Some of the grandest art has come out of the bleakest times. Consider, using your example, Stalin. Some of the greatest classical music has come out of that black period in Russian history. Consider, for example, Shostakovitch's 5th symphony.

Now consider what's coming out of modern "free" Russia.

I'm not certain that "freedom" and particularly, prosperity, have any relation at all to art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novelty_Theory

(isn't there a user named timewave0?)

http://users.lycaeum.org/~sputnik/mckenna/TZandL.html

It seems more likely to me that all this complexity is better directed toward the end of the cycle when, after billions of years of evolution, everything finally comes together. Alfred North Whitehead proposed this same idea. He said that history grows toward what he called a "nexus of completion." And these nexuses of completion themselves grow together into what he called the "concrescence." A concrescence exerts a kind of attraction, which can be thought of as the temporal equivalent of gravity, except all objects in the universe are drawn toward it through time, not space.

As we approach the lip of this cascade into concrescence, novelty, and completion, time seems to speed up and boundaries begin to dissolve. The more boundaries that dissolve, the closer to the concrescence we are. When we finally reach it, there will be no boundaries, only eternity as we become all space and time, alive and dead, here and there, before and after. Because this singularity can simultaneously co-exist in states that are contradictory, it is something which transcends rational apprehension. But it gives the universe meaning, because all processes can be seen to be seeking and moving in an effort to approximate, connect with, and append to this transcendental object at the end of time.

One way of thinking about it is to compare it to one of those mirrored disco balls, which sends out thousands of reflections off of everybody and everything in the room. The mirrored disco ball is the transcendental object at the end of time, and those reflected twinkling, refractive lights are religions, scientific theories, gurus, works of art, poetry, great orgasms, great souffles, great paintings, etc. Anything that has, in Nietszche's phrase, the "spark of divinity within it," is in fact, referent to the original force of the spark of all divinity unfolding itself within the confines of three-dimensional space.

A quick look at Western civilization over the past several hundred years suggests we are indeed moving toward the concrescence. The twentieth century has only accelerated the process of increasing novelty and the dissolving of old boundaries. In our own time, we have created ever more elaborate languages and ever more elaborate technologies for transforming, storing, and retrieving language, so that we are now on the brink of being able to give every single person the complete cultural inventory, the complete data base of human beings' experience on this planet. It's as if the collectivity of our humanness has finally become an intellectual legacy for all of us. That's what these data highways and networks are all about. The nervous system is being hardwired. This is not only an advance deeper and deeper into novelty, but it is an advance in which each successive stage occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it.

http://www.miqel.com/entheogens/terrence_mckenna_interview_1.html

TM: Well, so in looking at this, I created a vocabulary ... actually I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead ... but I think I'm on to something which science has missed, and it's this; it's that the universe, or human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large scale or small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call habit and novelty. And I think they're pretty self-explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system, and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen. And these two qualities — habit and novelty — are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle. But the good news is that if you look at large scales of time, novelty is winning, and this is the point that I have been so concerned to make that I think science has overlooked. If you look back through the history of the human race, or life on this planet, or of the solar system and the galaxy, as you go backward in time, things become more simple, more basic. So turning that on its head, we can say that as you come towards the present things become more novel, more complex. So I've taken this as a universal law, affecting historical processes, biological processes and astrophysical processes.

Nature produces and conserves novelty, and what I mean by that, as the universe cools the original cloud of electron plasma, eventually atomic systems form, as it further cools molecular systems, then long-chain polymers, then non-nucleated primitive DNA-containing life, later complex life, multi-cellular life, and this is a principle that reaches right up to our dear selves. And notice, Art, it's working across all scales of being. This is something that is as true of human societies as it is of termite populations or populations of atoms in a chemical system. Nature conserves, prefers novelty. And the interesting thing about an idea like this is that it stands the existentialism of modern philosophy on its head ... you know, what modern, atheistic existentialism says is that we're a cosmic accident and damn lucky to be here, and any meaning you get out of the situation, you're simply conferring. I say, no ... by looking deeply into the structure of nature, we can discover that novelty is what nature produces and conserves, and if that represents a universal value system, then the human world that we find today with our technologies and our complex societies represents the greatest novelty so far achieved, and suddenly you have a basis for an ethic — that which advances novelty is good, that which retards it is to be looked at very carefully.

027-TerenceMcKenna-Valley01.mp3

4:30 "…the body is being dissolved as much by advanced medical technology as it is by cyberspace and the internet…"

8:22 "[psilocybin and DMT] particularly seem to impact the language-forming portion of the brain… [and] it’s the language-forming part of your brain that is explaining to you moment to moment what is going on… and …then you really do have a puzzlement on your hands because the machinery of description itself has been caught up in the process…"

9:12 "…these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted, machine-elf-type creatures that come bounding out of the [DMT] state… are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax–which is normally the invisible architecture behind language–has moved into the foreground, and you can see it… it’s crawling all over you…"

art, politics, science, religion -everything headed toward totally maxed, connected. rather fullerized almost.... (as in his poetry and his math are of a simple seamless wholecloth of complexity, for example.)

http://zuma.vip.warped.com/2_20_entelechy.aiff.mp3

it sounds rather odd keeping in mind that Ezra was a facist lover. However, I don't think they were afraid of democracy in itself, as we know it today, either way. In Ezra day's there were few democracies as we know'em today. So I think that they were afraid of the demos in that equation. You have to remember that most of those people were really a tad above the social ladder compared with mere mortals like you and me. So I think he was more afraid that the private club was going to loose its pedigree and become filled with commoners.

In their ideaistic phase, fascists are revolutionaries bent on tearing down the old, decadent institutions. But unlike communists, anarchists, etc.. they wanted to rebuild a new stratified structure to replace the old. At the top would sit the philosopher-kings or even the fascist "men of action".

I second.

Also, I think the British elite, who studied classics, had a natural suspicion of democracy. They viewed it as being unstable and corrosive, as Plato told us it could be. Plato suggested that democracies tend to produce great material wealth, and that this, in turn, tends to cause people to frame their lives and their values soley in material terms. Then ideas of virtue disappear from currency in both thought and action. Even the founding fathers wrestled with this idea. It explains institutions we consider oddities, like the electoral college.

It is dangerous, I think, to simply pronounce democracy good and ignore its costs and potential pitfalls. Another post on this page laments the complete eradication of the notion of nobless oblige. It was probably not so widely practiced by the British aristocracy as anglophiles are tempted to believe; but it did moderate behavior to some extent. It was a cultural idea closely related to the idea of acting responsibly with power - an idea the Brits have practiced to some degree since the establishment of their civil service system.

The irony of democracy is that people get power by hook or by crook rather than by means of patrimony and preferential educational opportunities. This means they are inclined to behave as crooks rather than spoilt brats once in power. The brats only fail to make good policy; the crooks set out to rape and pillage the nation they rule.

The post-Reagan era is a case in point. It has shown us that neither Plato nor Pound were being completely fanciful in their fears. Only by facing up to democracy's weaknesses can we hope to do better. That, for gosh sakes, is why we have mandatory education; to preserve democracy from degredation - not to earn a manager title at Wal-Mart.