The rise and decline of great powers

[The Dharma Bum]

Great powers emerge as the circumstances allow a society to exploit the available resources in some way. When those circumstances change the power structure and the ideology that underpin it changes.

Change is the hallmark of human history. Things always change, it is inevitable. It is only when we fail to anticipate change and adjust our thinking accordingly that we become obsolete.

[broken robot]

[The Dharma Bum]

[eynon81]

[broken robot]

Didn't everyone think Obama was going to be the next FDR, a new new deal? Sadly our political system has serious issues that undermine any kind of grand plan. It's become over-bureaucratized with fragmented one-issue special interest groups. There aren't any major social or political organizations such as trade unions that can propose alternative visions of society. Is there even a place for a Roosevelt? That said I think promoting more regulations on banking, etc. is always a good idea. Even if we can't promote new activities toward redistribution of wealth in US society we need to at least curb the massive wave of financialization that led up to 2008 crisis.

Non you've also brought up another interesting variable: war. War can always change things, but its scope in the 21st century for shifts in grand strategy is limited. Right now there's just low intensity conflict in various parts of the world, kind of similar to Cold War proxy wars in third world countries. Even in the case of the Syrian civil war Middle Eastern countries don't want to get directly involved in a full blown regional conflagration.

The way I see it, war over territory is becoming increasingly irrelevant given the globalization of corporations, ethnic diasporas, and other kinds of organizations that cut across nation-state boundaries. War is now limited to more police/criminal/terrorist kinds of operations which doesn't mean they're any less brutal, but which also can't provoke a full scale shift in the world order on the basis of realignment among great powers.

[eynon81]

[Spider]

The US decline could go a couple of ways though, socially. On the one hand...problems could compound and leave everyone poorer, demoralized, and less mobile. Diet Russia.

Or, people could make better use of what they've got and focus on quality of life upgrades, as opposed to upgrades in TV size, square footage of their house, and whether or not their cell phone has a fingerprint reader.

The real decline has been societal, and has been getting worse for half a century, with the focus on perception of success and conspicuous consumption as the metric of acheivement. Less money and less consumerism could drive a reordering or priorities....

...who am I kidding. Eventually we'll just have to cut the rich people's heads off and start over again like all the other times this happened.

[broken robot]

I don't know, have we adjusted our expectations since the economic crisis? I don't see any let up in the base value of mass consumerism.

[PoS]

[The Dharma Bum]

You guys need to learn about deep history.

The idea that great men and events that have occurred in the last few hundred (or even thousands) years are what shape the present social structure is wildly incorrect.

Recent advances in archaeological analysis, gene mapping, evolutionary ecology, linguistics etc have shown that trends and processes over long periods of time are what produce the current human social paradigm.

Understanding these complex processes is what will allow us to truly understand our past and that is what will make it possible to understand what it means to us in the present and what direction to choose for the future.

Our history began long before we developed writing. There is much to learn beyond hero worship.