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    The Trend of History

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    Aetius Romulous
    The document discusses the decline of Western dominance and the rise of Eastern influence, particularly China, in global economics and geopolitics. It argues that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism have disfigured and become unsustainable, while Eastern societies like China and Japan embraced patience and fortitude to surpass the West. The triumph of the West over the last century was brief, and a trend toward Eastern prominence has now sealed the West's preeminence in history.

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    The Trend of History

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    Aetius Romulous
    42 views4 pages
    The document discusses the decline of Western dominance and the rise of Eastern influence, particularly China, in global economics and geopolitics. It argues that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism have disfigured and become unsustainable, while Eastern societies like China and Japan embraced patience and fortitude to surpass the West. The triumph of the West over the last century was brief, and a trend toward Eastern prominence has now sealed the West's preeminence in history.

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    The document discusses the decline of Western dominance and the rise of Eastern influence, particularly China, in global economics and geopolitics. It argues that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism have disfigured and become unsustainable, while Eastern societies like China and Japan embraced patience and fortitude to surpass the West. The triumph of the West over the last century was brief, and a trend toward Eastern prominence has now sealed the West's preeminence in history.

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    42 views4 pages

    The Trend of History

    Uploaded by

    Aetius Romulous
    The document discusses the decline of Western dominance and the rise of Eastern influence, particularly China, in global economics and geopolitics. It argues that Western liberal democracy and free market capitalism have disfigured and become unsustainable, while Eastern societies like China and Japan embraced patience and fortitude to surpass the West. The triumph of the West over the last century was brief, and a trend toward Eastern prominence has now sealed the West's preeminence in history.

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    of 4

    The Trend of History

    The triumph of Liberal Democracy in the last, brief moment of history is


    a gift from nature squandered. As free markets and democracy bend and
    disfigure in the western world, on the chosen path of the chosen people, a
    fork in the road on the roof of the world has come into focus. After twenty
    centuries of trying, western civilization has finally pushed across and into the
    Eastern world, multinational American corporations completing the work
    begun in Henry the Navigators bobbing, Portuguese caravels. A linear history
    now shattered on contact and found wanting; not the end of history, but a
    trend of history.

    From its beginning, the past has been measured in progressively larger units
    of space, from local tales passed from generation to generation, to regional
    experience with improvements in transportation, to our present day when
    history is measured in minutes across a spatial plane that extends infinitely
    in every direction. Where the village of one's ancestors once anchored a
    world no larger than one could see, ours is anchored in the palm of our
    hands with Blackberry's, IPods, and I Phones. And yet, we of the English-
    speaking world still consider ourselves decidedly "Western" in a digital age
    with no reference points.

    Cruel geography placed a screen across Asia Minor, and as civilization


    crawled out of the damp edges of the world, it became convenient to stay to
    one side or the other of mountains, rivers, and barren steppes, like mercury,
    rolling on down, away, and apart. The dichotomy that is history became east
    and west by an accident of creation, and has remained long past the age
    where simple nature was any impediment to human kind. "Us and them"
    remains a permanent feature of our digital cultures and our cheap plastic
    souls.

    Generations of denizens from the "West" have always accepted as


    understood, that ours is the pre-eminent civilization and sum of all history.
    Ours has been a journey of arrogance and conceit as we crafted that history
    in our own image. Only the centre of gravity has shifted over recorded time,
    the West laying claim to first the Euphrates, the Danube, the English
    Channel, and then the new world, always heading west in an effort to get to
    the East. Rome, Paris, London, New York City USA. No "North", no "South",
    just West and East on a wobbling sphere in space.

    If you're not East or West you're nobody, or worse, Argentina.

    The foundations of our western part of the globe have become free
    markets, unbridled capitalism, corporate nations, faux democracies in a riot
    of hues and hypocrisy, and exponential expectations. Unchecked opportunity
    for wealth accumulation became our religion, supplanting a Christian ethic
    that stood in tough for two millennia, cast aside now like an aged and
    irrelevant wife.

    In the West, there never was any doubt - at any time - that the economic
    engine that had made us all wealthy, lazy, and stupid was not a God given
    right of man, and the natural course of history. To us were given the fruits of
    the Garden of Eden by God himself, in much the same way as Adam Smith
    gave us the rationale for raping the Earth. The American way to the
    American dream.

    In the East, there was Japan...and then nothing. Straw hats perhaps, and
    take out. The East was mysterious in a quaint sort of way, communists of
    course, old grainy war films, Chairman Mao. Richard Nixon went to China, a
    trip we all remember as the first time we gave one billion Chinese any
    interest at all. We missed the significance of the visit, coming as it did when
    the great Western economic engine slipped a gear for the very first time. If
    the West had given that confluence of events any space in history at all, we
    would be recalling it as a moment of supreme irony - and perhaps, the
    beginning of the end.

    The West believed the East had always been a mix of badly mismanaged
    command economies based on borrowed western ideas, grafted to customs
    and totems as old as time itself. To the West, it looked arcane and
    dysfunctional, as everything did before the triumph of the triumph of
    Americanism. In the East - where patience is a foundation of both history
    and culture - they politely absorbed the lectures and admonitions and quietly
    went about their business. The tortoise and the hare.

    Once Richard Nixon closed the gold window and exports from America
    slipped below the waterline for good, the battle ship America began an
    imperceptible list to port that would not be fixed by everyone running over
    to starboard. Through successive booms, busts, recessions and recoveries
    the Western economy began to lurch and stagger towards exhaustion on a
    forty year flare out. Technology raced ahead of morality. Hiroshima,
    Nagasaki, Wall Street. The latter spreading radiated derivative debris
    throughout the arteries of global economics. With each successive blast, a
    greater triumph for the West.

    We were manufacturing our own proof of the validity of our greed.


    Westerners became consumers, chasing accumulation of crap as if it were a
    standard for civilization itself. The wider we spread the gospel of free
    markets and democracy, the richer it seemed, we got. Or at least some of us
    did anyways. By Christmas 2006 (the annual western celebration of
    consumption), it would have been crazy talk to suggest that the same God
    who gifted the West with so much, would so cruelly wrench it away, and so
    quickly, and pass it across Asia Minor to the East. In the West they would call
    it a "reset", in the heavens they know it as balance.

    You just have to believe that in idle chatter before the meetings of the
    Chinese Politburo, while the comrades are all quietly renewing acquaintance
    and passing along gossip, it has not gone un-murmured that the proverbial
    "shoe" is now on the other foot. It simply cannot have escaped notice or
    comment that China was now the pre-eminent superpower on the planet. I
    wonder if they joke how they accomplished it without firing a shot in anger,
    or if they're smug with their patience and fortitude. I wonder if they chuckle
    over who got the best value in the cheap t-shirts for debt and foreign
    reserves deal. I wonder if there is an office pool or anything on the date
    when the West will realize they had switched jerseys.

    If this is not the time when the economic, social, and political ideals of the
    western world prove themselves unsustainable, the multi trillion dollar fight
    to prop up the beast will surely hasten it. What's that old saw..."it may not
    be the best system, but it is the best we've got"? Perhaps not.

    There are those who believe the price of homes in America will resume their
    northward march, and that the auto industry will return to 16 million unit
    years. Others see that given enough time, the great western banking houses
    can earn their way back to mortgage shredding prosperity. There are those
    who think that "drill baby drill" is the solution, and not the problem. Those
    would be the nervous voices of the titanic western civilization, all cylinders
    blazing, full steam ahead through the ice fields.

    The United States of America was the sole earthly superpower for two
    decades on the bridge between the 20th and 21st century. For perhaps the
    only time in history, a nation state had held the earth in economic
    hegemony, giving righteous glory to free markets and democracy. Twenty-
    five years of spectacular excess, gluttony, and hubris in a stress test they
    themselves set. Two and half short decades at the tail end of 100 centuries
    of history.

    Not the end of history, but a trend of history.

    With the inclusion now of global influence on international economics and the
    rising importance of Chinese interests in particular, the pre eminence of
    Western socioeconomic thought has waned. And while some may say not a
    moment too soon, it is a moment that has been sealed in time and we, just
    fortunate to be included in the same frame.

    Originally published as "The Trend of History In The East" for the Asia Chronicle, where
    Aetius Romulous is a regular columnist and syndicated writer on geopolitics and
    socioeconomics.

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