This is the first in a series of articles outlining where we are in the context of historical cycles spanning centuries, even millennia. The objective is an introduction to the work of German historian Oswald Spengler a century ago. Spengler was deeply influenced by Freidrich Nitzsche, whose concepts will be examined first. The table below summarizes Spengler’s thesis as applied to our vibrant, emergent civilization. A civilization with its best days ahead, unlike the pessimistic belief of so many. The bottom row briefly outlines the corresponding Roman eras, the civilization for which we possess the most detailed record.
Briefly, Spengler held that all civilizations evolve in the same sequence of stages. Just as humans experience infancy, adolescence, maturity, and senescence. The Trump figure appears in every civlization, in Rome as Augustus, or in China as Shih Huang-ti, the first emperors of their nation’s respective imperial eras. The stages in the graphic below will become clear as this story unfolds.
If journalists write history’s first draft, their efforts demand extensive revision to account for both new information and the consequences of events as they emerge. Trends only come into view over a much longer term. What seemed important at first often matters less than other things that bring larger patterns into focus.
Said differently, current events are the static, scratches in the vinyl LP record of history. We are focused here on the melody, the longer-term movements which impart meaning and context to the news events of the day. With an accumulation of data, patterns can then be discerned. JFK’s murder was one data point. RFK’s murder was another. Then there was the coup which dispatched Nixon to the wilderness, or more recently, the 2020 election theft targeting Trump.
The historical import of this one example of a series of data points serves to highlight the question of the nature of the forces controlling events, their origin and duration. Taken separately, these events lack meaning. Considered as parts of a whole, it becomes apparent hidden forces direct events and control who is permitted as the front person heading the U.S. government. Is the president in charge or merely the public face of a hidden network? The answer is obvious. The question then turns to the nature of the faction controlling the government. None of this should surprise readers.
We are at the cusp of finally overthrowing oligarchic contol and returning power to the masses, reversing a century-and-a-half of increasing plutocracy.
Once answers to such questions appear, attention turns to previous civilizations and the question of whether similar things previously occurred. If the answer is positive, then context and meaning can finally be achieved. It eventually becomes apparent the overall pattern has repeated numerous times across various civilizations. We are witnessing a power shift from the few to the masses. This same power shift occurs in every civilization at the same point in its evolution.
People spend too much time on the last 24 hours and not enough time on the last 6,000 years. — Will Durant
HISTORICAL OBJECTIVITY
The analysis below is neither subjectively optimistic or pessimistic. It is objectively based on recognition of long-term historical cycles. By definition, when cycles turn and reverse direction (whether political, economic, or societal cycles), the great majority will be wrong. The greater the magnitude of the coming change, the greater the bias in favor of conditions continuing in the current direction. The majority are always wrong at turning points. Financial traders completely understand this. In auction markets, price trends in one direction until volume dries up. Only when the last buyer has bought, or the last seller has sold, is price able to reverse course. In economics, politics, and history, few are able to see around the corner to visualize what comes next. The greater the impending shift, the fewer will see it coming because they are peering into the rearview mirror.
The majority, wedded to the immediate past, can not foresee the major events about to unfold.
What comes next is straightforward:
Trump hits the ground running and amputates much of the federal bureaucracy. Some of this can be done by simply moving various federal headquarters to distant states. Rather than relocate out of Washington D.C., many will elect to resign or retire. We are probably talking between 30% and 75% of the bureaucracy being erased. At Trump’s October 27 Madison Square Garden rally, Musk said he could cut at least $2 trillion from the $6.5 trillion budget, a 30% cut. That would be a good start, but far more needs to be slashed. A cut of that magnitude would only eliminate the deficit, but do nothing about the impossible debt burden. Nor address the drag such a massive federal workforce has on the economy.
The intelligence community, increasingly weaponized inward over recent decades — contradicting its mission to face outward — will be redirected to its original purpose. It is unclear if criminal prosecutions will be utilized as part of this process.
Identical to what Augustus accomplished, the legislature will be neutered while retaining its constitutional facade. It will become nothing more than a rubber stamp for legislation authored by the executive branch, rather than by lobbyists as is currently done. Roman senators were reduced to jockeying to sit closest to Augustus at dinners. Trump’s blessing is now all any politician requires to retain their seat. Legislators who step out of line will get the Liz Cheney treatment and be made examples of. Trump will focus the spotlight on them and their careers will be terminated at the polls. The rest will clue in fast. He has made this abundantly clear.
The days of the income tax are numbered. There is nothing which so thoroughly discourages economic activity, while simultaneously imposing huge compliance burdens, as the income tax. Whether through a sales tax and/or tariffs, it has to go.
Mass deportations goes without saying. There are so many tens of millions of illegal immigrants that some formula will need to be developed to allow many to remain. Otherwise, the sudden shock to the economy would be too great. During the entire Obama years, we heard incessant repetition of an 11 or 12 million figure, which supposedly remained static for 8 years. As Trump recently stated, nobody has any idea of the true number. After 12 years of Obama/Biden, it’s a lot. With more massing at the border waiting to flood in after the election.
Credit is contracting. This will accelerate and not end until all the excess debt (federal, state, municipal, corporate, and private) is wrung from the economy. It won’t be pretty. This is a global phenomenon. Similar to WWII, America will emerge from this crisis as the global superpower. Regime change in nations such as China and Iran will occur organically as part of this process.
Socialism/communism can not exist without debt. Nations now flirting with socialism/communism (Brazil, Venezuela, Britain, China, etc.) will witness populist uprisings, just as America has. We will witness wholesale bank failures, unemployment, etc. Trump will determine political solutions. Price deflation will be profound, reversing much of a century’s worth of inflation.
The globe will witness a substantial peace dividend as nations are unable to continue funding belligerence. North Korea was a trial run for the Trump 47 agenda.
The oligarchs will be accommodated under Trump’s scheme. Augustus and his advisors realized they will always be present, the question is how to reign in their selfish inclinations to prevent them from becoming counter productive to the population as a whole. This year has witnessed Silicon Valley tech billionaires, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Musk all either wholeheartedly deserting to the Trump camp, or dropping their active opposition to him. USA Today and the Washington Post are sitting out presidential endorsements. These shifting alliances were predictable manifestations of how civil wars end. It is not 2020 when Facebook was actively censoring MAGArians and $400 million of Zuckerberg cash opposed Trump; or Twitter was under Deep State control. 2024 was the year Trump managed to bring many of the most consequential oligarchs into his orbit.
THE FUTURE IS KNOWABLE
The focus of this essay is to introduce the work of the German historian Oswald Spengler from a century ago, published in the wake of what was then known as the Great War. WWI traumatized Europe and triggered a search for meaning, an effort to place traumatic current events into a coherent framework. Spengler published two volumes, totalling 1,000 pages, to lay out his thesis. Will Durant, history’s best-selling historian, described Spengler as “the greatest German thinker of the 20th Century.” The Irish poet W.B. Yeats, Nobel laureate in literature, was another serious student of history and a Spengler contemporary. Both subscribed to a cyclical, or circular interpretation of the historical record. The notion that history can be broken down into discrete civilizations which come and go, as opposed to the Ancient — Medieval — Modern linear progression commonly taught. The latter includes a eurocentric conceit: first came the Greeks (sometimes Egyptians), followed by Romans, Europeans, and Americans. The story of civilizations goes back far further in time and geographic extent.
The tragedy of WWI (originally known as the Great War) triggered a widespread search for meaning. By the end of WWII, most were too weary of efforts at total annihilation and longed instead only to forget and move on. Writing in 1919, in the WWI aftermath, Yeats produced his The Second Coming, which includes the following profound six lines:
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The previous year, Spengler released his first volume, months before Germany’s surrender. His second and final volume appeared in 1922. The English translations did not become available until 1926 and 1928, respectively. As soon as the first English version became available, Yeats acquired a copy and excitedly wrote a friend in 1926:
Here is a very strange thing which will show you what I meant when I wrote of individual men not being shut up in a bottle. I published a few weeks ago a book called A Vision. In that there is a summing up of European history which I divide into certain epochs. I have just got Spengler's Decline of the West. I was writing my notes and drawing my historical figures in Galway while his first edition was passing through the press in Germany. I have never heard his name and yet the epochs are the same, the dates are the same, the theory is the same.
Yeats was a mystic and heavily influenced by esoterica, yet also a devoted scholar consumed with the search for historical comprehension. Durant was not only the most eloquent of historians, but perhaps the most perceptive. Both agreed Spengler stood above all others who had attempted to elicit History’s underlying patterns.
The essential point is that the future is knowable. Not in its minutiae, but in its broad outlines. Civilizations organically evolve in the various human societies. Their histories unfold in a predictable, repetitive sequence of events.
The current crisis will resolve. America will emerge revitalized and go on to oversee a global epoch of peace and prosperity lasting two or more centuries before terminal decline begins to set in. The current chaos is entirely normal in all civilizations at this phase of the historical cycle. Indeed, it usually manifests in a far bloodier and chaotic manner than today. To enable the conditions necessary to produce the coming constitutional reformation, it is first necessary for us to experience hell. Unless the social fabric is torn, there is no impetus for reform.
Most of the political hell has passed. We are concluding the interval Durant described as “the odor of a dying democracy.” Below is his relation of the comparable period in Rome, over two millennia ago.
While the potential dictators maneuvered for position, the capital filled with the odor of a dying democracy. Verdicts, offices, provinces, and client kings were sold to the highest bidders. In the year 53 [BC] the first voting division in the Assembly was paid 10,000,000 sesterces for its vote. When money failed, murder was available; or a man’s past was raked over, and blackmail brought him to terms. Crime flourished in the city, brigandage in the country; no police force existed to control it. Rich men hired bands of gladiators to protect them, or to support them in the comitia. [lower house of the legislature] The lowest elements in Italy were attracted to Rome by the smell of money or the gift of corn, and made the meetings of the Assembly a desecration. Any man who would vote as paid was admitted to the rolls, whether citizen or not; sometimes only a minority of those who cast ballots were entitled to vote. The privilege of addressing the Assembly had on several occasions to be won by storming the rostrum and holding it by main force. Legislation came to be determined by the fluctuating superiority of rival gangs; those who voted the wrong way were, now and then, beaten to within an inch of their lives, after which their houses were set afire. Following one such meeting Cicero wrote: “The Tiber was full of the corpses of citizens, the public sewers were stuffed with them, and slaves had to mop up with sponges the blood that streamed from the Forum.”
Clodius and Milo were Rome’s most distinguished experts in this brand of parliament. They organized rival bands of ruffians for political purposes, and hardly a day passed without some test of their strength. One day Clodius assaulted Cicero in the street; another day his warriors burned down Milo’s house; at last Clodius himself was caught by Milo’s gang and killed. The proletariat, not privy to all his plots, honored Clodius as a martyr, gave him a mighty funeral, carried the body to the senate house, and burned the building over him as his funeral pyre. Pompey brought in his soldiers and dispersed the mob. As reward he asked from the Senate, and received appointment as “consul without colleague,” a phrase that Cato recommended as more pleasant than “dictator.” Pompey then put through the Assembly — cowed by his troops — several measures aimed at political corruption, and another repealing the right (which his bill of 55 [BC] had granted to Caesar) to stand for the consulate while absent from Rome. He impartially supervised, with military force, the operation of the courts; Milo was tried for the murder of Clodius, was condemned despite Cicero’s defense, and fled to Marseilles. Cicero went off to govern Cilicia, and acquitted himself there with a degree of competence and integrity which surprised and offended his friends. All the elements.of wealth and order in the capital resigned themselves to the dictatorship of Pompey, while the poorer classes hopefully awaited the coming of Caesar. [the Roman analog to Reagan]
A century of revolution had broken down a selfish and narrow aristocracy, but had put no other government in its place. Unemployment, bribery, bread and circuses had corrupted the Assembly [analogous to the House of Representatives] into an ill-informed and passion-ridden mob obviously incapable of ruling itself, much less an empire. Democracy had fallen by Plato’s formula: liberty had become license, and chaos begged an end to liberty. Caesar agreed with Pompey that the Republic was dead; it was now, he said, “a mere name, without body or form;” dictatorship was unavoidable. But he had hoped to establish a leadership that would be progressive, that would not freeze the status quo, but would lessen the abuses, inequities, and destitution which had degraded democracy.
The stench from our democracy’s corpse is now overpowering. It was no more an accident that we have arrived at our current destination than Rome’s democracy degenerated so thoroughly. This is inevitable, the unavoidable conclusion to all democracies. Having studied the Roman experience, America’s founders understood this all too well and designed a system to postpone the inevitable as long as possible. They were under no illusions that what they had created would be immortal.
The American Republic expired at noon on January 20, 2017. We have been in a slowly boiling civil war since Dealey Plaza. Once Trump assumed office, that battle shifted into overdrive. After 8 additional years, that war rapidly nears its conclusion, with the pace of historical events accelerating proportionately.
No one can argue against the fact that our republic is dead. Not when elections are openly and systematically stolen; when borders are thrown open to import fresh voters; when the opposition leader’s security detail is withdrawn to create the conditions for his murder; when wars are instigated for profit and our foreign enemies are funded by politicians on their payrolls; when lawfare is perfected (an art Romans excelled at); the J6 gulag; etc.
American democracy, as is the case in every civilization, has run its course and brought to power the worst among us. It is a historical truism that the democratic interval experienced by every civilization lasts a couple of centuries and concludes with the elevation to power of the most corrupt and incompetent. As Durant noted,
"The basic principle of democracy is freedom inviting chaos; the basic principle of monarchy is power inviting tyranny, revolution, and war."
Thankfully, the American period of chaos is of far lesser magnitude than has normally been the case in other societies.
As we approach the conclusion of the political hell, economic hell is immediately over the horizon: a debt crisis which will usher in widespread bankruptcies and hyperdeflation. This will serve to cleanse the excesses of over a century of hyperinflation. The first victim will be the rotten hulk of the Democratic party. A party predicated on profligate spending and reckless indebtedness. Democrats (and RINOs) bought their way into power. Now that the bills are coming due (in the form of impossible levels of interest payments), their entire edifice is about to crumble. If the civil war had not been resolved soon against Democrats (and their oligarchic patrons), the economic cataclysm would see it through to its conclusion.
THE BIG PICTURE
History is fractal, with longer trends subdividing into ever smaller ones. We will begin at the top, with a trend of roughly 2,000 years. That trend, the story of the rise and decline of the various civilizations, has been reproduced across the breadth of our planet many times over the past 15 millennia since the last glacial maximum. It is often preceded by an interval of around five centuries, when a nascent civilization begins to form. Such preparatory phases are murky and disorganized, leaving little hard evidence behind to allow future detection. Once a society gathers sufficient momentum to eventually produce a full-fledged civilization, then it is off to the races.
The 2,000-year cycle exhibits two distinct subcycles. Approximately a millennium is spent in a cultural era, when the essence of the eventual civilization is worked out. The arts and sciences are all developed, within the framework of a religious weltanschauung unique to that society. Each civilization possesses a distinct soul, its own lens through which everything is perceived. The soul of our civilization was described by Spengler as the will to the infinite. To peer and travel infinitely far into the heavens and to the tallest mountains on earth, the ocean depths, and to go infinitely small to the subatomic level.
The cultural era is a fluid period of innovation and exploration. The civilization era which follows is a rigid recapitulation of styles and problems long before worked out. This becomes increasingly true with each passing decade. This shows up most distinctly in the architecture, particularly the religious architecture, of each civilization. Which is much or all of the extant evidence available to reconstruct many past civilizations.
Below is the schematic of Spengler’s basic paradigm, unaccompanied by any detailed explanation here. Its meaning will emerge over the course of this essay, to be presented in multiple parts. Spengler’s point is that human societies subdivide into discrete civilizations, each with its own “soul.” its unique prism through which it interprets its universe. Each civilization will recapitulate the stages of infancy, adolescence, maturity, senescence, and decline. Our present reality was fully predictable, as is our future destiny.
This blog is titled the Great Class War to reflect America’s status since the JFK assassination when the plutocrats began their overreach and initiated a series of steps culminating in our current mess. Until recent years, this civil war has largely been one-sided, with the Money forces on offense, but without much of a defensive response from the populace. That dichotomy has exponentially flipped in recent years. It is now the Money interests playing defense. Our civil war is accelerating toward its completion.
WHAT IS A CIVILIZATION?
Before proceeding, we must define a civilization. Let’s go back maybe a couple of hundred years, to a time when Ohio marked America’s western frontier. A young boy living in the Ohio of that era, we’ll call him Neil, would tell everyone that one day he was going to ride a rocket ship to the moon. Of course everybody thought Neil was nuts. But suppose 50 people were convinced Neil was on to something, and agreed to assist him in his objective. We would call that a cult. Let’s take this a step further, and consider the situation if 1,000 people subscribed to Neil’s vision. We would call that a movement. If the number increased to 100,000, we might even consider this a religion, and Neil a prophet. But if 200,000,000 people all got together and actually sent a guy named Neil to walk on the moon, while budgeting over 4% of their GDP to do so, that is the sort of insanity only a civilization can pull off. Such accomplishments can only occur when an economic surplus exists, allowing diversion of resources to nonessential pursuits.
The great works of any civilization (typically massive architectural creations) only make sense to those residing in that place and era. There is universal agreement that such efforts must be undertaken. When men first landed on the moon in 1969, everyone thought it was appropriate and logical, and did not question the enormous expenditure required, over 4% of the federal budget. Two centuries earlier it would have been considered nuts. Future peoples are likely to conclude the same.
A civilization can not develop overnight and accomplish such grand insanties, that requires many centuries, usually at least a dozen or more before it has acquired sufficient critical mass and economic surplus to be able to contemplate such extravagances. Along the way, the society will develop from a nomadic, or modest clan structure, and evolve into tribes, feudal holdings, nation states and competing monarchies, and finally a fully-formed civilization of great cities and a sophisticated trade network making it all possible. Once the warfare concludes to determine the ultimate power at the head of the civilization, energy can be directed toward monumental architecture and similar pursuits.
The one constant — from the earliest villages to the great megalopolises — is perpetually increasing urbanization. Once urbanization reaches its zenith, then an unstoppable wave of depopulation ensues, the result of a plummeting birth rate. That phase is well underway, beginning in Europe and with a lag in America. Immigration (a phenomenon appearing simultaneously along the timeline of each civilization) is masking the declining birthrate among the native populaces of Europe and America.
WHERE WE CAME FROM AND WHERE WE ARE HEADED
Essentially no one grasps the historical context of the current American political moment. How we arrived here, what the future holds, or the underlying historical meaning of events flowing before our eyes — none of this is understood. Pessimism abounds as it seems America has approached a point of no return. This failure of understanding vanishes when events roiling the surface of the waters today are examined through a long lens. Rather than focusing on the waves, our attention must be directed to the ocean itself. Yes, the 2024 election is a Big Deal, marking a major turning point in the history of our civilization. No, it is hardly unique. Something similar occurs at the corresponding point in the evolution of all civilizations. The corruption of a small cabal of plutocrats becomes overbearing, triggering a populist revolt to restore balance. How matters reached this point, and what will (and must) follow, are our focus.
Residing as we do at the conclusion of a republic, historical context can be especially murky and difficult to grasp, with hidden forces jockeying for position and manipulating events. America’s republic was a direct rebuke to the monarchical regime which spawned it. Under a monarchy, events are far more straightforward. The monarch controls events and who gets what. Things are never so simple. Palace intrigue, hidden jockeying for the monarch’s favor, rivals vying to dethrone the monarch, contests to succeed the monarch, etc. are scattered across the historical record. In a republic, lacking an individual around whom public life revolves, means various factions battle for power. Sometimes these factions are overt (political parties), sometimes they are covert, operating behind the scenes to control events and wealth. Often it is a combination of the two, with public facing entities controlled by concealed actors. At the conclusion of a republic an oligarchic class consolidates its power and exploits those below it, enriching themselves off the labor of the masses.
To understand our era, how we arrived here and what the future holds, History provides abundant clarity. America has been engaged in a slow motion civil war for decades. It has not been a bloody mess, as has normally been the case when the same struggle manifested in previous civilizations. This war occurs in every civilization once it evolves to the same degree we have now achieved. The war is between two classes: oligarchs vs. everyone else. The triggers for the war occur when the oligarchs become consumed with greed and their lust for total control. Think the avarice of the World Economic Forum, or Bill Gates. Seizing ever greater shares of the pie from the other classes, matters finally reach a breaking point and the masses push back. The oligarchs are eventually defeated after a period of crisis. Welcome to our present.
The oligarchs are in trouble, and the uniparty and its media retainers are doing everything possible to stem the populist tide. They might as well be attempting to block the ocean tides. A populist victory is inevitable. The only question has been when. Why? This is strictly a case of lopsided numbers. There are vastly more with something to gain from overthrowing the current status quo. Hence the extreme gaslighting efforts of late. Attempts to gaslight the public saturate the media we are fed. Fake news abounds.
Civilizations pass through a process of evolution which can be analyzed briefly as follows: each civilization is born in some inexplicable fashion and, after a slow start, enters a period of vigorous expansion, increasing its size and power, both internally and at the expense of its neighbors, until gradually a crisis of organization appears. . . . After[ward] a Golden Age of peace and prosperity [ensues].”
— Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of The World in Our Time. 1966.
Why do these patterns of history repeat? Because human nature remains fixed. War leads to peace when people grow tired of chaos. Poverty leads to the accumulation of wealth in response. Wealth leads to degeneration and dissipation. We are all familiar with families founded by immigrants who came from nothing, spent their lives toiling to create a better future for their children by accumulating wealth, only to see successive generations degenerate into sloth, substance abuse, guilt, self-loathing, depression, etc. It is these sorts of examples of the hardwired patterns of human behavior which, over the course of centuries and combined with masses of individuals, drive History’s repetitive patterns.
Civilizations are fully organic phenomena, experiencing the stages of infancy, adolescence, maturity, senescence, and finally death. Each stage is similar in its broadest outlines to the same era in every other civilization. Where are we now? We are well into the maturity phase of American civilization, far enough along to be experiencing a midlife crisis. This crisis is manifesting as a divorce. The reason for the divorce is one spouse has been abusing the other, creating irreconcilable differences.
Socrates maintained an unexamined life is not worth living. Otherwise we are mere animals. He referred to those focused on piling up wealth, rather than contributing to the common good. His student Aristotle took this a step further and added that a purposeless life is not worth examining because it lacks meaning. Similar observations could be made regarding History and efforts to acquire understanding of how current events relate to the long-term perspective. Without an effort to grasp the essential nature of historical cycles, we are doomed to wander confused through a maze of seemingly random current events. Once understanding is acquired, most events and trends can be placed into context and contribute meaning.
Consider the current phenomena of: attacks on masculinity, whiteness, and christianity; antisemitism; nihilism; or gender confusion, resulting from discontent with one’s birth gender. These are related manifestations of something which could have been anticipated to occur at the current point in our history. Something which has occurred repeatedly across History. Dr. Camille Paglia, who identifies as transgender and has experienced gender dysphoria since childhood, has stated that:
There is something weird about the transgender question. There is something going on that's beyond the very sort of liberation of fluidity. Something else seems to have happened, where many young people in this country now, there's a percentage increase in the number registering for clinical interventions on transgender questions. . . . [Everyone has] to apologize and is kind of ridiculed and shamed [for voicing opposition]. . .
There's something weird about lots of young women wanting to be young men and lots of young men want to be women. . . . I personally believe that anyone who who collaborates in an intrusion into a developing child's body and mind is guilty of child abuse, a crime against humanity. . . . I'm very concerned with this. I think that it's become a fashion. That the transgender definition has become a kind of convenient label for young people who may simply feel alienated, culturally, for many other reasons. So that, in the 1950s, they might have become a beatnik. In the 1960s, they might have become a hippie, and taken mind-expanding drugs. And so, today, you're encouraged to think that your alienation is because you are not totally defined, identifying with your particular inherited gender definition.
I think that [this] has to do with the assault of masculinity. You see transgender doesn't really exist. it's . . . all about expanding women's rights but also terminating men and defining men out of existence. Masculinity is by definition toxic. . . .I explored it in history, but the more I explored it, I realized that historically this movement toward androgyny occurs in late phases of culture as a civilization is starting to unravel. And that you can find it again, and again, and again through history.
In Greek art you can see it happening. All of a sudden the sculptures of handsome nude young men athletes that used to be very robust in the Archaic period suddenly begin to seem like wet noodles toward the end. And that the people who live in such periods of late-phase of culture, whether it's the Hellenistic era, whether it's the Roman Empire, whether it's the decade of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s, whether it's Weimar Germany, people who live at such times feel that they're very sophisticated, they're very cosmopolitan. Homosexuality, heterosexuality, anything goes. But from the perspective of historical distance you can see that it's a culture that no longer believes in itself. And then what you invariably get are people who are convinced of the power of heroic masculinity on the edges [of the civilization], whether they're the Vandals and the Huns, or whether they're the barbarians of Isis. You see them starting to mass on the outsides of the culture. And that's what we have right now, that there is a tremendous and rather terrifying disconnect between the infatuation with the transgender movement in our own culture and what's going on out there.
As a side note to Paglia’s comments above, women’s liberation is a phenomenon repeating at the same stage in every civilization. After decades of struggle, the women’s suffrage movement finally succeeded in enacting the 19th Amendment in 1920. For a half-century, a procedural hurdle has prevented final ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The final phase, when America “no longer believes in itself,” lies centuries in our future. Our current malaise is a temporary affair. Indeed, if the MAGA movement stands for one thing, it is a people who desperately believe in their nation and what it represents. The malaise Paglia documented is that of a late republic as it is about to transition into a young empire. This sickness will eventually return, but not for centuries after the current episode subsides.
Before leaving this thread, it would be a gross omission to fail to include the COVID lockdowns and related insanity among the list of late-stage absurdities. A politically healthy society would never have allowed such transgressions of basic rights and logic. The COVID regime was a symptom of a political infection far more dangerous than any manufactured virus. The great unreported and unnoticed fact is that in the end, the percentage who could still be conned and intimidated into acquiescing to the toxic “vaccines” was in the low single digits. All the people can not be fooled all of the time.
OUR PAST AND FUTURE
It is essential to figure out how we arrived at the present and what the future holds. Not what it might hold, but what must unfold. Because human nature is fixed. If A happens, B must follow. If wars of annihilation and genocide continue intermittently over two centuries, the two subsequent centuries will be peaceful because everyone is tired of the chaos.
In families, it has been said that the children repeat the mistakes of the grandparents’ generation. They do not repeat their parents’ mistakes because the latter are alive long enough to constantly remind them what not to do. In societies, not just families, this pattern also appears, especially in the economic context. Children of the Depression were leary of taking on debt and living large. They lived parsimonious lives. Their descendants have swung toward the opposite pole, creating the conditions for another economic crisis.
The analysis offered here relates to History’s grand cycles extending across many decades and centuries, rather than the static of minor events blurring the larger picture. We will focus on pattern recognition of the principal historical cycles and identify our present location along a 2,000-year continuum of advancement followed by decline. The broad outlines of how a society develops from nothing, becomes something special, then returns to nothing. For the past several millennia there has been no new physical ground on which the various civilizations have manifested. Each has arisen upon territory previously occupied by a predecessor civilization. This is true for both the eastern and western hemispheres, regardless of what eurocentrism might have taught us. Humans have figured out the most hospitable portions of our planet for civilizations to occupy. Climatic changes over this span of time have moved some areas in or out of attractiveness.
The Ancient — Medieval — Modern version of history as it is too often taught, alleges history developed from the Greeks, maybe Egyptians, proceeded through Rome and the Dark Ages experienced after the collapse of its trading networks, then continued through to the present. It is an exercise in ignorance. Ignoring the great civilizations which rose and fell in North America, South America, Asia, Africa, and the Fertile Crescent. It is eurocentric in focusing on just one small portion of the higher civilizations our species developed. It fails to accept the cyclical nature of the various civilizations.
In Part 2 we will explore Nietzshe’s insights and how he foresaw our current chaos as early as 1880. To be continued . . .