@Lookout
by the excrement that's exuded from the bowels of the fetid swamp creatures.

...of the same arse. The output remains the same.

@Cassiodorus
I can see the Romans after centuries of wars, currency debasement, insane leaders, mass immigration, civil wars, debauchery, and most of all corruption from the top down fueled by exploitation of conquered nations and regions, saying "we need one more big war to return Rome to the apex of its once glorious role as the ruler of the known world", as the barbarians knock on the gates with an urgent dose of reality.

The archetypal reality being subsequent centuries of regressive "Dark Ages".

Same as it always was.

What I said here:

an elite fantasy circulating in the top circles about "It's gonna be great! World War Three will be like World War Two." "See, if we fight another world war," they're telling each other over cocktails, "this will rejuvenate the world economy and especially America's economy just like World War Two did." And so the US and the West are preparing for another war, in the only way they remember -- by throwing money at it. So if we assume this elite fantasy, it explains Trump's trillion-and-a-half dollar budget and Europe reintroducing conscription and rearming.

Of course, it's ridiculous.

But of course it's an extension of Cornelius Castoriadis' observation at the end of the Eighties, about the state of political philosophy in our era:

A grave concomitant and related symptom is the complete atrophy of political imagination. The intellectual pauperisation of ‘socialists’ and conservatives alike is staggering. ‘Socialists’ have nothing to say and the intellectual quality of the output of the advocates of economic liberalism over the last 15 years would have made Smith, Constant and Mill turn in their graves. Ronald Reagan was a chef d’œuvre of historical symbolism.

What makes recent history explainable, even though capitalism is a historical anomaly and even though there are more anomalies to come, is the notion of utopian dreaming, the notion that we can in fact improve our world, that it isn't fixed for all time in a caste system, as it gained traction in the Enlightenment (though it was available before then). Study our utopian dreams, then, and you can get something of the shape and size of the anomaly.

In my most recent explanation of the history of utopian dreaming, the generation preceding the Baby Boom, as well as that of the Boomers (I am an end-stage Boomer, born 1961), concluded that this was it, that in the post-1945 universe they had reached the pinnacle of our civilization and that we had figured it all out and that there was really nothing more to be said, or at least this was the sentiment voiced by GWF Hegel, born 1770 and died 1831, who thought the end of history happened much earlier. The cheap version of this thinking is in Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History," in which it is said that we are all headed toward liberal democracy.

The truth is, however, and Castoriadis pointed this out, that we are instead all stuck in some kind of imaginative void, the product of a society that was capable of what once appeared to be amazing things but which has now grown to be a set of intractable problems that nobody cares to fix. Our current, uninspired period of history appears less surprising, I would further argue, if we look at our civilization's defining moment not as 1945 but rather as the 1880s, with the invention of the large-scale power plant and the automotive assembly line and with Europe's conquest of Africa. The result was technotopia, seeming convenient but basically brutal. It's no wonder history isn't over.

Given all this, it should be no surprise that the elite caste of this society, whose defining characteristics are narcissism and hubris, are bent on reviving World War Two in World War Three, so we can have another postwar boom thereafter, or at least this is what they imagine. And they imagine it, we might assume, because they really can't think of anything better to do.