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Were Strauss & Howe Wrong?
#2
Batra did call attention to even bigger cycles (that of Prabhat Sarkar, 1921-1990) in history, on in which certain people become or try to become the elites. Historical patterns start with the soldier deputed to protect the hunter-gatherer community from marauders who come for the seasonal surplus (should there be some planting and harvesting) or the nubile young women. The soldiers establish discipline necessary for fashioning weapons, organizing troops, or building palisades -- or building boats for getting to strike an enemy where it isn't looking. With more sophistication in different times, add barracks, naval docks, and air bases and technologies that go from bows and arrows to firearms to missiles. The soldiers become builders of fixed objects with civilian uses, like barracks that might become houses, docks suited for fishing boats, and in later times airports.

But -- the Soldier becomes the chieftain, king, or emperor and can't do everything himself. He needs people able to think: tax collectors to ensure that soldiers have food, a criminal code to establish acceptable and unacceptable behavior (priests to establish the code and judges to order its enforcement), record-keepers to monitor where the stores are. He may need artists and musicians to laud him, and teachers to teach the youth how to do things. In some places he may need astronomers for knowing what the season is for planting and harvesting or for exploiting such food sources as fish. For that one needs the Intellectual.

Intellectuals can become extremely powerful, but they also can bicker -- and their bickering becomes more sophisticated, but also more ferocious. The priests (and later academics) develop their own heresies and divide society over those. Much of intellectual activity becomes death struggles over seemingly-trivial issues as "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" People find that they need turn their intellects to something else to avoid trouble.

Intellectuals often look with disdain upon 'base' activities such as commerce, money-lending, entertainment, and manufacturing, but where such has been ignored such is lucrative. The Acquisitor class of bankers, merchants, manufacturers, landlords, and providers of low-brow entertainment cone to the fore. Such activity requires less intellect than does law or medicine and no pretense of devotion. The Acquisitor class takes over the legal system and enforces harsh terms for workers; slaves may be in use. Violators of the property rights of Acquistors face draconian laws. Such comes at the cost of great disparity of wealth and poverty. Much of the economic activity devolves into economic rents -- charges against working people just for living in the domain of capitalists. Money-making from commerce and industry looks easy to laborers paid badly... and laborers get the delusion that they can cast off their workplace exploiters and the gouging landlords and merchants and take over things themselves.

Following the Acquisitor class one might expect -- if one has taken Karl Marx seriously at any time in life -- the working class (proletariat) to seek to overthrow the Acquisitors and create a workers-and-peasants state. This creates a set of problems. The toilers rarely have the courage of soldiers, the imagination and intellectual power of Intellectuals, or the canniness of Acquisitors. They put an end to the power of capitol, only to discover that they can't maintain the productivity without some sort of regimentation. They have destroyed the legal system by killing off the lawyers as well as the merchants, landlords, and proprietors. So what happens?

Love him or hate him, Lenin showed how it is done. Let the revolution take place and then start paying the police, jailers, and soldiers. Any revolution ends when those who have the guns and the authority to shoot wayward people get paid. OK, the same can be said of Corazon Aquino, Vaclav Havel, and Nelson Mandela, too.

The proletariat has never had the skills for ruling a society. Those who come from it and prove competent at anything from organizing troops in combat to writing fine poetry or building housing tracts do not remain in the proletariat. Most likely the soldiers, jailers, and police (the Soldier class) take over.

That is about where we are. Note that people on the Left on civil liberties, the environment, and labor-management relations are increasingly sympathetic to law enforcement, the Armed Forces, and the Intelligence services. Those can be useful. That Obama and Biden have gone that way and that Trump has been a failure demonstrates such.
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.


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Messages In This Thread
Were Strauss & Howe Wrong? - by Anthony '58 - 06-02-2023, 06:40 AM
RE: Were Strauss & Howe Wrong? - by pbrower2a - 06-03-2023, 03:32 PM
RE: Were Strauss & Howe Wrong? - by Anthony '58 - 06-03-2023, 09:00 PM
RE: Were Strauss & Howe Wrong? - by pbrower2a - 06-04-2023, 09:38 PM

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