Back in the Trench

Once more, my tutorial with Scott the horseman of the apocalypse turns hysterically funny and suicidally tragic at the same time. The cycle of development, we figure, takes many forms and many time frames, most of which we appear to prefer short term to keep things easy. If you don't think like this your world gets extremely problematic, but at least you are thinking about something else other your next holiday.

The big one, the long one, that of our Great Western Enlightenment Project, which runs something like absolutism (Pharaohs) through feudalism through mercantilism through to capitalism (at which point you have an interesting choice of progression) probably is reversing itself. What goes up, after all, must go down. It's possible that with the new world of the super corporation - movable money rather than national asset - the Toyota Parthenon rather than the Greek Parthenon, that we have already moved onward to mercantilism again. As resources diminish, feudalism will follow, and before you know it we'll be back to the land of the pharaohs. Of course we can witness this decline easily and most vividly in films such as 'The Time Machine', there our destination inverts the Great Pyramid into a great pit in the earth where you die. HG Wells may have been an egotistical loony but he does now seem to have a point.