Dear Friends,
It seems to me, a measure of the barbarity or civilization of mankind, is how much is built versus how much is destroyed. It’s a pretty simple measure. A metric that’s easily quantified… but is it accurate? I propose it’s not only accurate, it predicts the future. It’s accurate because history tells us it is. Human history is nothing but the record of civilizations rising and falling. When they rise there’s always construction, and when they fall, there’s always destruction. The two are interconnected. They’re not concurrent they’re consequent. The obliteration of cities characterizes the rise of barbarism. Moreover, barbarians don’t create they destroy. Because a barbarian is the avatar of the toddler knocking over a sand castle. A castle carefully built by someone else.
If we look at human history from the earliest record of it, we see humanity rising and falling. The collapse of the Bronze age was one such event. While no one knows who the “Sea Peoples” were, there is agreement they were consequential to the collapse. Waging war on The Hittite Empire, the Levant and Egypt. Perhaps driven from their homes by climate change, because of their copious use of fossil fuels for smelting tin and copper. Else they could have been merely conquerors. Nevertheless, we see that the Hittites were ready to collapse due to corruption. So when the Sea Peoples showed up… they collapsed. While Egypt fended them off. The barbaric age that followed didn’t see much construction.. but a lot of destruction.
The future can only be gleaned close at hand, due to the rapid onset of chaos in a dynamic system, like history. But we can presume yesterday plus today equals tomorrow. Or a facsimile of it. Using the barbarism civilization measure, of construction versus destruction, we can tell where we are in the cycle. When the amount of destruction is accelerating while construction is decelerating, we can surmise we’re in the destruction phase, and barbarism is coming, if it’s not already here. If there’s more construction, than destruction, then we can presume we’re in the civilization phase. When in the civilization phase, there’ll be good times ahead, and if in the barbarism phase, poverty, crime and want, lurk in the future. We have to look at construction and destruction in the aggregate though.
Elitist theory, the theory I subscribe to as opposed to class theory, says that before a civilization collapses, that civilization has been hollowed out by the elite, abandoning their societal myth. In the case of the Sea People’s, had the Hittites been at their zenith the Sea Peoples would have ended up enslaved, instead of conquerors. The conquerors are interested only in conquering. So they ushered in a dark age. This is an important lesson. A force can be considered civilized or barbarian by it’s proclivity to build or destroy. Leading us to the vista of what their advance to power would mean. Barbarians usher in dark ages while civilized people bring civilization to barbarism. Civilization however wouldn’t be vulnerable to barbarians were it not for the elite’s corruption.
Looking at the world today, construction is dropping off in China, Europe and elsewhere. Meanwhile war is destroying Ukraine wholesale as well as parts of Russia. The Middle East is struggling to outpace the destruction of war. Even with their riches from oil. American cities are crumbling with abandoned infrastructure rusting in the rain. South America, the Middle East and Africa are and will remain economic basket cases due to their cultures. Who are the conquerors of today? The Islamists and globalists. Neither of which have shown any interest in building… only in conquering. Which means, judged by the measure of building versus destroying, the Islamists and Globalists are, and will, usher in a new dark age. With toddlers in control again, we’ll see if this scale still predicts dark ages.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
