Six Levels of Culture: Rise and Fall of Civilizations
April 11, 2026 by elainedianetaylor~
Eternal Pendulum of Garden vs Pie
The builders plant the garden.
Then they pass away.
And the ones who come after?
They can only divide the pie.
These managers only know how to count and divide the harvest.
They do not know how to plant and multiply.
An institution for its own survival.
Extra slices for those inside who protect the system.
Loud media proclaim the benefit of the current system, promoting nostalgia for when the system was built, was fair, was working for the many and expanding.
Nostalgia and a longing for the culture at the civilization’s peak.
Before it cemented into a rigid institution.
And when the many feel the tension of loss of living standard they see through the stories, they eventually rise to replace the institution as it has become.
The culture shifts with incoming technology as a catalyst.
Or else they are so weakened as individuals, through lack of opportunities or food or hope, that they will not or cannot defend what is, and are then overtaken from without (or within).
From Gods to Numbers: Value’s Evolution
In the past age of the “God of the Garden” mindset, humans thought of the material world as a thing that expands by the work of God.
For their metal framework, before the Renaissance, each occurrence was unique and decided by God or the gods. The people gave gifts to their God in exchange for a good harvest or health for their loved ones, or triumph over their enemies. But it was decided by an unpredictable, divine God.
And then, with the coming of Pythagorus, was the very thought of a predictable world using numbers. Of math. Of the idea that everything was number, in a predictable manner. And the mystery of God was removed from the equation of life.
We got this.
Tiny pieces of matter were just pieces of something that could be divided into smaller and smaller pieces. Down to an atom and then smaller. This very concept of dividing a whole into sections, by a concept of math and not by the immediate hands on individual work of God, was a change in the frame of the mind at the time.
Plato took this concept out to the world.
After this the concept of money as representational of value, divisible into smaller and smaller pieces came out.
Money’s Metamorphosis
Money became a fraction of a whole unit. Every THING was divisible into a representational value of a whole thing. An item was not traded for another, or gifted with an obligation of something of the like in return, trade became a hand off of an in-between item that was a bridge between the items.
Money started as a commodity, so the cattle, pieces of leather or cigarettes could be traded for something else or else consumed if times got tough. But then, after a time and the tech advancement of travel, the traders became further and further apart physically. At the same time, the frame of the mind was affected by the alphabet, and items, as well as culture as a whole, became uniform and identical and so could be named with a ‘price’ before it was seen.
This allowed for nations, armies of identical soldiers who could be interchangable parts like the letters of the printing press.
Traders travelled further away and so needed a medium of exchange that could be trusted without each party knowing the others’ reputation.
This was the advent of the need for a representational money instead of moving physical gold or silver. A note of debt or an obligation marked in clay, papyrus and then parchment was more economical and safer to travel with.
Coins of gold and silver, long lasting, divisible, were stamped with a brand of a king, then melted and rebranded when that king was overthrown.
This was the mind set of the world that began to use precious metals by weight as a commodity, then representational and stamped coins by division of math and branding.
Then a mental value locked in a value and traded by promises.
And now, with the current Iran war on hold for negotiations, we see a playing out of an evolution of money, trust, trade and civilization.
The Six Cultural Levels
Carroll Quigley saw this pattern clearly in 1961. In Chapter 4 of The Evolution of Civilizations he gives us the tools to analyze it.
Not as storytelling. As science.
He breaks culture into six levels.
Military. Political. Economic. Social. Religious. Intellectual.
These levels interact.
They ripple.
Then the advent of a new weapon or technology changes everything.
Those in power want to capture and monopolize the benefit quickly, to cement their power and prevent being overthrown.
Rising powers want to advance to challenge the ruling culture and gain their own power.
No power is looking to share because there is no ruling force above all to maintain the balance. It needs to defend as it can against threats known and unknown, because trusting an equal or rising power means agreements can be broken with force.
Social laws are played out by individuals.
Political laws are enforced by the institution.
Tech Disrupts Power
For example, the horse arrived on the Plains.
The technology of the stirrups joined human to horse, and the knight became the most powerful military machine of the time.
The Romans could not or would not adapt, and their infantry, the tech of many men moving as one, was then no longer the ruling cutting edge technology.
The culture shifts as the territory is taken, as then the religious stories shift.
Social bonds rearrange.
Economic surplus moves in new directions.
Nothing stays perfectly integrated.
That tension is what allows adaptation.
This is the pendulum swinging from centralized management to decentralized. And then the new tech, first used by decentralized motion, is used to centralize and cement a new power, either by a new group or the old group adapting.
Expansion to Preservation
This swing is what eventually allows decay of the old.
Quigley called it the instrument of expansion.
In the growth phase it works.
Inventiveness. Surplus. Investment.
The garden gets planted.
New tech and new ideas.
But then the creators die or move on from the creation.
The institution remains.
It hardens.
It turns inward.
Then the second law of thermodynamics takes over: anything left to itself falls apart.
Any THING. The institution is the thing that isn’t adapting, because it’s unwilling or its unable.
Under the laws of economy of scale and diseconomy of scale, it means that the bigger it gets, the harder it is to change, because it takes more time and more force to get it going.
So the new start up in tech can use speed and agility to get going before the financial institutions can even have their committees set up to discuss it.
This is the issue confronting the BIS and all central banking as a whole.
Institutional Decay
So, humans will human, and a few insiders start to loot. A little at first, unnoticed. But that grows into corruption of the whole. Every time. Because humans in the aggregate do human things.
This is the very thing that creates cycles that are predictible. You can’t know what an individual will do, but you can quite certainly know what a crowd will do. Until a Mule comes along (as in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series), acts as an unpredictible individual with power inside an institution.
The only job left for an institution is dividing the existing pie.
Smaller slices.
Thinner crust.
More for them. A little extra slice for a friend.
Less for the whole.
Keeping the institution alive is all that matters to them, and human nature sees a rise in corruption that is covered up to protect the powerful inside.
This is where civilizations begin to die.
Institutionalization, Quigley called it.
This is where the NDAs and pay offs of victims comes in. This is where individuals inside the system are damaged and there is no justice.
This is the stage where the sexual exploitation of young men and women in religion, in education, in science and other parts of culture are damaged and silenced to protect the whole institution.
This is where the Jeffery Epstein situation is right now.
New technology, well not so new now, being the internet and flow of information from many-to-many at once, has uncovered the massive corruption and shared the information across the masses. The corruption became so widespread that it itself became too big for centralized control. Threats of excommunication and punishment stop working when information comes out and the victims stop being afraid, and are protected by a new crowd.
Anger is rising for full disclosure. But full disclosure would overthrow a current power institution, so it is fighting to keep control.
OR, it is buying time to develop a new system, using new technology, that will keep the top insiders in power worldwide, and the files can come out, take down the whole old institution and punish many players. In this, the core keeps power in the new system.
Digital Money’s Power Play
This is the race.
Maybe this is why the delays and attempted delays.
The First Lady of the US, Melania Trump, just did a press conference to publicly distance herself from the situation, and to ask for full disclosure from the Epstein victims on the record, if they wish.
Think of the world monetary system. It’s built on debt. The debt must grow always, to make more debt to pay off the old debt, and keep it flowing.
How can we keep the masses from having enough power?
By not allowing them to pool money, move money, or amass with pitchforks.
By creating a money system where the money itself represents a value, but is fully trackable, and the value can be changed by the central power.
The value that is changed it not just how many goods and services it can be traded for.
No.
By a central power being able to stop it from moving en masse out of the country, being sold off in a bank run, or by making the holder spend it in a certain place that benefits the institution.
Or by controlling how fast it is spent, so the citizen cannot build wealth.
Or by tracking the purchases and the travel, and freezing the whole thing if a person is suspected of being a potential threat to the institution itself.
It would be the end of the individual, or of decentralized anonymous movement of the money.
That’s the race.
Everyone is not needed. There will be some private money not controlled by the central power, which allows for buy in from some, like corporations, a mafia, big tech or commercial banks.
As long as that ratio is small compared to the total amount of programmable money out there, then it can be controlled.
McLuhan’s Medium as Message
Think of Marshall McLuhan here.
We are docile bodies moving inside a medium.
The levels of culture become what he called the medium itself.
The medium is the framework we think, and live, and create inside of. The culture, all six levels, are the water we swim in.
It is also the bridge from the idea, or the value, from one human to another human. They must use this to form a crowd, be powerful as one unit. That’s why the story of the Tower of Babel says the language was confused and then the humans could not reach God and accomplish whatever they could imagine.
You can’t accomplish that if you can’t communicate enough to join into a quantum field as one with many others.
It is a message, a way we think or the possibilities we think about, and we encode that in a language, written or symbolized, and we send that message down the medium, across the bridge, and it is decoded on the other side.
With new technology there are new possibilities, and that changes the frame itself.
Remember, the medium shapes how we think and what we think about.
The new tech, a weapon, a culture shift, a way of communicating and interacting with our society.
We stop seeing possible options if we can’t see the new frame.
We stop shaping them and others shape them for us for their benefit.
We stop being creators and begin to become an institution in our own minds.
Quantum Civilization
This is quantum physics.
This is the difference between the P wave and S wave in an earthquake.
Acting alone as an individual is like an S wave. One action causes a reaction by the next part, and that reaction is an action that causes a reaction by the next part. Like a wave in the ocean.
But, a P wave is like holding a stick and pushing against one end.
The entire stick moves as one.
The end of the stick moves exactly in time as the front of the stick.
This was the technology of the Roman infantry.
Many connected and moving as one.
Our world is made up primarily of plasma. It is the thing inbetween the particles of matter. The vast majority of our world is the space, the plasma, inbetween material things.
Act on one part and another part, many, many miles away is also acted on at the same time. It is part of human conciousness that can be connected to all as a P wave, or can act as an S wave.
This is the basis thesis I’m presenting.
Biological entities, us, can individually act, or can form into blocks and act in quantum at once, a crowd, a quantum entity, a stick.
But to have human individual sovereignty and agency, you must control your own attachment and detachment, physically, financially and emotionally.
Join for a reason. Un-join for a reason.
This is agency.
If you are forced to join, unjoin, or stay in either, you are not free.
Canetti’s Crowd Dynamics
Elias Canetti.
In his book
Crowds and Power.
He understood how the political and military levels of culture can coerce and manipulate individuals into crowds, and swallow the social and the intellectual levels whole.
When we as individuals melt into a crowd out of fear or jubilation we stop creating individually.
We become a part of the crowd quantum and are moved by it.
The crowd becomes the institution.
The power of that crowd becomes the purpose.
That is how civilizations go to war.
If that crowd is moved and adapted and set about it is a very powerful force. This is why mainstream media all have the same message. To move the crowd. To create the very frame of “normal” in the listener.
In this situation, the crowd, which can be a whole civilization is centrally manipulated, can be fomented with fear or greed and set off, in anger or jubilation.
When the purpose of the crowd wanes then the crowd disperses. People come back to their senses. You cannot reason with a crowd as individuals. You persuade and manage the crowd as a whole.
History’s Cyclic Pattern
History is more than a narrative.
It’s more than a story written in a linear path by the winners.
It changes. It follows cycles as all biological closed systems do.
And if those in power become corrupted, cement into an institution, lock in new military technology for the institutions benefit without the building of a new garden, then it cannot adapt.
It can only divide what is (or was).
The history of money as a commodity and on to be representational, and now developing with the use of technology into a tokenized function of instruments for institutions, has a window of time where there can be creation.
Utility that rewards creators and investors, big and small, and does not overly take a ratio of profit, can be built now. There is a technology now to move money, private or fiat, in a few seconds across the globe and beyond, for under a penny.
I will talk more on this. And about how I want to participate for the benefit of many. I want to build gardens. I want to talk about gardens.
Gold’s Timeless Adaptability
Gold is both a commodity and a financial instrument. It is art, science, medical and religiously symbolic.
Gold is being used as part of the old and new systems.
Why?
Because gold is adaptable.
Physical. Representative. Collateral. Rebrandable. Malleable. Divisible. Moveable. Untraceable. Or traceable as representational. Or untraceable as representional.
In this time, we can see why those with power are holding it and buying more.
It adapts.
No matter what power(s) win this reset, it is adaptable.
Worldwide benefit, without the civilization crowd being coerced to accept it against the best interest of the individual for the benefit of a military or political structure.
The centralized global financial system is building for their institutional benefit. It has to for its survival. If you happen to be on the side that wins you will see benefits, but most likely a loss of freedom. If you are on a losing side you will see the hard loss of freedom and the metaphorical boot on the face forever (also metaphorical).
Crypto and the Strait of Hormuz
Communication theory at its best is showing us the monied example of an idea of value, coded into a token/digital shape, crossing a bridge, and decoded on the other side.
It can unlock the greatest garden our minds have never comprehended as civilizations.
Or it can cement and force a lock up of institutional decay.
Iran is putting forward that a fee to pass through the Strait of Hormuz be allowed for a cryptocurrency toll payment. Because cryptocurrency is private money, not central bank money managed by the central banks and governments. So it cannot be tracked or seized in the same way fiat can.
There is no trust as the technology is developing.
Oil is the energy of the current global system. It is intregal to our food, our transportation, our ability to communicate, our culture in all six levels.
New technology is morphing civilizations right now. Right now.
The citizens are being calmed to keep the markets steady enough while the insiders position themselves. Only those individuals watching can see what’s happening.
The six levels give us that lens.
They help us select the facts that matter.
They show where the rippling starts.
And where it stops.
Because when the instruments of expansion becomes the instruments of self-preservation, the pendulum has already begun to slow for the pause and reset, then the swing back.
The Current Reset
This wheel is spinning.
This wheel of peace and war.
Because the times are moving in their cycle around the wheel and in a real sense winter is on the doorstep.
Fertilizer has been held up at the Strait. It is crucial to grow enough food to feed a big part of our planet into this fall and winter.
It’s planting season now so needed now.
Step back.
See the pattern.
The garden planters of this system are gone.
Digital technology from our electric age is moving from mechanical into digital money so fast now.
Let’s look at how it can benefit us with private money, fast, almost zero fees.
It can live inside, and be compliant within a new institutional, worldwide system.
Can we build a garden with this technology that helps individuals instead of crowds?
Will the reset of global debt be based on gold, gold and debt, gold and commodities, fiat currencies of many nations, or a combination?
Those with power are fighting over that now.
The pie dividers are still at the table.
They are fighting over how to divide what is, as they are fighting over how to divide power with the new digital tech money.
There are carrots and sticks. There are sabers rattling.
But there is also, just now, a pause to negotiate.
Gold is holding.
Elaine~
Elaine Diane Taylor
Keys: gold, quantum systems, war, crowds, digital currency and wealth, Iran, Epstein, six levels of culture, civilizations rise and fall, sovereignty, debt resets, war, economic collapse, globalism and nationalism
Songs for today:
“Wag the Dog” unplugged, war, pitchforks, lyrics move in quantum meaning you can join the word before and after to make a different meaning individual or joined, with different meanings either way, the powers beating the drums of war. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KD4B2OqSP0
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Mike Maloney’s Hidden Secrets of Money:
- Hidden Secrets of Money – Full Series on YouTube (opens in new tab)
- Direct link to Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (the one that features “Coins and Crowns” unplugged): Over 6.8 million views
- Episode 1 – Currency vs Money (opens in new tab)
Elaine Diane Taylor on X @ ElaineDTaylor
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Thank you to Jim Rickards for including me in his New York Times bestselling book The New Case for Gold.
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Nothing on this site is intended as investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing. Harness it.
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Gold is at historic highs because trust in government and legacy systems is at historic lows.
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Elaine – Barkerville, Gold Rush Town, British Columbia, Canada
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Thank you to Mike Maloney for including my song Coins and Crowns in Episode 1 of his bestselling YouTube series Hidden Secrets of Money.
Coins and Crowns
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
SOCAN/ASCAP
from the album Coins and Crowns
Coins and Crowns is featured in Episode 1 of Mike Maloney’s bestselling series Hidden Secrets of Money.
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Not Much of a Holiday (Bank Holidays and Media Persuasion)
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Thank you to the late David Crosby for his kind messages, including the message to me on X (formerly Twitter) saying this song, Terrible Breeze, has excellent lyrics and good music, and his encouragement for me to get out there and sing.
A Terrible Breeze (War and Social Media)
The news comes down
A little ex (X) bluebird sings
Words of war
Fire and furious things
Of testing might
‘Til no patience knows
If keeping still
Still keeps you safe at home
There’s a terrible breeze
They speak of today
Of threats that used to live a world away
We all know wind
Can blow both ways
And a terrible breeze can blow it all away
A worldwide net
Sees our village grow
Until we all forget
What each one used to know
How a blind bird’s wings
Can reach the shore
And turn the wheel of peace and war
Village fools sinking down, down, down
Debt and gold wound in numbered shrouds
Deal of a life it’s bread and clowns
Can we afford another go around?
The news comes down.
It’s a terrible breeze. The news comes down.
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
Single available on iTunes
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Preparing for the Fall is a live boutique album available for digital download — featuring Wag the Dog, Black Swan Dive, American Pie and Gods of the Copybook Headings. Also available on iTunes, Google Music, Amazon Music and major digital distributors.
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The Gods of the Copybook Headings
words by Rudyard Kipling and music by Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Preparing for the Fall.
The copybooks of the early 1900s gave us all the wisdom we need. The sayings that were copied are the truths, the gods of our world. All the empires who followed the gods of the marketplace have fallen, and there’s terror and slaughter when the gods of the copybook headings return. The lyrics are by Rudyard Kipling. One of my gurus.
Another Week on Wall Street
words and music Elaine Diane Taylor
from the album Coins and Crowns.
“A little grease (Greece) is floating out to sea, and little pigs (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain) are bobbing up and down, they’ll send a storm and we’ll see, when the tide goes out who’s naked on the beach“. The world is changing as we know it.
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Nothing on this site is intended as individual investment advice. We’re all watching which way the wind is blowing.
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Elaine Diane Taylor 
