[P2P-F] Fwd: Modern Feudalism, Two Cases

21 Feb 2015

      ---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bob Reuschlein <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, Feb 21, 2015 at 9:18 PM
Subject: Modern Feudalism, Two Cases
To:

Link to send to others by:

https://bobreuschlein.wordpress.com/2015/02/21/modern-feudalism-two-cases/

*Modern Feudalism, Two Cases*

by Dr. Bob Reuschlein

What happens when an advanced civilization breaks down and leaves feudalism
in its wake?

One case is when the global temperature changes and new areas are favored
while other areas are left behind.  The other case is when an advanced
civilization becomes an empire and the erosion caused by high levels of
military spending steadily reduces the civilization into a lower state of
existence.

CLASSIC FEUDALISM

Classic feudalism or medievalism refers to the down period in European
development between the end of the Roman Empire and before the Renaissance
of the Modern Era.  With the overrunning of the well organized society by
barbarians, the breakdown was replaced with rampant warlord militarism
leading to many fiefdoms dominated by castles with motes.  The lord would
give protection to those working the land in his or her castle at night and
from time to time as these workers were called serfs.  The lord serf
relationship features high income inequality.  The lack of intellectual
development as martial skills are instead rewarded leads to a lack of what
we in the developed world call progress in the sciences.  The church steps
into the void in scientific progress and becomes a dominant institution.

ROLE REVERSAL

Just as one great religion rose at the peak of the Roman Empire,
Christianity, another great religion, Islam, rose at the peak of the
Byzantine Empire.  As the Western European world was in decline, the Arab
world was in ascendancy with the invention of algebra, the zero, and the
spreading of Islam across the Southern Mediterranean and into Eastern
Europe and Asia.  The reaction to all of that was the Crusades.

Then the tide turns with the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution, as
Christianity once more became ascendant. The reaction to all of that were
the rejection of colonialism and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. The
recent attacks on the president for mentioning the Crusades in the same
breathe as the current religious extremists just goes to show how
determined to be wrong the right usually is.  The Middle Age world warming
that favored more Northerly Europe over the more Southerly Middle East lead
to the Crusades, which lasted about as long as the farming in Greenland,
both ending as the world cooled.  The first Crusade when it reached Asia
Minor, now called Turkey, descended on a town there where every man woman
and child were killed.  It turned out they had unwittingly chosen a
Christian community.  So the Crusades of yesteryear did not lack in
barbarity in comparison to today’s religious militants.

MODERN EMPIRE DECLINE

Today’s America seems ascendant in every way on the world stage, but the
rot from within is well advanced.  While China and India graduate ten times
the engineers the US does, we send our best talent into financial schemes
on Wall Street.  As the rich get richer and the middle class fails to
obtain pay raises at all, we devolve more and more into a lord serf
relationship society.  Indeed, the military seems the only way out for many
in poor white rural communities.  When the technology manufacturing sector
is in decline and the retail and service sectors are ascendant, that is the
surest sign of a declining empire.  When 4% of the world’s population
houses 25% of the prisoners, crime is at epidemic rates in America.  When
America has the highest homicide, prisoner, mental illness, teen birthrate,
and obesity rates in the developed world, surely it is because of high
income inequality and militarism, as shown in my tables in the Empire
Economics presentation listed second immediately below:

[P2P-F] Fwd: Modern Feudalism, Two Cases

Michel Bauwens