politics, with putative successors being rejecte4d almost automatically by (one hopes!) a wiser electorate than existed in 2016.
Our technologies from the telephone to the automobile to electric power and lighting to the Internet -- have all had consequences, not all of them good. I see the telephone as the perfect tool of the rude person. The mobility that the automobile gives us makes us much less community-oriented than we used to be, especially when we have excellent roads for going to retailers, entertainments, and celebrations outside of our communities. We pay less attention to the Little League and Pop Warner games of our neighbors' sons and more to the often-bloated personalities of professional sports. Electric lighting gives us the ability to stay awake into ungodly hours and (until COVID-19 broke that) 24-7 commerce. The glories and deficiencies of the Internet are obvious to us all.
We adapt here in America. Maybe a few tweaks to our educational system will make improvement of the youth more impo9rtant than preparing someone for a low-paying, dead-end job. Maybe we will expand the length of formal education so that most people will know howe to get the most out of life -- including the technologies.
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.