Is it my job to write this epitaph? It looks like it.
My basic thesis is very simple. There are two core human value systems:
- Envy of social distance.
- Creative human imagination.
Humans form tribes for food and other aspects of survival. For the tribe to grow it implements a social system. There are several social systems. The most common is a simple hierarchy with merit as its operating principle.
Most such hierarchies fail rather quickly, meaning decades or at most a century, as biological reproduction, throughout the hierarchy, replaces the meritocracy with mediocrity. The low- born meritocrats lead the revolutions.
Three forms of hierarchy have solved this problem. The Chinese, the Japanese and the Jews.
The Chinese instituted an imperial examination to find and reward the meritocrats. This system has been in place for 1,500 years and results in an occasional century of social stability with the interruption of a periodic revolution.
The Japanese system, on the other hand, promotes meritocracy by marriage and adoption of the meritorious members into the higher ranks of the hierarchy. It keeps an Imperial family that remains outside the power structure as a moderating force. The Japanese social system has lasted 1,500 years with only two interruptions.
The Chinese and Japanese social hierarchies with promotion of meritocrats have solved the human problem number one, the envy of social distance.
The Jews formed a distinct social class, the Levites, the temple keepers, who were separate from the main body of the tribe. Among the Levites, meritocracy was based solely on intellectual merit, without power. The Levites moderated the rest of the society. Jews were always a minority of outsiders living in enclaves of larger bodies. They survived 2,000 years without any revolutions but with endless murder of the tribal members by their neighbors.
Problem number two was solved by accident on the American continent with the Louisiana Purchase giving the Coastal Europeans, with a weak social hierarchy to begin with, a vast stretch of land to be settled far outside the reach of the Coastal social hierarchy. In that vast open land with great mobility, the Europeans established a new society with a nearly non-existent social hierarchy, local governance, for over 150 years.
Out of that historic accident, unrestrained individualism emerged, creating the first explosion of modern commerce. Humans, when left to develop on their own, develop a system of commerce mixed with technological insight that creates a radically productive society.
That incredible productivity creates a prosperous middle class that provides a form of social stability. For a short time. One century, apparently.
Then it fails, as it has in the only two countries where it has occurred. The United States and Israel. In both cases human envy, without a social hierarchy to repress it, rises up to destroy the society.
This is too much to write on a tombstone, and very sad for me, but the world looks this way at this time.