On April 15, 2010 (more than a year ago), I posted The Mandate of Heaven, which has become the most popular post on this Blog. To date, there have been about 2,000 views and they keep coming daily. Only the Home Page has more. Third place has less than half.
On April 13, 2011, Part 2 of Predicting the Fall of a Civilization posted, where I quoted three historical experts.
Edward Gibbons in The Decline of the Roman Empire; Arnold J. Toynbee‘s A study of History, and Jeffrey A. McNeely. All three pointed out elements that were signs of the pending collapse of a civilization.
However, these Western historians and authors are novices compared to ancient Chinese scholars and historians.
The Dynastic Cycle or the Mandate of Heaven as explained by a sixth grade American teacher.
After more than a dozen dynastic collapses, the Chinese learned that underlying the rise and fall of a civilization [The Mandate of Heaven (天命)], is the belief that when ruling families or political parties do nothing for the people but everything for themselves that civilization is doomed to fail.
The Chinese learned that there are duties governments are required to carry out to protect the people from widespread catastrophe, chaos and anarchy. When a government fails to do this, we may predict that the end of a civilization such as America or Europe is at hand, which will not happen overnight but may take decades or a century.
What I did not realize until this morning was that the Chinese discovered the life cycle of civilizations millennia ago and called it The Mandate of Heaven, The Mandate of God or the Dynastic Cycle.
It doesn’t matter which form of government a civilization has. They all follow this same pattern. Republics and democracies have existed before the United States, and they all perished along with civilizations ruled by kings, emperors and dictators.
To be continued on May 15, 2011 in The Mandate of Heaven’s Global Revelation – Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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