Psychohistory will never get off the ground.
As writers and essayists, the pundits of the blogosphere tend toward being a little more certain of their predictions than they should be. The cries of it is all going to hell may or not be true, but only time will tell. The real trouble is, when time does tell, the answers that it issues are so ambiguous that one cannot see the truth (with a capital T) that everyone here in blogoland is trying to grasp.
I read the Archdruid and Dmitry and am somewhat a fanboy, They are my favorites. They discuss the overarching fate of the society. Nearly everyone else just bitches that their toys are being taken from them. But I think sometimes that these two veer a little bit toward the desire to be prophets. They are armed with a solid grasp of history and a firm opinion of the way things work, they boldly go into the future with a certainty that really draws people in.
You see, that there is the weakness. People such as your esteemed correspondent are suckers for certainty. They grasp the truth of the past and see the truth of the present, and they use those to show us the way to the future. I eat that up.
But in the end, I always come back to ground. Prophecy is a strange thing to grasp at. Knowing where the future will be is a tempting fruit to try and pluck, but it will always remain out of reach.
I don't know where the financial world will be a year from now. I can't say that Ebola will fulfill its role as God's RoundUp. The decline of the West may give way to the renewed vigor of a culture.
No One Knows.
There is no flight to Stars End scheduled.
1 comment:
I am not a big fan of Orlov. He overlearned a place and time (Soviet Collapse) and doesn't strike me as being nearly as well learned as the Druid.
The Druid is well learned, but once he comes to a conclusion he seems to be as bad as anyone else at ignoring contrary evidence.
He keeps going on about the collapse of Rome, and I pointed out to him that only part of Rome Collapsed. Some of it continued on until the 15th century, and Charlemagne often had access to Roman text via this surviving empire.
The reason why the Roman collapse is viewed as being "total" is because OUR cultural grouping comes from the part that did collapse. A very parochial view.
He sort of hemmed and hawed and moved along.
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