And maybe it is true to an extent. But what if he came to this conclusion upon being surrounded by egos breaking away every which way when his own traditional society was in the process of breaking apart?
The curious thing we can learn about egos thanks to the current state of things is that they will diminish themselves if they perceive that they can regain power in becoming connected to everything, as opposed to breaking away from something that is stifling them.
Now this is very interesting. This pattern repeats cyclically in the behavior of large cultures. You have power crystallize in these traditional structures, which might be somewhat benign, or at least adhere to an ideology of benevolent paternalism. You always hear about the old order complaining that there was a time in which there was honor and good will and concern for one's society.
But what old power doesn't realize is that holding onto power out of fear and concern for the masses necessarily sets the conditions for destruction. Each ego needs to be enriched and exercise power at some point, and then there is a tendency to desire more and more power, and to hold onto what power was gained.
So you have the circulation of power freezing within these old structures, and new egos left out of these structures are coming up against limits to their own power. Unable to exercise their own power, these egos begin to develop an ideology of radical individualism and nihilism, and so pressure builds against the traditional walls of power until the oppressed egos can no longer be contained, and so they burst forth, absorbing what power each of them can.
Then new structures of power are formed, and the ideology of the oppressed grows ever more nihilistic and individualistic until the process bottoms out and we are left with petrified structures of completely sociopathic and solipsistic individuals, and so the oppressed egos, in seeking power, seek not to break away, as there is nowhere left to go, but to reconstitute all of the broken connections that have been so completely frayed, and we return full circle to an ideology of beneficence and concern for fellow human, which will eventually harden into new traditional structures.
Perhaps this is a glimpse into the nature of evolution: against the backdrop of a changing environment, a body of connected life units progresses from a state of organization to a different state of organization to maintain stability (and keep in mind there are even changing topographies internal to the body itself), until it becomes something different altogether.
It brings to mind a chord progression, changing shapes of interrelated notes that fit into each other like puzzle pieces. There is this phenomenon in which a highly dissonant chord, a chord with all sorts of notes crashing into each other (which sounds unpleasant or at least harsh), transitions into a harmonious chord and the entire progression becomes something highly pleasurable to the sensibility. Pleasure often takes on this characteristic: it is heightened by the fact that it follows pain.
So human history, or even the history of life appears as a never-ending chain of intelligence struggling to fight fires breaking out upon the breaking down of vessels constructed for the purpose of perpetuation.
And that is alright.
