When History Quakes

The world rattles

Did you feel it?

Sorry for the late post, folks. I’m having issues with Substack, Microsoft, Google, and Meta connections over here. Saved by VPN!

Last week, the world ended and a new world arose. There were epicenters all over the place and the foundations of civilization cracked. Hyperbole? Hardly.

Let’s set up one of our Far Side metaphors first. Have you ever had the joy of watching a snake shed its skin? You can tell the time is coming when the skin gets dull looking and rough. It starts by rubbing its nose on a rock or stick until the face slays open like an umbrella in the wind. Over the next day or so, it wriggles and writhes until the old skin slides off in a heap and is abandoned to the past.

A civilization functions in much the same way as a snake shedding. At some point, it becomes dull and rough and colorless. Civilization begins rubbing on rough political, cultural and intellectual hard spots, in this case Woakism, ideological art and academic Divisive Epistemological Implosion (DEI). Soon, the face cracks open and peels away, and the civilization enters a period of wiggling its way out of the old System to reveal bright new colors and room to grow.

Of course, we must look at the situation with an historical view of time. Civilizations are living creatures, and they have lifespans and growth cycles, but on a scale of centuries rather than years. The last time the global civilization shed its skin was during the Renaissance and the subsequent Age of Discovery and the Enlightenment. The colors were bright and growth explosive.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, we started outgrowing our old skin. We had grown beyond the limits of the old civilization and global wars broke out as we reached the culmination of our socio-economic systems.

Desperate ideologies emerged that fought the inevitable changes. Ideologies like Marxism and Socialism sprang up that sought to preserve and repair the old pyramidal authoritarian hierarchies, but civilization was moving inexorably toward a philosophy of individualism that eschewed rigid prêt-à-porter structures. These movements were the necessary rough spots that our serpentine civilization needed to start the shedding process.

On a civilizational scale, this process seems to occur roughly every 500-600 years. The transition periods last approximately a century and a half. This is followed by an explosion of growth in all areas of society — art, trade, law, philosophy. It’s a time of exploration, as new eyes see new opportunities.

I can’t speak for snakes, but the shedding process is always painful for us humans. Humans fight change until the changes become the new normal. For those of us living through these eras, it can seem like the end of the world, and in a sense it is.

So, I hear you asking impatiently, what were the foundational shifts that occurred last week? Well…

The most powerful epicenter was in Beijing (sorry about the CNN link but the headline fit so well). The leader of the largest land mass and nuclear arsenal in the world held hands with the largest military industrial complex in the world, and they skipped happily into the new multi-polar world.

The second biggest temblor is still ongoing in the second largest industrial power, and India wraps up its elections and Modi appears to have won. It seems that India is moving toward protecting its cultural heritage against all invading forces, including Islam. This is the largest of the nationalistic waves sweeping the globe, along with Argentina, the Netherlands, Hungary, Indonesia, and now Slovakia.

The third major global shake-up occurred in a New York City courtroom, where the political witch hunt against the ruling party’s opponent crumbled in spectacular fashion, as the predicate for the alleged crime disintegrated in classic Perry Mason style. The vaunted American legal system’s corruption and weaponization was laid bare for everyone to get a whiff.

After three shocks of this magnitude, and the after-shocks yet to come, we can safely say that the monolithic globalist hegemon is done. Nationalism and cultural populism are the new forces that will carry civilization through the rest of the shedding process — at least through 2050 or so — when the new civilization will emerge in all its glory.

Talk about mixing metaphors.

The movement toward smaller power bases is just the beginning. It will continue until Enlightened Self-Government takes hold. We have the tools, but our minds are still catching up with our new capabilities. Humanity has lived under various forms of omnipotent centralized authority since the dawn of civilization. We are now entering a new phase in history, for which we have no precedent to guide us. It’s like inventing a new game and trying to figure out all the rules and permutations that apply.

Oh sure, it hurts like yanking off a bandage, though we seem determined to make the process as slow and painful as possible. Profound and fundamental change is scary and there’s a lot of mistakes to be made that will require backing up and trying again.

There is one big consolation in all this, we will emerge with soft, shiny, vibrant new skin that will give us room to grow.

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