Competence Isn't All It's Cracked Up To Be

Suprastructure or
infrastructure?

I have written quite a bit about the ideological minorities that Toynbee studied and pointed out in his A Study of History.

In so doing I often quoted The Encyclopedia Britannica's take on it:

Once that aspect of a culture becomes hooked up with "nationalism" and "militarism" that culture's "goose is cooked" as the saying goes:

History told us this was going to happen:

But always TCS is primarily the population segment diagnosed as a despotic minority which the once most-often-quoted historian, Toynbee, fingered as one of the members of the trinity of extinction that he found in all civilizations that were about to become very successful at becoming extinct:

That something is the dementia that produces and ends up in suicide:

"In other words, a society does not ever die 'from natural causes', but always dies from suicide or murder --- and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown."

(A Study of History, by Arnold J. Toynbee). There is no cure for the final symptom of that group dementia, there is only prevention by way of avoiding it altogether in the first place.

The components of that group dementia were pointed out in an encyclopedia piece concerning that historian quoted above:

"In the Study Toynbee examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history, and he concluded that they rose by responding successfully to challenges under the leadership of creative minorities composed of elite leaders. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to the sins of nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Unlike Spengler in his The Decline of the West, Toynbee did not regard the death of a civilization as inevitable, for it may or may not continue to respond to successive challenges. Unlike Karl Marx, he saw history as shaped by spiritual, not economic forces" ...

(Encyclopedia Britannica, emphasis added). The show stopper, in terms of remedy, in this type of group dementia is that it is a contagious dementia.

(Etiology of Social Dementia - 18). That particular "minority" is not a racial or ethnic minority, rather, it is primarily composed of a destructive suicidal trance (Choose Your Trances Carefully, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8).

(Arrested Development: The Creep State). Our culture is composed, now, of the toxins of power that habitually destroy nations and civilizations (Hypothesis: The Cultural Amygdala - 2).

(When You Are Governed By Psychopaths - 8). Voting politicians out of office, because they cater to the despotic minority, is not enough.

(How To Identify The Despotic Minority, cf. this). Noam Chomsky, an academic and an activist, who has been at it for decades has expressed in modern speak the history and herstory that Toynbee flushed out years ago.

Even though Mr. Chomsky (Noam Chomsky Website) moved from the humid MIT realm to the Dry Void Desert, he has not lost his impeccable observational skills by so doing:

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Lyrics: here

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