(2025-01-06) Hunt The Four Horsemen Of The Great Ravine Part1

Ben Hunt: The Four Horsemen of the Great Ravine, Part 1. Every so often, things fall apart. Every so often, human society collapses into violence both economic and kinetic, both large-scale and small-scale, a war of all against all where life is nasty, brutish and short.

I can’t shake the feeling that we are beginning just such a descent, a winding but one-way path down, down, down into what my favorite living author, Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin, calls the Great Ravine.

part of that lifecycle is decline and collapse. I’ve always believed that there would be recognizable signs and portents for that final stage, signs and portents that I think I’m seeing now.

The rhyme of history is where we find meaning from our past to provide wisdom for our future.

If you’re familiar with old school historians like Gibbon, Toynbee and the Durants, you’ll know what I’m talking about because the lifecycle and rhyme of history is what they write about.

Such, indeed, is the policy … severely to remember injuries, and to forget the most important services. Revenge is profitable, gratitude is expensive. – Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Vol. 1 chap XI pt 2 (1776)

I love this quote from Gibbon for the same reason that I love so many quotes from the Durants … it’s communicating a vibe from the third century AD, a vibe that I recognize so clearly in the twenty-first century AD.

All of these touchy-feely words are part of the science of semantics — the exploration of meaning in information and communication

Yes, Gibbon is communicating the vibes of the third century AD. More precisely, Gibbon is communicating the semantic signatures (embeddings?) of the third century AD,

More than anything else, this gives me hope that we can survive and shorten our Great Ravine, that we can use generative AI to build an effective defense against the retconning and Orwellian rewriting of history that is the most powerful enemy of humanity.

For today, though, I just want to give you a taste of what’s possible in a semantic approach to historical understanding

See, as much as I appreciate Gibbon and Toynbee and the Durants as gifted storytellers, I don’t entirely trust them to relate historical vibes and semantic signatures faithfully.

I’ll start with Chinua Achebe and his novel about how things fell apart in Southeastern Nigeria.

it allows us to apply directly the tools of generative AI and large language modeling to primary historical texts at incredible scale and scope, making historical interpretation and meaning-finding available to everyone rather than remaining the province of academic historians or the plaything of revisionist politicians.

This is the Great Project of my life. No biggie. (Great Work)

I think we’re on the cusp of an entirely new way of understanding history and political science, where we use generative AI to uncover the semantic signatures of storytelling texts written by people who lived in and through the events we want to understand

I think we’re better off looking to primary historical sources, broadly defined

I believe that we can take the true primary texts of human history – our novels and plays and poems and religious texts and fables and folk tales and diaries and letters – and tease out their linguistic threads and motifs of meaning (semantic signatures!) in order to weave a better human history.

I mean, if there’s a better description of our national ‘leaders’ today than a profound commitment to injury-remembering and service-forgetting and score-settling, and yes I’m very much talking about Trump and crew but I am also very much talking about Biden and crew, then I am unaware of what that description might be.

The rhyme of history is found in the vibes that connect one society at a point in time to another society at another point in time, in the expressions and motifs of meaning that connect human cultures across time and space.

Achebe’s words lead us directly to William Butler Yeats and his poems of the descent into World War I.

Yeats’s words in turn take us to the essays of Hannah Arendt on the social origins of World War II.

From there I’ll look to the stories of science fiction writer Liu Cixin, who writes of a global collapse in some far-off future – what he calls the Great Ravine – as a way of describing the vibes and semantic signatures of the Cultural Revolution.

Four gifted storytellers who lived it, who can relate the vibes and the semantic signatures of some of the twentieth century’s most devastating social collapses.
And from the meaning in their words, wisdom for our future emerges.

In 1958, Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart, a novel about the collapse of traditional Igbo society in Southeastern Nigeria under the weight of colonialism and Christianity, a social decline and collapse that ultimately resulted in the Biafran War of 1967-1970.

which the Nigerian government won by imposing a blockade and starving somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Igbo civilians to death. I think about this sometimes when the African Union and the Nigerian government start talking about a ‘genocide’ in Gaza.

Achebe doesn’t sugarcoat the pre-colonial, pre-Christian Igbo clans in Things Fall Apart. Like most traditional societies, they’re hidebound and intensely patriarchal and cruel by modern standards.

Long before the white man came onto the scene, the villages and clans of Achebe’s world had already forgotten the WHY of their traditions and their institutions of cooperation.

the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan.

Yes, the economic/military power of neoliberalism colonialism and the ideological power of MAGA/wokism Christianity demolished the empty shells of American Igbo traditions and institutions of cooperation.

Six years ago I wrote a series of notes called Things Fall Apart, my homage to Achebe’s novel and my first effort to rhyme his patterns of social collapse with our patterns of social collapse. Here’s the money quote: How did we get here? We got soft. I don’t mean that in a macho sort of way...
We have long forgotten the horrors of literal war and why we constructed these cooperatively-oriented institutions in the first place. ((2018-08-08) Hunt Things Fall Apart)

Besides, it’s so wearying to maintain the actual intent of the old institutions, to mean it when you swear an oath to a Constitution or a god or a chief, and not just see it as an empty ritual that must be observed before getting the keys to the car

If it weren’t Donald Trump, it would be someone just as ridiculous. It WILL be someone just as ridiculous in the future, probably someone on the other side of the political spectrum, someone like Elizabeth Warren or Kamala Harris.

I wrote this before Kamala Harris was a blip on the Presidential radar screen.

It’s obvious where all of this is going. Men and women of honor recede into the background, and ridiculous, profoundly flawed ‘leaders’ come to the fore

Achebe took the title of his book from a 1919 poem by William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming, where Yeats describes the collapse of Western society in the lead-up and progression of World War I.

Turning and turning in the Widening Gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

And yes, there’s an Epsilon Theory note on that.

We are the falcon, and the falconer is … God, if you’re religious, the Old Songs of reason and empathy and reciprocity if (like me and like Yeats) you’re not.

The widening gyre is a profound social equilibrium where bad people and bad ideas drive good people and good ideas out of circulation. It is the triumph of Fiat World, where Fiat News and fiat ideas and fiat people are presented as reality by proclamation, not lived experience.

Just as Achebe wrote an entire novel based on the phrase Things fall apart, I’ve written so many notes on the phrase the Widening Gyre, which I believe is the essential distillation of political and social polarization as an equilibrium, a universal semantic signature (embedding?) of social decline and collapse.

it’s another line I want to focus on now, because I think it represents an even more powerful semantic signature of decline.

Mere anarchy. What a phrase!

The ordinariness of anarchy, the ho-hum of humans losing their humanity, what Eugene Ionesco described as “oh look, another Rhinoceros” in his absurdist play by the same name … THIS is the semantic signature of social collapse that I was not expecting in my reading of the storytellers who lived it.

And no one has written in that motif of meaning better and with more clarity than Hannah Arendt.

In 1961, Arendt went to Jerusalem to watch the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the foremost architect of Germany’s Final Solution

In 1963, first in a series of articles for The New Yorker and then in a standalone book, Arendt published Eichmann in Jerusalem, her take on the man and the trial

Instead of the visionary architect of State-directed evil on an unimaginable scale, she found the managing director of State-directed evil on an unimaginable scale.
In Hannah Arendt’s words, Adolf Eichmann personified the banality of evil, the quiet managerial tedium and ordinariness by which our world descends into madness and violence.

For me, Arendt’s banality of evil is second only to Yeats’s widening gyre as a potent distillation of a semantic signature about the path of social decline

He was the director of the OG department of government efficiency, enthusiastically being really efficient at the industrial murder of millions

And that’s so boring. There’s no story to Adolf Eichmann’s infamy other than that there is no story, and that’s why Arendt gets dismissed as ‘not being hard enough’ on Eichmann

We desperately want the evil things that happen in this world and the evil people who do them to have a story

But it doesn’t. It’s just not true. The collapse of a society into selfish violence isn’t a story of supervillains, strutting and monologuing their way through Act II so we can get to the superhero victory of Act III. It isn’t a story at all. There’s no plot here. No triumph. No redemption on a grand scale. No overcoming of anything. It’s only pain.

I learned this from the science fiction novels of Liu Cixin, after I finally realized that they’re not science fiction.

AND it’s a lived it account of seeing your parents sent to the mines during the Cultural Revolution, of seeing the damage of the Cultural Revolution never really going away but just being absorbed and forgotten over time

He never goes into the details of this period that he calls the Great Ravine. He basically just waves his hands at it and writes “yep, that happened”.

Why? Because the Great Ravine does not advance the plot.

The Great Ravine is not permanent, but it’s not a Fourth Turning or a cyclical thing, either. There is no plot line here! And that’s what a cycle is … a plot line, a script.

Gibbon tracked the decline and fall of the Roman empire over centuries, and the Dark Age was literally that … an Age.

what I’m missing is the rubric that weaves these semantic signatures into a coherent whole

for that I need an author who somehow exists across time and place

Perhaps the answer is to look not for a single author but for a set of authors

In Part 1 I think we found insight for our present.
In Part 2 I hope to find wisdom for our future.

I think the Book of Exodus has something to tell us about that.