Strenuous attempts to resist the tide of history—its repetitive waves and cycles—reflect perhaps the greatest human intellectual disease. It is a human frailty, a blind spot that has been the byproduct of widespread urbanization and materialism.
It is based on fear of the unknown and a reluctance to surrender the protection of the crowd. In its most advanced form, it presupposes that humankind has finally triumphed completely over nature—that nature no longer matters. In reality, human understanding of much of nature has decreased in almost inverse correlation to the ability of advancing science to name so many components of the biological and inorganic aspects of the world.
We know so much yet understand so little.
That is not to say that there have been no advances in the study of humankind’s behavioral patterns in relation to their geography and nature. Instead, we see how little this learning has seeped into the accretion of societal wisdom. We benefit from many tangible aspects of human tool-building, evolving from one generation to the next since prehistory. Still, it seems as though there has been a pause in the widespread accretion of wisdom within individuals or groups.
Before the world achieved nominal universal literacy, we know that history and wisdom were passed through oral traditions, often with the repetition and recitation of folklore and sagas. It could be argued that there was greater cohesion of societal understandings of the historical and geopolitical context in that age—before Johannes Gutenberg popularized mass printing—than there is today. Our present understanding that knowledge exists in modern repositories—libraries, databases, and the like—does not translate into the actual use of these intellectual tools. Neither has this knowledge become innate to most individuals in modern society.
Supposed universality in literacy and education and the availability of technologies that have taken millennia to evolve seem only to have resulted in societies that are further removed than ever from the capacity to produce individual senses of responsibility and comprehension or even the ability of most individuals to fend for their own and their family’s survival through personal initiative or learned problem-solving skills.
The greater the concentration of human societies—through urbanization or technology—the greater the decline in individual wisdom and leadership, largely through the suppression of initiative and the need for individual responsibility. It is as though, in a crowd, each person’s gaze is downward, unable to rise above the masses to see the horizons of the past and the future.
Is it any wonder, then, that few look into the future with a comprehension of the past—particularly the unplanned chaos of the past—so that a sound perspective of the future can be gained? “The future,” in modern parlance, is merely a linear extrapolation of what we have seen surrounding us.
Tomorrow will be like today—only better.
And yet history shows that there is no “linear” path in history. It is always a pattern of growth, success, failure, and chaos, awaiting the time when new phases can be crafted.
So if we take this view of the future as a reflection of the waves and cycles of the past, then we have to be able to recognize when civilizations or social or economic cycles are becoming exhausted and are ending. Then we see how new possibilities are opening, regardless of the innate desire to cling to the familiar patterns with which we have become comfortable. By taking this alternate view, which is possible only by standing apart from “the crowd,” we begin to see the lack of logic or survivability of the present paths of those in control of large areas of governance.
One of the recurring cycles of human society is the dominance at certain times of groups who place more reliance on what is said than on what is done. Words and thoughts—and resultant imagery or signaling—have civilization-shattering consequences, of course, sometimes more than conscious physical acts. We are now in an era in which globalized totalitarianism is about words rather than constructive deeds. The regrowth of this kind of totalitarianism—the “revolutionary globalist messianism” that saw its flowering in the 20th century—has created a responsive reawakening of reactive nationalism attempting to stand its ground anchored in geographic and geopolitical realities.
One is a world entirely made up of abstract psychological messaging; the other is a world of tangible and proven elements of survival. The psychologically dominant (or dominated) crowd, however, ultimately depends on the products of the physically grounded crowd. Thus, the competition between these mutually hostile crowds cannot long endure. And yet this is the war in which the world is now engaged, without looking into the long-term inevitability of it failing to reach a satisfactory conclusion for either the urban-based totalitarian globalism or the geographically based (and often also ethnically, religiously, legally, or linguistically based) nationalism.
In such a conflict, societies become shorter and shorter in their vision, seeking reactive improvements in technology, doctrine, or skills to win what will be seen as merely tactical engagements in the hindsight of history.
Does chance alone, then, determine who will eventually control the strategic terrain? Or is there scope for a broader comprehension of the grand strategic sweep of history and tolerance to challenge the death march of conformity?
