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Toynbee wrote that civilizations come to birth and proceed to grow by successfully responding to successive challenges. But each challenge must be between excessive difficulty, which would crush a culture, and ease that allows it to stagnate.

Civilizations continue to grow so long as they meet new challenges, one after another, in a cycle he called challenge and response.

Each civilization develops differently because each overcomes different challenges.

Societies do not respond to challenges as a whole. Rather, it's a class of elites that are the problem solvers. He calls them the "creative minorities" who find solutions ... and inspire (not force) others to follow their lead. The masses follow the solutions of the creative minorities by imitation. Synchronicity between the creative minorities and the masses brings civilization to its height.

The decline of the creative minority leads to a civilization's downfall. Through moral decay or material prosperity, the creative minority degenerates. They are no longer the great men who solve society's problems, but are only a ruling class intent on preserving their power.

Toynbee points to a kind of "self worship" that takes hold of new dominant but degenerate minority. They become prideful in regard to their positions of authority, yet are wholly inadequate to deal with the culture's new challenges.

Ultimately, the dominant minority, incapable of solving their culture's actual problems, form a universal state in a gambit to shore up their power. But it stifles creativity and subjugates the common people.

That summarizes what Arnold Toynbee wrote in his books.

Now for my comment:

America is ruled by a thoroughly degenerate dominant minority,
which is totally incapable of dealing with America's problems.

The end of the American Empire is coming.
Not from our external enemies,
but our own degenerate leaders.

Welcome to the dustbin of history.
Just like all the other empires that ever existed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3gzkHhSMHIA

Toynbee's assessment is a bit over my head in some respects. I think he is characterizing narcissism and arrogance in government. But that and even the disconnect in values is not the main theme of the US's decline.

The main problem the US faces above all else is corruption and financialization of every aspect of life. Everything in our culture is either to exploit, or to be exploited for profit. Medical system, higher education, automotive market, energy market, the food industry, pharma, etc.

Nothing in this country is considered worth doing unless you are fucking someone else hard.

For one example, the entire homelessness "assistance" industry in a state like California where most managers and executives in the NGOs make upper 6 digit salaries, and the problem keeps getting worse regardless.

But the narcissism and arrogance makes our corruption straightforward and understandable.

I do completely agree that our country is in a death spiral, and Trump is NOT going to save anything just because of the scope of the issues. Sic: the national debt as it is now cannot be paid off unless the US miraculously quadruples its GDP from a normal peacetime level. If Trump goes in hard on illegal immigrants he will likely spark a very bloody actual civil war - there are 40+ million illegals.

It's just too large. It's monopoly money now. If the US government miraculously started doing $100 billion annual budget surpluses, it would take 30 years to pay the debt. And there's no chance they will produce a $1 surplus let alone $1e11. The people at the top do not take debt seriously any more, they simply invent dollars and then hand them to their mates. It's a bit depressing, really.

Civilisation is a fascinating topic but I haven't had a chance to look into it properly. Quigley, Chodorov and Russell have all done work and all three I have set to go when I can get to them. I also have Huntington which I did have a look at but I suspect he is a bit of a fake.

I'm not convinced about Toynbee. Sounds too ordered to me. Yes there would be some challenges encountered and conquered but there would also be challenges smaller and larger than goldilocks size, and also periods of no challenge. Unless he has shown that every civilisation in those other circumstances fell, his theory fails.

I'm not convinced about Toynbee. Sounds too ordered to me.

That's a good way to sum it up, exactly how I thought. A mass of people isn't exactly a state machine.

Remember I said that exploitation seems to be a really useful way to characterize how US and western society as a whole operates now.

So about that:

Governments print the money they need to monetize the public debt.

The direct cost is inflation at all levels - financial assets and goods and services.

We work in order to gain the PRIVILEGE of obtaining debt units (dollars.)

The worst thing that can happen in the US is that your ability to earn the privilege to transact those debt units is taken away.

And the velocity of money in the economy, touted as strength, actually shows how weak the dollar is.

An investment guy I follow on Youtube made this cogent argument: money works as a means of transaction AND as a means of value storage, and those are TWO DIFFERENT use cases. If faith in the currency as a store of value reduces, then everyone seeks to unload dollars by spending, and seeks to obtain more resilient stores of value. IE, spend a lot in dollars and hoard precious metals, or crypto. (His video - watch it and you will feel your brain swelling in size: https://youtu.be/19c_nf8RtVg?si=qD-hATYM1vSSTLGW )

The US dollar is an egregious example of exploitation.

The American Empire as we know it is dying and it should because of the greed and corruption from the top down, not to mention the moral degeneracy of our government. They want to destroy our country and have no interest in fixing any of our problems. They just take our tax dollars and do whatever they want with it. That money should be clawed back because they didn't use it.

This article basically says the government allocated $7.5B for 500,000 EV chargers across the nation, yet we only built 8 in 2.5 years! This really shines a light on how incompetent our government is at handling any kind of project. There is so much waste and incompetence in government, if we ever focused just on that one issue we could reduce the national debt by a good amount. Our federal government is a complete clusterfruck.

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/7-5-billion-in-government-cash-only-built-8-e-v-chargers-in-2-5-years/

For a normal person, if you spend $10k every month and have $8k in income, you will go broke eventually. Government does not have to follow the same rules as normal people.

The key insight is that government debt is in its own money. It can never go broke, because it can keep printing new money (more precisely new debt) to keep refinancing its debt.

This idea is sometimes referred to as "modern monetary theory". That's the idea that the national debt is just a number on a piece of paper. The national debt does not represent an obligation that someday must be repaid, because it can always be refinanced by creating new bonds. Debt for the Federal government is not the same as debt by a normal person.

The only limit is a hyperinflationary collapse of the monetary system.

This is really only true for countries like the USA, who get the perk of debt being in their own money. The Euro countries gave up this ability by joining the Euro. Most 3rd world countries will have their debt be in foreign currency, like US dollars.

Technically, the US does not print new money for deficit spending. Instead, the government creates new Treasury bonds, which are sold to the financial industry. The financial industry then sells bonds to the Federal Reserve, which creates new money to buy the bonds. The financial industry scalps a profit doing this.

You might ask "Why doesn't the US just print and spend its own money, instead of borrowing it from a central bank?" The answer is the lobbyists from big banks set up the monetary system like this on purpose, because it lets them scalp a profit on all government Treasury bond sales. As will all corrupt this, reforming this is impossible as the banks' access to free money also gives them an unlimited lobbying budget.

The US has a debt-based monetary system. New money is only created when someone borrows it. This means the national debt plays a key anchor in the monetary system. The government can always prevent a deflationary spiral by deficit spending. The reason deficit spending is a risk is that, during a severe recession, no new money is borrowed but all existing debts are still due. Money is created when borrowed, and destroyed when the loan is repaid. Thus there is a risk of hyperdeflation, which the government prevents by deficit spending.

Debt-based money is an inherently corrupt system, but reforming it is impossible. Too many people are making a fortune off the way things are now.

Notice that you have many debates covered in public about one aspect of corruption or another. You'll almost never hear someone publicly criticize our monetary system. Most people are unaware, and they're kept that way on purpose.