Skallagrim
Well-known member
My reaction came across more harshly than I meant it to be. I was just trying to clarify my thoughts. I didn't mean for it to come across as attacking your post.
And yes, what I expect is certainly worse than what you outlined!
My view is that history has no "good guys". Not really. There are often clear cases of "worse guys", who we're glad to see gone, but that rarely renders their opponents into saints. And there are surely individuals who demonstrate clear heroism. But when we look at the big picture, at the overall "sides" and factions that struggle against one another... there are bad guys everywhere.
Men are flawed beings.
Personaly, I look at the practical reality of life on the ground, and conclude that there is little difference of tangible effect. Of course, from my own background (Catholic), it may be easier to wave a hand at such things. But then again, you'll note that I casually indicated that the Papacy will most probably be terminated and that role usurped by the head of the universal state-- so I'm not afraid to posit a world that brushes aside some pretty fundamental elements of Catholicism, either...
Nobody is exempt from history, after all. My point, however, is that Protestantism (by and large) is already well attuned to obeying an authority. After all, the main political ramification of the Reformation was that heads of state became heads of the national church. The USA is actually a bit of a weird outlier in that regard... and I (obviously) think a temporary one. In that specific context, note that I propose that the future "Caesarist" movement will have distinct religious overtones, and (certainly in the American context) of a mostly Protestant flavour. (Although I think it'll deliberately aim for a "national Christianity" kind of thing, where people of all mainline denominations are welcome so long as they are suitably loyal to the goals of the movement.)
This leads me to believe that the very existence of the idolised, half-statesman-half-prophet "Caesar" figure will... acclimatise his followers to the (only natural!) notion that he is the desired leader of their state and the desired leader of their church. As such, Caesarism in its own way paves the path for the universalism of the Principate.
That's very kind of you to say!
Naturally, I don't expect people to agree with my on the details-- and in fact, I'm sure to be wrong on many of them.
I don't actually disagree in the long run, but there are important factors that lead me to believe that the Principate will be an age of limited government. Not necessarily of a limited ruler (the Emperor is essentially an absolute monarch, even if the Constitution pretends otherwise), but an age in which the government is essentially unwilling to involve itself in the day-to-day lives of the people.
In the Principate, all politics become court politics. The Emperor may have courtiers and magnates executed or exiled; he may have wealthy plutocrats divested of their riches when they step out of line... but if you live a few hundred miles away, you can bet he never visits. Pay the modest tithe, obey the (much-reduced and fairly basic) laws of the imperial government, go to church on Sundays, and don't be a problem to the larger functioning of society. No more is expected of a citizen.
The reason things are bound to be like that is three-fold.
First, the preceding age (our age, c. 1800 - c. 2100) is a period of upheavals, social experimentation, and unprecedented governmental growth and excess. This culminates in brutal "global civil wars" that are effectively the conclusion of a triptych. The age of "modernity" began with the French Revolution and its excesses, followed by Napoleon and the warfare state (e.g. levée en masse). In the middle, we have the World Wars and the extremes of totalitarian ideologies that produce gulags and gas chambers. And at the close, we have the wars of "Caesarism" against the established elites of "modernity". In the wake of those extremes, "modernity" as a whole will be viewed with hate and disgust. Men will seek to leave it far behind. There will be deep distrust of abusive state power, which will linger in the culture for some time.
Second, in the wake of civilisational war, order can only be restored though legitimacy. Since all ideologies have debased themselves in the preceding carnage, and the core tenets of the "modern" age itself are completely discredited by then, the only source of meaninful legitimacy is the oldest and truest source: tradition. Because of this, the civil wars only end when a sufficiently capable and sufficiently traditionalist person seizes power. that person is the "Augustus". (This is why the person filling that rule is always a reactionary.) In the West, limited government is the traditional -- and therefore the most intrinsically legitimate -- mode of operation.
Third, democracy gets discredited as a part of "modernity". The Principate, therefore, will almost certainly introduce a decidedly non-democratic (and indeed effectively anti-democratic) system of societal and governmental organisation. And as you may be aware, there is literally nothing in human history that so powerfully speeds up the growth of government as the introduction of democracy. This was addressed in this thread by @Lord Sovereign, just yesterday. Therefore, the elimination of democracy will prevent government from "growing back" as rapidly as it could and certainly would do under a democratic regime.
...Now, as I said: I do actually agree with your thinking in the long run. Governments do, invariably, grow in scope. My point is that although this is inexorable trend over time, this does not mean it's a straight line up. You get peaks and valleys. You get periods where government is rolled back in size, for a time. As I mentioned, those periods of push-back are always temporary and do not buck the trend. However... some of them last for quite some time. And history provides ample evidence that the Principate of a civilisation is such a time of "governmental reduction". It is, in fact, the most effective and thorough and durable of these periods.
You know, this is a bit like Murphy's Law, which is often stated as "anything that can go wrong will go wrong for sure". Whereas in reality, the thesis is that anything that can go wrong will... given enough attempts... eventually go wrong for sure.
My approach to the iron law of governmental overreach is of a similar nature. Any government will, given sufficient time, expand its size to the maximum extent that its host society's economy permits. All attempts to roll this back in the face of catastrophe are temporary, and the trend is always for government to enlarge itself. Eventually, all governments exceed the capacity of their host (i.e. society) to sustain their swollen size, culminating in system collapse.
Yes. The implication is that all governments are inherently parasitical in nature, and always turn out to be a net drain of resources. In the long term(!), all arguments to the contrary are demonstrably false. All governments, with no exceptions in recorded history, ultimately turn out to be a massive (and indeed fatal) net burden upon the vitality of their host society.
As such, my most ardent long-term hope for humanity, bar none, is the utter extinction of all governments, forever. Regrettably, I see no avenues that will effect this result within the next few centuries-- let alone within my life-span. Bummer.
Anyway, I've gone off on a tangent. Back to the actual topic. The unstoppable growth of the scope of all governments ever. My point is not that the Principate magically stops this process, or is magically invulnerable to it. My point is that the Principate is one of the deep "valleys" in the graph. It doesn't negate the trend, but for the reasons outlined, it's a period in which the growth of government is very effectively hindered... for a time.
The Principate essentially undoes the excesses of the preceding three centuries. In certain ways (though certainly not in all!) it effectively rolls back the clock by 300 years. Which simply means that the Principate is uniquely suited to produce a relatively long-lasting period of "constrained government". The culture of the age is bitterly set against abusive all-powerful government. Its founding ruler ("Augustus") is, by definition, a traditionalist who hates the excesses of the preceding era (i.e. "modernity", an age of big government). And by resolutely rejecting democracy, the most powerful vector for rapid government expansion has been removed from play. The result of this is that the Principate is an age of constrained government, where all politics are essentially court politics.
This changes again once the (closely linked) economic and geo-political realities of a universal state catch up to us. That's when the mid-Imperial crisis erupts, which is invariably "solved" by a far more active government that begins interfering in all sorts of aspects of social and economic life again. That is the Dominate, and it usually terminates in the final Pyrrhic victory of the parasite that is government: it ends up killing its host civilisation, and thereby also kills itself.
And new life then feeds upon the corpse, allowing for the cycle to begin again.
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