[MD] What's missing

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Khaled]
We have 2 political parties that feed at the same trough. Once the 
election is over, we are back to the status quo. ... Has the pendulum 
gotten too heavy to swing anymore?

[Arlo]
People are content, rightly or wrongly so. I could make some 
reference to the "fiddling while Rome burned", but that just 
underscores the point. I've heard a few of my international friends 
talk about America as the "artistocracy of the world's population". 
When we examine our place in the totality of the world's people, we 
occupy the same position the Princes and Kings occupied in the Middle 
Ages. Power, money, wealth and "freedom" are given to the few at the 
expense of the many. In the case of Europe, the peasants were the 
many and the Nobility the few. In the same way, we are the Nobility 
to the world's peasants. The Nobility is always comfortable, 
entrenched, dogmatic in their support of the system that brought them 
their power. They are also separate and apart from the day to day 
lives of those who's backs they stand on. Revolution never comes from 
within the Nobility. It comes from the disenfranchised or victimized.

I am also reminded of Arnold Toynbee's warnings, discussed in Joseph 
Campbell's Hero with A Thousand Faces.

"As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of 
the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in 
the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any 
scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs 
guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by 
the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the 
deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death- the birth, not 
of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within 
the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long 
survival- a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to 
nullify unremitting reoccurrences of death. For it is by means of our 
own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work if Nemesis is 
wrought doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace is then 
a snare; war is a snare change is a snare; permanence a snare. When 
our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is 
nothing we can do, except be crucified- and resurrected; dismembered 
totally, and then reborn."

We are hopelessly optimistic when we think that although every 
civilization has fallen and given rise to new ones throughout our 
history, that now somehow we have a created a civilization that will 
last forever. Sooner or later, all Romes burn. And just like the tale 
of the minotaur, the new will come from outside, like Theseus 
represented the emerging power of Crete. Maybe in our case it will be 
China. Or India. Or from some unexpected location. But it will come.

That's not to say that change from within is impossible, of course. 
We seem to be in an era of static latching. Pirsig called it a slow 
drift back to the last set of static latches. Hopefully, we will 
enter another era of Dynamic progress, and will see the return of the 
next generation of hippies. But, maybe not.