Among the thinkers who work within the broad school of cyclical history, many fall into one of two major camps: those who intuit or infer patterns in existing histories or narratives, and those who model the ebbing and flowing from a statistical viewpoint.
This term has fairly universally negative connotations, but in treating it as such, we risk throwing out far too much, and dissuading the rebuilding of degraded forms.
Ideology, like religion; matters to people. So much so that it will make them throw away their lives in the hopes that their chosen doctrine will be empowered. No amount of money will convince a man to sacrifice his life in such a way. Clearly, ideology matters, with differing contents offering different levels of commitment …
The established wisdom, from both historical precedent and common logic; is that to wage a war, no matter how sophisticated the tools may be, a hardy man with an iron will is still required to wield it. We in the West seem to have abandoned that principle and chosen instead to recruit all manner of assorted misfits. Between these two suppositions, we can assume that the armies of the West are either presently or soon-to-be dysfunctional paper tigers. Our leaders are either blinkered by domestic politics or totally incapable of seeing the plain reality in front of them. What if we’re behind the times? And not, as is often retorted, because technology has outmoded human capabilities through force multiplication.
Britons, and the English in particular – are not a revolutionary bunch, it’s not in our nature. Whenever the topic comes up, this vague point seems to be raised. It’s something in our culture, or simply in the water perhaps. We just get on with it and make things better. We prefer slow reform – …
This is an evolving story, and so in an effort to not date the below too much – we shall focus on some wider context, rather than the exact events unfolding. But it remains to be established that – subsequently to buying a significant stake in Twitter and refusing to be integrated into the existing …
Much is afoot in international markets, this much is obvious. Between existing inflationary pressures to supply chains, fiat currency printing, and financial market troubles in regional markets (notably China’s property sector, and Turkish currency devaluation), there would already be a bumpy few years in our collective economic future. Then the war in the Donbas heated …
Man is hungry by nature. Whether it be for adventure, experience (of a sort), control, understanding, or ownership, he wishes to know what is beyond the next hill – metaphorical or literal. He wishes for growth, in himself and his holdings. He wishes to be able to answer the question with confidence; this is why …
Part of the draw, if not the main draw, to studying topics such as power relations, social dynamics, and political trajectories – is the promise of unearthing some universal qualities which will make sense of the world in some underlying way. Conversely, there is the opposite proposition: that all traditions are distinct and particular to particular people. After all, if there is no such thing as a generic man without a distinct culture or tradition, then stimuli will be reacted to differently at both the micro and macro scale.
Networks of influence and influence hierarchies are something that are well-known, and well understood in principle, but specificities around what the peak of any such network would look like – are often elusive. There may be disagreement on whether, in practice, a large number of small nodes exist, or one great network in which one …