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The Next Warrior Age - Right Under Our Noses?
#21
It is essential to understand cycles, if we want to understand history. Not all cycles are completely valid (probably none of them are), but if we put them together we know more than just an assemblage of facts can tell us. Academics in their short-sighted view today don't realize this. But we need more than reams of facts; we need narratives and an understanding of how a living world works. It runs in cycles! (and spirals Smile )
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
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#22
Several cycles operate at once, and those that depend upon a static ideology, believers in which assume that all is settled once and for all after some critical event such as a revolution, are proved wrong. What is wrong with Marxism-Leninism will prove just as much wrong in neoliberalism. I see the late stage of a 3T informed with neoliberal ideology as a deformed and depraved expression of capitalism. Sarkar has something here. It may not be perfect, but Sarkar has one of the longest views of history. He's from India, which has one of the longest histories in the world and a series of cultures. He is as knowledgeable about the West as someone living in the West.

I see Donald Trump as an example of Capitalism at its worst. He did not innovate; he parlayed wealth that his father made into a toy in which he played office. Unlike most capitalists who have no Plan B in the event of failure except to go back to being a 'mere' worker, Trump has been exempt from the consequences of personal failure. He's been a landlord in a time of rents rising faster than administrative costs and taxes and a creator of the sewage that is reality television. As the journalist H. L. Mencken put it, nobody can go broke underestimating the taste of the American public. Just as when Mencken was alive, the level of intellectual sophistication of the American masses remains abysmal. Some people may be highly skilled at a trade or at what passes as a profession, but their learning of the liberal arts could hardly be more superficial. Trump actually made money peddling sludge, and he does the same now in politics.
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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#23
(12-14-2021, 02:35 PM)Eric the Green Wrote:
(06-29-2020, 10:26 AM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote:
(06-29-2020, 09:36 AM)pbrower2a Wrote: Churchill had his faults; he was a racial bigot and he was very wrong on Indian independence. On the other hand, the UK was one of the few European countries to come out of WWII with its Jewish population intact. Churchill did read Hitler right.

I read a story once that Churchill had a daydream in his youth that he would someday save the British Empire from a great evil that would threaten civilization.  When Hitler came around, he recognized him, and sort of positioned himself to become that hero...

We have him back. Biden has his faults too. But he has been appointed to be the next Churchill and the next Lincoln. There's no-one else available. Strange as it may seem!

Churchill was prime minister at age 80, roughly ten years after the war. 

One thing is certain: Trump is not the sort of leader who can get us out of a mess.
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.


Reply
#24
(12-13-2021, 03:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: An Indian historian-philosopher Prabhat Sarkar (1921-1990) suggests that history is itself cyclical based upon what sorts of people are the elites in a predictable succession from soldiers and builders, intellectuals (priests, teachers, accountants, diplomats, and administrators), entrepreneurs (enough said), and finally laborers.

So imagine that some primitive tribe sees itself under siege from a neighboring tribe that seeks to kill the men, steal the livestock and foodstuffs, and save the women... for themselves. If that primitive tribe has any desire to survive, then it will  train a militia, fabricate swords or spears, and build palisades or other fortifications and possibly barracks. Someone will start barking out orders and train warriors, and there is your chief. The alternative is extinction, which means that that tribe disappears into the mists of prehistory.  No other sort of leader can preserve one's tribe.

After the war the organization remains. People are no longer so anarchic. Food supplies are more secure because the spears good for killing enemy tribesmen are also good for spearing fish or deer (the nutritive quality of food increases). Farmers who were recently warriors are better disciplined. But know well: that organization has a price, and that can be met only with taxes (and by tax collectors). Formal justice is necessary just to enforce taxes, so there will be courts and judges even if those are unprofessional and part-time. The leader will need story-tellers to exalt his greatness as people's memories fade. There may be a need for shamans or priests to establish some Power behind the new organized order. Maintenance of the palisades will be a public expenditure. Those elites are intellectuals, typically smarter than the soldiers. With them come the obvious problems.  Intellectuals can get extremely arrogant and narcissistic, and they readily turn on each other with lethal disputes over such a question as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Smart people, and an intellectual-driven culture fosters a large number of them, find that they can instead turn to commerce. Maybe they can deal timber for the repair of palisades. They might establish a money supply to establish some lifeblood of trade. They might trade with neighboring tribes that recently were at war with them. "You have something I don't have and I have something you don't have. Let's deal". They may be fashioning the tools and weapons, carts, and storage bins. This is the era of the businessman. They establish businesses that run as quickly as possible on autopilot. Their heirs become passive owners who need not innovate at anything other than keeping labor cheap, dividing the 'market' to make people captive clients, and gouging those clients. Satisfying customers, something to be expected when capitalists are still innovators, is inevitable at first. Once the innovation ends, people not the capitalists become nothing more than toilers and income streams. It is far easier to collect rents from tenants who have nowhere to go than to build the original apartments... especially when those tenements become slums. There may be profit in mass low culture... but to keep it profitable that mass low culture must overwhelm anything intellectually rich or demanding. People get paid well for becoming questionable performers, and part of their pay is that those performers get to live in sybaritic indulgence without having to show any noblesse oblige. These performers become the models for youth: sports stars, film stars, and pop musicians.  


What's the problem? The heirs make it all look easy, and anything novel and of high quality requires much sacrifice to get good enough. The people who work for them often see the entrepreneurs such as storekeepers and landlords as unnecessary. Under the businessmen forms a proletariat that lacks the courage of the soldiers, the intellectual prowess of the thinkers, and the rationality of enterpreneurs. This is the short-lived, chaotic world of the primitive versions of communes (as in Paris in 1871) or soviets (as in Russia in 1917). Get it?  Communism and soviet? Obnoxious, selfish entrepreneurs who do no innovation because their grandparents set things up to run on autopilot can't convince people that enterprise is necessary to ensure that there be the stuff, and they are the first before the wall come the Revolution.

Some of the laborers become soldiers, and the cycle returns to the Warrior Age, which in some respects resembles a First Turning.  Sarkar's cycle is on a longer scale of time, one much longer than the Saeculum of which we discuss here. Our saeculum is usually on a shorter scale.

But as I have pointed out previously, each "age" encompasses two saecula: The first saeculum of the warrior age had the War of the Spanish Armada as its Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution as its second.  The first saeculum of the intellectual age had the American and French Revolutions as its Crisis, and the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War as its Crisis.  And the first saeculum of the acquisitive age had World War II as its Crisis, and (very likely) the Second (American) Civil War as its second.

After that, not only will we return to a warrior age, but an entirely new epoch whose new name will be pinned on it by midlife Millennial historians.
"These, and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation" - Justice David Brewer, Church of the Holy Trinity v. United States, 1892
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#25
It is easy to see why a thoroughly-depraved capitalist order would seek to extend a 3T that endorses economic and social depravity. Easy money for a few and hardship for everyone else is great for intensifying the disparity between sybaritic indulgence and gross desperation. When the plutocrats get extremely callous about hunger, exposure, and exhaustion things are extremely and inexcusably bad.

Extreme plutocracies make proletarian revolutions possible when something goes catastrophically wrong -- military defeat and the breakdown of the credibility of the economic system, as when the warring state starves those who make the weapons and grow the food on behalf of the warriors. The warriors know that they will be the next to starve, so they turn against the current leadership.

Lenin's revolution succeeded when his revolutionary government started paying the soldiers and police. The Tsar and the chaotic Provisional Government had started to fail at that.

A 3T is at best a fun time, but it is one of cakes and circuses -- and cocaine and concubines. Crises can be over quickly, and when they are the 1T can begin. I expect America to be much more regimented in 2030 than in 1980.
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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#26
(12-16-2021, 02:12 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: It is easy to see why a thoroughly-depraved capitalist order would seek to extend a 3T that endorses economic and social depravity. Easy money for a few and hardship for everyone else is great for intensifying the disparity between sybaritic indulgence and gross desperation. When the plutocrats get extremely callous about hunger, exposure, and exhaustion things are extremely and inexcusably bad.

Extreme plutocracies make proletarian revolutions possible when something goes catastrophically wrong -- military defeat and the breakdown of the credibility of the economic system, as when the warring state starves those who make the weapons and grow the food on behalf of the warriors. The warriors know that they will be the next to starve, so they turn against the current leadership.

Lenin's revolution succeeded when his revolutionary government started paying the soldiers and police. The Tsar and the chaotic Provisional Government had started to fail at that.

A 3T is at best a fun time, but it is one of cakes and circuses -- and cocaine and concubines.  Crises can be over quickly, and when they are the 1T can begin. I expect America to be much more regimented in 2030 than in 1980.

Given your use of the word regimented, do you imply that you expect the US to become a strict and sterile place relative to 1980? I wasn't alive in 1980 & barely remember the early 1990s, so I wouldn't know what sort of freedoms people had in 1980 that they likely won't by 2030. I do know there is currently a drive for society to be less exploitative among my generation - something people didn't seem to talk about as much in the Y2K days. When some big corporation does someone wrong, the victim is more likely now to speak out negatively on social media for the world to see.
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#27
(12-14-2021, 02:37 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It is essential to understand cycles, if we want to understand history. Not all cycles are completely valid (probably none of them are), but if we put them together we know more than just an assemblage of facts can tell us. Academics in their short-sighted view today don't realize this. But we need more than reams of facts; we need narratives and an understanding of how a living world works. It runs in cycles! (and spirals Smile )

Agreed. Facts are important, but if you don't actually possess a gut level, intuitive understanding of how they work or what models are driving current outcomes, they are meaningless justifications used to shield oneself from critical thinking at best, and tools to cherry pick and deceive at worst. Previous societies placed too little weight on facts, but imo, we put too great a weight on them and end up staring myopically at the trees at the expense of the forest.

With that said, when facts and theories do manage to make friends, both are easier to remember.
ammosexual
reluctant millennial
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#28
The last post here brings to mind the saying that history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. This means that the next 1T may not yield a return to the Organization Man/Suzy Homemaker lifestyle glorified during the last 1T. Similarly, many have opined that the next 2T may end up featuring austerity and not be free and easy as the last one was.
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#29
(03-20-2022, 01:48 PM)beechnut79 Wrote: The last post here brings to mind the saying that history doesn't repeat, it rhymes. This means that the next 1T may not yield a return to the Organization Man/Suzy Homemaker lifestyle glorified during the last 1T. Similarly, many have opined that the next 2T may end up featuring austerity and not be free and easy as the last one was.

The cosmic cycles say precisely the opposite. The next 2T is timed to a basic angle between the same two planets that happened during the previous one. Uranus conjunct Pluto 1965-66; Uranus opposite Pluto circa 2047. The next 2T will pick up from where the last one left off, and fulfill it. The only difference will be that the next one will be a more-mature and calmer version. By the same token, the 1T will resemble the last one, but even more like the Gilded Age one, and like then, it will be less placid and less agreeable than the last one in the 1950s was. So, the (Neptune) double rhythm applies, but the turnings will keep the same nature, not an opposite one as you suggest here might happen, which does not even rhyme.

Austerity? Perhaps, in the sense that ecological living will be a prime feature.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
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#30
(03-19-2022, 09:32 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:
(12-14-2021, 02:37 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: It is essential to understand cycles, if we want to understand history. Not all cycles are completely valid (probably none of them are), but if we put them together we know more than just an assemblage of facts can tell us. Academics in their short-sighted view today don't realize this. But we need more than reams of facts; we need narratives and an understanding of how a living world works. It runs in cycles! (and spirals Smile  )

Agreed. Facts are important, but if you don't actually possess a gut level, intuitive understanding of how they work or what models are driving current outcomes, they are meaningless justifications used to shield oneself from critical thinking at best, and tools to cherry pick and deceive at worst. Previous societies placed too little weight on facts, but imo, we put too great a weight on them and end up staring myopically at the trees at the expense of the forest.

With that said, when facts and theories do manage to make friends, both are easier to remember.

Well, we certainly agree on THOSE points Smile
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
Reply
#31
(12-16-2021, 09:49 AM)Anthony Wrote:
(12-13-2021, 03:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: An Indian historian-philosopher Prabhat Sarkar (1921-1990) suggests that history is itself cyclical based upon what sorts of people are the elites in a predictable succession from soldiers and builders, intellectuals (priests, teachers, accountants, diplomats, and administrators), entrepreneurs (enough said), and finally laborers.

So imagine that some primitive tribe sees itself under siege from a neighboring tribe that seeks to kill the men, steal the livestock and foodstuffs, and save the women... for themselves. If that primitive tribe has any desire to survive, then it will  train a militia, fabricate swords or spears, and build palisades or other fortifications and possibly barracks. Someone will start barking out orders and train warriors, and there is your chief. The alternative is extinction, which means that that tribe disappears into the mists of prehistory.  No other sort of leader can preserve one's tribe.

After the war the organization remains. People are no longer so anarchic. Food supplies are more secure because the spears good for killing enemy tribesmen are also good for spearing fish or deer (the nutritive quality of food increases). Farmers who were recently warriors are better disciplined. But know well: that organization has a price, and that can be met only with taxes (and by tax collectors). Formal justice is necessary just to enforce taxes, so there will be courts and judges even if those are unprofessional and part-time. The leader will need story-tellers to exalt his greatness as people's memories fade. There may be a need for shamans or priests to establish some Power behind the new organized order. Maintenance of the palisades will be a public expenditure. Those elites are intellectuals, typically smarter than the soldiers. With them come the obvious problems.  Intellectuals can get extremely arrogant and narcissistic, and they readily turn on each other with lethal disputes over such a question as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Smart people, and an intellectual-driven culture fosters a large number of them, find that they can instead turn to commerce. Maybe they can deal timber for the repair of palisades. They might establish a money supply to establish some lifeblood of trade. They might trade with neighboring tribes that recently were at war with them. "You have something I don't have and I have something you don't have. Let's deal". They may be fashioning the tools and weapons, carts, and storage bins. This is the era of the businessman. They establish businesses that run as quickly as possible on autopilot. Their heirs become passive owners who need not innovate at anything other than keeping labor cheap, dividing the 'market' to make people captive clients, and gouging those clients. Satisfying customers, something to be expected when capitalists are still innovators, is inevitable at first. Once the innovation ends, people not the capitalists become nothing more than toilers and income streams. It is far easier to collect rents from tenants who have nowhere to go than to build the original apartments... especially when those tenements become slums. There may be profit in mass low culture... but to keep it profitable that mass low culture must overwhelm anything intellectually rich or demanding. People get paid well for becoming questionable performers, and part of their pay is that those performers get to live in sybaritic indulgence without having to show any noblesse oblige. These performers become the models for youth: sports stars, film stars, and pop musicians.  


What's the problem? The heirs make it all look easy, and anything novel and of high quality requires much sacrifice to get good enough. The people who work for them often see the entrepreneurs such as storekeepers and landlords as unnecessary. Under the businessmen forms a proletariat that lacks the courage of the soldiers, the intellectual prowess of the thinkers, and the rationality of enterpreneurs. This is the short-lived, chaotic world of the primitive versions of communes (as in Paris in 1871) or soviets (as in Russia in 1917). Get it?  Communism and soviet? Obnoxious, selfish entrepreneurs who do no innovation because their grandparents set things up to run on autopilot can't convince people that enterprise is necessary to ensure that there be the stuff, and they are the first before the wall come the Revolution.

Some of the laborers become soldiers, and the cycle returns to the Warrior Age, which in some respects resembles a First Turning.  Sarkar's cycle is on a longer scale of time, one much longer than the Saeculum of which we discuss here. Our saeculum is usually on a shorter scale.

But as I have pointed out previously, each "age" encompasses two saecula: The first saeculum of the warrior age had the War of the Spanish Armada as its Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution as its second.  The first saeculum of the intellectual age had the American and French Revolutions as its Crisis, and the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War as its Crisis.  And the first saeculum of the acquisitive age had World War II as its Crisis, and (very likely) the Second (American) Civil War as its second.

After that, not only will we return to a warrior age, but an entirely new epoch whose new name will be pinned on it by midlife Millennial historians.

Interesting. If a saeculum has an average of 82 years (almost one of Uranus' cycle around the Sun, one half of Neptune's cycle around the Sun, and one-third of Pluto's) and there are 6 of them in this longer cycle of three double ones, that adds up to 492 years, the length between Neptune-Pluto conjunctions (the cycle of civilization). Of course, in this case, the saecula of the warrior age were longer in time-length. 82 x 6 = 492.

I have written in my books that the period around 2120-2140 will see "crusades".
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
Reply
#32
(03-21-2022, 01:54 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:
(12-16-2021, 09:49 AM)Anthony Wrote:
(12-13-2021, 03:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: An Indian historian-philosopher Prabhat Sarkar (1921-1990) suggests that history is itself cyclical based upon what sorts of people are the elites in a predictable succession from soldiers and builders, intellectuals (priests, teachers, accountants, diplomats, and administrators), entrepreneurs (enough said), and finally laborers.

So imagine that some primitive tribe sees itself under siege from a neighboring tribe that seeks to kill the men, steal the livestock and foodstuffs, and save the women... for themselves. If that primitive tribe has any desire to survive, then it will  train a militia, fabricate swords or spears, and build palisades or other fortifications and possibly barracks. Someone will start barking out orders and train warriors, and there is your chief. The alternative is extinction, which means that that tribe disappears into the mists of prehistory.  No other sort of leader can preserve one's tribe.

After the war the organization remains. People are no longer so anarchic. Food supplies are more secure because the spears good for killing enemy tribesmen are also good for spearing fish or deer (the nutritive quality of food increases). Farmers who were recently warriors are better disciplined. But know well: that organization has a price, and that can be met only with taxes (and by tax collectors). Formal justice is necessary just to enforce taxes, so there will be courts and judges even if those are unprofessional and part-time. The leader will need story-tellers to exalt his greatness as people's memories fade. There may be a need for shamans or priests to establish some Power behind the new organized order. Maintenance of the palisades will be a public expenditure. Those elites are intellectuals, typically smarter than the soldiers. With them come the obvious problems.  Intellectuals can get extremely arrogant and narcissistic, and they readily turn on each other with lethal disputes over such a question as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Smart people, and an intellectual-driven culture fosters a large number of them, find that they can instead turn to commerce. Maybe they can deal timber for the repair of palisades. They might establish a money supply to establish some lifeblood of trade. They might trade with neighboring tribes that recently were at war with them. "You have something I don't have and I have something you don't have. Let's deal". They may be fashioning the tools and weapons, carts, and storage bins. This is the era of the businessman. They establish businesses that run as quickly as possible on autopilot. Their heirs become passive owners who need not innovate at anything other than keeping labor cheap, dividing the 'market' to make people captive clients, and gouging those clients. Satisfying customers, something to be expected when capitalists are still innovators, is inevitable at first. Once the innovation ends, people not the capitalists become nothing more than toilers and income streams. It is far easier to collect rents from tenants who have nowhere to go than to build the original apartments... especially when those tenements become slums. There may be profit in mass low culture... but to keep it profitable that mass low culture must overwhelm anything intellectually rich or demanding. People get paid well for becoming questionable performers, and part of their pay is that those performers get to live in sybaritic indulgence without having to show any noblesse oblige. These performers become the models for youth: sports stars, film stars, and pop musicians.  


What's the problem? The heirs make it all look easy, and anything novel and of high quality requires much sacrifice to get good enough. The people who work for them often see the entrepreneurs such as storekeepers and landlords as unnecessary. Under the businessmen forms a proletariat that lacks the courage of the soldiers, the intellectual prowess of the thinkers, and the rationality of enterpreneurs. This is the short-lived, chaotic world of the primitive versions of communes (as in Paris in 1871) or soviets (as in Russia in 1917). Get it?  Communism and soviet? Obnoxious, selfish entrepreneurs who do no innovation because their grandparents set things up to run on autopilot can't convince people that enterprise is necessary to ensure that there be the stuff, and they are the first before the wall come the Revolution.

Some of the laborers become soldiers, and the cycle returns to the Warrior Age, which in some respects resembles a First Turning.  Sarkar's cycle is on a longer scale of time, one much longer than the Saeculum of which we discuss here. Our saeculum is usually on a shorter scale.

But as I have pointed out previously, each "age" encompasses two saecula: The first saeculum of the warrior age had the War of the Spanish Armada as its Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution as its second.  The first saeculum of the intellectual age had the American and French Revolutions as its Crisis, and the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War as its Crisis.  And the first saeculum of the acquisitive age had World War II as its Crisis, and (very likely) the Second (American) Civil War as its second.

After that, not only will we return to a warrior age, but an entirely new epoch whose new name will be pinned on it by midlife Millennial historians.

Interesting. If a saeculum has an average of 82 years (almost one of Uranus' cycle around the Sun, one half of Neptune's cycle around the Sun, and one-third of Pluto's) and there are 6 of them in this longer cycle of three double ones, that adds up to 492 years, the length between Neptune-Pluto conjunctions (the cycle of civilization). Of course, in this case, the saecula of the warrior age were longer in time-length. 82 x 6 = 492.

I have written in my books that the period around 2120-2140 will see "crusades".
Where do all the so-called Social Justice Warriors fit into all this? Cannot help but wonder why that term wasn't invented during the last turbulent period when you had all the celebrity SJWs including Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Abbey Hoffman, etc.? Many can't even name the current crop of SJWs, myself included. Unless you count the president of the embattled nation of Ukraine one.
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#33
(03-21-2022, 10:10 AM)beechnut79 Wrote:
(03-21-2022, 01:54 AM)Eric the Green Wrote:
(12-16-2021, 09:49 AM)Anthony Wrote:
(12-13-2021, 03:15 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: An Indian historian-philosopher Prabhat Sarkar (1921-1990) suggests that history is itself cyclical based upon what sorts of people are the elites in a predictable succession from soldiers and builders, intellectuals (priests, teachers, accountants, diplomats, and administrators), entrepreneurs (enough said), and finally laborers.

So imagine that some primitive tribe sees itself under siege from a neighboring tribe that seeks to kill the men, steal the livestock and foodstuffs, and save the women... for themselves. If that primitive tribe has any desire to survive, then it will  train a militia, fabricate swords or spears, and build palisades or other fortifications and possibly barracks. Someone will start barking out orders and train warriors, and there is your chief. The alternative is extinction, which means that that tribe disappears into the mists of prehistory.  No other sort of leader can preserve one's tribe.

After the war the organization remains. People are no longer so anarchic. Food supplies are more secure because the spears good for killing enemy tribesmen are also good for spearing fish or deer (the nutritive quality of food increases). Farmers who were recently warriors are better disciplined. But know well: that organization has a price, and that can be met only with taxes (and by tax collectors). Formal justice is necessary just to enforce taxes, so there will be courts and judges even if those are unprofessional and part-time. The leader will need story-tellers to exalt his greatness as people's memories fade. There may be a need for shamans or priests to establish some Power behind the new organized order. Maintenance of the palisades will be a public expenditure. Those elites are intellectuals, typically smarter than the soldiers. With them come the obvious problems.  Intellectuals can get extremely arrogant and narcissistic, and they readily turn on each other with lethal disputes over such a question as how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Smart people, and an intellectual-driven culture fosters a large number of them, find that they can instead turn to commerce. Maybe they can deal timber for the repair of palisades. They might establish a money supply to establish some lifeblood of trade. They might trade with neighboring tribes that recently were at war with them. "You have something I don't have and I have something you don't have. Let's deal". They may be fashioning the tools and weapons, carts, and storage bins. This is the era of the businessman. They establish businesses that run as quickly as possible on autopilot. Their heirs become passive owners who need not innovate at anything other than keeping labor cheap, dividing the 'market' to make people captive clients, and gouging those clients. Satisfying customers, something to be expected when capitalists are still innovators, is inevitable at first. Once the innovation ends, people not the capitalists become nothing more than toilers and income streams. It is far easier to collect rents from tenants who have nowhere to go than to build the original apartments... especially when those tenements become slums. There may be profit in mass low culture... but to keep it profitable that mass low culture must overwhelm anything intellectually rich or demanding. People get paid well for becoming questionable performers, and part of their pay is that those performers get to live in sybaritic indulgence without having to show any noblesse oblige. These performers become the models for youth: sports stars, film stars, and pop musicians.  


What's the problem? The heirs make it all look easy, and anything novel and of high quality requires much sacrifice to get good enough. The people who work for them often see the entrepreneurs such as storekeepers and landlords as unnecessary. Under the businessmen forms a proletariat that lacks the courage of the soldiers, the intellectual prowess of the thinkers, and the rationality of enterpreneurs. This is the short-lived, chaotic world of the primitive versions of communes (as in Paris in 1871) or soviets (as in Russia in 1917). Get it?  Communism and soviet? Obnoxious, selfish entrepreneurs who do no innovation because their grandparents set things up to run on autopilot can't convince people that enterprise is necessary to ensure that there be the stuff, and they are the first before the wall come the Revolution.

Some of the laborers become soldiers, and the cycle returns to the Warrior Age, which in some respects resembles a First Turning.  Sarkar's cycle is on a longer scale of time, one much longer than the Saeculum of which we discuss here. Our saeculum is usually on a shorter scale.

But as I have pointed out previously, each "age" encompasses two saecula: The first saeculum of the warrior age had the War of the Spanish Armada as its Crisis, and the Glorious Revolution as its second.  The first saeculum of the intellectual age had the American and French Revolutions as its Crisis, and the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War as its Crisis.  And the first saeculum of the acquisitive age had World War II as its Crisis, and (very likely) the Second (American) Civil War as its second.

After that, not only will we return to a warrior age, but an entirely new epoch whose new name will be pinned on it by midlife Millennial historians.

Interesting. If a saeculum has an average of 82 years (almost one of Uranus' cycle around the Sun, one half of Neptune's cycle around the Sun, and one-third of Pluto's) and there are 6 of them in this longer cycle of three double ones, that adds up to 492 years, the length between Neptune-Pluto conjunctions (the cycle of civilization). Of course, in this case, the saecula of the warrior age were longer in time-length. 82 x 6 = 492.

I have written in my books that the period around 2120-2140 will see "crusades".
Where do all the so-called Social Justice Warriors fit into all this? Cannot help but wonder why that term wasn't invented during the last turbulent period when you had all the celebrity SJWs including Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Abbey Hoffman, etc.? Many can't even name the current crop of SJWs, myself included. Unless you count the president of the embattled nation of Ukraine one.

Well, they are "warriors," according to the name. So I guess they would come into their own in the next saeculum, if the cycle is correct. Or maybe the current cycle is already the one, and all the preceeding would be moved back one. S&H start their list with the one preceding the Tudor/Armada cycle. That's the one during which the last Neptune-Pluto conjunction happened, in 1399-1400 starting the Renaissance cycle of civilization. Our current "SJW" saeculum began over 50 years after the conjunction in 1892.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive;
Eric M
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#34
(03-21-2022, 10:10 AM)beechnut79 Wrote: Where do all the so-called Social Justice Warriors fit into all this? Cannot help but wonder why that term wasn't invented during the last turbulent period when you had all the celebrity SJWs including Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Abbey Hoffman, etc.? Many can't even name the current crop of SJWs, myself included. Unless you count the president of the embattled nation of Ukraine one.

Social media have rendered social action as too unimportant to be assigned celebrity status. Now the Kardashians, on the other hand ...
Intelligence is not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but they all play well together.
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