A centuries-long trend towards ever-greater centralization has run its course. From Joel Bowman at bonnerprivateresearch.com:
Joel Bowman, appraising the situation from Buenos Aires, Argentina…
Welcome to another Sunday Session, dear reader… that time of the week when we step away from the Monday-Friday war of attrition and take a moment to contemplate the bigger picture, such as we can… all with the animating assistance of a glass of two of high-altitude Malbec…
When we left you this time last week, we were ruminating over a theory of cycles, large and small. This is not a novel musing. In fact, greater thinkers have been puzzling over the subject for millennia, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks.
It was that clever ol’ Ephesian, Heraclitus, who believed in the universal concept of enantiodromia (later taken up by Nietzsche and Jung) – the idea that everything is at all times in the process of becoming its opposite; hot things cool, wet things dry, etc. One might consider this with regards to centralization vs. decentralization, top down control by the few vs. bottom up “spontaneous order” of the many, growth vs. value, life giving way to death…
The pendulum swings from one extreme to another, the emergent membrane between the two akin to that undefinable moment where one thing morphs into the other, when an edgy band becomes mainstream, when the politics of liberation becomes the politics of oppression, or when a young man looks in the mirror one day and sees an old man staring back at him.
In political terms, we think of peace giving way to war… then, once the parched earth is soaked in the blood of young men, yielding to peace once again.
“Great armies rise,” as Bill observed during the week, “and then – under the weight of their own booty, bureaucracy and brass – they fall.”
Today we continue our series on the nature of cycles with a look at how we view history itself. Please enjoy…
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 