Survival__ Structuring Prosperity for Yourself and the Nation - Charles George Smith [48]
We now see how one critical-point "landslide" can topple interlocking systems which are barely clinging to the "stick" phase to the "slip" phase: collapse.
Beneath the surface, the depletion, heavy borrowing, rising burden of interest, ever-more marginal returns on ever-greater investments of capital and labor, rising costs of military defense and conquest, widening inequality and all the other pressures are building from ontological (intrinsic) dynamics which cannot be released by adjusting the parameters (changing the palace guard, burning twigs instead of sticks, etc.).
As each system devolves, feedback (getting wood from distant sources, etc.) maintains the surface trend even as the strain to do so grows ever larger. At some unpredictable point, what might have been a small landslide/point of instability becomes a major dislocation that topples all the now-vulnerable, over-extended systems like dominoes.
The end-state is the valley crashes in output, population, wealth and stability.
Oftwominds.com contributor Harun Ibrahim offered this explanation of how systems can be viewed as oscillating above and below a level of equilibrium.
"In reference to the Power Law, which separates system into subcritical, critical and supercritical states, I submit that the critical state is a transient zone or an equilibrium around which the system oscillates. Therefore, systems will spend much of their time in either the subcritical or supercritical state. Because we spend so much time in these zones we tend to accept them as normal. Moves to the critical state (equilibrium) are seen as anomalies.
Clearly our economy has been in a supercritical state for decades and there is no doubt that this has become what we perceive as normal. Government, in attempting to stimulate a recovery, is in reality trying to return to the supercritical state.
If we apply the Stick/Slip hypothesis to the global economy then we understand that during the Stick phase things appear stable while in actuality the longer the time spent in this phase, the more likely it has gone from a marginal critical state to a supercritical state. Tremendous forces may be building that when released, 'we observe a power-law region with a Gaussian surplus of large events.' Is this an accurate description of what we are experiencing?
But with government at perfect MQ (perfect incompetence), which is also a supercritical state, no sustainable or effective solutions can be found for just about any system. The problem with this setup is that as problems mass and compress in time and space (energy, food, water, population growth, etc.) the competency to deal with these problems at a policy level declines.
If any of this is remotely correct then Mr. Kunstler (The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century) is proven correct that we must manage ourselves down to the critical state and learn to remain there. If history or the Peter Principle is any guide we will not do this consciously or voluntarily because we are incapable due to incompetence. Therefore an overshoot to the marginal subcritical state is almost assured."
This is why the insolvency and subsequent implosion of the State and its Elites is inevitable.
Sociological "End of History" Theories
Grand theories of history and ontological forces held great appeal to several generations of German thinkers in the 19th and 20th centuries, and as a result we have various "end of history" schemata from Hegel, Marx and Spengler.
Distilled to their essence, each theory posits internal forces within history and/or human society which will culminate in some version of "the end of history," that is, an inevitable end-point: the end of capitalism, decay of civilization, an illuminated