We will break the history cycle?

[speeder]

Every 2 thousand years, the following cycle happen:

Several hundred years of "dark ages", where the families are the state, men fight, farm, build and hunt, women stay at home taking care of stuff there, and supporting men to fight outside.

Then, states begin to form, there are no need for 100% of the men to be cop and soldier at the same time, and some form of state controlled education starts.

states start to merge, by force, or by their own will, in various forms, be it a empire, federation, union or alliance...

As the few states get bigger and wealthier, and near the apex of power, they start to provide everything, and thus people start to become free to do whatever they want, men do not need to protect their families anymore, as now there are police and army, women do not need to stay at home, as men can work at home and do not need to fight all the time.

We get women rights and gay rights movements, the huge amount of bureaucratic work the state needs is filled by women that join the workforce, divorce laws are enacted, divorce rates rise, marriage rate starts to creep down.

Society is at its apex, the maximum amount of technology available, women reach equality and starts pushing for even more power, men want only to have sex, but no responsability, individualism skyrockets, the profession of babysitter becomes popular, birth rate plummets, that last fact is considered "good" since women with less children can have better careers, and thus are more equal to men.

The state, starts to have problems as now it has a aging population and lack of young people, also that same state, so gigantic, need absurd amount of soldiers worldwide to maintain itself intact, but now there are shortage of native population to do that, the state starts hiring mercenaries, and immigration becomes a acceptable way of replacing workforce. Natives move on to bureaucratic jobs, immigrants get the crap jobs.

The state now has huge debt problems, it starts a series of crisis, at first a small amount during a century, but later a person can see several economic crisis in his own lifetime.

The civilization go bankrupt, it fails to pay all the mercenaries, police and army. Immigrants revolt, foreigners invade, the population, individualistic and not knowing the ways of the dark ages anymore, falls prey to invaders easily, everything collapse.

The lack of trade, leads to lack of technology exchange, lots of technology is lost, and a bunch more of technology is hidden, humanity as whole actually get thrown back a bit, some places worse than others.








That thing happened several times in history, with the two most recent complete cycles being Babylon (apex circa -2000) and Rome (apex circa 0). And smaller civilizations failed the same way (without crashing the whole humanity down, obviously) in faster cycles.



Although the story I wrote is based on Rome, as you can see it looks like our own history... and basic theory says that we WILL fail, our civilization is doomed to repeat the cycle, and seemly we are past the apex and already in debt crisis mode.





But something happened this time... something... special.

Punks.

First, TV and Radio, spread the punk music and the punk movement, people that were anti-government for whatever reason, they had thousands of different ideologies, but they all, were enemies of the current caucasian state.

Then we had several of its splinters, the most important to us now, Cyberpunks.

Cyberpunks, spawned the Cypherpunks.

Cypherpunks, spawned Bitcoin, Wikileaks, Anonymous, and have their hand in the arab spring protests, the european revolution protests, in the occupy wall street protests.

WE are the Punks. It does not matter if you know about computers or not, if you actually identify as Punk, Cyberbunk, Cypherpunk, whatever or not, it does not matter, if you are part of anonymous or not, it does not matter if you are of the left, or the right, totalitarist or anarchist, if you are against the current government, you are a punk, you are part of it, specially if you act upon it, be it a small thing, like spreading your information to others, or using bitcoin, to big things, like helping the protesters in a significant way, or doing great hacking for Anonymous (and I do not mean joining a stupid DDOS or 4chan lulz stuff).






Thus, we have two facts: 1) history works in cycle, we are near the end of a cycle, we are in the debt crisis mode, UN and its fiat financial system is clearly failing.
2) punks are acting in a more and more cohesive manner, working against the state, even if they do not know why they are doing it, or how, or what will be the result, in fact many do not even know who their enemy is, some blame corporations, others their federal governments, but the end result is the same: Everyone is actually fighting the UN itself, they recognize it, or not. Everything is actually fighting against the caucasian empire (caucasians are about 10% of the world population, but controls about 50% of the land directly, and lots of places indirectly).



So my question is: Our actions are leading to a faster demise of the civilization, or we will transform civilization, save it and break the cycle? (it is not a choice, the path is already set, I am asking what the results will be).

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[sje397]

I don't think we had gay rights movements 2000 years ago.

Maybe this is what you're talking about: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

[speeder]

Rome, when it started, being gay mean't getting killed...

Near the end, being gay was expected, women were mostly for having babies, pleasure was between men.


I am not saying that gay rights or women rights cause a civilization to fall, it is only a natural part of the process, as people become individualistic and do not need to do some stuff that now the state do for them.



And I do not got what singualirity has to do with my post.

[ineededausername]

Do you mean to say that individualism is bad in some way and that the liberation of the individual from irrational societal norms is detrimental to the "moral fiber" of society somehow?

[TiagoTiago]

Woah...

[netrin]

Polish up your thesis, cite references, correlations, dates, and please resubmit.

[speeder]

People want to talk about everything but my question

I really hoped that this would not happen.

[Hawker]

People want to talk about everything but my question

I really hoped that this would not happen.

On the Internet, you have to make short posts and only one logical point in each post.  If you go for a long post or have more than one point, people always go off topic.  Heck even if you have a concise post with one logical point, people often go off topic

[RodeoX]

The bronze age collapse, the fall of Rome and ensuing dark age; They are nothing compared to what is happening now that the climate is changing. Please fasten your seat belts, this may be the biggest fall since the ice age. IMO.

[speeder]

The bronze age collapse, the fall of Rome and ensuing dark age; They are nothing compared to what is happening now that the climate is changing. Please fasten your seat belts, this may be the biggest fall since the ice age. IMO.

I really hope you are wrong about that... I never considered that factor.

If you are right... holy shit.

[ElectricMucus]

Not everything happens in cycles. History is not.

IMO the dark ages in Europe are at least a myth, most likely a fallacy and possible a conspiracy. They almost certainly didn't happen the way we are thought in school. That said we now have a continuous development of technology with ever increasing sophistication. 
So: No we will not break the circle, because there is none.

There are however setbacks each time propaganda catches up with the state of the art. We are currently at the end of such setback.

[speeder]

Not everything happens in cycles. History is not.

IMO the dark ages in Europe are at least a myth, most likely a fallacy and possible a conspiracy. They almost certainly didn't happen the way we are thought in school. That said we now have a continuous development of technology with ever increasing sophistication. 
So: No we will not break the circle, because there is none.

There are however setbacks each time propaganda catches up with the state of the art. We are currently at the end of such setback.

There are a cycle of setbacks...


I mean, our techology looks like a stock market: ever increasing in long term, but if you transform that long term into a horizontal line, you see like a sawtooth wave. It rises slowly, as a civlization go from rural to urban and trade increases, and then it collapses.   After the collapse, techology is in a level higher than the last collapse, but still lower than the all-time-high during the civlization peak.


My question is: This time, we will maintain civlization working (and maybe end in a singularity) or we will have another colapse? (and return to probably some victorian era tech level...)

[Hawker]

Actually there never has been a regression in technology.  There have been oddities - like the Chinese inventing gunpowder but its use in combat being developed by Europeans.  But I can't think of a step backwards.

[ElectricMucus]

My question is: This time, we will maintain civlization working (and maybe end in a singularity) or we will have another colapse? (and return to probably some victorian era tech level...)

Neither.
I view "The tech singularity" as the other side of the coin, namely propaganda with the goal to obfuscate technological progress. The whole trans-humanist movement is a bunch of cointelpros and some front-man quacks.
The whole concept of autonomously improving technology is cybernetically an invalid transformation. Hence it is impossible by definition.

A collapse is nearly as retarded. It all breaks down to the current metaphysical dogma that there was some "beginning of time" either the "big bang" or a "creationist god". That implies that everything that has a beginning has to have an end. But that is a far shot...
More straight forward: The rate of destruction of information has never surpassed its growth rate. Hence the knowledge to make technology will never be "lost".

[speeder]

Actually there never has been a regression in technology.  There have been oddities - like the Chinese inventing gunpowder but its use in combat being developed by Europeans.  But I can't think of a step backwards.

Yes, there are... at least temporarily until someone finds about it again...

For example, what happened to those that built Antikythera orrery? Or how catapults and onagers are known to have been in most of middle ages of poorer technology than in hellenic age... Or that a good part of renaissance started after the finding of several roman encyclopedias, and their descriptions of several interesting technologies and phylosophies...


Or the famous: How the pyramids were made? Or some other crazy ancient structures?

Or, how to make Damascus Steel? (noone know that by the way... if you have a reply for that, you probably can get some millions of USD)

We are constantly losing stuff, just look on wikipedia for lists of lost books, lost languages, things that noone know to repair or rebuild...

It just happen, it is the way how stuff works, sometimes a master of something dies without a student...




What cause a sort of mass loss of tech in "dark ages" is the loss of trading... Technology becomes isolated, and when isolated, it is easily forgotten, lost or hidden.

What secrets maybe are lost in the fire of Alexandria Library?

Some roman encyclopedias are highly interesting, and we found only some volumes, what was written in the other ones?





There is a reason why we have in several cultures, tales of lost technologies, ranging from ancient cultures (some Indian tales describe space ships, lasers and missiles and the loss of all that, tales written some thousand years ago...), to fairly modern (all our sci-fi about for example digging and finding some super cool ancient mecha underground...)

[Hawker]

Damascus steel: "The process was lost to metalsmiths after production of the patterned swords gradually declined and eventually ceased circa 1750."

So when the need for it disappeared, the technique disappeared.  And from the wiki, it appears that it wasn't widely used.

The other examples you give ignore the fact that the Roman Empire in the East survived until 1453.  Yes some poetry and stuff was lost in the Alexandria library but so what.

The pyramids were religious buildings that ceased to be used when the religion changed.  The cathedrals of the Middle Ages were far more advanced.

None of your examples actually stand up as examples of civilisation collapsing. 

[ElectricMucus]

There is a reason why we have in several cultures, tales of lost technologies, ranging from ancient cultures (some Indian tales describe space ships, lasers and missiles and the loss of all that, tales written some thousand years ago...), to fairly modern (all our sci-fi about for example digging and finding some super cool ancient mecha underground...)

You are just quoting myths.
The pyramids were built using giant wooden wheels around the stones.
If you have enough money you can still pay someone to make you a real samurai sword.

Just the fact that there is some secret sauce doesn't mean that this constitutes lost technology.


But let me throw in something constructive: There are swings toward centralization and decentralization if you combine centralist propaganda the process of decentralization you suddenly have a "collapse"
The fate of the people is determined by their individual choices and their affection to said propaganda.

[RodeoX]

My wife's PhD. is in the Medieval history of music. So I know that the idea of a "dark age" is out of fashion. However I say there was a dark age after the barbarians sacked Rome. In Roman times you could travel on a *safe, maintained throughout the empire. Your kids may even be able to go to school.  100yrs. after the fall, no one could read or write, roads fell into disrepair and banditry,  and the record of history went dark. 

[Hawker]

My wife's PhD. is in the Medieval history of music. So I know that the idea of a "dark age" is out of fashion. However I say there was a dark age after the barbarians sacked Rome. In Roman times you could travel on a *safe, maintained throughout the empire. Your kids may even be able to go to school.  100yrs. after the fall, no one could read or write, roads fell into disrepair and banditry,  and the record of history went dark. 

That was only in the Western Roman areas.  The Eastern Roman Empire survived until 1453 when the Turks finally captured Constantinople.  Even in the Western areas, by the time of the First Crusade, they were not only rich literate kingdoms at home but they had a unique ability to project the power sending armies 1000s of miles to Palestine. 

[ElectricMucus]

Funny how every instance of mainstream science ties into the status-quot.  

It it easy to few history to confirm with ones world-view, so I claim what we know as The Renaissance happened after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the Dark Ages were invented and indoctrinated during the Counter Renaissance.  

addendum: This topic now got me hooked on this...
Fomenko's "History: Fiction or Science?"
http://vimeo.com/28085647

disclaimer: Russian with English subtitles, highly controversial!  
In short a mathematician uses statistical methods to validate historical evidence and discovers that historical events were copied over a large period of time.
In that light history cycles are statistically the same events. As it seems history is not 6000 years old but about 1000 years old. The conclusions are mind boggling. The stone ages suddenly appear to have occurred a few generations ago and the development of Man much more rapidly than commonly thought.