When a society goes into decay, the game becomes more important than the players of the game, the law overwhelms the people, the system dominates the populace, and honor trumps virtue.
The road to decadence in a society is the loss of vigor that comes of an honor code no longer identifying the best candidates for leadership.
The lower classes have their own problems with poor traditions for leadership but so too do the upper classes. Communism, as that system that promotes the leadership of the lower classes, failed for lack of moderation in its implementation. It insisted on revolutionary extremism.
Fascism, as that system that promotes the revitalization of the leadership of the upper classes, which revitalization takes place by the takeover of the upper class institutions by pretenders to that power, also failed because in order to take power the fascistic pretenders depended on the upper classes' ability to mask reality and to operate in the bubble of illusion, and that predisposition to illusion, amplified by the new-found instruments of mass media harnessed to propaganda, inevitably leads to downfall. The problem with fascism is it chooses the wrong leaders, and it does so invariably.
Fascism and Communism grew out of the carcass of Victorian honor society and the failure of the European honor elite to manage what became the debacle of WWI. The demise of the Victorian honor code set off a torrent of disillusionment that flooded the twenties and thirties and upturned the old order with the enthusiasms of the young.
The cultural instability we are today enduring began when the 'lost generation' of the inter-war years began to see itself as a generation, cut off from the values of the prior generation. The same happened in more popular form with the boomer generation.
No comments:
Post a Comment