Brandon Smith: Breaking Points: Recognizing the Signs of Painful Cultural Shift

From Alt-Market:

Through the ages, nations and cultures of spectacular proportion and prominence have risen to prosperity, and fallen to chaos, on very particular and fundamental principles. In some cases, these great and terrible declines have taken centuries to culminate (as was the story of the Roman Empire), and only a few years in others (the Soviet Union comes to mind). In every example of societal destabilization, however, there were many signs of danger long before the final plunge; some unique to each particular culture, and some common to all. One of the most enduring and frightening similarities between crumbling nations is an overwhelming belief amongst the people that they have somehow “advanced” beyond the need for concern. Each self-destructing society presumed itself invincible. Each country thought itself the pinnacle of human potential, only to discover yet again that in abandoning or subverting the principles of freedom, and the bedrock pillars of conscience, reason, and wisdom, they had become merely another footnote in a long marathon of footnotes.

Ultimately, the vast and sordid history of collapse could be summarized simply as a series of breaking points; moments at which opposing ideals and forces hyperextend the prevailing mechanics of a system, changing it entirely.

To predict the exact timing of a breaking point is impossible, but there are signals to watch for; social and political attitudes to monitor and examine. After analyzing the shifts of multiple nations and cultures over thousands of years of human record, a pattern does, indeed, emerge. Similar developments in our times should not be taken lightly…

http://www.alt-market.com/articles/305-breaking-points-recognizing-the-signs-of-painful-cultural-shift