zenpundit.com

I have featured Sir Ken Robinson here previously. I saw this short 11 minute “talk” today in John Hagel’s   twitterfeed. It’s great!

Charles Cameron is the regular guest-blogger at Zenpundit, and has also posted at Small Wars Journal, All Things Counterterrorism, for the Chicago Boyz Afghanistan 2050 roundtable and elsewhere.  Charles read Theology at Christ Church, Oxford, under AE Harvey, and was at one time a Principal Researcher with Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies and the Senior Analyst with the Arlington Institute:

Regarding the popular intel phrase “connect the dots”,  this is the first, brief ‘blip’ in a series of short posts that Charles will be feeding in here along with more substantial pieces, to capture the sort of stray thoughts, while they are flying by, that may add up to more of a mosaic later.

Bin Laden the Avatar

by Charles Cameron

Just a quick question:

Is bin Laden portrayed as an “Avatar” in the James Cameron sense in this
video in which he also talks about climate change — a significant
ecological theme in his recent discourses?

h/t Ibn Siqilli, frame taken from the video “Help Your Brothers in Pakistan”. People have joked about it – see Here for instance… But is AQ picking up on the meme and exploiting it, as they’ve exploited Tolkien on occasion?

John Robb at Global Guerrillas:

JOURNAL: Moral Decay?

Moral decay is often cited as a reason for why empires/civilizations collapse.  The slow failure of the US mortgage market, the largest debt market in the world and the shining jewel of the US economic/financial system, is  a good example of moral decay at work.  

Why is this market failing?  It’s being gutted — from wholesale fraud and ruthless profiteering at the bank/servicer level to strategic defaults at the homeowner level — because a relatively efficient and effective moral system is being replaced by a burdensome and ineffective one.  What shift?  Our previous moral system featured trust, loyalty, reputation, responsibility, belief, fairness, etc.   While these features were sometimes in short supply, on the whole it provided us with an underlying and nearly costless structure to our social and economic interactions.  

Our new moral system is that of the dominant global marketplace.  This new system emphasizes transactional, short-term interactions rather than long-term relationships.  All interactions are intensely legalistic, as in: nothing is assumed except what is spelled out in the contract.  Goodness is solely based on transactional success and therefore anything goes, as long as you don’t get punished for it.  

In this moral system, every social and economic interaction becomes increasingly costly due to a need to contractually defend yourself against cheating, fraud, and theft.  Worse, when legalistic punishment is absent/lax, rampant looting and fraud occurs.  

Given the costs and dangers of moral decay, it’s not hard to see why it can cause a complex empire/civilization to collapse.

John is drawing on an intellectual tradition goes back to Gibbon, Ibn Khaldun, Polybius, Confucius and Mencius  but is mashing it up with modern concepts of social complexity, such as is found in Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. This makes sense; when members of a ruling class start to behave in an unethical manner, there is a natural reaction by morally vigilant members of the ruling class to check future abuses of power by dividing administrative authority, increasing regulations, creating new watchdogs and erecting balancing countermeasures. This is an increase in complexity that decreases rather than improves efficiency. Society pays more for the same level of effective governance and the creep of corruption will soon require another “re-set” and yet another no-value added  increase in complexity as the elite multiplies and seeks their own aggrandizement.

When Robert Wright wrote of “ossifying” societies unable to stand the test of barbarians in the ancient and medieval worlds, in Nonzero:The Logic of Human Destiny, he was explicit that a moral critique often correlated with economic/darwinian fitness. Rome, for example, eschewed adaptive technological innovation due to it’s heavy reliance on inexpensive slave labor. Oligarchic societies fit the moral decay theory because oligarchies focus on the zero sum game of extracting existing wealth from the population instead of creating and accumulating it. The extraction process requires an expensive social architecture of control and this is subject to diminishing returns. At a certain point, any system reaches the tipping point on adding the next level of non-productive complexity and begins to unravel.

What if the historical ratchet could be reversed?

What if the excess complexity could be systemically pared back along with the opportunities for corruption and self-aggrandizement that required countermeasures?

Societies are occasionally capable of moral and political renovation, cases in point, the Glorious Revolution and the Meiji Restoration, both of which tied ancient ideals to new political forms while sweeping away a corrupt elite. The American Revolution period, through the adoption of the US Constitution would be another example of societal transformation. These successes, which involve constitutional reforms and a rejuvenated political economy are essentially of a social contractual nature and are rare. Failure is more common, as with Sulla’s bloody reforms that temporarily got rid of bad actors and rebooted the Roman Republic to an older, more virtuous model but failed to address the fact that the structural flaws of the Republic itself were the problem, not the ambition of Marius.

Things are not yet too far gone. There is much that is wrong with the United States but we have a more resilient and coherent foundation upon which to reconstruct than did the Romans of the 1st century BC. 

America has many Mariuses but a better Republic.

Another Chicago Boyz colleague, James Bennett, author of The Anglosphere Challenge, had a feature article in National Review, which is now available online:

The Great U-Turn

Admirers and detractors of the United States agree on one point: This country is unusually resistant to the social consensus and set of structures broadly known as “social democracy” or “progressivism.” (Social democracy leans more toward state ownership, progressivism toward state regulation.) Various versions of such schemes have prevailed in Western Europe and Japan, and to a lesser degree in Britain, Canada, and Australia. The characteristics include a wider scope and role for the state, centralization of decision-making in a national bureaucracy, monopolization of power by a set of large institutions, including state-champion corporations and labor unions, and a wide variety of social entitlements for all citizens. This was the classic progressive economic program; since the 1960s, it has also included certain social characteristics, such as official multiculturalism.

Most of these measures were characteristic of some parts of Continental Western Europe from the late 19th century onward, and became generally prevalent there after the Second World War. The English-speaking countries lagged well behind; Britain began to adopt welfarist policies and admit labor unions to the domestic power system before the First World War, but moved to full entitlement systems and substantial state control of the economy only after 1945. Australia and New Zealand adopted entitlement systems early, using their agricultural and mineral export earnings as petro-states now use oil wealth, but remained socially conservative in many other ways. Canada was essentially similar to the U.S. in its domestic systems (despite some greater public ownership, mostly in transportation) until the 1960s. But by the end of the 1970s, America stood virtually alone in a world of seemingly universal consensus for a strong managerial state.

….America had gone some distance down this road by 1980, although not as far as Canada or Britain, and nowhere near as far as Germany or France, which had never been all that laissez-faire in the first place. But 1980 marked the point at which the nation reversed course. Thenceforth it would be headed in the opposite direction, toward a new vision of individualism and decentralism, driven by the computer rather than the plow….

Read the rest here.

Is it right? Horribly wrong? Missing variables?

Fire away in comments.

ADDENDUM:

Joseph Fouche offers up his graph of schools of strategy at The Committee of Public Safety. Note that unlike me, he has placed them in terms of “Influence…..Coercion…Violence”:

Dr. Chet Richards, in his turn, kindly drew my attention back to graph he created -if memory serves – around the time he wrote Neither Shall the Sword, but I am still trying to figure out how to convert the file to something I can post here. Until I do, go to slide 89 in the link below:
4GW and Grand Strategy