The Sex Model explains how the "battle of the sexes" will unfold. Taub elegantly uses the Chinese yin and yang principle to make his case. In prehistoric society, yin, the female principle, dominated. In patriarchal society, yang, the male principle, dominates. In the future, androgyny will dominate. Taub superimposed the Sex Model on the Caste Model to provide a second parameter for his macro-history. The Caste Model not only shows that the Worker Caste age will culminate in Far East Asia, the Sex Model reinforces it. If we look at East Asian countries, from Japan to Thailand, we can't help but agree that its populations are less masculine and have, in fact, a strong androgynous tendency.
[FIGURE 3] The Sex Dialectic
Copyright Larry Taub
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Social, ecological, and technological imperatives will reshape the economy and society, says Taub. Several movements will define tomorrow's economic structure. One of them is voluntary simplicity, a term first coined by Richard Gregg in 1936 and defined as "avoiding clutter and focusing energy on what really matters" (a Zen-like approach to life). Voluntary simplicity will lead people to do more with less. Moreover, it will result in the growth of rural and urban semi-collective communities and sharing communities that combine features of the Kibbutz and cooperatives.
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The voluntary-simplicity movement will be accompanied by a second movement called appropriate technology. The vanguard of this movement, says Taub, will set out to "de-develop" the current overdeveloped industrial system. It will create and apply appropriate technology to produce and distribute agriculture and manufactured goods on a smaller, localized scale (think 3D printing, solar power and small-scale urban and rural farming). Taub: "Like the voluntary simplicity movement, the appropriate technology movement will stimulate the spread of collective and semi-collective communities. Such communities have just the right scale and organization to use appropriate technology efficiently and economically."
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Many developing countries, Taub predicts, will bypass traditional economic structures and will develop their economies in a decentralized, village-based, spiritual-economic way using technology to address their local needs. This is not a choice but an economic and ecological necessity. "Capitalism," Taub writes, "cannot survive in a no-growth economy. It needs rampant, unlimited economic growth, especially in manufacturing industries." And the world lacks the material resources to support 8 billion people with a profligate lifestyle common in developed countries. "Even industrialized countries," says Taub, "will de-develop using appropriate technology. This will close the North-South and rich-poor gap and will put an end to unlimited economic growth."
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Taub, whose book was a Number 1 bestseller in Japan, has a remarkable track record in forecasting the unexpected. In the 1970s he predicted the breakup of the Soviet Empire, a religion-based revolution in the "religious belt" (which turned out to be Iran), and the rise of "Confucio", the emergence of an economic bloc of countries consisting of China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. When Taub made his predictions, Mikhail Gorbachev was an anonymous Soviet apparatchik, Islamic fundamentalism was practically non-existent, and Deng Xiaoping had yet to start the modernization of the Chinese economy.
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Most importantly, Taub up-ends conventional cultural, social, political and economic assumptions. As he explains in his book, most people argue that the major drawback of Marxist philosophy is that it is based on economic determinism, the idea that all cultural, social, political, and intellectual activities are a product of the economic organization of society. Yet mainstream historians also see history as economically determined. This lulls people into thinking that the economic system controls their lives. But the models convincingly show that it is the reverse: as society and individual consciousness changes, people determine change and create new economic systems.
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The election of Donald Trump seems counter-intuitive to nearly all notions about progress -- and to Taub's models -- but in the larger scheme of things it makes perfect sense. People elected a radical outsider to uproot a corrupt system, taking their chances with a narcissist, nationalist and unpredictable tycoon. Fundamental change often requires a wrecking ball and they got one with Trump. The no-holds-barred president may plow over the deeply rooted corrupt system enough to create fertile ground for a new system to take root. On the international front, Trump plays right into several Taub forecasts -- an alliance between the US and Russia and (with Trump's canceling the TPP) the inevitable formation of "Confucio". Get ready to revisit Yalta and Bretton Woods.
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