The rebirth of what is essential to a productive culture may appear political in a superficial review, but the real driver of change is cultural.

This is essay #16 in the series The Revolution No One Sees Coming.

The word Renaissance–“rebirth”–is associated with the European Renaissance of the 14th to 17th centuries.

But when viewed as a rediscovery of core values, principles and intellectual / spiritual heritages that have been lost to decay and corruption, then we can extend this idea of the “rebirth of what is essential to a productive culture” to movements that are typically described as regime change: rebellions, revolutions and the rise of new dynasties that draw inspiration from the core values, principles and intellectual / spiritual heritages of past eras of stable, widespread “good times” (for example, the Tang Dynasty, the Southern Song dynasty, the early Ming dynasty, the Roman Republic, etc.).

The rebirth of what is essential to a productive culture may appear political in a superficial review, but the real driver of change is cultural–the social, intellectual and spiritual/ethical values and principles that guide public conduct and Consent of the Governed not by the force of laws or state repression but by shared values and beliefs.

Renaissances by their very nature are rediscoveries or revivals of ideas and ideals lost to the decay and corruption of self-interest and sclerosis, as the status quo descends into going though the motions rather than actually being diligent, avoiding sacrifices for the common good, maintaining a fake facade of devotion to honored principles while pursuing corruption and self-enrichment with a pathologically single-minded avariciousness.

This decay and corruption typifies regimes that have reached their limits and have succeeded for so long that those feeding at the trough reckon there is no limit on what they can siphon off for their personal fortunes, while the ideas that enabled the long success no longer activate nimble problem-solving; rather, they now encourage “doing more of what’s failed.”

The European Renaissance began with the rediscovery by the intellectual-commercial class of Greek and Roman texts preserved in the Christian monasteries by monks whose tasks included laboriously copying decaying manuscripts into new handwritten texts, a task so tedious that many manuscripts included margin-notes by monks praying to be relieved of the excruciating work.

Handwritten copies of these works began circulating among the intelligentsia, and with the advent of the printing press in Europe (China had long had the same basic technology, but had never developed it into a mass media), by the early 1500s these classics became more widely available.

This process of rediscovery and rebirth does not require the unearthing of long-buried texts; it works equally well with ideas and ideals that remain in plain sight but have been abandoned in a culture corrupted by the supremacy of self-interest by any means available, including artifice, fraud and the Big Con–claiming fealty to ideals as the cover story for relentless self-enrichment.

The key to this rediscovery erupting into a force of mass cultural change is the ideas and ideals inspire new adaptations that sweep away the sclerosis of the stagnant, going through the motions status quo, as opposed to the pursuit of a dream of res-establishing or restoring a previous Glorious Realm. A Renaissance is not the exhumation of a bygone regime; it’s the inspirational rebirth of ideals that generate the adaptive, nimble, willing-to-sacrifice for the common good principles that are the foundations of Glorious Realms.

All of which brings us to the present state of the United States: its leadership so corrupted that it no longer even recognizes its corruption (corruption is now “the way the world works”), a leadership of True Believers in the secular religion of the pathologically single-minded pursuit of self-enrichment and power, a belief structure that is once again unrecognized for what it truly is, a leadership–intellectual, political, cultural–that has reached its limits and is only going through the motions of mimicking “innovation,” “democracy” and “progress” to mask the sclerosis of the status quo (doing more of what’s failed) and their ceaseless self-aggrandizement.

I call this complex structure of artifice masking sclerosis and corruption–the collapse of the Moral Universe that underpins all productive cultures–The Big Con, as the essential task in uninterrupted self-enrichment is to con the public into believing that the status quo benefits them even as it stripmines them and makes a mockery of “innovation,” “democracy” and “progress.”

The descent into sclerosis and corruption is not a new progression. What fueled Martin Luther’s outrage was the Church’s blatant corruption, as bribes were openly accepted as the path for the wealthy to gain easy access to Heaven.

We find ourselves in a similar cesspool today. a cesspool with a diving board to lend an absurdly transparent and laughable air of normalcy to the stench of decay and corruption and the putrid morass of sclerosis–doing more of what’s failed and calling it “innovation” and “progress” as The Big Con.

I know this sounds like the ravings of a white-robed lunatic on the street corner, but as this series has attempted to illuminate, The Big Con has reached its limits and the fury of the conned will burn hot as the pendulum swings to the other extreme. At some point, we will seek inspiration and adaptive nimbleness in ideals such as thrift, social cohesion, authenticity rather than artifice, and the elevation of leaders based not on their ability to con us but on their willingness to forego private self-enrichment to serve the shared interests of everyone, not just themselves and their cronies.

We can find such inspiration in Marcus Aurelius, of course, but we can also find it in American sources such as Emerson and more recently, Christopher Lasch. The treasures of inspirational ideas and ideals await our rediscovery and rebirth…