Would readers please help me make a killing by filling in the gaps in my plans for a new board game comparable to Monopoly?
The elements for Decline of the West are in place in my draft outline:
- Materialism, greed, selfishness, unwillingness to make enough babies.
- Reluctance to take the environmental crisis seriously.
- The portion of medical expenditures devoted to cosmetic surgery.
- The artistic talent wasted on the production of porn.
- The number of books written confirming or denying the existence of God.
I don’t think you will have much difficulty adding hundreds of elements to this list.
The difficulty is finding factors demonstrating that China and India deserve to be, and are destined to be, on the way to replace the West – an essential part of the proposed board game.
Many of the virtues of China and India are pre-existing conditions. They were there when they were down and the West was on top. What is it now that makes those two countries winners?
I am stuck.
Please help me.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
They haven’t run out of positions…?
I am sorry: I should have guessed it was YOU!!!!!
EK
comment-reply@wordpress.com9/16/09 2:33
This is my second reply:
Since you seem to be interested in the game, what abiout investing a thousand dollars in it,
for development?
I can’t say I’ve done an exhaustive survey, but the porn I’ve seen has not suggested to me that the people creating it are wasting artistic talent.
In days of overpopulation, why is a low birthrate a sign of decline – it tends to go along with (= caused by??) empowerment of women. Some people say that is a sign of decline, but I don’t expect you are among them.
Could decline not just be decline? Why must it be accompanied by somebody’s rise? Rome declined and fell but was not replaced by anyone on the world (or even its world, i.e. Europe and continguous regions) stage for many centuries.
There are as many reasons to think that China and India will not ‘take over’ as that they will, maybe more. But why should they, and why should they even want to – unless they share the greed, materialism etc that you suggest are causing the West’s decline.
What is the point of the game as a player? To avoid decline, or to advance (if that’s the opposite of decline for game purposes)? Do you have a card, or a roll of the dice, that says “have 6 children – advance one square”? Or “start a charitable foundation – advance two squares”?
Or do some squares come with some kind of penalty card (“West = low birthrate = go back two spaces”) or bonus cards (“China = industriousness = advance three spaces”)?
How does one know when one has won? Do you define terminal decline, or triumphant advance?
Good luck – some interesting themes here, Eric, but I’m afraid I am not going to enrich myself by being an early investor. (I have a kid starting university who is using up my spare cash…)
You made some terrific points, John, but, alas, you are not as much a man of the world as I am. I have seen some superb porn, highly artistic. I remember especially a pornographic Alice in Wonderland which I would have liked to have shared with you. – The assumption of the proposed board game is Darwinian – that every major power – not Liechtenstein – wants to be on top, to demonstrate it is the fittest. But I agree that is a barbarous assumption, and one should, of course, prefer the opposite assumption – the more civilized, the LESS you want to be on top –
I am sure you are right about the birthrate. I did not understand at the time why de Gaulle, worried about the sinking French birthrate in the fifties, appointed a powerful committee to stimulate it – every potent Frenchmen of his day wanted to be on it!
But of course that was before the population explosion was discovered.
Please respond again!
Well, I suppose that if the porn IS very artistic, then it’s not a waste of talent to have created it. Some would say that the original Alice in Wonderland was pornographic, at least for the Rev Mr Dodgson, its author. But that’s another story.
If the theme or at least title of the game is the decline of the west, then I presume that the value of attributes that one is allocated or that one can acquire as an Eastern country are in the long run more powerful than those that one might acquire when one is France or England or Italy?
I made my assumptions about the values in my first response based on your opening salvo of characteristics that suggested that the West was doomed, notably the greed and the blindness to environmental sustainability. Of course the latter is a virtue several Eastern countries claim to themselves, i.e. their right to be blind to such things until they catch up to the West.
There are other games of world domination – Diplomacy etc. I had assumed that yours was different because of its moral vision, or at least underlying indignation. Will the indignant player prosper? Or must virtue once again be its own reward?