Wheels within wheels.

[Mikebert]

(07-15-2019, 10:45 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(03-14-2017, 09:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary is 1000 times more honest, good looking and authentic-sounding than Con-way, who cons her way all the time.

It's time to toss another log into this fire. One never knows where the Epstein rabbit hole will go.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-long-view/


How about a long, stair step bounce down ?

Spengler's forecast of a Caesar already came to pass in 1933 with Hitler.

[pbrower2a]

(07-15-2019, 10:45 PM)Ragnarök_62 Wrote:

(03-14-2017, 09:26 AM)Eric the Green Wrote: Hillary is 1000 times more honest, good looking and authentic-sounding than Con-way, who cons her way all the time.

It's time to toss another log into this fire. One never knows where the Epstein rabbit hole will go.

https://www.ecosophia.net/the-long-view/


How about a long, stair step bounce down ?

Thank you for the excellent link. 

It is telling that at one time the well-educated studied Latin. Even if declining puer and puella or conjugating habere and amare had little practical use, the well-educated got to see how badly a society that seemed to have much going for it could so waste its capabilities. (The really-well educated learned classical Greek, and got to learn how wonderfully a civilization could work). 

The Romans really did fcuk up. They went from an agricultural order based upon yeoman farmers to one in which practically everyone was a serf because the Master Class decided that taxes were the responsibility of the little people to pay.Does that sound familiar? The Romans had slavery, always a degradation of life for all but slave-owners and a sure way to suppress enterprise and innovation. (America did solve the problem of slavery almost four score years after enshrining that great goof and crime in the Constitution... today if we had slavery we would have a well-funded industry hectoring all of us on how humane and necessary slavery would be, and that slavery creates needful progress and feeds the slaves wou would be unable to take care of themselves. Do you not believe me? Look at how special interests promote the most expensive method of medical payments in the world and defends the possession of AR-15's and AK-47's. The specific gain of a tiny minority is more important in America than the good of us all.

OK, the example of Germany at the start of the last Crisis Era exemplifies what happens when the Master Class (tycoons, executives, and big landowners) decided that they would be better off if they dispensed with labor unions, political competition, and small business, creating one big happy plantation on behalf of crony capitalists and the managerial elites within. Adolf Hitler promised those elites exactly what they wanted, including a highly-profitable program of re-militarization as a bonus. I am tempted to believe that those elites (the right-wing German Nationalist People's party was antisemitic if not as ferocious as the Nazis) saw the Jews troublesome because of their presence in small business and in their ability to expose the amorality of elites that never accepted them. (The Nazis hated the Jews not for their vices, but not for their virtues!) 

In a short time the Nazis knocked out a model minority who seems to have well fit Arnold Toynbee's description of a creative minority and created a workers' Hell. Then Hitler started spreading his nightmare into places where it was unwelcome with the aid of an economy dedicated (after the profit, power, and privilege of the Master Class) to military expansion. Hitler and the plutocrats revived an institution abolished long earlier in other countries -- slavery, and indeed slavery at its absolute worst. For a slave in the Third Reich, survival was a privilege with no semblance of a blessing. 

As far as I am concerned, the plutocrats who exploited slave labor from the camps were as deserving of ropes around their necks as the administrators of the camps. Keeping people on the brink of starvation as a reward for working to destructive exhaustion with the threat of stopping the food to the laborer who faltered is as much a murderous act as is leading people into gas chambers. Everyone was going to falter at some point. 

....

We need to remember that we Americans are where we are not so much because of Donald Trump, but instead because of the depravity of what Toynbee calls a dominant elite -- here, plutocrats no longer innovative and providential. The Koch family relies heavily upon low-technology items in making money -- paper, fuels. asphalt, cattle, old chemicals, and now glass... nothing high-tech here. This family was among the biggest donors to the Hard Right that won big in elections of 2010 and 2014. To get sponsorship of the Koch family and others one needed to establish that one held a firm belief in the idea that no human suffering short of slavery can ever be in excess so long as such allows a new or enhanced profit. Much of the focus was on taxes, but in the same timeframe, labor unions have been taking a beating.

The winners of 2010 mostly got re-elected in the Senate in 2016, and now we have Donald Trump, who fits well as a pure crony capitalist. I wish that he did not bring out my worst tendencies toward cynicism, but he is treating many in America badly; he debases public discourse with vicious stereotypes. I am tempted to believe that his erratic foreign policy is likely to get us into a very nasty war if such is not reversed. Donald Trump may not even approach the roguishness of Adolf Hitler, but somehow I prefer that my politicians not ridicule the handicapped (I found such offensive when I did not realize that I had a severe handicap that has messed up my life badly), let alone brag about grabbing women by their...

So how would detachment go with me? If I could telecommute, I would rather live in a country in which people appreciate freedom because they know what life was like without it. Maybe America will have some resemblance in that respect to places like Chile and the former Czechoslovakia, where people remember how degrading a dictatorship could be even if it quite murdering people after it ran out of dissidents. Transcendance? One finds religion -- one different from one's heritage. Many who became Protestant Fundamentalists found their way from mainline Protestantism. Oddly, Fundamentalism is a comparative innovation in American religious life -- it dates from the 1920's! Contrast what seems new -- Mormonism -- and Mormonism is approaching the two-century mark in age. But back to transcendence: recognizing that the rest of the world does not matter. Transcendance poses some risk to the elite in that people could find the 'wrong' vehicle for transcendance. Neopaganism? Islam? Buddhism? Futurism is futile because daydreams about a radically-different world advanced far from the present will not materialize.

After Trump and the Tea Party pols (and they may well go down together) we may be stuck with an archaism in the sense of reverting to what we used to do well... OK, do not re-establish Jim Crow, let alone slavery... and do not turn back LGBT and women's rights. Even if I am a liberal I have some ideas that are reactionary in some ways -- like returning to the liberal arts as an objective in post-secondary education rather than as a direction to go for people who flunk out of technical specialties. (Make sure that the technically-trained get some liberal arts, too). We need to learn how to live so that we can adjust to the plethora of entertainment that includes comparatively little culture and far more schlock. With few exceptions, the old Western canon remains rich in usefulness, and if one adds the likes of Mann, Kafka, Ellison, Orwell, and Kundera -- fine. It is tempting to believe that the people who voted for Trump were less likely to have familiarity with Orwell. 

Words have meanings; images (if not simply decoration) have even greater meaning than mere words.  (If I have to explain what is in a photograph with a caption other than to identify the time and location, then I did not take an interesting photograph). Ideas can be base (practically anything by Hitler) or noble (practically anything by Martin Luther King), and the choice is as much everyone's as is the choice between good and evil.

[pbrower2a]

(10-16-2019, 02:25 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Toynbee is a cyclic theorist. The basic idea of cyclic theory is not that everything is always in decline, but that after a decline and death a new birth comes. The question is where are we on the cycle. And how do you define who "we" are, and what a rise and decline looks like, and so on. And what is the length of the cycle you refer to, since there may be many. Different theories have different answers.

I tend to agree that the Renaissance was the start of our civilization, but I prefer to think that the Renaissance era ended at the turn of the 20th century. Our times today since then are not just a continuation of the Renaissance, but a new beginning that altered that older era. That puts us close to a beginning of a civilization cycle rather than near the end. But if you define our civilization as having been founded by the Declaration of Independence, then we are farther along.

Toynbee is not quite cyclical. Every civilization rises from seemingly nothing, perhaps a clan or tribe a bit more successful than its neighbors. Maybe someone innovates, finding a more efficient way to herd livestock or irrigate crops. Maybe it does war a little better. Maybe it has attractions in its culture.A possible analogue is the firm. To be sure, one does not want government to operate like a business. I do not know whether this business analyst read Toynbee, but the parallels are evident:

http://www.adizes.com/lifecycle/




So that I can provoke some thoughts about business in general. 

 

Courtship is the first stage of an organization's development. At this stage, the company is not yet born. It exists as a gleam in the Founder(s) eye. The focus of Courtship is necessarily on dreams and possibilities.

The primary goal of this stage is to build the Founder's enthusiasm and commitment to his dream. The higher the risk, the deeper the commitment needed. As Conrad Hilton said, "If you wish to launch big ships, you have to go where the water is deep."

In Courtship, it is normal to experience fear, uncertainty and doubts. What exactly are we going to do? How is it going to be done? When should it be done? Who is going to buy this and why? Now is the time to wind-tunnel test the brilliance of the Founder's vision.

The goal of the fledgling business should be to add value and satisfy market needs. Founders that are in it solely for the money, often don't have the fortitude to sustain their companies over the rocky road they will encounter in Infancy and Go-Go. A useful definition of a Founder is someone with; "unreasonable conviction in the face of insufficient evidence." By definition, most will think that the idea for the new business is risky, and probably won't work. It is not important that everyone else believes it will work. It is crucial that the Founder(s) believe it will, and are committed to doing whatever it takes to make the new company succeed.

Infancy begins the moment financial risk has been undertaken and the Founder quits her paying job, signs the loan documents or promises 40% of the company to outside investors.

Infant organizations are necessarily action-oriented and opportunity-driven. The focus instantly changes from ideas to action. The time for talking is over. It is time to get to work and produce results (sales and cash). Like a real baby, Infant organizations need two things to survive: 1) periodic infusion of milk (operating capital), and 2) the unconditional love of their parents (Founder(s).

Like a newborn baby learning to walk, performance in Infant organizations is inconsistent. Unexpected crises appear with little notice. Because Infant organizations lack systems, it's easy for them to get into trouble. Moving from one crisis to the next is normal. The Founder and all employees constantly test the limits of their endurance for work, stress and confusion. Employees are often attracted to Infant companies for reasons that go far beyond money; and their loyalty to the team often extends beyond the struggling Infant's ability to pay them. They end up working seven days a week and sleeping under their desks but still there is not enough time and talent to do everything that must be done.

A Go-Go organization is a company that has a successful product or service, rapidly growing sales and strong cash flow. The company is not only surviving, it's flourishing. Key customers are raving about the products and ordering more. Even the investors are starting to get excited. With this success, everyone quickly forgets about the trials and tribulations of Infancy. Continued success quickly transforms this confidence into arrogance, with a capital A.

Go-Go companies are like babies that have just learned to walk. They can move quickly and everything looks interesting. Fueled by their initial success, Go-Go's feel that they can succeed at almost anything that comes their way. Accordingly, they try to eat everything they touch. On Friday night the Founder of a Go-Go retail shoe business goes away for the weekend. On Monday morning, he walks into the office and announces, "I just bought a shopping center". This does not surprise the employees. It has happened before. The success of the Go-Go is the realization of the Founder's dreams, and if one dream can be realized, why not other dreams too? "What we did for shoes we can do for a whole mall". This arrogance is a major asset of the Go-Go, but when taken to an extreme, it is also how they get into trouble.

During the Adolescent stage of the organizational lifecycle, the company is reborn. This second birth is an emotional time where the company must find a life apart from that provided by its Founder. This critical transition is much like the rebirth a teenager goes through to establish independence from their parents.

The Adolescent company teeters on the brink of both success and disaster. So long as the Adolescent company does well, investors and the Board regard the Founder as a genius with a golden touch. However, when the infrastructure collapses, sales slow down, costs mushroom or profits decline, the finger pointing begins in earnest. The Founder, accustomed to the magic of adoration, is instantly transformed into a goat who is no longer up to the task of leadership.

Adolescence is an especially stormy time characterized by internal conflicts and turf wars. Everyone seems at odds with everything. Sales fall short or exceed production's estimates, quality is not up to customer expectations, and old timers plot against the new hires. Emotions are volatile and organizational morale traces a jagged line: ecstasy in one quarter, depression and dejection in another. Throughout the organization, people are busy tracking the real and imagined injustices they have suffered, which they nurse with great care. The Founder's safe conduct through this tempest is by no means guaranteed. If these conflicts are not resolved, Adolescent companies can find themselves in Premature Aging that can lead to the early departure of entrepreneurial leadership, or the professional managers leading to pathologies called Divorce or Premature Aging.


Prime is the optimal position on the lifecycle, where the organization finally achieves a balance between control and flexibility. Prime is actually not a single point on the lifecycle curve. Instead, it is best represented by a segment of the curve that includes both growing and aging conditions. This is because flexibility and self-control are incompatible and there is no stable equilibrium. Sometimes the Prime organization is more flexible than controllable, and sometimes it's not flexible enough.
These are the characteristics of an organization in Prime:

• The organization is guided by the vision of its reason for being. There is a clear purpose and people know what they will do, and will not do, "they walk their talk".
  
• The company operates in a focused, energized and predictable manner.
  
• Stretch goals are set, aligned and consistently achieved.
  
• There is an enterprise-wide focus on customers and earning their long-term satisfaction. There is a high degree of customer loyalty. At the same time, the organization knows when and how to say "no" to the market. It is disciplined enough to protect itself.
  
• Priorities are clear. The organization knows what to do, and what not to do. It enjoys a certain composure and peace of mind when making tough decisions.
  
• The entrepreneurial spirit is fully institutionalized. Evidence of organizational fertility abound. This creativity repeatedly produces controlled, profitable innovation.
  
• Organizational structures work well. Opposing forces are balanced. There is alignment between vision, strategy, structure, information, resource allocation and rewards. A company in Prime is continuously realigning these subsystems.
  
• The infrastructure provides reliable support.
  
• The governance process is institutionalized. People know and understand where and how decisions are made.
  
• Decision-making is done is an environment of healthy, constructive conflict. Points of view are considered, but there are no hard feelings if one's recommendations are not heeded. Differences of opinion rarely deteriorate into personality clashes or turf wars.
  
• There is intra- and inter-organizational integration and cohesion with clients, suppliers, investors, and the community. This internal cohesion enables the Prime organization to devote much of its energy externally.
  
• People enjoy working at the company. Few willingly leave and there is a backlog of people applying for positions at all levels.
  
• They embrace change. Prime companies work hard to adapt to changes in markets and technology so that they can gain share from weaker competitors.
  
• They enjoy consistent, above average growth in both sales and profits.
  

So far, so good. But this halcyon era comes to an end.

The Fall is positioned at the top of the Lifecycle curve, but it is not the place to be. That position is Prime, where organizational vitality is at its maximum. Companies that are in the The Fall phase have started to lose their vitality and are aging. When an organization first begins to age, the symptoms won't show up on its financial reports. In fact, the opposite is true. The Fall companies are often cash rich and have strong financial statements. Like medical tests, financial statements reveal a problem only when abnormal symptoms finally surface late in the Aristocracy stage. If you wait until the signs of aging appear in the numbers, the company will already be significantly aged. If you want to catch aging early, you must look elsewhere.

When people begin to age, the initial signs aren't apparent in their actions or bodies. Aging starts in their minds with subtle changes in attitude, goals, and their outlook on life. This is also true for companies. When an organization starts to age, the first place the symptoms appear is in the attitudes, outlook and behaviors of its leaders.

The leaders of The Fall companies are starting to feel content and somewhat complacent. This attitude has been developing for some time. The company is strong, but it is starting to lose flexibility. It is at the top of its lifecycle curve, but it has expended nearly all of the "developmental momentum" it amassed during its growing stages. The rocket is slowing down and starting to change direction and head down the lifecycle curve. The organization suffers from an attitude that says, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." The company is losing the spirit of creativity, innovation, and the desire to change that brought it to Prime. It has sown the seeds of mediocrity. As the desire to change lessens, the organization mellows. There is less contention than in previous stages. More and more, people are adhering to precedence and relying on what has worked in the past. The company's dominant position in the marketplace has given it a sense of security. From time to time, creativity and a push for change surface, but such eruptions become less and less frequent. Order and predictability prevail. To avoid endangering success, people opt for conservative approaches.

As organizations enter Aristocracy they characteristically:

• Are cash rich and have very strong financial statements.
  
• Have reduced expectations for growth.
  
• Demonstrate little interest in conquering new markets, technologies, and frontiers.
  
• Focus on past achievements rather than future visions.
  
• Are suspicious of change.
  
• Reward those who do what they are told to do and punish those who do not.
  
• Are interested in reducing their risks.
  
• Invest much more on control systems, benefits, and facilities than they do on R & D.
  
• Form dominates function in the organizational climate. More emphasis is placed on how things are done, than what was done.
  
• Value uniformity, consistency and formality in dress, decorum, and behavior.
  
• Employ individuals who are concerned about the company's vitality, but are willing to abide by a "don't make waves" operating motto.
  
• Engender only negligible innovation with internal efforts.
  
• Acquire other products or companies for new products, markets, and entrepreneurship to feed into their distribution channels and operating systems.
  
• May be takeover targets themselves.
  

When an Aristocracy is unable to reverse its downward spiral and the artificial repairs finally stop working, management's mutual admiration society abruptly ends. The good-old-buddy days of the Aristocracy are gone, and the witch-hunts of Recrimination begin. Companies in this stage exhibit the following behaviors:

• People focus on who caused the problems, rather than on what to do about the problems.
  
• Problems get personalized. Rather than dealing with the organization's problems, people are involved in interpersonal conflicts, backstabbing, and discrediting each other.
  
• Paranoia freezes the organization.
  
• Personal survival and turf wars absorb all available energy leaving precious little to deal with the needs of customers or the world outside the organization.
  

The Witch Hunt

Everyone is busy trying to find out who caused the disaster. With blades drawn, it's backstabbing time in the boardroom. Like primitive tribes afflicted by extended drought or famine, there is a rush to appease the gods. The organization needs a sacrifice. Whom does it sacrifice? The fairest maiden, the finest warrior, or the cream of the crop? Typically, the management of a company in Recrimination sacrifices its most valuable and scarcest treasure.........the last vestiges of innovation and creativity. The company fires the EVP of Marketing, explaining, "We're in the wrong market with the wrong products and our advertising does not work." The heads of Strategic Planning, Business Development and Engineering are the next to find themselves on the street. "Our strategy does not work. Our acquisitions are not working. Our products and technology are obsolete." The people who get fired don't feel they are responsible for the company's situation. The Marketing VP often said that the company ought to change its direction. The strategist has an ulcer worrying about the lack of direction. Privately, these individuals complained, urged, begged, and threatened, but their efforts were like pushing wet spaghetti up a hill. Their exodus merely exacerbates the problem because these creative people are the indivduals the organization needs most for survival.

Although it should be dead, the company in Bureaucracy is kept alive by artificial life support. The company was born the first time in Infancy, it was reborn in Adolescence, and its third "birth" is in Bureaucracy when it gets an artificial continuance on its life. Death occurs when no one remains committed to keeping the organization alive. If there is no business or government commitment to supporting a company in Recrimination, death can occur instead of bureaucratization.

In the Bureaucratic stage, a company is largely incapable of generating sufficient resources to sustain itself. It justifies its existence by the simple fact that the organization serves a purpose that is of interest to another political and business entity willing to support it. The Bureaucratic organization:

• Has many systems and rules and runs on ritual, not reason.
  
• Has leaders who feel little sense of control.
  
• Is internally disassociated.
  
• Creates obstacles to reduce disruptions from its external environment.
  
• Forces its customers to develop elaborate approaches to bypass roadblocks.
  
  

Finally, when creditors pull the plug on infusions of cash, when clients choose elsewhere rather than deal with this company, when a government chooses to cease subsidies, along comes

Death when no one remains committed to sustaining the organization. Monopolies and government agencies that are quarantined from competitive pressure and provide a large employment base, often live long and very expensive artificially prolonged lives.

[pbrower2a]

Toynbee saw the civilization, and not the nation-state, as the unit of history. A model of a corporation from birth to death is imperfect; corporations can technically die as they are absorbed into bigger ones, and divisions can be sold off. Keebler Corporation (a maker of snack foods) 'died' when Kellogg's bought it out and incorporated it -- but the Keebler trademark remains along with its 'elves'. When Procter&Gamble found that Pringle's chips (P&G had a good process and innovative packaging) poorly fit its other product lines, P&G sold out the division to Kellogg's, which was more compatible selling snack foods. Kellogg's retains the trademarks and the processes.

But we are familiar with corporate birth, rise, decline, and death. Civilizations are somewhat analogous. A civilization is not so easy to define as is a corporation, but perhaps some local tribe or clan starts doing some things better than other tribes or clans -- and starts innovating because it cultivates creativity, imagination, and enterprise. It is better at organizing people to do what they want and get people what they need. The good society, like a good business, brings out the best in people; the bad one brings out the worst, especially in privileged elites who lord it over everyone else.

Toynbee saw no predictable revival of a civilization once it died any more than Adizes says (he doesn't) that an entity like Montgomery-Ward, Penn Central, or Enron can come back into existence. Our current civilization is not a restoration of the Greco-Roman civilization; if anything, ours is an offshoot of the Islamic civilization because much of our intellectual and technological heritage comes directly from it. I can make the case that the Renaissance is the beginning of modernity for the West because it started trends that never came to a real end. Consider Impressionist art -- in many ways it is a revival of Renaissance tastes with a few twists...contrasting the scenery to the blue of clear skies, the gray of overcast skies, or the green of grass unlike the Renaissance focus on lighting the focus against a dark background. What seems like a diametric opposite is all in all a modification.

The Greeks and Romans did not do algebra and chemistry; the Arabs did. The Greeks and Romans did not do rhyming poetry; the Arabs did. The Greeks and Romans did not make steel or use paper; the Arabs did. We use algebra and chemistry; we have poetic rhymes; we use steel and paper, much unlike the Greeks and Romans.

[Eric the Green]

(10-21-2019, 12:00 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Toynbee saw the civilization, and not the nation-state, as the unit of history. A model of a corporation from birth to death is imperfect; corporations can technically die as they are absorbed into bigger ones, and divisions can be sold off. Keebler Corporation (a maker of snack foods) 'died' when Kellogg's bought it out and incorporated it -- but the Keebler trademark remains along with its 'elves'. When Procter&Gamble found that Pringle's chips (P&G had a good process and innovative packaging) poorly fit its other product lines, P&G sold out the division to Kellogg's, which was more compatible selling snack foods. Kellogg's retains the trademarks and the processes.

But we are familiar with corporate birth, rise, decline, and death. Civilizations are somewhat analogous. A civilization is not so easy to define as is a corporation, but perhaps some local tribe or clan starts doing some things better than other tribes or clans -- and starts innovating because it cultivates creativity, imagination, and enterprise. It is better at organizing people to do what they want and get people what they need. The good society, like a good business, brings out the best in people; the bad one brings out the worst, especially in privileged elites who lord it over everyone else.

Toynbee saw no predictable revival of a civilization once it died any more than Adizes says (he doesn't) that an entity like Montgomery-Ward, Penn Central, or Enron can come back into existence. Our current civilization is not a restoration of the Greco-Roman civilization; if anything, ours is an offshoot of the Islamic civilization because much of our intellectual and technological heritage comes directly from it. I can make the case that the Renaissance is the beginning of modernity for the West because it started trends that never came to a real end.  Consider Impressionist art -- in many ways it is a revival of Renaissance tastes with a few twists...contrasting the scenery to the blue of clear skies, the gray of overcast skies, or the green of grass unlike the Renaissance focus on lighting the focus against a dark background. What seems like a diametric opposite is all in all a modification.

The Greeks and Romans did not do algebra and chemistry; the Arabs did. The Greeks and Romans did not do rhyming poetry; the Arabs did. The Greeks and Romans did not make steel or use paper; the Arabs did. We use algebra and chemistry; we have poetic rhymes; we use steel and paper, much unlike the Greeks and Romans.

I see things a bit differently, according to my observation of historical cycles. I see many cases, such as in Egypt, the Middle East and Greco-Roman-Byzantine history where a cycle of civilization ended but another cycle began on the same ground and so the civilization was reborn. But these reborn civilizations are not just the same as the old; they were new civilizations too. So indeed, Rome fell, and the medieval era succeeded it and was inspired by it and tried, unsuccessfully, to copy it. But it also learned from and absorbed the Arab civilization, and also the new Christian civilization that arose from within the earlier Roman and Middle Eastern/Greek civilizations. And indeed the Christian and Muslim civilizations were based on the previous civilization cycles and arose from the same root in earlier times within the Middle Eastern world.

My art history teacher said well that impressionism was like some kind of mold on the old style. It was the climax of the old renaissance style; realistic observation carried to the farthest extent that it could be taken. Its use of color then led into post-impressionism, which was the foundation of modern art, in which the Renaissance style was completely overturned and replaced. Thus, the cycle of a new civilization and its dating is thus perfectly indicated by art history in this case, as it has been in the past. 

What happened in the 1890s and 1900s was the start of a new civilization. Just as in Egypt, the Middle East and Greco-Roman-Byzantine, and also in China, in the last thousands of years, our age of civilization is a new version of the previous one, but reborn and indeed carrying forward some aspects of the old, but also bringing in new foundations. In the 20th century, all the old paradigms were questioned and destroyed. Observation and objectivity are no longer the basis of our picture of reality, but must be supplemented by the observer him/herself. We are no longer seen as separated from our environment as human objects seeking to observe a world objectively. The environmental crisis as well as science, art, and a mystical revival spurred by new visions and psychedelic aids, requires that the new civilization be built on an integral paradigm in which subjectivity is recovered and observers and observed become one process. Conservation became a primary goal of our times, starting in the 1890s and 1900s, and accelerating in the 1960s and 70s with the environmental ecology movement. Green is a new civilization, and it must be the future if we are to survive.

So in world affairs; starting simultaneously with post impressionism in the 1890s, imperialism reached its climax as western powers completed their conquest of the world, and began fighting over it. Europe split into two alliances and prepared for the civil war (world wars 1 and 2) that would bring about its downfall as imperial leader of the world. New non-European powers emerged. What has resulted is a developing global civilization in which multiple power centers predominate, not nations competing for world hegemony. Such hegemony is no longer possible. The Renaissance Era was the era of European exploration and conquest. That era is over as of the world wars and the end of colonization. In the United States the "end of the frontier" was announced in 1890; in World War I and II soldiers died by the millions, giving their lives for a new world in which the nations could live in freedom in a global association.

But now we live in a century that so far as not moved on from the past, and seeks to make the old era great again. We are in a holding pattern. Young people and many older people, predominant on internet sites like this, still think we live in a Renaissance/Enlightenment civilization, and sometimes they cast out people like me from their midst if they disagree. Millennials on Wikipedia censor the frontier of the paranormal. Meanwhile, politically, returns to 18th century economics and 19th century nationalism or ancient racism and tribalism have stalled and reversed the progress toward this new global integral civilization. I predict that all this regression and ignorance of the world we now live in will reverse itself over the next 30 years, and progress will resume.

[pbrower2a]

If one uses the word "empire" to describe just any impressive political order by military and economic prowess and geographic extent, the United States of America is one of the most formidable empires to have ever existed. Comparisons to several Chinese and Egyptian dynasties, Alexander's conquests, the Spanish Empire in the Americas, the British and French colonial empires, and Imperial Rome are already valid. The United States has been in existence for 243 year, which is now only sixty fewer years than the existence of the Romanov dynasty in Russia.

Toynbee's creative minorities, and not his ultimately-destructive dominant minorities, have held sway throughout most of American history. The creative minorities allow competition by challengers. The only dominant minority in America was the slave-owning planters... and had they dominated America they would have made America another failure in what Trotsky called the dustbin or trash-heap (depending on the translation) of history.  Creative minorities exist in a competitive society for elites, with competition tending to keep people honest and attentive. Dominant minorities preclude competition, establish monopoly power, and repress all challenges and dissent. The rest of the world exists solely to enrich and pamper those elites and to enforce their will. Dominant minorities use the crudest means of staying in power -- brutality. Where a dominant minority prevails, innovation and enterprise disappear. Any thought that challenges the official position of the ruling elite becomes a dangerous heresy to be extirpated with death and torture -- probably both in an execution involving torture. Life under a dominant elite is a dubious privilege; for the common man under a dominant elite life is as nasty as Oliver Hobbes called the state of nature -- "nasty, short, and brutish". So the elites live in posh pomp that does few others any appreciable good. 

When a social order with a dominant elite takes over an entire civilization forming what Toynbee calls the Universal State (I wonder if he had the fear that the United States of America going bad and taking such a role in Western Christian Civilization... a Freudian slip?), then that civilization is doomed. Innovation through imagination, technological innovation, and individual enterprise are then impossible. The society loses its economic efficiency and becomes unable to keep up with its potential enemies. Imperial Rome was an impressive entity at the start of the fifth century of the Common Era, but it would come to a formal end in three-quarters of a century. In 476 AD
Odoacer found the Roman Empire unsuited to preservation. He could have established himself or a puppet ruler as Emperor, but he chose to dissolve the Empire.  He saw nothing worth saving. 

If you see the Roman Empire coming to a sudden and unforeseen end, then consider how it ended. The barbarians gave the serfs and slaves their freedom in return for telling the conquerors where the loot was hidden and where the elites were hiding -- male masters to be slain and female members of the ruling class to be raped. Such was a win-win proposition for all but the recent dominant elite. 

When the foreign conquerors are treated as liberators...



    

...the decrepit old order is dead even if it lasted only twelve years.

[Eric the Green]

The USA in the historical cycles has been in an analagous though far from identical position as the late Roman Republic. What succeeded the Republic, which had conquered vast territories, was the closest thing to a universal state that has existed, and a growing connection between east and west, both in a similar point in their history. It was impressive for 4 centuries, but in the third century it became weaker and less stable. A final revival in the early 4th century became oppressive and was transformed into the religious imperial age that succeeded the imperial age/bronze age era.

In our time, what is developing out of the American Republic and other republics and regimes throughout the world is a global society. There is already a world government that was first instituted after the first world war. It will grow in strength and power, as the world becomes ever-more integrated. We do not live in a world of nations anymore. We are a world society, but it can't be an empire dominated by one nation within it as in Roman times. The imperial Age of Mars is long gone. There are diverse power centers that will need to learn to cooperate and join in world coalitions and world institutions. By 2165, a beacon of light for us in the next century, the world system could become a working reality, though still subject to the demands and rights of smaller entities and peoples, with continuing tensions between these priorities.

[Hintergrund]

(10-14-2019, 01:14 AM)Kinser79 Wrote: Interesting Article Rags.  It also isn't the first time I've seen Trump compared to either Julius or Augustus Caesar. Personally I think he is Julius; the Democrats are making moves to assassinate him politically if not physically, just like the Roman Senators assassinated Julius Caeser. 

(10-19-2019, 03:39 PM)Mikebert Wrote: Spengler's forecast of a Caesar already came to pass in 1933 with Hitler.

Hitler was more of a Caesar wannabe, and Trump's no Caesar either... he just talks as if he had Caesar's achievements.

There are more important characters in Roman history.

(10-21-2019, 11:32 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:  

Interesting. Today, very few infants die in western countries, but for firms, Darwinism is very alive.