A View of Civilization Through History

This book offers a whole new lens on history. It begins with a question asked beside a campfire ten thousand years ago: "When will this ever end?" From there, it ignites four engines: energy acquisition, anchoring meaning, reciprocal balance, and strategic parity. It shows you how the Spring and Autumn period and 1945-2008 shared the same formula for a golden age, and how the Warring States period and 2008-2026 shared the same underlying logic of "the collapse of rites and music." It dissects the Qin, which pushed agricultural civilization to its limits before dying in its second generation, and the United States, which has pushed industrial civilization to its limits. Their two checkup reports are astonishingly similar. It asks about the fatal ailments of industrial civilization: the divide between producers and consumers, declining birthrates, and a vacuum of meaning. Finally, it returns to a path forward: harnessing humanity's fear and greed to replace the old System's functions one by one, planting oases in the desert so that civilization's transition need not be a rupture.