History confirming theory:
Way back in 1992 a man named Fukuyama wrote a book The End of History and the Last Man, proposing, not that events would no longer occur – even momentous events – nor that political changes would never happen, but that the end was in sight. Sooner or later, and progressively, liberal Western style politics would result in a single world government of free people. He even got his book published.
Of course I thought it was balderdash. One of my favorite publications the ECONOMIST entertained it as a serious proposal for a time. Over the many years since, they have not trumped it so much, but they seemed terribly optimistic about everything, as if they were busy chronicling just such an evolution. I kept thinking, “It all looks a lot darker than they are making it out to be. I don’t get it.”
Alas, I never did get it. They got it. (What’s Wrong with Democracy ECONOMIST vol. 410 no. 8876 March 1, 2014 page 47) According to their assessment the number of free countries rose from 11 in 1941 to something over 150 by 2007. Their euphoria thus was understandable. However now they acknowledge that the number has drifted back down a bit and that at closer look a fair number of countries are losing things like freedom of speech, independent judiciary, free press and other characteristics that are produced by and support freedom.
As I look at their work it is like watching someone doing a meticulous study of the cowcatcher on the front of a locomotive pulling a train at high speed, and the student is on the tracks. The cow catcher is not the problem. And in American politics the debate seems to be over which track to sit.
The problem is the unthinkable momentum to the train. And the debate should be how to get off the tracks if, indeed, that is feasible.
So let me go over the theory of history again. IT’S ALL DEMOGRAPHIC.
First proposition is that politics is like any major undertaking. Professional clowns are dying out. I don’t know any stats, but I promise you that they don’t have enough children to fill their ranks. The same goes for professional sword smiths. Any highly demanding field requires practitioners from old families.
The second proposition is that old successful families have few children because they have for generations lived in a social pool far larger than the less successful.
That’s it. All that needs to be done is to show, as has been shown in published papers I refer to in the summary from last New Years Day, that the large gene pool suffers a penalty in fertility.
Lo it is proven. And you can, as I have done before, actually look at the data:
That’s the history of southern Mesopotamia from the first dawn of civilization until the 20th century. The horizontal axis is the age of the various civilizations lumped in 50 year increments. The vertical axis is the chance on the average of that age surviving 100 years. (Reference in that summary.) As you see, the line is so clean that there is one cause of the decline of civilizations AND NOTHING ELSE. The cause is not external, in which case the line would be horizontal. It is not internal or the line would go up. It simply does not matter how just, how sweet or how odious your society is. That is cowcatcher design. It is trivial in the big picture.
The article I cite above observes in melancholy mode that when regime changes occur in recent years they do not produce stable regimes. Of course not. You need old families for that, families that have done such work for generations, like clowns, like sword smiths.
I can take a certain comfort afforded to the inventor of no other theory. I know my principle will not be ignored by historians a hundred years down the road.
If it is ignored, there will be no historians.
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