Tag: The Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire

MORAL DEGRADATION APPLAUDED

“The five marks of the Roman decaying culture:

Concern with displaying affluence instead of building wealth;

Obsession with sex and perversions of sex;

Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of creative and original;

Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;

Increased demand to live off the state.”

Edward Gibbon

“Of the twenty-two civilizations that have appeared in history, nineteen of them collapsed when they reached the moral state the United States is in now.”

Arnold Joseph Toynbee

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FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE: IS DONALD TRUMP THE MULE?

In Part One of this article I analyzed the similarities of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy to Strauss & Howe’s Fourth Turning, trying to assess how Donald Trump’s ascension to power fits into the theories put forth by those authors. Now I will compare Trump to the most interesting character in Asimov’s classic – The Mule.

The Mule

“A horse having a wolf as a powerful and dangerous enemy lived in constant fear of his life. Being driven to desperation, it occurred to him to seek a strong ally. Whereupon he approached a man, and offered an alliance, pointing out that the wolf was likewise an enemy of the man. The man accepted the partnership at once and offered to kill the wolf immediately, if his new partner would only co-operate by placing his greater speed at the man’s disposal. The horse was willing, and allowed the man to place bridle and saddle upon him.

The man mounted, hunted down the wolf, and killed him. “The horse, joyful and relieved, thanked the man, and said: ‘Now that our enemy is dead, remove your bridle and saddle and restore my freedom.’ “Whereupon the man laughed loudly and replied, ‘Never!’ and applied the spurs with a will.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

I had not thought about the Foundation Trilogy for decades, until someone recently mentioned it in a comment on my website. They pondered whether Trump’s arrival on the scene represented The Mule’s advent during the decline of the Galactic Empire. Trump’s numerous enemies would love to portray him as an evil mutant freakish warlord, bent on using his persuasion powers to mislead the populace into doing his bidding. I don’t necessarily see Trump as The Mule, but as a disrupting factor, disturbing the best laid plans of the establishment and helping reveal the hidden agendas of the Deep State.

Seldon’s science of psychohistory was outstanding at predicting the behavior of large populations but worthless in trying to predict what an individual might do. The emergence of the Mule, a mentalic mutant with an acute telepathic ability to modify the emotions of human beings, could not have been predicted by the Seldon Plan, focused as it was on the statistical movements of vast numbers of peoples and populations across the galaxy.

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FOUNDATION – FALL OF THE AMERICAN GALACTIC EMPIRE

“The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity—a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

 

“Any fool can tell a crisis when it arrives. The real service to the state is to detect it in embryo.” – Isaac Asimov, Foundation

I read Isaac Asimov’s renowned award winning science fiction trilogy four decades ago as a teenager. I read them because I liked science fiction novels, not because I was trying to understand the correlation to the fall of the Roman Empire. The books that came to be called the Foundation Trilogy (Foundation, Foundation and Empire, and Second Foundation) were not written as novels; they’re the collected Foundation stories Asimov wrote between 1941 and 1950. He wrote these stories during the final stages of our last Fourth Turning Crisis and the beginning stages of the next High. This was the same time frame in which Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings Trilogy and Orwell wrote 1984. This was not a coincidence.

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