[Tanada]

Now that we have been under Democratic leadership for two years where do you think we are today?

Those who study history learn that during the birth, growth, decline and fall of a civilization/culture you go through a series of stages.

The first stage is Bondage and is the most stable for reasons that should be apparent. Those who are keeping others in bondage derive the benefits of the system and seek to keep the bonded downtrodden, ignorant and complacent. At some point the Bondsmen throw off the yoke of their society and become free at which point you have:

Stage two, Liberty! This is when anyone can do anything so long as they don't annoy the neighbors to the point of causing violence. This is a rollicking good time for most people and was epitomized by the 1783-1811 period of American history.

Stage three, Abundance, is a natural outgrowth of Liberty, all those people doing what they want when they want manage to do a lot of things that accumulate wealth, in the process cultural and individual wealth grows rapidly.

Stage four, Greed, is when the culture has shifted a bit and the people then alive see the abundance created by their predecessors and want to do even better for themselves.

Stage five, Complacency, when even the greedy have everything they could possibly want people come to think of a certain high standard of living as being their birthright, they no longer have to strive to achieve instead they have more than the poor of other nations can even imagine having in their wildest dreams.

Stage six, Apathy, this is the stage where the youth in the culture/civilization don't take any interest in anything requiring effort. Everything from education to work ethic declines, the hedonistic philosophy of

Eat Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we die

takes root in the culture. So called Moral Fiber degrades and the culture turns to earthly pleasures to entertain itself above all other goals.

Stage seven, Dependency, this is the point where leaders arise who promise the party will go on forever, as long as you put them in charge. The people in the culture willingly give up the right to think for themselves in return for a complete abdication of personal responsibility.

Stage eight, Bondage, this usually follows quickly after dependency as the powers that be encourage the 'lower class' to just go along and get along, don't worry be happy and let us make all the decisions for you. After a generation or two the bondsmen are now so ignorant they believe that their ancestors were always bondsmen and their decedents will always be bondsmen because it is the

Natural Order

Anyone care to speculate on where Europe and the USA are on this wheel of history?

[Carlhole]

It doesn't help to confuse "aging populations" with "collapsing civilizations".

If aging populations create a something of a vacuum of national vitality, then there is plenty of un-apathetic excess population waiting to fill that void in China and India - and nothing to prevent their immigration.

At this point in the study of civilizations, you have to make the distinction between today's global, interconnected civilization with yesterday's city-state or tribal arrangement. It's a stretch to equate the two. And, even though a good lesson may be learned from Easter Island, it isn't a good comparison to our interconnected, scientifically-advancing, rapidly-evolving, global civilization.

[Rod_Cloutier]

I would suggest, (mostly from personal experience), that your 8th stage of bondage is actually the beginning point of the new order emerging. Yes, I also take your implication that we are in the 8th stage of the return to bondage now.

Bondage in terms of herditary laws we are born into and largely cannot change. Bondage in term of taxation we cannot control; parking fines, photo radar fines, mandatory dog licenses, sales taxes, gas taxes, income taxes, in fact taxes or fines on essentially anything anybody can do or own. Bondage in term of no hope going forward in terms of social mobility or improvement in economic well being.

As far as your second stage 'Liberty' is concerned, that is well on its way. When the social order collapses because of peak oil, peak food, or whatever, lawlessness will rein supreme. 'Lawlessness' could be considered 'liberty' depending on your perspective. I'm sure the British regarded early America as 'lawless' as compared to their regimented straight-jacket social order. Liberty will mean more people can do what they want to do, when they want to do it, with alot less interference from others. A bankrupt establishment can't enforce old laws, can't pay for policing, courts and incarceration, martial law is short term and would lead to revolution. (and chaos).

I recently read 'the Ecotechnic Future' by John Michael Greer, and he described how he thinks a slow collapse will proceed from the present situation to an 'Ecotechnic' society of a few hundred years from now. I'm not entirely on board with his slow collapse scenario, but his ideas on what will follow collapse are excellent:

http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4051

[Carlhole]

I recently read 'the Ecotechnic Future' by John Michael Greer, and he described how he thinks a slow collapse will proceed from the present situation to an 'Ecotechnic' society of a few hundred years from now. I'm not entirely on board with his slow collapse scenario, but his ideas on what will follow collapse are excellent:

http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4051

Oh, it ain't gonna take no "couple of hundred years" to build an ecotechnic society. We will be seeing a strong progression toward this ideal over a few decades.

Sorry to break it to you people, but we are NOT at the End of All Possible Knowledge. There's all sorts of innovation going on towards realizing an ecotechnic society now. You never can tell when some game-changing innovation will be conceived and adopted widely. More likely, more than enough progress will be made through the many of thousands of smaller innovations which routinely occur.

[sparky]

.
Tanada , your eight stages are somewhat subjective ,
Many thinkers have contemplated the growth and decay of societies since antiquity

The ones which seems better to me is that at first an increase in complexity bring real benefit

some people specialize , they do not produce for themselves but provide services for the rest
it could be artisans , warriors ,administrators

the basic producing units ( usually peasants ) gain better protection and services
their contribution is well worth the cost
As societies rise in complexity , this cost advantage decrease while more and more people
are not directly producing but are living off the useful work of their productors
since they control the politics and the ideology they resist any decrease in their share
the producers are squeezed further or marginalized as cheap slaves or destitute migrants

eventually the overhead are too much , the productive base shrink or there is some crisis
the whole edifice collapse or wither
.

[Cloud9]

Actually the great depression generation turned out to be our greatest generation. The children of the 1930’s were the people who saved the world for democracy in the 1940’s. They went on to produce the great prosperity of the fifties and sixties. Their children, the spoiled ones, my generation, the boomers, were the Nihilists.

[Cloud9]

I had the great good fortune to grow up listening to the stories of some of those men and women that went through the depression era and fought WW II. I assure you that there are very few in the current age that have a narrative that can compare with theirs.

[Umber]

Rapidly moving from stage six into stage seven.

Umber

[evilgenius]

I think the mistake a person makes in summing up a society this way is to count all generations as being alike. The multiple generations in today's America are very dissimilar. As a consequence youth have many different choices of shaman to follow. Whoever we are, whichever generation we are in, has a significant effect on how we, therefore, perceive the nature of youth today.

Leaving youth aside, the failures we are experiencing are the fault of those in charge, the generation in charge. Across America the kind of person who realized a long time ago how gullible the rest of those around them were chose to go into religion and politics in huge numbers. As a consequence both the political world and the religious world in America are leaderless in crisis. The paucity is evident in the lack of understanding of many basic things, things that in both politics and religion would have been considered foundational by legitimate leadership and thus continually both taught and practiced. How many churches find themselves under a mantle of love as the guiding principle rather than the love of money? How many people in the general society rail about 'socialism', but haven't got any idea what it is? Does anybody vaguely remember civics from their kindergarten days, maybe from the lessons of how to ride a bike safely thus getting along safely with your fellow bike riders and those driving cars? Crashing into one another in an attempt to get your own is one ignorant way of dealing with the condition of society, dropping any attempt to properly engage and fill your essential part is another.

[Ludi]

If the Greatest Generation were so fabulous, why were they such lousy parents? Why did they have such a high divorce rate? Why did they start two stupid wars (Vietnam & Iraq 1)?

[Tanada]

Actually the great depression generation turned out to be our greatest generation. The children of the 1930’s were the people who saved the world for democracy in the 1940’s. They went on to produce the great prosperity of the fifties and sixties. Their children, the spoiled ones, my generation, the boomers, were the Nihilists.

There was nothing "great" about the people who came of age during the Depression/WWII. They twice had the good fortune to inherit a nation not devastated by war and the all the resources of a brand new continent. Yet they squandered it on the Suburban Experiment, a vast failure of the imagination and those same precious resources. All of us living today acquired our vast store of complacency/smugness from them.

Stage six, Apathy, this is the stage where the youth in the culture/civilization don't take any interest in anything requiring effort. Everything from education to work ethic declines, the hedonistic philosophy of

Eat Drink and be Merry, for tomorrow we die

takes root in the culture. So called Moral Fiber degrades and the culture turns to earthly pleasures to entertain itself above all other goals.

This describes most everyone living in the US today. I suppose it can take several decades or generations (whatever that is) for a stage to play out.

Stages do take a variable amount of time, sometimes historically speaking they have stretched as much as two generations (about 50 years) but sometimes they are also shorter than average. This is all about human nature, not physics.

Just as an aside, while I agree in principal that the Suburban Experiment was a dismal failure please keep in mind for those living through its early stages it was new and exciting and a very hopeful thing, they could not or at least did not foresee all the negative consequences that grew out of it.

[Pops]

As I think about this it seems hard to separate my classification of society as a whole from my current outlook as an individual. Over time my outlook has changed roughly in step with these stages - so I'm perhaps at a stage five.

At any one time, societies are probably made up of people who fall within each of these categories to a greater or lessor extent, As well I don't think these stages can be assigned on the basis of one or two years in policy.

I guess starting sometime back when Clinton was first elected, the idea that stalemate was a viable method of governing has taken hold. The latter stages outlined above, point to leaders hoodwinking the citizens into submission but that isn't what it feels like with congressional approval at 11%, GWBush had 20-something percent in the end, Obama has 52% approval - down from 78%. On the surface this would seem to argue against the later stages where leaders are more and more in control.

But I'll guess "Dependency" anyway. Based on the definition given, "leaders" can be anyone from some blogger to a talking head to a media personality - not necessarily the POTUS. My impression is that people today simply regurgitate, in total, the inputs of whatever interest group most closely taps into their prejudices.

Having said all that I'll just add that since the advent of the debt based economy and especially easy mortgages in the 40s and revolving credit in the 50s we're increasingly all in end-stage bondage.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/141485/Bill- ... Obama.aspx

[Cloud9]

Dr. Spock

[Tanada]

People seem these days to be far more interested in posting snide comments than in giving anything a serious discussion. It is a shame really, kind of lends itself to the Apathy argument.

[Dreamtwister]

I don't think you can encompass the whole of society into the same stage. Certain segments of the population are well into stage 8, while others are still merrily plodding along in stage 2 or 3. You will get vastly different answers depending on where you ask the question. I imagine the ultra-wealthy would say they are in stage 3. Someone approaching retirement (who doesn't have a 15 figure retirement fund) is terrified of the future and feels they are in stage 7. A "student radical" might consider that they are the standard bearer for stage 2, but his burnout best friend laying on his parents' sofa might say stage 6. Ask a black guy and they will probably say stage 1, but an illegal immigrant might say stage 2.

It's not as simple as a number on a chart.

[Roy]

I voted for dependency.

Based on my experience with the gen y's and the millenials while I worked at a major university, what I saw was a lot of apathy as described in the OP.

My generation has many members that still believe in the American dream, and we see our elders, the boomers, living it. Enjoying nice retirements with the money they made in both the stock market and real estate. Problem is, at least with my generation, is that it is much harder to make that kind of money. There is no return on savings, the stock market is down, on a purchasing power basis, from it's all time high in 2000; and it is more like a casino now than a reliable long term investment strategy. Sure the professional day traders can make money, but the average person who just wants to sock away money for the future is losing big time or if lucky staying even. Inflation is eating up surplus income, as well as destroying the value of what has been saved. I look at like this: since 1985, the dollar has declined in value by 50% ( http://www.minneapolisfed.org/index.cfm ). So if the status quo remains in effect, I think it is reasonable to assume that we can expect to see similar devaluation over the next 25 years, at a minimum. Given the baseline scenario, that would mean I would need to save 2 hamburgers today, in order to be able to eat one when I'm 67. That itself is a deliberate policy, and in my view: criminal.

It's a treadmill with no easy way off.

Dependency is taking root, starting from the lower economic strata and working its way up. Things like welfare, food stamps, unemployment compensation, medicare, and yes even government jobs and 'guaranteed' pensions (that's funny). I also see that people over age 50 are being laid off 'preferentially' due to their higher pay and higher health care costs that they represent. The future doesn't look so great from my perspective if it stays on the current track.

More and more people are becoming dependent on the government. Once that number reaches critical mass, we will move into bondage. I don't know when, but I do know that people are very reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them. So, once there are enough dependents on the government, there will be little opposition to the imposition of 'bondage', although I have no idea what form that bondage may take; be it debt based (arguably large numbers of Americans are there already), or political (we have a ways to go yet).

[Subjectivist]

Late stage Seven. At this point we have more laws being enacted in the form of federal regulation than any human can understand or keep up with.