MORE SIMPLISM: GREAT CIVILIZATIONS AND THE MASTER-SLAVE RATIO | 2008-08-04
If we cut the crap, a Great Civilization is one that gets noticed by historians because it:
1) Builds a lot of stone monuments and 2) has lots of scribes.
They are able to build lots of monuments and hire lots of scribes because they have lots of slaves.
Each Great Civilization begins with a Northern Barbarian Invasion which, as is barely mentioned, brings in the wheel or iron. By the time The Northern Invasion comes, the invaded Great Civilization consists of a brown society rich in slaves which the invaders take over. The Barbarians get comfortable and begin to assimilate with the natives. They become a brown society, rich in slaves.
Another Northern Invasion moves in, with some little addition like the wheel or the chariot.
So much for Khaldoun, Spengler, and Yockey's dumber parts.
A society which is easily herded, by the Orient, differs from this only slightly. When Aryans reached China and gave it their genius, that genius was multiplied, but not improved upon, just as Japan has gotten EXACTLY as productive as the West, but no MORE so.
No one in the Orient even imagines that they will do more than equal the West in per capita productivity.
In all the world, only the white lands, "Scythians" and so forth, had the wheel. Soon the Orient had it too, and, with its natural reserve of slaves, was able to ORGANIZE its technology long before the West was able to harness its own genius. The Orient has a slave-master ratio that is optimal for the Tom Fleming-type Great Civilization obsessionist.
In all the deluge of oohs and aahs over Great Civilization, the spark of creativity is easy to ignore.
Historians write endlessly about pyramids, but not one has even mentioned how rare the wheel is.