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Well, I'm back
#66
(01-25-2018, 01:33 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:
(01-24-2018, 08:18 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: One thing I've noticed is how many tyrants have appeared and gone beserk in recent times despite the touted "end of history" following the end of the Soviet Union and the birth of many new states and some new democracies in the 1990s.

Human nature, especially of economic and administrative elites, hasn't changed much since the time of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle or of the Hebrew prophets. The classics remain relevant to Modern Man in ways that we don;t realize until we neglect the lessons. In case someone says that this observation is unduly ethnocentric, one can get a workable order out of Confucius and the Buddha.

Economic and administrative elites have invariably done what they think that they can get away with, whatever their stated ideology. The question is whether they know when to give up. The French Revolution of 1789 had much to say about the Romanian Revolution of 1989 even if the ideologies of Louis XVI and Nicolae Ceausescu were seeming opposites.

History and human nature goes on, and what level of revolution it will take to dislodge the current rebirth of tyranny remains to be seen. Some level will occur in this 4T, and further levels of revolution will occur in the next 2T. How far tyranny is overthrown in these waves remains to be seen.

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Quote:Now, Turkey has slipped back into the world of thuggery, and Assad of Syria has taken it to a level not seen since Hitler and Pol Pot. This vacuum also opened the way to the horrible Islamic State. The current Isreali thug ruler continues to attack his Palestinian neighbors. Deterte has waged war on his own Filipinos in the name of the drug war, and General Sisi hijacked the Egyptian Arab Spring democratic movement and turned it into virtual tyranny. The Saudi royal family is easing some restrictions while they rain terror and death over their Yemeni neighbors -- even as they now are offering some aid to them. Putin has put the emergent Russian democracy back into the age of the Tsars. Hungary and Poland seem on the verge of fascism, and Venezuela and Brazil are in the grip of corruption, and in the former case of one-man rule despite people massed in the streets against him. Honduras remains in the grip of thuggery too. And the USA put a would-be thug into its Oval Office who is marching that nation back into medieval times as fast as he can.

I now have more fear of what Donald Trump can do to the world than I ever had of Khrushchev or Brezhnev. This is what one gets with a political leader whose style of communication is the schoolyard taunt. This is what one gets with leadership more attentive to personal gain and indulgence than with service to Humanity, someone who ridicules any critic.

Perhaps multicultural tendencies have their own reaction in people circling the wagons against people unlike themselves by culture, religion, and appearance. But we Americans seem to be recognizing that we have a big problem.

Trump is now on the verge of provoking a constitutional crisis, if he fires the new FBI director, the 2nd in command at Justice, and investigator Mueller. I suspect his actions will be sustained by the Republican congress, and that this will be further cause for the voters to remove it. We'll see how far things go in either direction.

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One thing is sure, more change will come in this 4T, and in the USA the progressive side has always won the 4T battles. If the progressive side loses this time and the Republicans win instead, it will mark the first time that the regressive side has won, and will indicate that the USA is in severe decline. It would not survive as we know it. One thing is sure too: changes in a 4T are never enough, even if the progressive side wins as usual. There is always more needed, and that's where the next 2T comes in to take things to the next level. 

 In Germany (with the arguable exception of the Soviet Zone), Austria, Italy, and Japan, the progressive side won. But the ones who won were foreign Great Powers, even if that was not soon enough to prevent some unspeakable horrors of enslavement and genocide. God help us should America go so bad that it should need foreign liberation in defeat to recover some political decency.

America as an Evil Empire dominant upon the world is one of the worst scenarios possible. To be sure, corruption and cruelty are not good for winning the final struggle. The best way to win a war is to make sure that the other side has nothing left for which to fight. What would be worse? Extinction of civilization, let alone humanity itself.
I was primarily addressing David Horn's concern and our pessimism generally about how bad things are now. Yes they are, but the 4T is going to last another decade, and the real question is whether more change will come in the USA. I predict a lot more progressive change is coming in the next 10 years. I am hoping that the progressive side will win this 4T, as it always has before in our cycle.

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Quote:But I think we need a progressive victory in the 4T before the next 2T can bring a new Awakening. A reactionary victory in this 4T will result in there being no new Awakening in what is now the USA. There will be no basis for one in society. America cannot recover from a victory by today's regressive faction, which is now in power. Awakenings as we have known them don't happen in societies that are in constant suffering and decline. One reason for this is that there will be no new prophet generation. These generations have always been victory children.


But Germany and Italy had Awakening eras just as strong as ours. So did Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary, not as privileged as the non-communist industrialized countries. Japan might not have, but that says more about Japanese culture or that Japanese pop culture didn't then travel well. Sweden, not a participant in World War II, had an Awakening. The repressive regimes of Spain and Portugal were able to put off Awakening Eras until the 1970s. but when the glacial winters of repression died, the flowers could bloom. An Awakening Era depends on some freedom and the perception that the world is a much safer place than it had been.

Yes Europe had its Awakening, thanks to the American victory, so it was their victory too, a peoples' victory. As your recounting of history shows, where this victory in 1945 was slight or non-existent, awakenings did not follow. Eastern Europe did have its 4T victory too, the Soviet victory over the Nazis, though it wasn't a victory for the people so much as for stability and peace. So some level of Awakening did occur, though it was quickly suppressed where it bloomed.

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Quote:One thing to note well, however. In 4T crises, it has always been uncertain whether the progressive side would win, or whether we instead would slip into a new dark age. It is always darkest before the dawn. The American Revolution hung by a thread many times. The Civil War seemed to go on and on with no end in sight. The Depression seemed never-ending too, and Hitler could have defeated the Allies had he been smarter in his strategy.

Hitler lost the war because he could have never gotten peace except through the extermination of his enemies as he tried with the Jews. In any event I can figure that his style of government would have imploded much as the Soviet order did in the 1980s.  But this is a science-fiction scenario.

The best thing that one can say of a 4T is that people eventually do what they must to preserve what is best in their heritage while undoing the worst, when alternatives (especially giving in to a seeming fate) become unworkable.

Hitler lost the European war because of his atrocities. I can easily imagine Britain accepting a German hegemony over Europe had it not been for Nazi atrocities much as Britain had shown little concern about the Franco-Prussian War.
I'm not sure about that. Britain entered the war because its allies and itself were attacked. Nor did Britain accept German hegemony in 1914, but fought a super-deadly war to prevent it. The important point to remember is that Crises don't seem to be going well while we are in them, but that doesn't mean we won't fight through them and emerge winners.

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Quote:Awakenings have not always been entirely successful or progressive spiritually, but they DO nevertheless put some momentum behind the changes that happen in the next 4T. Earlier awakenings were traditionally-religious, but uplifting to the spirit. This kind of awakening in the mid-18th century gave momentum to positive changes such as the American Revolution 4T, with a new constitution as its outcome that, while still flawed, was a landmark in human history that inspired the French and then the world. 


The Boom Awakening has not been as rich in consciousness-building literature as the Transcendental and Missionary Awakenings. So far I see some progress in minority-based consciousness... but at this stage of the  4T I see largely the narcissism among economic and administrative elites, and this is much the problem of contemporary America -- people with the power to get practically anything that they want and nobody able to stop them. This said, many Boomers reject this and want something very different -- and they will need Generation X to administer such change and Millennial adults to realize it in work. Donald Trump is not the last act of Boomers, the youngest of which will be in their 60s in the 2020s.

Quote:Since then, our great Awakenings have often been both traditionally-religious and non-conformist spiritual movements. That includes the previous one, which was dominated by non-conformist awakenings through human potential and counter-cultural movements like esalen, est, the hippies and the new agers, which although climaxing early in the 2T, continued throughout and beyond it, and which also helped empower environmental and peace movements as well as diversity awakenings. Later in the 2T came a counter-awakening of a Jesus-freak movement followed by the moral majority and other fundamentalist awakenings that empowered the reactionary political movements still dominant today in red states. This divided awakening has resulted in the red-blue divide that threatens to tear our nation apart in this 4T. I suspect, however, that if the nation holds together, that this divide will pass away or lessen in severity in the following 1T.

There are the libertarian causes... and it looks as if Esalen, est, hippies, and New Age stuff will not be particularly relevant to the future. They are strictly Boom phenomena. As for the Christian Protestant fundamentalists -- they have children. If those children read and contemplate the Bible instead of treating it as a holy icon beyond discovery, they will find out how amoral and immoral their parents are for racism, homophobia, and economic hierarchy.

First of all, as I keep pointing out, there is no such thing as a Boom Awakening. Members of several generations were awakened. It's the Consciousness Revolution, and that's what it was. It was a breakthrough of a new consciousness, and that's what the new age, human potential, counter-culture and hippie movements were. It won't be reversed or fully forgotten, but will keep bursting through, because people can't entirely be fooled into going back to the mechanistic, conformist materialism and phony religion of the old consciousness.

People still want to evolve and grow as human beings, and free themselves from phony, false consciousness. That's what these movements did, and they helped to give momentum to the "libertarian causes" (I assume you mean here the diversity awakenings). The Consciousness Revolution is always relevant to ALL fields of experience and endeavor. And it gave birth to an extensive consciousness-building literature indeed. The human potential and new age movement prophets are legion, and in fact sometimes excellent, even if not familiar enough to a public brainwashed to believe that the counter-culture was nothing but sex, drugs and rock'n'roll. Yet even here, the counter-culture and new age music is as valuable a legacy as the literature, and the psychedelic art also was recognized recently with a great Summer of Love 50th anniversary exhibition in San Francisco's museum.

So "Esalen, est, the hippies and the new age stuff" are the greatest legacy of the 2T, and the most relevant to the future. New Agers and hippies have children too. If they contemplate the lessons from these movements, they will have much ground for rejecting racism, homophobia, and economic hierarchy. I am not so optimistic about the children of Christian fundamentalists in that regard. This is the blue/red split, and much of it will remain for some time. Most white fundamentalist children are continuing in their parents' vein, though not all by any means. And if some of the Xers and Millennials and even Boomers today are not as hooked into the Consciousness Revolution that is their heritage, it will come around again as S&H predict in the next 2T. So even if it takes that long to rev up again, it will not have been "strictly a Boom phenomena." Rediscovery of what it means to be human remains a great awakening awaiting us all, and a great project to further pursue. It can be denied only for so long. There remains a rich heritage from the 2T that is available to us all, if we care to delve into it and sample its delights and its potential to liberate us and help us grow as human beings and as a society of love and respect.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
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Messages In This Thread
Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-04-2018, 11:10 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by gabrielle - 01-05-2018, 10:40 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-05-2018, 11:40 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-06-2018, 10:08 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Galen - 01-07-2018, 01:22 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-07-2018, 12:30 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-09-2018, 11:11 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-09-2018, 07:59 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Galen - 01-10-2018, 05:12 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-10-2018, 12:53 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-08-2018, 08:19 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-09-2018, 01:42 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Galen - 01-09-2018, 05:46 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-09-2018, 06:14 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-09-2018, 11:16 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-09-2018, 09:01 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-10-2018, 01:24 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-09-2018, 09:30 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-09-2018, 11:25 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-09-2018, 10:19 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-09-2018, 09:31 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-10-2018, 02:33 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-09-2018, 10:29 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Kinser79 - 01-11-2018, 03:22 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-11-2018, 05:52 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-12-2018, 08:06 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-14-2018, 07:15 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-14-2018, 02:55 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-15-2018, 01:12 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-15-2018, 05:37 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-16-2018, 06:40 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-18-2018, 03:26 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-21-2018, 08:27 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-22-2018, 12:23 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by tg63 - 01-12-2018, 12:36 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-14-2018, 11:34 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-14-2018, 12:44 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-15-2018, 03:26 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-15-2018, 05:44 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-15-2018, 08:10 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-15-2018, 10:16 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-15-2018, 11:14 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-15-2018, 10:47 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Classic-Xer - 01-17-2018, 06:35 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-17-2018, 10:43 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-16-2018, 12:21 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 01-18-2018, 03:32 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-18-2018, 03:38 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 1954 - 01-18-2018, 04:02 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-22-2018, 11:05 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-23-2018, 11:51 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-23-2018, 01:12 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 01-23-2018, 05:15 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 01-23-2018, 05:13 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-25-2018, 10:08 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-24-2018, 08:18 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-25-2018, 01:33 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Ragnarök_62 - 01-25-2018, 08:00 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-25-2018, 11:50 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 01-25-2018, 01:22 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-25-2018, 04:05 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 01-25-2018, 04:47 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-25-2018, 08:38 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by David Horn - 01-26-2018, 01:40 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 01-28-2018, 08:07 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 02-02-2018, 04:30 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 02-02-2018, 05:08 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 02-03-2018, 06:17 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 02-03-2018, 06:25 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 02-09-2018, 03:45 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 02-09-2018, 05:00 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 02-09-2018, 08:08 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 02-11-2018, 05:18 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by pbrower2a - 02-11-2018, 09:21 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 02-11-2018, 11:49 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 03-13-2018, 06:46 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Tim Randal Walker - 03-15-2018, 06:55 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Tim Randal Walker - 03-15-2018, 07:02 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 03-15-2018, 07:40 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 03-25-2018, 05:57 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Bob Butler 54 - 03-28-2018, 12:14 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Eric the Green - 02-07-2019, 01:50 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Ragnarök_62 - 02-07-2019, 03:17 PM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Mikebert - 04-06-2018, 11:06 AM
RE: Well, I'm back - by Marypoza - 02-07-2019, 02:55 AM

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