05-07-2019, 11:07 AM
(05-07-2019, 09:39 AM)David Horn Wrote:(05-06-2019, 04:00 PM)Kinser79 Wrote:(05-02-2019, 06:41 AM)sbarrera Wrote: That's another good comparison in line with the 1850s redux. I'm learning that a 4T is really invariably some version of a civil conflict between factions. It's the factions that were formed throughout the saeculum as the culture was shaken up finally figuring out who is dominant. Hopefully more in the political sphere than in the military sphere. If there is war with a foreign power in the 4T it is a backdrop to what is happening within the society.
It has been likened by myself and others on the forum that the current 4T is a cold civil war. In the US at any rate the current 4T looks like it will be an internal affair, one which we should be approaching the climax too soon whether one places the start in 2001, 2005/6 or 2008.
The question really should be does the cold civil war ever go hot or does it peters out and the 1T whimpers in in a very un-high like manner.
If it peters out, and issues like AGW and wealth inequality are just left there to rot, the final resolution will not be so quiet. When that occurs is not hard to guess: much sooner than the next 4T. We can't tolerate that much climate alteration before the lid blows off, and wealth inequality is already starting to generate hate of the rich. Letting them run will only intensify those feelings.
So why must a Crisis happen? People get slack about their vices, even deciding that those vices are virtues. Institutional corruption has its attractions to economic elites who increasingly entrench themselves and lose the original rationale for their existence (an ancestor saved his country from invasion/invented something important/made a big investment when others wouldn't/made major reforms of the System) while becoming increasingly rapacious while ignoring the toil that underpins all productivity and the intellectual ferment that causes major reforms. If the ancestor shook up the system to save it, the contemporary elite profits from the rot and suffers no attempts to reform the system even when such is possible with little disruption.
Addled in indulgence, the economic elite becomes the economic effete. It brushes off pressures for equity and reform. Life may be hellish for others, but it is wonderful for themselves. At best they simply skim a little off the top, but they cannot justify themselves. Maybe some environmental calamity brings famine, and the elite has no clue even that anything is going wrong.
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.