(03-16-2021, 06:20 AM)Captain Genet Wrote: This is a great summary. Russia's 4T lasting 28 years was exactly as long as last Anglo 3T (1980-2008).
Another remarkable feature: in the 1910s Russia went from a 2T directly into 4T.
A 3T is a time for sorting out ideas and testing them on an individual level. Regrettably many of the trials, at least by those who choose intellectual ease over intellectual depth, are of behaviors that have never worked out well.
Enterprise is ordinarily an honorable course of human activity, and it is necessary for prosperity. The more polished sort of enterprise rejects behaviors that simply do not work, like pyramid schemes. A basic rule of business is to not hurt one's customer, which explains why we have prohibitions on the selling of heroin or on selling liquor to minors. It is tempting, though, for businesses to seek shortcuts that get greater quick profits while leaving huge problems for others to sort out. Super-low wages can attract people who can make investments of their lives in alleged growth businesses, but many of those growth businesses go under. Solid savings might keep people from being destitute in old age, but if people are overworked and underpaid throughout their lives they will be broken in old age.
Cranks get even more mass attention than academics with solid educational credentials... and superstitions and quack medicine flourish. Because anything goes intellectually, such garbage as racism gets more support than in other times. Politics debases itself to accommodate fads and panics. People sacrifice equity for greed and at least in America that leads to speculative booms more adept at devouring capital than putting capital to solid use as investments in plant and equipment.
I will not go so far as to say that Russia went from 2T to 4T. The Crimean War was the closest thing to a Crisis for Russia in the middle-to-late 19th century, and that comes before such events as the Sepoy Rebellion in India (Britain's closest thing to a Crisis, the American Civil War, the overthrow of the Mexican Empire, Canadian Independence, the Franco-Prussian War, unification of Germany and the French Commune, the Taiping Revolution in China, and the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Russia was later into the generational cycle than any other major country of the time. Even with that caveat, Russia probably did go into a 3T -- but if it had plenty of crazy ideas to work out as societies usually do in a 3T, it did a poor job of it. It was a short time from the disgraceful influence of Rasputin in the Imperial Court to Lenin's Marxist dictatorship. and opposing sides in a Russian civil war that both sides deserved to lose. Both sides saw each other as damnable scum to exterminate in the event of victory.
How a society handles a 4T says much about the strengths and weaknesses of that society, and those societies best suited for sorting out the conflicting themes of contemporary thought and practice do best. Russia. of course becoming the Soviet Union, got a pathological leader (Stalin) who could never rule except as a brute. Germany let an angry crank get power, and we know how that went. Yes, Germany got a Regeneracy -- but a very bad one, and one that defined the Third Reich until its death.
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.