Living at the end of a great historical cycle, we take for granted that the way things are currently organized, is the way they have always been organized. Ours is the natural order of things. One reason we think this is that we can only really know our age. We can read about prior epochs, but we cannot truly know what it was like to be alive in those times. It will always feel alien to us. The other reason is that a product of our epoch is the linear theory of history. All of the events of the past led to this point in time.
The linear thinking of our age is why a guy like Francis Fukuyama could write a book titled The End of History and not be laughed out of the room. The truth is, the West has gone through a number of cycles, which had a beginning, middle and end. The feudal period is the easiest example. It was born out of the ruins of Rome, flourished through the Middle Ages and then collapsed in the Enlightenment. The period between the scientific revolution and the French Revolution, was the great transition from old epoch to the new.
To flesh this out a bit, think about the natural trajectory of human organization. The trend has always been for larger and larger organizational units. First settlements were a few tribes making up a few hundred people. The first settlements were small but grew into villages and then towns. The more successful became cities and eventually, the political units we call city-states. The first empires were collections of city-states, but in Europe, that model never scaled up very well, which is why counties were the maximum unit.
This is one of great forces in human history, the natural tendency for human societies to “level up” by getting bigger, taking over neighboring societies. The Han Chinese are a great example of this phenomenon. The Huaxia ethnic group is believed to be the ancestors of the Han, who formed into a tribe and slowly dominated the neighboring tribes. They moved north and south, eventually occupying most of what we think of as China today. Put another way, a bunch of small tribes combined into one big tribe.
We see a bit of this at the end of our epoch. The great industrial wars of the 20th century made war for territory unacceptable. Borders were drawn and respected. Changes to borders were to be negotiated. Then the idea of eliminating borders entirely became the default position of elites. Europe was to combine into a single political unit. Asia would slowly combine into an economic unit. North America was to be the glue, binding it all together. Human organization would be global and managed.
Just as the Bronze Age empires collapsed with the coming of the great migrations and the Iron Age, our commercial empires are showing signs of stress. That is because of the other great force in human history. Disaggregation is when a large entity breaks into its constituent parts. The simplest example is a big company splitting into a bunch of specialized little companies. Men have gotten extraordinarily rich figuring out how to break apart large companies into many smaller, more valuable little companies.
In history, the most obvious example is the Roman Empire. The Romans managed to stitch together people from the Levant to Britain, but the cost of holding it together exhausted them and it broke apart into more logical units. First the Britons, then the various German tribes broke free of Rome. Eventually, the Western Empire collapsed into its tribal parts. Even the Italian peninsular broke into its parts. The end of the Western Roman Empire was also the end of a great historic epoch.
Today, the signs of disaggregation are appearing in all over Europe. The Catalonian revolt is one good example. It has deep historic roots, going back to the Roman Empire, but it is boiling over now for a reason. The same is true of the Visegrad Group. There is more history in those lands than the rest of Europe, but that is not why they are in dissent from the rest of Europe. The reason for the break ups is that the underlying logic of these great combinations no longer makes any sense. The EU is a solution to a problem of the past.
From the Enlightenment through the end of the Cold War, the great debates were about how whites would deal with whites. How would whites organize their lands politically? How would whites describe and maintain borders between groups of whites? How would whites manage commerce in their own lands and between other groups of whites? These were the great questions. The answer was social democracy, separate borders for separate peoples and regulated markets for goods and services.
The end of an historical epoch is not just when the great questions of that epoch are answered. The end comes when new questions arise that the old answers cannot address. The EU is proving to be less than worthless in the face of mass migration from the south. The Yankee Imperium over America has no answers for the demographic challenges facing the white population. It is why the arrangements of the old era are showing stress and beginning to break.
In the European world, large countries and supra-national organizations are solutions to past problems. The new problems, like how Europe will deal with four billion Africans to their south, demand new solutions. If the current social arrangements do not address the coming problems, then those arrangement will fall apart and be replaced by new ones. That first means tearing down the old arrangements to make way for the new. The era of disaggregation will be about the old organization units breaking into their parts.
Have you noticed how the elites aren’t troubled by autonomy movements in places like Catalonia or Scotland? It makes sense; Catalonia and Scotland don’t challenge the imperium; they make it stronger. On the other hand, ‘Spain’ and ‘Britain’ are stubborn reminders that Europe was once a continent of nations. So, ‘Brexit’ is a crime against modern thought, yet ‘devolution’ within traditional European states is ‘progress’.
If Karmic Justice actually existed, Fukuyama’s book would have been entitled, “The End of my Career”.
So the EU wont survive then 😉 gee who knew …
Ps please write about your take on Las Vegas, I would like to hear your thoughts.
the larger the voting district size, the voters are less able to unite against business/govt/media…and thus the less control they have, and the more control to business/govt/media…
james madison was actually the first come to fully describe this elite plan…he called it a divide et impera strategy…
divide by enlarging voting districts so that the people could not unite against business/govt/media…the greater the number of distinctions/divisions in any district, the less unified. These distinctions/differences might be anything–geography, language, race etc
Isn’t the Catalonian revolt a question of how whites would deal with whites, borders between whites, etc.?
On the other hand, it is more likely than not that our particular point in time and history is of no particular significance. No disaggregation. No turning points. No end of an epoch. One day at a time. My dogs seem to like it that way, and they always seem happy.
July 16, 1969, 6:32 AM was the beginning of history. everything before that was prehistoric.
The best times in history for dirt people are called dark ages by the cloudsters.
I think the best times for the dirtsters was between the discovery of the Americas and the closing of the western frontier.
Nothing was better than being able to pack up our stuff and leave whenever the local cloud people got too annoying.
The title End of History gave me a laugh back in the day also. But I never laughed at the pseudo-philosophic mind which would produce and embrace both the fatuous term, Post-Modern, and the evil, Decontruction. These minds, which are so little motivated to honestly sort out the past, are left nostalgic for the future.
What does ‘nostalgic for the future’ actually mean? Nostalgia for an era in which we believed we had one?
I love these “big picture” posts, and would hope that at some point you’ll follow it up with a “what comes next” post. Yes, as Yogi Berra would say, predicting is hard, especially about the future, but it’s a conversation starter if nothing else.
My $2 bet of what the world will look like in 50 years, is a competing set of networked city-states, a little something like a modern version of the Hanseatic League. And I imagine those massive cities won’t be terribly fun places to live unless you’ve in the top one percent or so.
Z: Care to explain Carpatho-Ruthenian separatist?
disaggregation will help with the lack of trust discussed recently. might even set a ceiling on how large a polity is sustainable in the face of massive disinformation efforts.
For a small scale example of this in the United States, see the case of Gardendale, AL:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/judge-lets-white-alabama-town-secede-school-district-despite-race-n752581
“The end of an historical epoch is not just when the great questions of that epoch are answered. The end comes when new questions arise that the old answers cannot address.”
Its not just a matter of questions; its that there isn’t enough money to paper over the complaints anymore either. Mass non-western immigration didn’t start in 2001 and the necessity to deal with it didn’t start in 2011; the problem was around much longer but times were good and money papered over the situation. Now however, the money is in shorter supply and the cracks have become more obvious because of it.
“The EU is proving to be less than worthless in the face of mass migration from the south.”
The EU elites got too full of themselves probably because there was nothing at stake in doing so; the EU as a Franco-German economic union with Britain and a few other west European states associating with it could have gone on if not forever than at least for most of a century. The EU as a “United States of Europe” was always going to be dead in the water once the nations outside the core couldn’t make money from it anymore.
As for the African tidal wave, the problem is that the elite aren’t feeling the effects of whats happening. They hear grumbling but life is pretty much unchanged for them; there aren’t any migrants swarming into Davos and if there are any non-Germans living near Angela Merkel, they are probably very upper “middle” class. (The King of the Hill episode “Bill’s House” http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5vc51c was a good example of this – the SJW who dumped all the alcoholics at Bill’s house while lauding the “diversity” of his gated community. And the solution to the problem of the all the elites is probably similar; dump the problem literally next door to them and mysteriously a solution will be found…)
“The Yankee Imperium over America has no answers for the demographic challenges facing the white population.”
I wouldn’t count Yankeedom down yet; if I had to bet, I’d say that a lot of the solution to the demographic issue is going to be a change in bureaucratic definitions; we’re already half-way there in that we now have a “white hispanic” category. All you need is a cut in the flow of money that makes being non-white over white so profitable and then you just drop the second part of the category. Suddenly Rodriguez is as Apple pie as Smith, Jones, O’Mally, Goldberg, and Russo. Is it a perfect solution? No. Does it still leave us with a lot of problems? Yes. But there are a lot of lies that make up the bedrock of a society.
” And the solution to the problem of the all the elites is probably similar; dump the problem literally next door to them and mysteriously a solution will be found…)”
This seems difficult to arrange.
A good example would be to force the owners of private jets to go through the same security routine as the rest of us before boarding their flying villas. I can assure you a completely different vetting process would ensue.
The question is how to bring this about. The people you are talking about are influential. Influential people get their way. That’s why we call them influential.
As I’ve said before, Trump should slap a bunch of Somali’s in Section Eight housing in Santa Monica and Chapaqua. (sp?)
Evert Western Country should afford Immigrants and “Refugees” exactly the same benefits they would be entitled to in their native countries.
Our interconnected culture is wired for aggregation, not disaggregation. Many, if not most, of our institutions survive only if they continuously grow and expand. A simple incremental drop in revenues or membership can send most institutions into tailspins.
Disaggregation ain’t gonna be pretty.
I certainly hope you are correct. Most of us are getting sick of the current paradigm – politically and culturally – and would like to see some different options.
Without any outside source of competition or threat to focus everyone on fighting that enemy, a structure is only as strong as the weakest members.
The Progressive/Communist cancer is built upon convincing the people there is no real outside threat, and pushing weakest to demand more and more from the strongest, bringing everything to a ‘level playing field’ overseen and managed by the enlightened elite Progs/Commies.
The fatal flaw in this theory is that people who won’t work for their daily ration multiply and find converts must more easily than those who will work to feed those outside of their family. Even charities are built upon the work of people who are willing to hand out food for the emotional reward, not people willing to grow food and watch others get the accolades. That’s why food banks get food from consumer donations, not the overstock from the packing companies or giant farming conglomerates.
This flaw is why all Prog/Commie systems fail, and the systems they design break apart. The breakup of a larger unit into smaller is essentially the same process as removing a tumor, some of which that have grown larger than the body itself. The EU is just such a tumor, as is Spain to the Catalans, and if things kept going as they had under Obama, America to the white population.
The tumors know they can’t survive without the hosts, so they fight back using all the weapons they can, but they can’t replace the host, so their options are limited at best. The host has a lot of ways to deal with it’s tumors, the best being those done early. The most effective way to fight a tumor isn’t though submission, but eradicating it from the body.
There is a lesson here: For all those here and elsewhere looking to seize power to use against the other tribes, you are creating forever conflict that will destroy both sides in time. The better strategy is to get the tumor off the body – no more ethnic advantages for government services. Fight for the right to free association. No more special protections for subgroups and deviants.
The leeches will then turn on the productive in their own tribes, which will hurt them in ways they never noticed/acknowledged when the pain was shared among the entire population. Let them decide whether to eradicate or support their parasites – or, more plainly put, survival or suicide.
You greatly underestimate the seriousness of our problem.
We don’t just have a tumor. We have a tumor that has the ability to stop the host from fighting it off.
It tells us that tumors are no different than your own flesh.
It tells us that fighting off parasites & tumors is discrimination, and that discrimination is the single greatest sin on earth.
It reacts to efforts to even understand our predicament with painful attacks of every kind it can launch.
Not only has this tumor been successful, it has won the loyalty of a significant portion of our own flesh, that assists it in all these efforts.
Getting rid of this tumor is going to require some strong chemo indeed. We are going to lose a lot of our own flesh getting it out. And it’s gonna hurt.
Long overdue. Europeans haven’t culled their weak since the Black Plague.
well, there was the 30 years war, and that nasty business in Poland during WWII.
When a surgeon removes a malignancy, he removes sufficient “healthy” flesh to assure the margins are clear. And yes, that smarts when the anesthesia wears off.
The progressive/communist cancer is based on people thinking that the world is made up of free shit. That’s my probably overly simplistic take in a nutshell.
You can get all intellectual and/or religious in the analysis and talk about how progressivism is a religion and that’s why they attack the “rich” with such ferocity because they feel God’s bounty is being stolen from them or whatever – but at the core of it IMHO is just basic human laziness and ego/greed which leads them to believe that they are somehow owed sustenance in this life.
A lot of “conservatives” take an entirely different view of the world in that they believe that you have nothing without work. There is NOTHING in this world that is “free” except for maybe the air you breathe. Literally everything else must be paid for in some form or fashion.
My experience with progressive lefties has led me to this conclusion because there is a common strain among all of them in that they are perpetually offended that somebody has taken something from them – even when it’s plainly obvious that the person they’re offended by has worked their ass off to get what they have.
My take on the current civilization / societal structure we live under – is that it’s a very sophisticated and complicated mechanism to redistribute the wealth that arises from actual work. It has enabled an awful lot of people to become disconnected from actual work – and has therefore subsidized the progressive disconnection from reality.
I’ve read before that before the Industrial Revolution – something like 70% of people lived and worked on farms. What that means is a very high percentage of the population had a DIRECT connection to the work/reward cycle. They also knew that no matter how much they work – sometimes it results in nothing (crop failure). Maybe the human mind is build for that kind of environment. Removing a direct work to reward connection leads a good many people into a mental realm they are simply not equipped to handle.
Our current progressive overlords have done something that did not exist even back in the days of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. They have built an empire based on supporting those who do NOTHING of any real value. And they force those who do create value – to support them.
In the days gone past of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany – being truly useless would get you a bullet to the back of the head. At least they recognized that one basic truth that you can’t have a successful society when everybody is on the dole. We can’t even seem to get that one correct.
If there’s one thing I would hope for when the current paradigm implodes is that whatever rises up in it’s place recognizes that ” no workee equals no eatee”
In the USSR, being called a parasite was the highest “official” opprobrium.
The only difference I would have with your take is the motivation of the Progs/Commies. In my view it is envy that drives them, which is why when they get power, they don’t just command people, they attempt to humiliate and destroy them, as would anything that is ugly do to all that is beautiful.
The followers are primarily combine laziness and enviousness – envying the successful and hardworking enough to support those who seek to destroy them, because they are unwilling to muster the energy and effort to join them.
I’ve some background studying African and Hispanic culture and history, and it is the ever-present and unyielding combination of envy and sloth that holds those nations back, and forms the basis of the corruption therein.
I won’t judge an individual based on his heritage, but there are unifying characteristics to areas with high crime, corruption, and economies that just can’t seem to get off the ground – major problems arise in the nations where socialism and darker hues combine.
And it is not hard to see the cultural/ethnic similarities between the troubles there and the troubles in every major ghetto.
I would expect to see “The Gods of the Copy Book Headings” come into play – http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_copybook.htm
There won’t be 4 billion Africans if the West stops propping them up with imported medicine, infrastructure and money. I suspect the carrying capacity of the continent with its own native cultures dominant is WELL under a million people. When the West started the Scramble for Africa, the estimated population of the continent was only about 100 million.
Sorry; meant under a billion, not under a million.
I’ve always wondered about this. It seems obvious that the limiting factor for big empires was communication speed — by the time the Emperor heard about it, the barbarians were 200 miles past the Rhine, and by the time the legions got there… Modern communcation, though, is effectively instantaneous, and you can spin up an airstrike on the barbarians in a few minutes-to-hours. Not to mention 24 hour drone and satellite surveillance… I’m not so sure we won’t still go all-in on super-aggregation.
There’s a tension building in human affairs right now specifically because of our unprecedented ability to communicate. The net can bring people together in a way never before possible thanks to this instantaneous borderless medium, and the result is a more thorough disaggregation than ever could be achieved based solely on borders. How many of you spend much (any?) time perusing far-left websites? Yeah, me neither. But we live within the same borders as many of these people.
Is the future going to be micro-tribes that are based on the ability to communicate with far-flung members who agree within a very narrow range on issues? What of the larger fixed-border entities these tribal members live in? Will they have any allegiance to them at all? That doesn’t sound very stable to me.
you don’t have to read left wing sites because they are all the same. i see article titles at drude and lucianne and i know all i need to know about what the hive is up to.
Better communications seem to solidify central power when they are controllable from the top, the (state-backed clergy, television, or radio.) They encourage decentralization when they tend to circumvent central control of information (printing press, bibles translated into local languages, the internet.)
it’s all to do with the cost of administering a larger vs smaller entity. administrative costs go up exponentially as the entity size increases linearly. eventually 100% of GDP goes to administrative costs (at which point there is nothing left to administer). would not surprise me to learn that early rome had a more efficient government than ours is now.
The limiting factor for all Empires, of any size, is energy flows. In the beginning of an Empire expansion brings in new wealth, new sources of energy (from slaves for Rome to soil for America to oil for the world now), but adding and maintaining an Empire takes up energy itself. Those maintenance costs add up, first stalling and then later collapsing the Empire.
One of the other things about energy levels is that, the more one has, the more complexity it brings. This was actually one of the saving graces of the Roman Empire: a great Empire they were, but their energy sources were slaves and animals, which meant that although it might have taken a week to hear about barbarians and a month to put them down, the Romans could rebuild their forts rather easily, only bankrupting themselves slowly. Contrast that with our drones and air strikes, and realize that however many pilots we have, a single break in the supply chain for everything from fuel to bombs to microchips means those planes don’t fly.
This blessing/curse of complexity is why the collapse of the Roman Epoch took three centuries, while ours will likely take only one.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics applies.
There must be many more disordered states for a system than there are ordered states; therefore random interactions will inevitably lead to greater disorder.
It’s always been fascinating to me how little the social sciences look to the laws which govern the universe as a means to understand history.
We tend to get large bodies, complex organization in nature when that configuration conserves energy. An elephant is far more efficient than an equivalent mass of bacteria. Kind of like lighting up a block of wood vs. wood dust.
Actually, an elephant is an incredibly inefficient use of mass and energy resources. Bacteria are why you exist on this planet at all today, and why the planet looks the way it does. You have more bacteria in and on your body than human tissue cells. It’s almost a certainty that the first “life” we find off-planet will be bacteria. They are the most successful life form on the planet, and likely the most successful organisms in the known universe.
Elephants are allowed to exist…to achieve large scale order from disorder…because of bacteria. But the Elephant will eventually die, and release into the universe disorder (through decomposition).
Elephants, like countries, fight a losing battle against the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Elephant packs will make a five mile detour to avoid walking over a hill. Energetically speaking they’re making the right call.
The animal kingdom is not animals, it’s fungal/bacterial/animal superorganisms. Your gut bacteria is as much you as your lung cells, and none of the cells have any shot at life outside the greater context. Everything evolved to this state together.
This human host bacteria is known as the microbiome and it co-evolved with us symbiotically. It is our fist line of defense against disease and other forms of harm that may befall us. It also can adapt more quickly than us to deleterious environmental changes and thereby help us better survive these episodes. Microbiome inoculation occurs via mother-to-child transfer when passing through the birth canal. Modern humans have a relatively small array of bacteria, whereas the ancients had a much larger and more robust bacteria army to protect them.
way to stay on topic dr doolittle
Who are you, the comment-box Church Lady? Geez, lighten up.
I was taught that God created man but others believe that bacteria created man (Steven Gould)
It is always fun to ask the acolyte of the false faith of Darwinism what accounts for its incessant use of teleology.
I think it is because one does not wish to live a life devoid of meaning which one is if one is an acolyte of Darwin’s false faith
Haven’t you ever seen War of the Worlds??? lol, lighten up Francis.
Besides, if I were creating the Universe, I too would start small and scale up.
Why would materials fight to order themselves against a fundamentally hostile universe? I am not versed in physics but I would guess that you get a planet or an elephant because it is in some way a path of least resistance under local circumstances, even if we are ultimately slated for heat death of the universe. Otherwise, we begin to appeal to supernatural causes.
In the case of the elephant, I assume there’s a reason matter “likes” to be like that. It would seem reasonable organized, specialized multicellular living things are in a lower energy state than an e. coli slime of equal mass. Kind of like a functional society is way more efficient and effective than millions of random individuals.
In numbers, but not biomass. Bacteria are very small compared our cells.
Which tells you that biomass is not a great survival plan in the long run. Kinda like the EU. And dinosaurs.
A highly nimble and adaptive collection of individuals acting in their own self interests…survives.
‘The great industrial wars of the 20th century made war for territory unacceptable’
And both Islam and La Raza have determined that taking a long-view and obtaining new lands by migration is a less bloody alternative. but they do still desire to expand beyond their current domains,
As a citizen of Oceania I vehemently disapprove of this article.