Posted on 02/14/2013 3:53:45 AM PST by Kaslin
Why do once-successful societies ossify and decline?
Hundreds of reasons have been adduced for the fall of Rome and the end of the Old Regime in 18th-century France. Reasons run from inflation and excessive spending to resource depletion and enemy invasion, as historians attempt to understand the sudden collapse of the Mycenaeans, the Aztecs and, apparently, the modern Greeks. In literature from Catullus to Edward Gibbon, wealth and leisure -- and who gets the most of both -- more often than poverty and exhaustion implode civilization.
One recurring theme seems consistent in Athenian literature on the eve of the city's takeover by Macedon: social squabbling over slicing up a shrinking pie. Athenian speeches from that era make frequent reference to lawsuits over property and inheritance, evading taxes, and fudging eligibility for the dole. After the end of the Roman Republic, reactionary Latin literature -- from the likes of Juvenal, Petronius, Suetonius, Tacitus -- pointed to "bread and circuses," as well as excessive wealth, corruption and top-heavy government.
For Gibbon and later French scholars, "Byzantine" became a pejorative description of a top-heavy Greek bureaucracy that could not tax enough vanishing producers to sustain a growing number of bureaucrats. In antiquity, inflating the currency by turning out cheap bronze coins was often the favored way to pay off public debts, while the law became fluid to address popular demands rather than to protect time-honored justice.
After the end of World War II, most of today's powerhouses were either in ruins or still preindustrial -- China, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Russia and Taiwan. Only the United States and Great Britain had sophisticated economies that survived the destruction of the war. Both were poised to resupply a devastated world with new ships, cars, machinery and communications.
In comparison to Frankfurt, the factories of 1945 Liverpool had survived mostly intact. Yet Britain missed out on the postwar German economic miracles, in part because after the deprivations of the war, the war-weary British turned to class warfare and nationalized their main industries, which soon became uncompetitive.
The gradual decline of a society is often a self-induced process of trying to meet ever-expanding appetites, rather than a physical inability to produce past levels of food and fuel, or to maintain adequate defense. Americans have never had safer workplaces or more sophisticated medical care -- and never have so many been on disability.
King Xerxes' huge Persian force of 250,000 sailors and soldiers could not defeat a rather poor Greece in 480-479 B.C. Yet a century and a half later, a much smaller invading force from the north under Philip II of Macedon overwhelmed the far more prosperous Greek descendants of the victors of Salamis.
For hundreds of years, the outmanned legions of the tiny and poor Roman Republic survived foreign invasions. Yet centuries later, tribal Goths, Visigoths, Vandals and Huns overran the huge Mediterranean-wide Roman Empire.
Given our unsustainable national debt -- nearly $17 trillion and climbing -- America is said to be in decline, although we face no devastating plague, nuclear holocaust, or shortage of oil or food.
Americans have never led such affluent material lives -- at least as measured by access to cell phones, big-screen TVs, cheap jet travel and fast food. Obesity rather than malnutrition is the greater threat to national health. Flash mobs go after electronics stores, not food markets. Americans spend more money on Botox, face lifts and tummy tucks than on the age-old scourges of polio, small pox and malaria.
If Martians looked at the small box houses, one-car families and primitive consumer goods of the 1950s, they would have thought the postwar United States, despite a balanced budget in 1956, was impoverished. In comparison, an indebted contemporary America would seem to aliens flush with cash, as consumers jostle for each new update to their iPhones.
By any historical marker, the future of Americans has never been brighter. The United States has it all: undreamed new finds of natural gas and oil, the world's pre-eminent food production, continual technological wizardly, strong demographic growth, a superb military and constitutional stability.
Yet we don't talk confidently about capitalizing and expanding on our natural and inherited wealth. Instead, Americans bicker over entitlement spoils as the nation continues to pile up trillion-dollar-plus deficits. Enforced equality rather than liberty is the new national creed. The medicine of cutting back on government goodies seems far worse than the disease of borrowing trillions from the unborn to pay for them.
In August 1945, Hiroshima was in shambles, while Detroit was among the most innovative and wealthiest cities in the world. Contemporary Hiroshima now resembles a prosperous Detroit of 1945; parts of Detroit look like they were bombed decades ago.
History has shown that a government's redistribution of shrinking wealth, in preference to a private sector's creation of new sources of it, can prove more destructive than even the most deadly enemy.
Look to Karl Mark, Antonio Gramsci, Israel Cohen, the Fabian Society, the Frankfurt School, the Council on Foreign Relations and a whole host of others that have worked tirelessly through the years to undermine and overthrow Western Civilization in America and around the world.
“because of this, God gave them over”
—Romans 1++
What’s “this”?
Same Ol’.
http://www.franklincase.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=11&Itemid=9
The word that has been banished from our Politically Correct society:
SIN!
Nay... if they ignore their GOD...
2 Chronicles 7:14
If my people, who are called by my name,
shall humble themselves,
and pray, and seek my face,
and turn from their wicked ways; ,
then will I hear from heaven,
and will forgive their sin,
and will heal their land.
HMMmm..
Divide and Conquer...
I've heard that... somewhere...
No. Lenin and Stalin had their useful idiots here working to undermine America from within. Obama's idiots are are the low information voters. They're Useless Idiots!
It is a crime that most governments of the world are to-day being poisoned by atheistic principles.
The time will come when the very people they tell not to believe in a supreme Being will turn against them and destroy them.
No economic experiment will be successful until the country returns to Christian principles of morality, saneness, and brotherly love.
The welfare of the nation is based on the home and if the family is broken up no progress can ever be made toward recovery.
Written in April, 1935
So it remains, only more so.
I think societies get overcomplicated and self-possessed to the point they think their complexity is a measure of advancement. Somehow, the more advanced they think they are, the less they think they need their Creator, and they begin to worship themselves or their gadgetry.
Perhaps they don't realize that complexity is wearying, invites cutting corners, and eventually breaks down people as they burn out, then the society when enough people no longer want to put forth the increasing effort needed to keep nation, community, and even the home intact.
The more complex, the more difficult, the fewer have the time and/or energy to care.
Without that maintenance, the edifice crumbles, slowly at first, and then collapses.
We pride ourselves on intricate gadgets, and tend to scorn the most simple machine that gets the job done well. (What, It doesn't sharpen knives, too?)
We need to get back to basics, at all levels, and we will some day, one way or another.
The Founders were men who believed in the Almighty, who established (or tried to) as simple a form of government as could preserve the Republic against the depredations of human nature, provided it was kept limited.
As we see today, the abandonment of Constitutional limitations has led to an overwhelming governmental complexity which has caused many to abdicate their God-given birthright as a free people and to turn to the State in surrender, seeking the comfort of slavery thereto, yet calling it "freedom"--as if freedom from serving their Creator somehow replaces the freedom to serve Him.
Hand in hand with that goes the abandonment of their obligation to God, as they have replaced Him with idols of their own creation.
Here’s a corollary:
Our goal in studying history is not to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past,
but to recognize when the same dumbasses do the same dumbass things resulting in the same disastrous consequences,
we can prepare accordingly.
“In a word, lawyers. We have so many regulations from the government and a second barrage of controls coming from insurance companies’ lawyers. It’s too much. Few people can start a successful business today without doing the immoral pay to play thing and it all comes from lawyers. They create a system that favors themselves even though it kills society.”
As I have posted many times, lawyers are the commissars of American Socialism.
One observation of Romans 1:18-32,
acceptance of all those deviant behaviors did not cause the wrath of God,
but ARE the wrath of God revealed from heaven.
Genesis 1513 And he said unto Abram, Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four hundred years; 14 And also that nation, whom they shall serve, will I judge: and afterward shall they come out with great substance. 15 And thou shalt go to thy fathers in peace; thou shalt be buried in a good old age. 16 But in the fourth generation they shall come hither again: for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
In other words the timing of kingdom events in Egypt, and Israel were all related to and intricately woven with, the sin of the Amorites. Canaan came to an end because of their sin, but God controlled the timing and destiny of several nations in order to bring that judgment when HE was ready. He waited for their wickedness to rise to the degree that they would deserve what they were going to get.
Oh, and I forgot one other major reason for WWI in the previous post. To stop the 2nd reich. The 1st reich was the "Holy Roman Empire". The 2nd was a German/Prussian attempted revival, as was the 3rd.
Though I understand your sentiments, they are NOT useless to Obama. They are, along with voter fraud, what got him re-elected. Consequently they are “Useful Idiots.”
Politicians know this instinctively, which is why, in times of existential domestic crisis, they universally raise up or instigate an external enemy. The fall of the Soviet empire left the West to fall to squabbling among and within themselves, which is where we are today.
There is good historical reason to expect Obama to attempt to unify the country under his regime by instigating war with a foreign power. Indeed it will be a historical anomaly if this does not happen.
Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
“because of this, God gave them over”
What is “this”?
There were two parallel phrases there where “they did such and such” and “because of this” or simply “therefore” “God turned them over to...”
(claimed to be wise and became fools worshipping idols, therefore God gave them over):
22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.
24 Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.
(Again, worshipped created things instead of God, and he gave them over...):
25 They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.
Bingo.
God is dead. Therefore we are as gods.
This isn’t the first time a culture threw all its gold into the fire and worshiped the Ba’al out they forged in the process.
25 They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
26 Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.
The First Commandment. “You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3.
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