Another paradigm I want to establish is a difference between two
kinds of civilizations, which means a difference between two kinds
of governments in them.
Asiatic civilizations, which I call Class B Civilizations,
generally do not attempt to deal with individuals or with the
problems of individuals; they leave interpersonal relationships to
the local or kinship community.
Class A Civilizations include Classical Civilization, our own
Western Civilization, or the first Chinese or Sinic Civilization,
whose dates are 1800 B.C. to 400 A.D.
In Class A Civilizations, although the
civilization begins as an area of common culture made up of
communities, there is a long term trend to destroy and break down
those communities.
The way I would like to express this would be -- and I used to draw
it on the blackboard -- by saying that all civilizations start out
as aggregations of communities.
Those communities are generally of two types, either local, such as
parishes, neighborhoods, villages, or manors; or kinship
communities, families, clans, and so forth. When a civilization
begins with such communities, as ours did in 550, there is no
state, and there are no atomized individuals.
I will not go into the details of this, but in such communities,
there are no written laws; all law is customary. Most controls on
behavior are what I call internalized, that is, they are built into
your hormones and your neurological responses.
You do what is necessary to remain a member of the community,
because if you were not a member of the community, you would be
nothing.
You would not be a man. As you may know if you have ever studied
linguistics, the names which many primitive and not-so-primitive
peoples have for themselves is their word for man.
The communities from which Classical
Civilization came were clans, kinship groups; the
communities from which Western Civilization came
were local villages and manors.
Lucky civilizations, such as Chinese Civilization
over the past 1500 years, generally have communities which are both
kinship and local.
What happens in the
course of a Class A Civilization, over a thousand
or more years, is that the fundamental communities are broken up
and gradually disintegrate into smaller and smaller groups, and may
end up simply as what we call nuclear families, a father and a
mother, who eventually lose all discipline and control of their
children.
The result of this process is a state which is not only sovereign
but totalitarian, and it is filled with isolated
individuals.
Of the four civilizations which came
out of Classical Antiquity's wreckage, two,
Islamic and Byzantine, clearly are Class B Civilizations, that is,
they continued to work for
communities.
Their governments were governments of limited powers, of which the
most important were raising money and recruiting
soldiers.
The finest example of such an Asiatic Despotism was the Mongolian
Empire of Jenghiz Khan about A. D. 1250, but its origins go back to
the Persian Empires of the Achaemenids and the Sassanids. Good
examples of such a structure are the Chinese Civilization of
220-1949, the Byzantine Empire after 640, and the Islamic
sultanates which eventually culminated in the Ottoman
Empire.
The efforts of the Carolingian Franks to establish a similar empire
in Western Civilization collapsed and led to the Dark Age of
860-970.
http://www.carrollquigley.net/Lectures/The-State-of-Communities-AD-976-1576.htm
I reject the western way of organising society where the long
term trend is to break up the community.
Dun marry also good lah. Save money.The most old liao go do
volunteer work or just save enough money to rot in an old folk's
home. Now marriage is like a joke .So many divorces and lousy
marriages. So many unfaithful people .Sg also expensive to stay
happy with a partner.
I think Singapore society must be reorganised, de-westernised
and de-anglicised.
This destructive western way of organising society must be
totally rejected.
