Cognitive Thrift 42 – Spartan
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Cognitive Thrift
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/10/22
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Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Does this reflect the Spartan civilization?
Rick Rosner: I don’t anything about them other than that their name stood for self-sufficiency. I don’t think – the Spartans were pretty isolated. I think the various Greek city-states emphasized, probably, self-sufficiency.
They were less interested in economic partnership. The Romans were people who loved war. They loved a lot of stuff that wasn’t really warlike. They liked putting supposedly conquered people in charge of their own affairs. It’s kind of like the US model of imperialism versus – I kind of want to say the Society model of imperialism, but that’s not exactly it.
The US likes to come into countries and set them up the way we function and make them our friends to the extent that we can, and then hope or expect that they will run an election in American-type way.
And then we’ll sneakily go into the past. In the past, we have a history of killing the foreign leaders that don’t act in a friendly way to us. We kind of want to bring or say we want to bring democracy to the world.
We don’t want to rule the world. We want the world to be our pals because the world works the way we work, which is a bit like the way the Roman model works.
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