The following is a guest commentary by Tom Usher.
Those lamps were the lamps of independence. In Europe, independence meant conflict, just like it did here in the states. We succumbed to central control first and then it was forced on Europe by America as a result of the war.
I think that America was designed originally as it was because the founders looked at European history and realized that independent states would always be at war. They designed a system that was supposed to allow for a common governmental framework in which these conflicts could be defused without the loss of independence.
It took less than one hundred years to find out that peace among independent states is not possible and that a little control with only the power of man as its basis won't maintain it. Peace, or at least the fiction of it, can only be maintained through force of a more eternal kind.
And that's the real story of history. Who has the power to enforce peace and whether or not they do it with justice or terror. After the fall of Rome Europe became a place where subsidiarity was the rule. City states and small kingdoms all competed for power. Because there were many different actors and power was diffused a chaotic system kept any one group from holding too much power for too long.
During the Middle Ages the system the American founders wanted actually existed, though to read modern historians one would never know it. The Catholic Church became the great arbiter, a clearing house for grievances large and small which kept most of Europe independent and from each other's throat. Most rulers had an allegiance to the Church and the Pope which gave the Church the power to step in when needed and decide the issue at hand before war broke out.
A perfect system? No. But a better one than the one that came into place after WW I. The American system of top down central control, developed after the Civil War, came into its own during the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, and at the same time as the rise of the other centrally controlled system, Communism. And Europe became the testing and battle ground for global central government.
In the Middle Ages, Europe stayed relatively peaceful (at least for Europe) due to the fear of God. The limits imposed by the Church were shattered by the Reformation and the Age of Reason, culminating in the French Revolution and finally the force of government enforced through the fear of man and his arms after WW I. Nations no longer feared God. {Estase's note: "God is dead"--Nietsche's statement was more sociology than philosophy. Old Friedrich was only describing what had long been the case} They looked to themselves for authority and the guys with the biggest guns had the most. So, with the governors off, with nothing apart from national force as the benchmark of truth, we entered into a century of global conflict, a tug of war on a global scale; an unnatural state of never-ending warfare on a global and all-consuming scale.
That is the legacy of WW I and all that led to it. A war that has never been decided, a peace that can only be maintained through massive force, which requires an expenditure of resources that cannot be maintained over time on a global scale never before attempted. Entropy writ large.
We're out of energy to apply to the false system of peace that was put in place at Versailles. The system is collapsing and a new one will rise in its place. We're about to see why, on the biggest human scale ever, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not just a suggestion--it's a law.
Personally, I think that we'll use the last of our rapidly dwindling energy reserves fighting to damn near global exhaustion this time and then we'll see the injection of God into history. The power to rebuild had to come from the outside to keep the human system going or it will completely collapse and disappear. God uses nature and He pretty much follows the laws he designed. So buckle up. Those that make it to the other side of this will have stories that will need to be passed down through the generations as a warning to those that come after.
Those lamps were the lamps of independence. In Europe, independence meant conflict, just like it did here in the states. We succumbed to central control first and then it was forced on Europe by America as a result of the war.
I think that America was designed originally as it was because the founders looked at European history and realized that independent states would always be at war. They designed a system that was supposed to allow for a common governmental framework in which these conflicts could be defused without the loss of independence.
It took less than one hundred years to find out that peace among independent states is not possible and that a little control with only the power of man as its basis won't maintain it. Peace, or at least the fiction of it, can only be maintained through force of a more eternal kind.
And that's the real story of history. Who has the power to enforce peace and whether or not they do it with justice or terror. After the fall of Rome Europe became a place where subsidiarity was the rule. City states and small kingdoms all competed for power. Because there were many different actors and power was diffused a chaotic system kept any one group from holding too much power for too long.
During the Middle Ages the system the American founders wanted actually existed, though to read modern historians one would never know it. The Catholic Church became the great arbiter, a clearing house for grievances large and small which kept most of Europe independent and from each other's throat. Most rulers had an allegiance to the Church and the Pope which gave the Church the power to step in when needed and decide the issue at hand before war broke out.
A perfect system? No. But a better one than the one that came into place after WW I. The American system of top down central control, developed after the Civil War, came into its own during the Roosevelt and Wilson administrations, and at the same time as the rise of the other centrally controlled system, Communism. And Europe became the testing and battle ground for global central government.
In the Middle Ages, Europe stayed relatively peaceful (at least for Europe) due to the fear of God. The limits imposed by the Church were shattered by the Reformation and the Age of Reason, culminating in the French Revolution and finally the force of government enforced through the fear of man and his arms after WW I. Nations no longer feared God. {Estase's note: "God is dead"--Nietsche's statement was more sociology than philosophy. Old Friedrich was only describing what had long been the case} They looked to themselves for authority and the guys with the biggest guns had the most. So, with the governors off, with nothing apart from national force as the benchmark of truth, we entered into a century of global conflict, a tug of war on a global scale; an unnatural state of never-ending warfare on a global and all-consuming scale.
That is the legacy of WW I and all that led to it. A war that has never been decided, a peace that can only be maintained through massive force, which requires an expenditure of resources that cannot be maintained over time on a global scale never before attempted. Entropy writ large.
We're out of energy to apply to the false system of peace that was put in place at Versailles. The system is collapsing and a new one will rise in its place. We're about to see why, on the biggest human scale ever, the Second Law of Thermodynamics is not just a suggestion--it's a law.
Personally, I think that we'll use the last of our rapidly dwindling energy reserves fighting to damn near global exhaustion this time and then we'll see the injection of God into history. The power to rebuild had to come from the outside to keep the human system going or it will completely collapse and disappear. God uses nature and He pretty much follows the laws he designed. So buckle up. Those that make it to the other side of this will have stories that will need to be passed down through the generations as a warning to those that come after.
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