Previous

It is to be noted that Spengler considered tribal society, having 'no politics', outside his cultural phase system, except that the cycle started with tribal society (and unless interruped by external factors, will eventually return to it.) However, he may have without intending it uncovered several vital truths.   In tribal society, spirituality springs from legend, whereas in Spenglerian society spirituality is enchained with dogma, myth replaces legend and such is the nature of Spengler's "spiritual spring".   Also, everyone is linked to the tribe through family lines, and a leader is accountable to all through them.  In feudalism (Phase 1 to 3 of his system) the rulers of a castle and probably the knights are still structured through family ties, but the serfs are not; and the rulers have no concern with the serfs' opinions, needs or rights, and are concerned only in that they provide essential labor.  By the time you get to Phase 3, family structures delineate political power only in the royal family; and at Phase 5 and beyond political power has no family dependencies. %nbsp; New currency distribution may fall under a profit-driven private bank as early as the first phase, but definitely by the end of the fifth.

The tribal theory is a bottom-up theory of political science.   The elitist and Spenglerian theories are top-down.   Both are self-admittedly unstable.   The elitist theory admits that the Highs can remain in control only by convincing the Lows of the illusion that it is a bottom-up system.   In the Spenglerian theory the top-down system is also unstable by reason of being transitory: the initial religious-power regime, when it is about to crumble is replaced by a blood-power regime, thence a military power regime, thence a money-power regime and finally a regime solely for state' power.   When the illusion of even that is seen through all crumbles and bottom-up tribal politics resumes.

9/11 was, as we will explore shortly, the defining event in the transition from a Phase 6 to a Phase 7 Spenglerian state.   Egregious as these transition boundaries are, they pale beside the transition from a phase 0 - tribal society - to a phase 1 Spenglerian state characterized by a large, powerful and pampered priesthood.   It is this transition that shows the values of tribal society that were destroyed by statehood .   The differences include:

These changes remain in effect through the succeeding Spenglerian phases, which mostly differ in the rationale that justifies the existence of the State.   Majority rule applies in Phase 6 and well into Phase 7 as it applies today, but at the higher levels of society organization, corporatocracy / occultocracy conspires through the power of the press, which they control, to manipulate majorities into pseudo-majorities.   Also the priesthood power of Phase 1 gives way to aristocracy power, then military power, then corporate power, and finally to intelligence / secret police power.

Spengler considered that Western culture went through Phase 3, formation of aristocratic states, from 1500 to 1660.  This time saw both the rise of absolutism, which among other things meant that the king's power was absolute; and a rise of opposition to absolutism.  The Pilgrims were an example of the latter, and the Puritans the former.  Both groups came to and settled in what was to become America.  They came in contact with natives who were of tribal society.   Even though they had inter-tribal alliances, they did not have any development of feudalism, of culture in the Spenglerian sense.  So removed were the European settlers from tribal society that they saw the natives only as 'pernicious savages' to be exterminated.  Notwithstanding, the natives gave America not only place names but, through their intertribal alliances with their system of checks and balances, a template for some of the Constitution.

The American Revolution started when Western culture was in Phase 4, where the absolutism of royal power had become subject to a mentality of checks and balances.  It was this mentality that enabled Euro-Americans to notice and apply the natives' system of checks and balances in their alliances.  The mentality was applied to the idea that government itself was not trustworthy and therefore the less of it, the better.   This is entirely opposite to tribal society, which equates government with accountability; and thus to them, total government is total accountability.  With limited government, which eventually became written into the Constitution, there could at best be limited accountablility.

As it happened, the American Revolution was to ignite the French Revolution, which began with an effort to impose constitutional shackles on King Louis XVI.  But that was only the beginning.  As many historians have noted, it was a world revolution; and as Spengler notes, it was Phase 5 of Western culture, 'the victory of money over blood'.  In other words, political power would no longer be rooted in a royal family, but in the commerce and capitalism of the then-infant Industrial Revolution.

Thus, Phase 6 began with Napoleon's passing, and with it, the birth of corporatocracy.   The first corporations were formed several centuries before.   But, then as now, they are based on a lie and a decepton: a corporate entity exists only on paper.   In Europe, corporatocracy began with the traumatic wake-up call of war.  But in America, it began most subtly and seductively ("the era of good feelings").   Americans thus had a level of trust for corporations that Europeans never had.   It was a trust that tended to fill the vacuum of trust that they had self-imposed on their government.

In America the Civil War was a major battle in the ascendency of corporatocracy power.   The South, in their efforts to defend slavery and "their way of life", had resisted industrialization that had been sweeping the North for over half the nineteenth century.   The corporatocracy wanted to industrialize the South and knew that it would take a war to do it, but realized that citizens would not leave their homes, put on uniforms and fight a war just for that.   So they secretly backed the abolitionists who quickly enough were able to motivate them to go to war.   So although the war was funded and fought to industrialize the South, for the most part Americans believed it was to free the slaves and establish human rights for African Americans.  In the process corporations learned just how much they could gain through deception.   Indeed it became, after everything else, a foundation for a mythology of deception: a major misunderstanding of Americans of their own history.

The history of cover-up is closely related to the history of scandal.  Having bought into the mentality that government is not to be trusted, scandal was inevitable.  The need for cover-up was obvious.  Scandal punctuated American history in ever more egregious ways, and cover-up was close behind.  But the nature of cover-up is to create problems that just won't go away, they may be forgotten by many, perhaps by the great majority, but some will still remember.  Decades and even centuries are generally not long enough. The 1947 cover-up of the Roswell incident was truly a crossing of the Rubicon in that the government covered up perhaps the scientific discovery of the millenium.   In the shadowy, unventilated atmosphere of coverup and secrecy, occultocracy was born.   That is to say, the present form of it was born.   The roots of occultocracy are far deeper than the CIA, far deeper than America.  It was born in the powerful, pampered priesthoods of (Spenglerian phase 1) agricultural societies, with their secret drugs used to poison victims of human sacrifice so that they appeared to dance themselves to death.

Thus was the climate for the occultocracy's first truly dire deed: the Kennedy assassination.  It was messy, it remains controversial, but essentially it was successful.   Kennedy had a vision of getting out of Vietnam by 1965; the occultocracy didn't like that, they wanted the war to last longer.  And he had plans to defang the CIA.   So they took him out.  It was the first, but not the last.  Ten years afterward when Nixon planned to break up the CIA's lucrative drug trafficking business, as part of his "war on drugs', they decided to take him out in a different way.  Nixon didn't put Hunt and Liddy up to Watergate, the occultocracy did.   And then used Woodward and others to frame Nixon.

For a phase 6 Spenglerian state America has been remarkable in extending majority rule at the local level and up to the state level.   But at the national level there is a true Machiavellian / Orwellian illusion, a pseudo-majority rule where the Lows believe a majority rule exists when in truth the media, controlled by the Highs, manipulate that majority.   American democracy has succeeded in bringing majority rule, or at least the vote, to nearly all people within, remarkably so considering the political environment in which it grew.   But that political environment proved a fertile breeding ground for corporatocracy and occultocracy.   The ironic thing is, while America's borders are limited to much of the North American continent, its two illegitamate children, corporatocracy and occultocracy, have succeded in becoming global.

We need now to examine democracy as it is commonly believed to be in America, through the eyes of tribal theory and test its capability and performance in being accountable to all people.   As we will see, the very definition of democracy today is a source of confusion.   The concept is believed to have originated in ancient Greece, and the word is misunderstood to mean 'rule by the people'.  In actuality the concept grew from the writings of Democritus, a philosopher.   Philosophy was strong and prevalent in ancient Greece, and Democritus (contemporary with Socrates) stressed a philosophy of the sensations - the opposite of the philosophy of Plato.   Socrates politicized Democritus's philosophy, and so between them political philosophy was born.  In this, explaination was considered the work of philosophy; change the work of politics.   Classical philosophy was very much concerned with grammar, and as the marriage of politics and philosophy took place the art of rhetoric developed.   Rhetoric was then, and is now, a mostly psychological process of finding the right argument for the right person at the right occasion.   This manipulative process, so much unlike tribal politics, lies at the core of Greek democracy.

Greek democracy originated while the classical culture was in its Spenglerian fourth phase.   It is worth noting that America was born when the Western culture was in its fourth phase.   The fourth phase is characterized by alliances, checks and balances.   But also in the fourth phase, accountability of leadership to common people has long ceased to be through blood lines.  So in ancient Greece, majority politics replaced tribal consensus politics; and in America similarly.   In majority politics there is always the problem of what to do about the minority?  It's all too easy to merely ignore them, just turn your back on the glaring gulf of accountability.  So for a democracy to work, there must be minority rights; rights extended to all since there's no telling whether any individual will in the future be a minority in some way.   But it takes a majority to agree on what those rights should be.

In America the right to vote was first extended only to white males who owned property.  Little by little it was extended to non-property owners, then non-whites, then natives, and finally to women.  Today's issue is whether it should be extended to those who have in the past committed a felony.  Civil liberties and equality have been the issues that have caused this gradual extension of voting rights; issues that were absent from tribal society because there, accountability held all such issues.

Thus the concepts of civil liberties and of equality has been a fabric, a band-aid patch, that has allowed democracy as we know it to at least emulate in part the level of accountability in tribal society.  It is a fragile patch, for the political process in American politics, as it was in Greek politics, is rhetoric which is as we have seen more manipulative than accountable.   It is precisely here that the occultocracy is picking it away.   It is all the more fragile in this early seventh Spenglerian phase, where alliances are being dissolved and checks and balances are seen by many as anachronisms.

Democracy "as we know it" however has become a source of acute confusion.   People that equate democracy with "rule by the people" envision a bottom-up political structure more or less like tribal society: which is quite different than the Greek concept was, which was a top-down structure.   Today, with a lack of true bottom-up structures to relate to, top-down structures have filled the vacuum.   The present-day neocons equate democracy with capitalism: and there could be no more a truly top-down structure that today's international megacorporation.

We wish now to touch on what international Communism was under these theories.   Even as classical Greeks tried to capture the accountability aspect of tribal societies with a substitute, so Karl Marx tried to capture the communist aspect of tribal society, along with the principle of 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'.  Such was his vision.  But, understanding in his own way that Western culture was in its Spenglerian sixth phase, where capitalism was dominant, he believed that it had to be fought and defeated; and drew upon the philosophical viewpoint of Hegel, who considered that motion and change was a fundamental property of existence; to design the battle against it.

We have all seen the tragic result: how his vision of a classless society became a dictatorship.   One must be free to discover how he can best serve society.   Note that Marx said "ability", not "capability".   There is a big difference.   A person's capability includes both his abilities and his passions, and freedom is essential to discover the latter.   As for his needs, some like food and housing are obvious, but for others, the more subtle spiritual needs, he must be free to really experience them.   And such freedoms were sorely lacking in Soviet society.   We have seen how seven decades of despotism ravaged Russia and much of the world, until finally the leaders themselves threw in the towel.   Notwithstanding the Soviet Union was a superpower and flew the first satellite and put the first man into space, at the end the great social experiment was a colossal failure.  What went wrong?

In the elitist theory, of course the explaination is simple.  The Highs were never serious in the first place; it was merely so much ear candy for the Lows.   And surely there was enough internal struggles in the Soviet hierarchy to illustrate the eternal struggle of the Middles in their efforts to overthrow the Highs.  The Spenglerian theory would merely shrug its shoulders and say it was just the wrong time for such a venture.  The tribal theory however, would take Marx at his word, seeing as how he was trying to emulate tribal society at least in part.   But his system was woefully lacking in accountability to the common person.  Notwithstanding all that it said about what they were doing for the proletariat; there was not really any accountability to the proletariat so that he could voice his opinions or express his needs.  Without that accountability, all the common person who has given up all he has to the community sees, is what he no longer has.   We have not included Marxism among our political theories here, because it was anti-capatalist, anti-religious, anti-this, anti-that; and what with 'dictatorship of the proletariat' it became anti-democratic.

Americans have long had a love affair with Israel.  Why?  Perhaps we identify with how they fought their way to independence against their hostile Arab neighbors; even as we once fought our own way to independence against conflicting world powers.   And maybe the heroic way the survivors of Nazi death camps came together and forged a nation in the face of the wrath of the Nazi-sympathizing Arabs, fed our perennial need for heroes in post-frontier America.   And maybe because Bible-toting Americans saw a miracle in the nation arising as if to bring the long-dead pages of Scripture to life.

That same Bible however, shows that Israel began with God's promise to Abraham, the promise being essentially all the land that comprises present Palestine, and then some.   But even in Abraham's time, that land was already populated.   God's first command to Abraham was that he and his progeny not marry among Canaanites - then the residents of the land.   Segregation has always been the first step in the process of sovereignty.   Hebrews in the time of Joshua eventually took the land by force and established a sovereign nation, Israel.   In doing so they pushed the Canaanites aside or killed them.   There then began a series of spectacular spiritual highs and lows; the lows characterized by corruption, disrespect if not cruelty to other peoples, and idolatry; and being accompanied with war and sometimes conquest by external nations.   The last of these, the Romans, totally removed Jews from Palestine and dispersed them around the then known world.

In the nineteenth century there arose the Zionist movement.   The moderates in the movement considered various places in Africa and South America for a Jewish homeland.   But a fundamentalist element in the movement, led by Theodore Herzl, insisted that Palestine be the homeland.   His vision was to recreate Israel in the image of the Biblical kingdom of Israel.   Herzl led people to believe that Palestine was uninhabited, so that 'people without a nation could inhabit a nation without people'.   His faction came to dominate the Zionist movement.   But the problem was, Palestine was inhabited, by Arab Palestinians.   More importantly, his goal shifted the objective of the Zionist movement.   There's a big difference between looking for a homeland for an ethnic group, that they may practice their ethnicity and be respected in their place; and establishing a sovereign nation.   Ethnic integrity and identity is very much alive in today's world.   But sovereignty, as we will see, is obsolete.

When Jews, mostly with Herzl's Zionist movement, began returning to Palestine, it was with the basic intention of pushing aside anyone they might find there in somewhat the way the first American colonists had pushed aside the Indians.   At the time, Arabian culture was on its death bed.  It had completely run through its Spenglerian cycle of culture, to its eighth phase in the decaying and moribund Ottoman empire.   The First Aliyah, or migration to Israel, was during the 1880-90s and primarily were from Russia.  Russia was in the sixth phase of Western culture.  They were active nation-builders, but Arab resistance then was feeble and mostly passive.

All of that changed after 1918 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the influx of the West into Arab lands, mostly after their oil.  At that time succeeding waves of Jews into Palestine came mostly from Western Europe and America.  The Arabs saw the Westerners and the Jews alike, invaders as had been the Crusaders eight centuries before.   Even as the Crusaders had been colonialists in their way, the Jewish Zionists were in theirs.   They fought them tooth and nail.  Their own culture dead, they 'inherited' the sixth phase of Western culture, the phase of 'contending states'.   But in Palestine, as in Iraq, the British, under their "mandate", ruled with a colonialist mentality, and so brought the very worst of Western culture in.   Not surprisingly, they gave special favors to the Jews, fellow colonialists.   Similar happened in Syria and Lebanon as the French brought their colonialism in.

So it was after Israel became a nation and began receiving American aid that the Arabs saw the Americans in the same bag as other Westerners and Israel itself.  To their mind there could be no victory, no peace without all of them gone - including Israel.  Although Wahhabiism, which began in Arabia in the 18th century, is a kind of revivalism in the Spenglerian seventh-eighth phase sense, the same cannot be said of the radical Taliban-Bin Laden style Islam.  It has nothing to do with Arabian culture and very little to do with genuine Islam.  It is a product of Western culture religious radicalism, and anthropologically resembles the cargo cults of the Melanesians and the ghost dance cults of Native Americans.   It has served to keep the Arabs locked into the five-decade old conflict with Israel.

But three generations of continued conflict have transformed Israel into a monster.   Notwithstanding their colonialist mentality, Israel was at first a democratic and quite magnaminous nation.   Indeed, after the 1967 war, they set out to do in the West Bank and the Gaza strip what the United Nations intended to do and which Jordan and Egypt totally failed to do during their occupation: create an independent Palestinian state.   But, as it was in the time of the Judges, so it is again: after an incredible high has come an incredible low.   The actions of the Israeli soldiers and bureaucrats, and not to mention the West Bank and Gaza Strip "settlers", have come to resemble the Nazis whose ashes they have arisen from.  America and Americans would, love affairs notwithstanding, probably have long given up on Israel except for one thing: The Israelis have produced an incredibly effective intelligence community.  The Mossad is world-class, and they are prominent in the world's occultocracy.  Indeed, the Mossad was instrumental in training and preparing the 19 'hijackers' to be the fall guys of 9/11.  And that occultocracy has, through its control of the Israel lobby in Congress and by other means, silenced the American mainstream press, so that Americans do not hear the sad story of what Israel has become, but continue to hold on the hero mythology of the Israel that was, venerating Ari Ben Canaan in the movie Exodus.

Why does the occultocracy want to keep Americans in the dark about Israel?  If their only concern was oil, they would turn their backs on Israel in a heartbeat.   Israel has no oil.  It is as if they want to support Israel, yet Israel cannot win, but they dont want Israel to lose either.  This is an opportunity to comprehend the occultocracy, the entity presently ruling all of us.   As previously mentioned, the roots of the occultocracy were the priesthoods of pagan agricultural societies and their sacrificial rites.   Then and there, secrecy served to keep the mechanics of the show, including the drug using, hidden from the people in the interests of awesomeness and intimidation: the pagan version of 'shock and awe'.   As pagan agricultural societies were succeeded by empires, then kingdoms and then corporations, their leaders discovered well the value of learning all about their enemies, and preventing them from learning about themselves.   Indeed, the definition of intelligence is information about the enemy.   But then, what happens when there is peace, and hence no enemy?   The occultocracy has to ensure that it does not come to that.   And so it has come to the 'war is peace' mentality of Orwell's 1984, where the powers that be aided two combatants so that their war would be an eternal stalemate.   And this also provides some illumination on the CIA's role in drug trafficking.   They're just doing what they have always been doing.

In tribal societies male initiatory rites were universal and essential.   The essence of a male initiatory rite was ritual death and rebirth.   The boy spiritually died to enable and empower the man to come forth.   This essence is reflected in many stories, tales and legends.   The Biblical story of Abraham and Issac is actually a male initiatory rite.   In it, Issac the boy is placed on an altar, ritually a grave, and at the end he gets up off of it a man.   The violence of death is ritually symbolized in Abraham's knife, for only after the knife is in his hand poised over the boy does God tell him not to kill him.   But because of this ritual symbolism and the empowerment of it as such, it is not actually violence.

Male initiatory rites were once universal and served a basic human need.   They were enabled by the bottom-up structure of tribal government.   They failed to flourish in top-down political structures, but these have always tried to revive them.   The first attempts were in the priesthoods of agricultural societies, actually the first Spenglerian phase.   But what resulted was an ethic centered on killing, rather than on ritually dying.   It was an inverted and perverted version of male initiation, a kind of anti-initiation.   Human sacrifice became rampant in these societies.   In the Mayan and Aztec societies, thousands were killed ("sacrificed") to dedicate a temple.

How on earth did today's intelligence community become heir to the priesthoods of agricultural post-tribal societies?   These societies developed in a war-torn world where the sword was never far from the plowshare.   But the agricultural society priesthoods were large and pampered, and controlled a significant share of the economic 'national product'.   The priesthoods were also steeped in shrouds of secrecy.   There thus was, in the Spenglerian first phase of political evolution, the fateful marriage of secrecy and economic power: archetypal male secrecy with female ecomonic power.   It was a marriage that was to survive the succeeding Spenglerian phases, the second through the fourth phases in the form of the Church's Inquisitions and their secret courts, and after that in the military's grip on society economically and with their secrecy.   Still, all President Harry Truman asked for in creating the CIA as a government agency was "someone to make sense of all this (information) stuff".   How, and why, did the CIA evolve from just that to the monster they are today?

They evolved because once that fateful connection between power and secrecy was re-established, it had centuries of historical and metaphysical baggage to inherit, reaching back to the ancient priesthoods.   Truman incorporated the OSS into the CIA, which was already an international occultocracy.   And he turned over to them the investigation and "resolution" of the Roswell incident, which essentially guaranteed that the truth of that would never see the light of day.   And so it was: from Teapot Dome to Roswell to the Kennedy assassination, to Nixon's ouster, to Michael Ruppert's observation that by 2001, "the CIA is Wall Street, and Wall Street is the CIA"; as their directors and leaders freely exchange places.   And similar has happened, and continues to happen, in other nations of the world: Israel, Russia, Britain, France.   With their power and secrecy they undertake, in their way, to practice male initiation in the same inverted and perverted way as agricultural societies once did.   The keeping of secrets and ferreting out of information is both functional and initiatory.   And the drug running?   That's just part of the "business" - but also, very profitable.

In tribal societies there were also female initiatory rites.   Like the male, their essence was ritual death and rebirth: the girl must die so that the woman can be born and come forth.   But with the female rites was also the process of transformation: Raw immature feminine power, symbolized by blood (actually, menstrual fluid) was transformed into mature feminine power, symbolized by milk.   There was also the recognition and initiation of the male archetype within the girl-woman, and he also needed to be initiated.   Like the male, the essence of the female initiatory rite is reflected in many stories and legends.   The Wizard of Oz is actually such a reflection.   See the movie once again, or read Frank Baum's original book, with this in mind, and it will reveal many fascinating truths.

When the true male initiatory rites were lost to society, the true female rites were lost also, since they depend on the male rites within them.   But the male rites also initiated the female archetype within the man.   The rites were dependent on each other.   Humans have had since the days of tribal society this unfulfilled need.  This need manifests itself in violence of many but identifiable kinds.   The epidemic of pedophilia is fueled by uninitiated men whose yearnings have turned to violence as they remain disconnected to the delicate but essential female archetype within.   And the epidemic of child abuse is fueled by uninitiated women whose yearnings have turned to violence against children, even their own children.

Terrorism and Al-Queda unmasked

Agricultural society priesthoods were not, and the intelligence community is not, the only institutions attempting to satisfy that need with their deadly and perverted substitutes.   So are terrorists.   The definition of terrorism is: violence committed to satisfy political needs or agendas.   Of course, Al-Queda is not the only terrorist organization.   There are many others of the radical Muslim stripe.   Also, so is the Ku Klux Klan.   And for that matter, street gangs.   Some could argue that street gangs do not do what they do for political purposes.   But to the extent that politics serves the need to survive, they do.

Terrorists of all these kinds operate under the political beliefs that:

• Government is untrustworthy.
• Government is unresponsive.
• Government is hostile.

Let's look closer at these three beliefs, which are so unlike those of tribal society.  The first is, as we have noted, part of what American democracy has already bought into.  The second is normally the justification that terrorists give for the violence that they do.   The third, if not true at the start of their action, is surely true after they have done violence for awhile.

Copyright ©2004, 2013 Dave Smart. All Rights Reserved.

Continue. . . back to Causes. . . back 'home'