Women are rejecting marriage in Asia. The social implications are serious.

Interesting observation - I think another way to describe this phenomenon is that every society has to convince it's members to accept their individual role as members of society in order for it to function (you might argue that is society's only purpose). We can't all be kings, senators, business tycoons, etc. -- someone has to be the janitor or the street sweeper or the factory worker, and society's basic purpose is to re-enforce the individual's choice in accepting their fate.

Long enough ago, this was as simple as raising certain classes and races of people as slaves and telling them what to do and enforcing it with violence. However it seems that no matter how much you try to control it, societies eventually achieve enough self-awareness of the general inequality of things to revolt and re-order society to make things more fair. The next system of control is then instituted, and is seen as a vast improvement, and thus accepted by those who rebelled against the previous, even though it may be simply a more complex version of the previous system (slave-owners/slaves,land-owners/indentured servants,royalty/peasants,ruling class/working class, etc.).

In this way, I believe it's similar to the quote from HHGTTG: "There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable." I think that what happens is every time a society reaches the level of self-awareness required to realize what's happening to them and has the will to change it, a simply more complicated and harder to understand and harder to destroy system ends up replacing it.

I think in this way, you can describe the cyclical nature of societies coming and going, and applying the reasons behind this fundamental change, understand why your theory of war being beneficial fits right in: war simply leaves no room for questioning society's demands of the individual. The reason this works is that members of a militarized or war-time society are indoctrinated, and those who end up members of the military trained from day one to obey orders and follow authority. After leaving the military, if you do you happen to survive and get out of the war, working a factory job and having a few kids is damn near paradise compared to the hell you went through. It is a very effective way to keep individuals from questioning their place in society or the fairness of it's structure and thus why I think it has the society-prolonging effect you've observed. War shifts individual's thinking from long-term (career, legacy, mark on the world, children's future) to short term (survival, employment, simply procreating).

If you buy into any of what I am saying, you might also hypothesize that the U.S came close to becoming self-aware of and motivated to change it's societal inequalities around 2008 with the reaction to the Government bail-outs and the housing market crash. I think the only reason that energy hasn't really gone anywhere yet is twofold: 1) With the economy in the shape it's in, it makes those who are employed more happy with their current employment situation than usual, and more unlikely to try to change things in general, since they are "lucky to even have a job in this economy", and aren't really feeling the inequality in their day to day lives. And it's not bad enough to where mass unemployment is giving people enough free time to organize and actually try to restructure the way our government works. 2) The act of electing public officials to office helps stave off the idea that "we need to restructure society" as it lets people restructure a symbol of society to them. Elections act as a relief valve for political pressure, since it allows people to 1) have input and make changes and 2) it buys time for the newly elected official to "get settled" in their office before people become dissatisfied again or economic/societal conditions improve, whichever comes first.

Sources: Just my theory on the matter, please point out where I am wrong (I'm sure I am in more than one way)

I deleted my comment before I knew you were writing a reply.

My comment originally said that I think there's two ways of exploring the world.

1. Start with a conclusion you want to be true and looking for evidence that supports your view, or

2. Start by gathering facts and trying to find conclusions in them.

You write:

> This is what I want, and therefore I try to find theories to support that.

Right. I think that view fundamentally leads to disastrously bad places. It leads to assuming you're correct and looking for confirmation instead of truth.

Truth is often unpleasant. Confirmation is easily found, even for the stupidest and craziest arguments - look at some of the clearly insane views that people hold with no backing.

Why do they think that way? Because they start with the idea that they're right and look to prove that. It's easy to prove you're right, especially if your views are the norm in your community.

It's much harder to say, "What if I'm wrong?" and to constantly seek out counter-arguments and test your views.

Everyone has views that are wrong, mistaken, poorly informed, and counter-productive. The challenge of becoming an informed person is challenging your views constantly - even your sacred ones - looking for smarter arguments.

It's difficult and stressful. I can't even recommend it if your goal in life is happiness, because if you succeed then everyone in your social circle starts to think you're nuts. But ideally, you become gradually less wrong over time and can do a lot of good for the world, even when your views look crazy to people who never stopped and asked, "What if the world isn't the way I thought it was...?"

You may very likely have been right about it in the past, but at least in Europe, two world wars essentially killed any military spirit left -- for everybody. There are no barbarians at the gates, they have all been (mostly) civilized.

With regard to the rest of the western world, I think the kind of large scale war you talk about is permanently over -- both because it would be far too expensive for everybody and because there is no winning a nuclear war.

The "women do more housework" thing has been debunked over and over, at least in the west. You can only arrive at that conclusion by excluding traditional "man's work" jobs like yard work and car repair.

On the other hand, I have heard Japanese and Chinese men say they expect their wives to do all the housework, so maybe there really is a difference.

It was also one of the main factors Edward Gibbon blamed in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. However he had a somewhat different mechanism in mind than lionhearted's comment: he argued that Romans, as they got wealthy, no longer wished to personally serve in the military, so they hired mercenaries instead, which had the three effects of reducing the military readiness of normal Romans, filling the army with less loyal foreigners, and increasing the tax burden on agriculture. (It's worth noting that there's a lot of debate among later historians over whether that's the correct analysis.)