Climate change, civilization and Trumpism

[GliderGuider]

My very recent discovery of the effects of climatological "Bond events" on human civilization has completely re-framed my understanding of how we came to be the rapacious, destructive force we are today. The evidence of this research helps to explain why modern civilization developed along a completely different value-arc than might have been expected from the evidence of the aboriginal past.

Something apparently happened in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia that fundamentally changed a large part of humanity, and turned us into the juggernaut we are today. Something changed the way those people saw the world and related to it; something shifted their worldview from one of aboriginal abundance to one of civilized scarcity, and triggered a wave of greed, selfishness, separation, hierarchy and endemic social violence that has been reinforced ever since.

For a long time I was stuck in a perspective of strict evolutionary gradualism, with the assumption that our modern harshness was latent in our genes, and was gradually expressed through our encounters with high energy resources. Now, obviously we had this capacity all along, or it wouldn't have appeared at all. But I was quite wrong about the mechanism by which it suddenly appeared in part (but not all) of the human species.

The change in the human brain/mind/culture interface appears to have solidified about 4,000 BCE and was probably due to a sudden, intense aridification event that stretched from North Africa to Mongolia (a region that has been nicknamed "Saharasia".) The changes in humanity may have begun 2,000 years before that in a similar event, and were reinforced by subsequent drying cycles 4,000 and 3,000 years ago.

Because these events affected primarily the Eurasian land mass, North American aboriginals were largely untouched. This neatly explains why, when the Europeans stormed ashore they found a continent teeming with matrist cultures that had little sense of private property or profit, and felt unseparated from the natural world.

This line of reasoning is supported by the anthropological mapping work of Dr. James DeMeo, which he calls the Saharasia hypothesis. The effect is outlined in this paper by Dr. DeMeo:

http://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1897&context=ccr

Since I discovered it a scant week ago, I've been contemplating James DeMeo's "Saharasia" theory about the aggressive diffusion of warlike patrist "civilization" out of its original desertified Arabian and Central Asian core territories to conquer most of the African, European and Asian land mass, and implant its psychologically "armored" values in modern global, techno-industrial civilization. I've had some interesting glimmers of ideas.

The main one is that those barbarian carriers of the malignancy of civilization remind me a hell of a lot of Trumpists. They are similarly tribalist, morally rigid, exclusionary, punishment-based, fear-driven, patriarchal and aggressive. Most importantly, they both discarded all the previously-accepted rules of fair play in a fight.

That thought led me directly to parallels with the fall of Rome at the hands of the resulting barbarian hordes in the early 400s. In this morality play Trump owns the part of Alaric or Geiseric, while his followers are the Visigoths and Vandals. Washington, as always, stands in nicely for a decadent Rome. Only this time Geiseric has been elected emperor, the Vandals have taken over the Imperial Senate, and nuclear weapons are involved.

The psychological similarity I see between Trump's rabble and Geiseric's Vandals is enormously disheartening. It speaks to why the now-civilized world of the United States has been powerless to stop his rise. His followers have a tacit agreement that the rules of the game are for suckers - and that might, not law, makes right. The sword is assuming ascendancy over the pen once again.

Based on that historical analogy, I'm pretty sure our side is going to lose - if not now, then at the hands of some later Trumpian warlord. We are hamstrung by our core beliefs in rules, reciprocity and hope. They are not.

Like it or not, we are now the decadent and degenerate tail of the previous round of civilization whose peak was marked by ideas like "Manifest Destiny" and a "Thousand-year Reich". I am increasingly convinced that Trump's followers, along with others like them around the world, are the next wave - and not for better, only for worse.

The only thing that I see that will ultimately stop them is the same thing that began the experiment of civilization 5,000 years ago - climate change. And that cure will not only be worse than the disease, it will even amplify the disease before finally killing the host.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all.

As Dickens' Tiny Tim would have said, "God help us, every one!"

[pscot]

1. Happy Holidays

from the Behavioral Sink.

[GliderGuider]

2. The same to you, my friend!