Comment by 6stringmerc
8 hours ago
So how does the cycle work? I’m not being sarcastic I actually find this a relevant and on-point summation. I happen to be very interested in the systemic consequences and results in Western history as much as is applicable in present USA. I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
One final resolution is the guillotine, dangling upside down on a meat hook, or a bunker fire. Those are extreme but we have to wonder what will stop a specific leader from pushing so far that they meet such a fate. This personality type does not stop unless they have to.
> One final resolution is the guillotine
Did you miss the lesson from the actual guillotine? It’s just another escalation in the cycle. The parties switch from raiding to guillotining each other. The guillotine doesn’t solve the problem, it just raises the stakes.
Sure. Final resolution for that leader, in any case. But in the cycles of history, those events are almost always inflection points where something new happens. For the Terror, that lasted a while, but then we got Napoleon, which was definitely a new chapter.
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So what is 2A for? What is price of shooting children in schools for?
Just to add to this, it still blows my mind how quickly this happened. The French went from overthrowing the royals to guillotining their neighbours within 5 years, and in the same short timespan Robespierre went madder than any Sun King had ever been. "La Terreur" was total madness.
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It’s somewhat hopeful to assume that it is a cycle.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
2. Modern societies are really complex, and a great deal of information-processing work is required to keep them functioning. Authoritarian governments maintain control by concentrating power, which means there are too few people available to make decisions about the behaviour of the system. A good example is the centrally-planned economy of the Soviet Union, which was outperformed by 'the invisible hand of the market', which is really a metaphor for the collective decisions of all participants in market economies. Consequently, authoritarian governments always collapse in the end. It's interesting to note, however, that the Soviet Union and the fascist or quasi-fascist governments in Spain and Portugal lasted much longer than Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, because they built up some institutions that resulted in less concentration of power.
I find your explanation of free markets outperforming authoritarian regimes wanting. How should a stable and sealed dictatorship like north korea be impacted let alone destabilized by anything outside privateers do? Can you give an example?
Also, since many people bring up the french revolution. Peak weapons tech back then was front loading muskets and the fights in paris were desparation driven bloodbaths, where such weapons were eventually captured by the revolution. Today, the power gap to be outperformed by free markets is much bigger.
Usually there's a bodies-in-the-streets phase... guillotine was theatrical, bolsheviks called it the red terror, nazis were well the nazis, italians strung em up on meathooks, tienamin used tanks (after the famines), baltics did straight up ethnic cleansings, last week iranians gunned down thousands corralled in the squares.
Luckily we're still only in the "kidnap and beat-up by the secret police" phase, haven't had the mass executions yet. Only a singular execution here and there.
> I’m glad to be a bystander and not participant, that’s for sure.
Hope that's because you're not in the USA. USA-based bystanders is how this shit happens.