The Rationality/Irrationality Cycle
In your own point of view is history repeating itself?
Well kind of.
I think the struggle of life creates reason. Reason enables problem-solving.
However, problem solvers create great value (and wealth). Wealth ameliorates the struggle. As a result, people, writ large, do not acquire the capacity to reason. They become irrational and entitled. A terrible combination. Irrationality creates conflict (owing to the fact that no one is required to understand another). Society collapses or degrades until the struggle begins to make rational people again.
Ebb and flow. The cycle is predictable.
Thus, they [societies] are always descending from good to bad and rising from bad to good. For virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure, leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin; and similarly, from ruin, order is born, from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune.
Machiavelli, Fear and Virtue (Chapter 3)
We can fix this if people acquire the capacity to reason outside of the struggle.
I say …
- Hardship produces reason;
- Reason produces wealth (through self-reliance and self-governance);
- Wealth produces entitlement (enabling desire and ignorance);
- Entitlement fails reason;
- A lack of reason produces hardship (suffering, isolation, and societal disharmony).
