From: kharin (hidden@lucifer.com)
Date: Tue May 07 2002 - 03:22:19 MDT
I'd differ.
>From what precisely? The stated summary of Toynbee's views (i.e. that stable societies require 'memetic dissemination' by elites and that said dissemination being done to, rather than by, said elites is a mark of alienation and decline) or my critique of their universal applicability? It's no clear to me whether you differ from one or the other, or indeed, both; given that I don't recall the original
In fairness, I should observe that I haven't been able to read Toynbee (due to the fact that his books are largely out of print in the UK, rather than due to lack of effort to track them down).
Following Toynbee's model (and I would tend to agree), the USSR failed only when it had run out of reasonably accessible resources.
I'm left thinking of how whenever harvests in the Soviet Union failed, the regime invariably stated that this was an aberration and that the targets would be exceeded next year. The same would be repeated the next year, with even more unrealistic targets being set. It seems to me that the Soviet Union was not especially efficient at using the resources it had. But again, I'm not sure how that relates to the issue of elite memetic propagation, which was what I thought (incorrectly?) we were discussing.
Yours confusedly, Kharin.
---- This message was posted by kharin to the Virus 2002 board on Church of Virus BBS. <http://virus.lucifer.com/bbs/index.php?board=51;action=display;threadid=25450>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Sep 25 2002 - 13:28:46 MDT