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See also Samuel P. Huntington: > American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington

See also Samuel P. Huntington: > American history is driven by periodic moments of moral convulsion. The late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington noticed that these convulsions seem to hit the United States every 60 years or so: the Revolutionary period of the 1760s and ’70s; the Jacksonian uprising of the 1820s and ’30s; the Progressive Era, which began in the 1890s; and the social-protest movements of the 1960s and early ’70s. > These moments share certain features. People feel disgusted by the state of society. Trust in institutions plummets. Moral indignation is widespread. Contempt for established power is intense. > A highly moralistic generation appears on the scene. It uses new modes of communication to seize control of the national conversation. Groups formerly outside of power rise up and take over the system. These are moments of agitation and excitement, frenzy and accusation, mobilization and passion. > In 1981, Huntington predicted that the next moral convulsion would hit America around the second or third decade of the 21st century—that is, right about now. And, of course, he was correct. * https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing-levels-trust-are-devastating-america/616581/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/collapsing... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington

WealthVsSurvive 6y ago
There's a fundamental imbalance in our attempts at using marks, tokens, & bills to simulate resources & desires, and it is thus: the natural world doesn't work this way at all. In the natural world, living things die. Living things die because things never actually stay exactly the same, so nothing goes on forever, and to achieve something like forever, living things copy themselves before they die, bestowing their resources upon this copy. But, in the natural world these resources stop right there and don't compound. Capital, because it exhibits no entropy outside of inflation, does compound and will always send us right back here again to societal collapse in eternal return. Our desire, birthed in hunting & gathering, which was formed to stand in opposition to entropy, like entropy, has no limit. Thus our desires will always lead to excess capital accumulation, until such a time that our tokens and assets can become entropic or until we collapse. The lion will lay with the lamb, or we will be the hand of our own destruction, enabled by technology, or in the language of the Daodejing: "To understand others is to have knowledge; To understand oneself is to be illumined. To conquer others needs strength; To conquer oneself is harder still. To be content with what one has is to be rich. He that works through violence may get his way; But only what stays in its place Can endure. When one dies one is not lost; there is no other longevity."

WealthVsSurvive 6y ago

There's a fundamental imbalance in our attempts at using marks, tokens, & bills to simulate resources & desires, and it is thus: the natural world doesn't work this way at all. In the natural world, living things die. Living things die because things never actually stay exactly the same, so nothing goes on forever, and to achieve something like forever, living things copy themselves before they die, bestowing their resources upon this copy. But, in the natural world these resources stop right there and don't compound. Capital, because it exhibits no entropy outside of inflation, does compound and will always send us right back here again to societal collapse in eternal return. Our desire, birthed in hunting & gathering, which was formed to stand in opposition to entropy, like entropy, has no limit. Thus our desires will always lead to excess capital accumulation, until such a time that our tokens and assets can become entropic or until we collapse. The lion will lay with the lamb, or we will be the hand of our own destruction, enabled by technology, or in the language of the Daodejing: "To understand others is to have knowledge; To understand oneself is to be illumined. To conquer others needs strength; To conquer oneself is harder still. To be content with what one has is to be rich. He that works through violence may get his way; But only what stays in its place Can endure. When one dies one is not lost; there is no other longevity."