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[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“]

T. Greer of Scholar’s Stage has an exemplary post comparing the philosophy of English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes with medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, who described a critical component of a functional polity – asabiyah.  You should read Greer’s post in its entirety, but here is the take away as far as strategy is concerned:

….Asabiyah, then, amounts to the feeling among those dying that they are dying for their own. As soon as they begin to feel that they are not dying for their own, but are dying for the king, or for someone else’s clan, or for some obscure institution that is not them — well, that is when asabiyah is gone and the kingdom is in danger. Civilized life shrinks the asabiyah that once united people of different lineages, tribes, and occupations until the people of a kingdom only feel a sense of loyalty to themselves, of if you are lucky, those in their immediate neighborhood or caste. But at this point the feeling they have is not reallyasabiyah at all, but the narrow self interest Hobbes would appreciate. This leaves the kingdom open to attack from the next round of nomadic tribesmen united by charismatic leaders into one indivisible asabiyah driven force. 

Although it was not his intent, I think Ibn Khaldun here answers another puzzle apparent to the careful observer of human affairs. It has oft been held that a strong enemy unites a divided people. When faced with with a foe that threatens liberty and the integrity of the realm, private disagreements ought to be put aside until victory has been declared. But it is not apparent that history actually works this way. If one must compare the rising and declining eras of history’s great empires–here I think of the Romans, the Abbasids, the Ming, the great empires of Castille and the Hapsburgs, or the Russian Empire of Tsarist fame (no doubt other examples can be found with if more thought were put to the question)–it does not seem the enemies they faced in their early days were any less powerful or cunning than the enemies that pushed them to extinction. The difference was in the empires themselves; where the wars of their birth forged nations strong and martial, the wars of their decline only opened and made raw violent internal divisions. Even destruction cannot unite a people who have lost all feeling of asabiyah. 

Ibn Khaldun believed that asabiyah declined over time. He used the analogy of the transition from fierce desert life of equality, mutual glory and conquest to the effeminacy of sedentary decadence and servility of luxurious despotism and the fall of the dynasty in four generations to explain the effect of a decayed asabiyah. Greer continues:

The concept of asabiyah is applied most easily to the distant past. One cannot read histories of the early Islamic conquests and the slow hardening of state authority in Umayyad and Abbasid times without seeing Ibn Khaldun’s cycles within it. I have alluded to many examples of these same themes in East and Central Asian history, for I have found that his theories map well to state-formation among pastoral nomads across the world, including those places Ibn Khaldun had barely heard of. Indeed, Ibn Khaldun’s “independent science” can be applied to almost any pre-modern society or conflict without undue violence to his ideas. I recently wrote that in the pre-modern world, “internal cohesion and loyalty were often the deciding factor in the vast majority of military campaigns” [23]. Ibn Khaldun provides a convincing explanation for where such cohesion came from and why it so often failed when kings and princes needed it most dearly.

There are several reasons why it is difficult to see the hand of asabiyah in the rise and decline of modern great powers. Military science has progressed in the centuries since Ibn Khaldun wrote the Muqaddimah; the drills and training seen in the militaries of our day are capable of creating a strong sense of solidarity and cohesion even when such feelings are absent in the populace at large. In that populace the nationalist fervor that accompanies mass politics has eclipsed (or perhaps, if we take asabiyah as the nucleus of nationalist feeling, perfected) asabiyah as the moving force of modern conflict. This sort of nationalism, dependent as it is on mass media and technologies unknown to Ibn Khaldun,  has a dynamic of its own that he could not have foreseen.

The most important difference between Ibn Khaldun’s world and our own, however, concern the fundamental structure of the societies in which we live. Ibn Khaldun’s was a static age where wealth was easier to seize than make. This is not the case today. For the past two centuries military power has been intertwined with economic growth and industrial capacity. No more can poor ‘Bedouins’ living beyond the pale of civilized society dethrone kings and reshape empires. In the more developed nations of the earth there is so little fear of war that both asabiyah and nationalism are sloughed off with few misgivings. 

 Despite all these differences, Ibn Khaldun did articulate principles that remain relevant despite their age.  The first and most important of these is that social cohesion should be understood as a vital element of national power. Wars are rarely won and strategies rarely made without it. A nation need not be engaged in existential conflict to benefit from strong asabiyah. Absent solidarity, internal controversies absorb the attention of statesmen and internal divisions derail all attempts to craft coherent policy. Strategic malaise is one byproduct of a community deficient in asabiyah. 

Agreed.  In particular, it is difficult for foreigners to provide another society with an asabiyah that it lacks in order to fight and win counterinsurgency wars. You go to war with the asabiyah that you have and that has been a problem for Americans in places like South Vietnam and Afghanistan.

I’m not sure though that it is impossible to regenerate decaying or dying asabiyah if it can be built upon new myths that are harmonious with old ones, disguising innovations as fidelity to cherished values. The Meiji Restoration is the classic successful example of national revolution being presented as a reactionary movement to return to tradition, toppling the worn-out Shogunate and”restoring” a High Priest- Emperor whose ceremonial figurehead predecessors had not ruled Japan in eight hundred years, if ever at all.  There are also darker historical examples and we are seeing one play out now in the Mideast in the form of the ISIS “Caliphate”.

This kind of attempt to breathe new life into an eroding asabiyah operates at the moral level above strategy that John Boyd termed a “Theme of Vitality and Growth” and it can unlock atavistic passions and be extremely attractive. Simultaneously creative and destructive, society is suddenly remade – not as a plowshare, but as a sword in a strong hand.

[ by Charles Cameron — conspiracy is stranger than scripture, partly bcoz supercomputers! ]
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Hey, we can pick a face out of a crowd:

track the numberplates of individual cars around a city:

follow individuals by tracking their cell phones:

and see who’s in a room by their reflection in the cornea of an eye:

We’re asymptotic to omnipresent, eh?

**

Now consider this:

Nir Rosen, in his book In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, p 129, tells us:

Seyid Hasan Naji al-Musawi, the thirty-eight-year-old leader of Sadr City’s Muhsin mosque and commander of [Moqtada] Sadr’s Army of the Mahdi in Baghdad, said that the final days were approaching in which the Mahdi would return. … Musawi declared that America’s real purpose in coming to Iraq was to kill the Mahdi.

You got that? America’s real purpose in coming to Iraq was to kill the Mahdi. No wonder some Iranians think of us, and specificallay of US, as The Great Satan.

I must confess I’ve been under the impression that Mahdism, being not merely a religious concept, not merely a religious concept from an “other” religion, but an “end times” religious concept from an “other” religion, was ideally suited for those of us in the post-Enlightenment west to ignore, even though it may be a concern of immense significance to, say, Moqtada al-Sadr and his followers, or Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his.

But what an opportunity for conspiracy theorists the idea that the US wants to disrupt the coming of Islam’s Mahdi must be!

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Now, putting one and one together, we see what a dastardly plot the US must be up to!

Peace be upon Mohammad and the family of Mohammad.

If I was the CIA/FBI/MI6/MOSSAD or in fact the Dajjal, here is how I would make a fake Imam.

1 Get some the world’s most advanced supercomputers. Current supercomputers have speeds of up to 2.507 petaFLOPs per second (In layman’s terms the best way I can describe the speed of a petaflop to you is: 1 petaflop is equal to 10 times the speed of all the networked computers in the USA combined!!!). This supercomputer will be dedicated to the purpose of Imam Mahdi. It will be fed everything that is possible to find on the subject of Imam Mahdi. It will be used for planning our strategies and tactics, and it will be able to answer any questions instantly. It will be our “backbone” for our operations.

2 Get some of the world’s most clever young children. You know how they choose children who are cleaver and give them scholarships to the best schools and universities? Well, what we would do is to get about 100 or more of the most clever geniuses that we can find around the world. They will be our “candidates”.

3 Each candidate will be raised up by us – with a very special and specific top secret training program which will be devised with the help of our supercomputer. We will assign a role for each one, and we will brainwash them and have them truly believe that they are who we want them to be. For example, we could have 20 of them who will take the role of the Shia Imam Mahdi, and another 20 who will take the role of the Sunni Imam Mahdi. We will also have them impersonate other end time characters, such as Jesus, Khithr, Yemani, Khorasani, Sufyani etc etc etc. Each candidate will have a slightly different approach, so that we can target all the different people – with all their different beliefs about the Imam. With many years of training, they will become extremely good at impersonating an Imam at least they will NOT be making any recitation mistakes!

4 Once they are fully trained and thoroughly tested, we will put them into the real world. They will be secretly connected with our dedicated supercomputer. With sophisticated technology, they will be able to send and receive information instantly and automatically without anyone knowing. For example, if someone asks our fake Imam a question, the supercomputer will “hear” it and it will give the answer instantly to the candidate without anyone hearing anything. It will give answers complete with Qur’an references and ahadith references etc… so much so that the candidate will be able to answer every single question with so much knowledge and wisdom and so many references that he could not have possibly known it will appear simply miraculous. You can even ask him to read page 205 from your CLOSED book, and he will read every word of it. It will look like he has knowledge of every single page of every single book ever written on this matter. He can look at your face (have the supercomputer link it with the intelligence
databases and get a match) and he can tell you everything about your life (which is stored in their database).

5 We will stage fake events such as the 313 giving allegiance in the Ka’bah to our candidate to make the deception more effective.

6 We will stage “miracles” to make the deception more effective. For example, we will use neverbeforeseen technology, and we will stage several optical illusions (magic tricks) which are very difficult to tell from a miracle. We can also make use of the spiritual skills which have been demonstrated for years in India. There are those who do not eat or drink anything for 70 years, there are those who can stop a moving train without touching it, there are those who can make you have specific dreams, there are those who can read your thoughts, there are those who can KILL an animal just by looking at it! And these are not miracles. These are spiritual powers which mainly employ Jinn, and anyone can gain these abilities through special spiritual exercises. We will also stage “punishments” on those who do not believe in our candidate. For example, get someone to approach a scholar and say: “There is a fake Imam who is deceiving people! And I want you to talk about him in your next lecture!” And when he does, we kill him and make it look like an accident or a heart attack. This will be seen as a miracle for our fake Imam because those who speak against him are “punished by Allah!”

What will be the obstacles:

The scholars. The scholars know all the signs and with the help of Allah (swt), they will be able to tell that our candidates may be fake. So we will target them one by one, and make them look evil.

The expectations of the people. The people will have very high expectations from the Imam. The biggest is the Shia belief of infallibility. Since it is difficult even with years of training to guarantee “infalliblelike conduct” from our candidates, we will have to reshape the people’s definition of infallibility using ahadith which have a broader and less strict definition of infallibility.

And more obstacles… each with a clever remedy.

What is the purpose of all of creating a fake Imam? Well, there are MANY purposes. But
the most obvious is that if we succeed in getting many of the Muslims to believe in OUR fake Imam, then when the REAL Imam comes, the Muslims will automatically call him a liar and a fraud because they believe OUR candidate is the real Imam, and no one else!!!

Also, since the Muslims believe in our fake candidate, we can slowly push our agenda in a very clever and subtle way.

This is just a quick outline of how I would create fake Imams. There’s so much more that can be done, and I’m sure there are even better ideas which I missed. But that was just to give you an idea.

Do not be surprised if we start seeing some very convincing imposers very soon. I’m pretty sure that the CIA and the Masons and Illuminati will do EVEN MORE than what I’ve outlined above.

Narrated from Mufathal Ibn Umar:

I heard Aba Abdillah (pbuhaf) saying: Beware of being weak (loose translation). By Allah, your Mahdi will be hidden for years of your era and it will be very long for you, and you will say: “what”, and “I wish”, and “maybe”, and “how”, and you will be tested, and doubts will rise within you, and it will even be said “he is dead”, or “he perished”, or “in what pit did he go?”, and the eyes of the believers will weep for him, and you will be shaken (loose translation) just as the ships are shaken by the waves of the ocean, until none will survive except those from whom Allah (swt) has taken an oath and has written faith in their hearts and has supported them with a spirit from Him, and there will rise 12 similar banners, and they do not know of their matter what they do.

Mufathal said: I cried and said: Oh my Master, and what will your awliya (close companions) do?

The Imam looked at the sun and it had become clearly visible (loose translation), and he said: Do you see this sun oh Mufathal?

I said: Yes my Master.

He said: By Allah our matter is clearer and more visible than it.

Ref: AlHidayah AlKubra by Hussain Ibn Hamdan AlKhosaiby Chapter 4, the Chapter on the Awaited Imam Mahdi (pbuhaf) page 361.

Welcome to the age of awesome deception.

Allah (swt) alone can save us from what is to come. May He (swt) assist us and make us firm in faith and keep us on His straight path always.

**

That’s one Islamic eschatological vision of false messiahs — no more official than Alex Jones‘ rantings are official US policy — but it’s interesting to set it besides a somwhat similar scenario from our own western conspiracists — The Blue Beam Project:

The infamous NASA Blue Beam Project has four different steps in order to implement the new age religion with the antichrist at its head. We must remember that the new age religion is the very foundation for the new world government, without which religion the dictatorship of the new world order is completely impossible. I’ll repeat that: Without a universal belief in the new age religion, the success of the new world order will be impossible! That is why the Blue Beam Project is so important to them, but has been so well hidden until now.

[ .. ]

The second step involves a gigantic “space show” with three-dimensional optical holograms and sounds, laser projection of multiple holographic images to different parts of the world, each receiving a different image according to predominating regional national religious faith. This new “god’s” voice will be speaking in all languages. In order to understand that, we must study various secret services’ research done in the last 25 years.

The Soviet’s have perfected an advanced computer, even exported them, and fed them with the minute physio-psycological particulars based on their studies of the anatomy and electro-mechanical composition of the human body, and the studies of the electrical, chemical and biological properties of the human brain.

These computers were fed, as well, with the languages of all human cultures and their meanings. The dialects of all cultures have been fed into the computers from satellite transmissions. The Soviets began to feed the computers with objective programs like the ones of the new messiah. It also seems that the Soviets – the new world order people – have resorted to suicidal methods with the human society by allocating electronic wavelengths for every person and every society and culture to induce suicidal thoughts if the person doesn’t comply with the dictates of the new world order.

There are two different aspects of step two. The first is the “space show.” Where does the space show come from? The space show, the holographic images will be used in a simulation of the ending during which all nations will be shown scenes which will be the fulfillment of that which they desire to verify the prophecies and adversary events. These will be projected from satellites onto the sodium layer about 60 miles above the earth. We see tests every once in a while, but they are called UFOs and “flying saucers.” The result of these deliberately staged events will be to show the world the new “christ,” the new messiah, Matreya, for the immediate implementation of the new world religion. Enough truth will be foisted upon an unsuspecting world to hook them into the lie. “Even the most learned will be deceived.” The project has perfected the ability for some device to lift up an enormous number of people, as in a rapture, and whisk the entire group into a never-never land. We see tests of this device in the abduction of humans by those mysterious little alien greys. who snatch people out of their beds and through windows into waiting “mother ships.”

The calculated resistance to the universal religion and the new messiah and the ensuing holy wars will result in the loss of human life on a scale never imagine before in all of human history. The Blue Beam Project will pretend to be the universal fulfillment of the prophecies of old, as major an event as that which occurred 2,000 years ago. In principle, it will make use of the skies as a movie screen (on the sodium layer at about 60 miles) as space-based laser-generating satellites project simultaneous images to the four corners of the planet in every language and dialect according to the region. It deals with the religious aspect of the new world order and is deception and seduction on a massive scale. Computers will coordinate the satellites and software already in place will run the sky show

Oy.

**

I am posting thes two examples of end times religious conspiracism today because IMO we need a sense of how far out such speculations can go, as we consider the rumors of a connection between the death of King Abdullah and the coming of the Mahdi.

Take off your tin-foil hats, people. A little common sense is required.

Rabbi Yochanan Ben Zakkai says, according to the Avot D’Rebbe Natan:

If you are holding a sapling in your hand, and someone says to you, ‘here comes the Messiah!’ — come and plant the sapling, and afterwards go and welcome the Messiah.

And Anas b. Mâlik in Musnad Ahmad 12981 relates that the Prophet (peace be upon him) said:

If the Hour arrives and one of you is holding a date palm sapling, then he should go ahead and plant it before getting up from his place if he is able to.

Keep calm, in other words, and carry on.

[ by Charles Cameron — Talmud, hypertext, spider webs, Indra’s net, noosphere, rosaries, renga, the bead game, Xanadu, hooks-and-eyes, onward! ]
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Let me firmly anchor this post and its comments, which will no doubt shift and turn as the wind wishes, in discussion of the possibility of improving on current affordances for online deliberation.

Let’s begin here:

@hipbonegamer @Aelkus @pmarca Andy van Dam cited “Talmudic Annotation” as ur hypertext pattern since the mid 1960’s pic.twitter.com/F1XKEf9F7G

— Greg Lloyd (@roundtrip) December 11, 2014

**

There are a variety of precursor streams to this discussion: I have listed a few that appeal to me in the sub-head of this post and believe we will reach each and all of them in some form and forum if this discussion takes off. And I would like to offer the immediate hospitality of this Zenpundit post and comment section to make a beginning.

Greg’s tweet shows us a page of the Talmud, which is interesting to me for two reasons:

it presents many voices debating a central topic

it does so using an intricate graphical format

The script of a play or movie also records multiple voices in discourse, as does an orchestral score — but the format of the Talmudic score is more intricate, allowing the notation of counterpoint that extends across centuries, and provoking in turn centuries of further commentary and debate.

What can we devise by way of a format, given the constraints of screen space and the affordances of software and interface design, that maximizes the possibility of debate with respect, on the highly charged topics of the day.

We know from the Talmud that such an arrangement is possible in retrospect (when emotion can be recollected in tranquility): I am asking how we can come closest to it in real time. The topics are typically hotly contested, patience and tolerance may not always be in sufficient supply, and moderation by humans with powers of summary and editing should probably not be ruled out of our consdierations. But how do we create a platform that is truly polyphonic, that sustains the voices of all participants without one shouting down or crowding out another, that indeed may embody a practic of listening..?

Carl Rogers has shown us that the ability to express one’s interlocutor’s ideas clearly enough that they acknowledge one has understood them is a significant skill in navigating conversational rapids.

The Talmud should be an inspiration but not a constraint for us. The question is not how to build a Talmud, but how to build a format that can host civil discussion which refines itself as it grows — so that, to use a gardening metaphor, it is neither overgrown nor too harshly manicured, but manages a carefully curated profusion of insights and —

actual interactions between the emotions and ideas in participating or observing individuals’ minds and hearts

**

Because polyphony is not many voices talking past one another, but together — sometimes discordant, but attempting to resolve those discords as they arrive, and with a figured bass of our common humanity underwriting the lot of them.

And I have said it before: here JS Bach is the master. What he manages with a multitude of musical voices in counterpoint is, in my opinion, what we need in terms of verbal voices in debate.

I am particularly hoping to hear from some of those who participated in tweeted comments arising from my previous post here titled Some thoughts for Marc Andreessen & Adam Elkus, including also Greg Loyd, Callum Flack, Belinda Barnet, Ken (chumulu) — Jon Lebkowsky if he’s around — and friends, and friends of friends.

What say you?

 David Ronfeldt, RAND strategist and theorist has done a deep two-part  review of America 3.0 over at his Visions from Two Theories blog. Ronfeldt has been spending the last few years developing his TIMN analytic framework (Tribes, Institutions [hierarchical], Markets and Networks) which you can get a taste from here  and here or a full reading with this RAND paper.

David regards the familial structure thesis put forward by James Bennett and Michael Lotus in America 3.0 as “captivating”  and “compelling” for  “illuminating the importance of the nuclear family for America’s evolution in ways that, in my view, help validate and reinforce TIMN”. Both reviews are detailed and should be read in their entirety, but I will have some excerpts below:

America 3.0 illuminates significance of nuclear families — in line with TIMN (Part 1 of 2) 

….Bennett and Lotus show at length (Chapter 2, pp. 29-45) that the nuclear family explains a lot about our distinctive culture and society:

“It has caused Americans to have a uniquely strong concept of each person as an individual self, with an identity that is not bound by family or tribal or social ties. … Our distinctive type [of] American nuclear family has made us what we are.” (p. 29)And “what we are” as a result is individualistic, liberty-loving, nonegalitarian (without being inegalitarian), competitive, enterprising, mobile, and voluntaristic. In addition, Americans tend to have middle-class values, an instrumental view of government, and a preference for suburban lifestyles. 

As the authors carefully note, these are generally positive traits, but they have both bright and dark sides, noticeable for example in the ways they make America a “high-risk, high-return culture” (p. 38) — much to the bane of some individuals. The traits also interact in interesting ways, such that Americans tend to be loners as individuals and families, but also joiners “who form an incomprehensibly dense network of voluntary associations” — much to the benefit of civil society (p. 39). 

In sum, the American-style nuclear family is the major cause of “American exceptionalism” — the basis of our freedom and prosperity, our “amazing powers of assimilation” (p. 53), and our unique institutions:

“It was the deepest basis for the development of freedom and prosperity in England, and then in America. Further, the underlying Anglo-American family type was the foundation for all of the institutions, laws, and cultural practices that gave rise to our freedom and prosperity over the centuries.” (p. 52)The authors go on to show this for America 1.0 and 2.0 in detail. They also reiterate that Americans have long taken the nuclear family for granted. Yet, very different marriage and family practices are the norm in most societies around the world. And the difference is profoundly significant for the kinds of cultural, social, economic, and political evolution that ensue. Indeed, the pull of the nuclear model in the American context is so strong that it has a liberating effect on immigrants who come from societies that are organized around extended families and clans (p. 55) — an important point, since America is a land of immigrants from all over, not just from Anglo-Saxon nuclear-family cultures.

….As for foreign policy, the authors commend “an emerging phenomenon we call “Network Commonwealth,” which is an alignment of nations … who share common ties that may include language, culture and common legal systems.” (p. 260) Above all, they’d like to see the “Anglosphere” take shape. And as the world coalesces into various “global networks of affinity” engaged in shifting coalitions (p. 265), America 3.0 would cease emphasizing democracy-promotion abroad, and “reorient its national strategy to a primary emphasis on maintaining the freedom of the global commons of air, sea, and space.” (p. 263) [UPDATE: For more about the Network Commonwealth and Anglosphere concepts, see Bennett’s 2007 paper here.]

Read the whole thing here.

America 3.0 illuminates significance of nuclear families — in line with TIMN (Part 2 of 2)  

….Overlaps with TIMN themes and propositions

Part 1 discussed America 3.0’s key overlap with TIMN: the prevalence and significance of the nuclear family in the American case. This leads to questions about family matters elsewhere. Furthermore, it should be pointed out that there is more to TIMN’s tribal form than the nature of the family. I also spotted several additional thematic overlaps between America 3.0 and TIMN, and I want to highlight those as well. Thus, in outline form, this post addresses:

• Seeking a fuller understanding of family matters beyond the American case.
• Gaining a fuller understanding of the tribal/T form.
• Anticipating the rise of the network/+N form.
• Recognizing that every form has bright and dark sides.
• Recognizing the importance of separation among the forms/realms.
• Recognizing that balance among them is important too.
• Cautioning against the exportability of the American model.

After these points, the post ends by summarily noting that America 3.0 is more triformist than quadriformist in conception — but a worthy kind of triformist plus, well worth reading.

My discussion emphasizes the T and +N forms. Bennett and Lotus also have lots to say about +I and +M matters — government and business — and I’ll squeeze in a few remarks along the way. But this post mostly skips +I and +M matters. For I’m more interested in how America 3.0 focuses on T (quite sharply) and +N (too diffusely). 

By the way, America 3.0 contains lots of interesting observations that I do not discuss — e.g., that treating land as a commodity was a feature of nuclear-family society (p. 105), and so was creating trusts (p. 112). Readers are advised to harvest the book’s contents for themselves.

….Caution about the exportability of the American model: TIMN sharpens — at least it is supposed to sharpen — our understanding that how societies work depends on how they use four cardinal forms of organization. This simplification leaves room for great complexity, for it is open to great variation in how those forms may be applied in particular societies. Analysts, strategists, and policymakers should be careful about assuming that what works in one society can be made to work in another. 

….In retrospect it seems I pulled my punch there. I left out what might/should have come next: TIMN-based counsel to be wary about assuming that the American model, especially its liberal democracy, can be exported into dramatically different cultures. I recall thinking that at the time; but I was also trying to shape a study of just the tribal form, without getting into more sweeping matters. So I must have pulled that punch, and I can’t find anywhere else I used it. Even so, my view of TIMN is that it does indeed caution against presuming that the American model is exportable, or that foreign societies can be forced into becoming liberal democracies of their own design.

Meanwhile, America 3.0 clearly insists that Americans should be wary of trying to export the American model of democracy. Since so much about the American model depends on the nature of the nuclear family, policies that work well in the United States may not work well in other societies with different cultures — and vice-versa. Accordingly, the authors warn,

“American politicians are likely to be wrong when they tell us that we can successfully export democracy, or make other countries look and act more like the United States.” (p. 24)

“A foreign-policy based primarily on “democracy-promotion” and “nation-building” is one that will fail more times than not, … .” (p. 254)TIMN is not a framework about foreign policy. But as a framework about social evolution, it may have foreign-policy implications that overlap with those of America 3.0. In my nascent view (notably here, here, and here), the two winningest systems of the last half-century or so are liberal democracy and patrimonial corporatism. The former is prominent among the more-advanced societies, the latter among the less-developed (e.g., see here). As Bennett and Lotus point out, liberal democracy is most suitable where nuclear families hold sway. And as I’ve pointed out, patrimonial corporatism is more attractive in societies where clannish tribalism holds sway. 

Read the rest here.

This discussion about America 3.0 and TIMN seems particularly appropriate in light of the need to process, digest and distill the lessons of more than a decade of COIN and counter-terrorism warfare in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and – increasingly- Africa. One of the more difficult aspects of COIN operations has been for American military and diplomatic to decipher the layered relationships and interplay of family honor, tribe, political institution, emerging market and networks in a nation shattered by dictatorship and war like Iraq or to import modern institutions and  a democratic political system in Afghanistan where they had never existed.

Many of these aspects were opaque and were understood only through hard-won experience (frequently lost with new unit rotation) or still remain elusive to Americans even after ten years of fighting among alien cultures which were also permeated by the sectarian nuances and conflicts of Islam. A religion to which relatively few Americans adhere or know sufficiently about, yet is a critical psychological driver for many of our adversaries as well as our allies.

Arguably, the eye-opening response of people to America 3.0 indicates we do not even understand ourselves, much less others

America 3.0 

From Chicago Boyz:

America 3.0: Mike Lotus on The Bob Dutko Show

Mike Lotus will be on the Bob Dutko radio show tomorrow, May 31, 2013 at 12:40 p.m. EST. Bob hosts Detroit’s #1 Christian Talk Radio Show on WMUZS 103.5 FM.

Please listen in if you can!

Many thanks to the Bob Dutko Show for having me on.

This weekend we will post an updated list of upcoming appearances by Jim Bennett, Mike Lotus, and occasionally both of us together, talking about America 3.0.

Thanks to The Takeaway, the The Armstrong & Getty Show, and The Janet Mefferd show for interviewing Jim Bennett — all yesterday. It was a Bennett Threefer! 

And Author Appearances:

Upcoming appearances for Jim Bennett and Mike Lotus discussing America 3.0

Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Lou Dobbs Tonight (James and Michael)
We will be on about 7:45 p.m. EST.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Armstrong & Getty (James)
11:15 am EST

Wednesday, May 29, 2013 
Janet Mefferd Show (James)
3:30 pm EST

Friday, May 31, 2013 
Bob Dutko Show (Michael)
1:40 pm EST

Tuesday, June 4, 2013
Talk to Adam Smith Society, Booth School of Business (Michael)
Noon

Thursday, June 6, 2013
Mornings with Nick Reed (Michael)

Saturday, June 7, 2013
Marc Bernier Show (James & Michael)
4:25 pm EST

Monday, June 17, 2013
Western Conservative Summit, “Envisioning America 3.0” (James)

And their maiden TV appearance with Lou Dobbs: