Victor Davis Hanson encapsulates the mostly internal processes that destroy societies:
"1. Juxtapose pictures of Frankfurt and Liverpool in 1945, and then again in 2010 (or for that matter Hiroshima and Detroit). Something seems awry. Perhaps one can see, even in these superficial images, that something other than military defeat more often erodes societies.
2. why are some civilizations more vulnerable to foreign occupation or more incapable of reacting to sudden catastrophe such as the pyramidal Mycenaeans rather than the decentralized Greek city-states? In three wars, Republican Rome managed to end sea-faring Carthage in part through the building ex nihilo of a bigger and better navy and in a dynamic fashion not repeated 600 years later when 1 million-square-mile, 70 million-person imperial Rome now top-heavy, pyramidal, highly taxed could not keep out barbarians from across the Danube and Rhine.
3. At the end of the Second World War, the industrial centers of western and eastern Europe were flattened. Russia was wrecked. China and India were pre-capitalist. Germany and Japan themselves were in cinders. The factories of the United Kingdom (despite the 1940 blitz and the later V-1 and V-2 attacks) were largely untouched, and the United States pristine. Both countries had incurred massive debt. Yet Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s socialized, increased vastly the public sector, and became the impoverished nation of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, America began to return to its entrepreneurial freedoms, and geared up to supply a wrecked world with industrial and commercial goods, paying down its massive debt through an expanding economy. We thrived; yet socialist Britain did not become a West Germany, Japan, or Singapore.
4. [Most] important still is the nature of politics and the economy. As a general rule, the more freedom of the individual and flexibility of markets with lower taxes, less bureaucracy, constitutional government, more transparency, and the rule of law the more likely a society is to create wealth and rebound from either war or natural disasters.
5. We, in turn, can easily outdistance any country should we remain the most free, law-abiding, and economically open society as in our past. A race-gender-ethnic-blind meritocracy, equal application of the law, low taxes, small government, and a transparent political and legal system are at the heart of that renewal. America could within a decade become a creditor nation again, with a trade balance and budget surplus, drawing in the worlds talent and capital in a way not possible in the more inflexible or less meritocratic China, Japan, or Germany. Again that is our choice, not a superimposed destiny from someone else.
6. [Sadly, we evince] a new peasant notion of the limited good. Anything produced is seen to come at the expense of others. Absolute wealth is imaginary, relative wealth is not. We would rather be equal and unexceptional than collectively better off with a few more better off still.
a. The better off may or may not have at a certain point made enough money, to quote the president, but I have no idea where that certain point is (or whether it includes vacations to Costa del Sol), only that once our technocracy starts determining it, there is a greater chance that my town will not have as hot water as the rich and Hondas that run as well as their luxury cars.
7. Spread the wealth and redistributive change only occur when the enterprising, gifted, lucky, or audacious among us feel that they have a good chance to gain something for themselves (and keep most of it), or to extend to others that something they earned or more often both motives, self-interested and collective. Deny all that, shoot their bigger cow so to speak, or burn down their towering grain, and we will end up as peasants and serfs fighting over a shrinking pie."
(emphasis mine throughout)
VDH's Private Papers:: Decline Is in the Mind
"1. Juxtapose pictures of Frankfurt and Liverpool in 1945, and then again in 2010 (or for that matter Hiroshima and Detroit). Something seems awry. Perhaps one can see, even in these superficial images, that something other than military defeat more often erodes societies.
2. why are some civilizations more vulnerable to foreign occupation or more incapable of reacting to sudden catastrophe such as the pyramidal Mycenaeans rather than the decentralized Greek city-states? In three wars, Republican Rome managed to end sea-faring Carthage in part through the building ex nihilo of a bigger and better navy and in a dynamic fashion not repeated 600 years later when 1 million-square-mile, 70 million-person imperial Rome now top-heavy, pyramidal, highly taxed could not keep out barbarians from across the Danube and Rhine.
3. At the end of the Second World War, the industrial centers of western and eastern Europe were flattened. Russia was wrecked. China and India were pre-capitalist. Germany and Japan themselves were in cinders. The factories of the United Kingdom (despite the 1940 blitz and the later V-1 and V-2 attacks) were largely untouched, and the United States pristine. Both countries had incurred massive debt. Yet Britain in the late 1940s and 1950s socialized, increased vastly the public sector, and became the impoverished nation of the 1960s and 1970s. In contrast, America began to return to its entrepreneurial freedoms, and geared up to supply a wrecked world with industrial and commercial goods, paying down its massive debt through an expanding economy. We thrived; yet socialist Britain did not become a West Germany, Japan, or Singapore.
4. [Most] important still is the nature of politics and the economy. As a general rule, the more freedom of the individual and flexibility of markets with lower taxes, less bureaucracy, constitutional government, more transparency, and the rule of law the more likely a society is to create wealth and rebound from either war or natural disasters.
5. We, in turn, can easily outdistance any country should we remain the most free, law-abiding, and economically open society as in our past. A race-gender-ethnic-blind meritocracy, equal application of the law, low taxes, small government, and a transparent political and legal system are at the heart of that renewal. America could within a decade become a creditor nation again, with a trade balance and budget surplus, drawing in the worlds talent and capital in a way not possible in the more inflexible or less meritocratic China, Japan, or Germany. Again that is our choice, not a superimposed destiny from someone else.
6. [Sadly, we evince] a new peasant notion of the limited good. Anything produced is seen to come at the expense of others. Absolute wealth is imaginary, relative wealth is not. We would rather be equal and unexceptional than collectively better off with a few more better off still.
a. The better off may or may not have at a certain point made enough money, to quote the president, but I have no idea where that certain point is (or whether it includes vacations to Costa del Sol), only that once our technocracy starts determining it, there is a greater chance that my town will not have as hot water as the rich and Hondas that run as well as their luxury cars.
7. Spread the wealth and redistributive change only occur when the enterprising, gifted, lucky, or audacious among us feel that they have a good chance to gain something for themselves (and keep most of it), or to extend to others that something they earned or more often both motives, self-interested and collective. Deny all that, shoot their bigger cow so to speak, or burn down their towering grain, and we will end up as peasants and serfs fighting over a shrinking pie."
(emphasis mine throughout)
VDH's Private Papers:: Decline Is in the Mind
Excellent C & P job, PC!
... this is more idealism put to task against real geopolitical and economic factors which drive national ideologies, rather than the other way around. fundamentally, a fallacious observation of what makes societies tick a certain way.
