Philosophy and Konratieff cycles

Konratieff cycles, also known as Kondratiev waves or long waves, are economic cycles lasting approximately 40 to 60 years, named after the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratieff. Kondratieff proposed that capitalist economies go through long-term cycles of boom and bust due to technological innovations, changes in infrastructure, and shifts in economic fundamentals.

These cycles are often divided into four phases:

  1. Expansion (Boom): A period of economic growth, marked by high productivity, technological innovation, and investment. Prices and profits rise.
  2. Recession (Crisis): The economy begins to slow down. Investments stop yielding high returns, leading to reduced growth.
  3. Depression (Contraction): A deeper slowdown where overproduction, excess capacity, and economic stagnation occur. Prices drop, and profits shrink.
  4. Recovery (Revival): The economy begins to recover as new technologies emerge, sparking new opportunities and investments.

Each Kondratieff cycle is usually driven by major technological innovations like the Industrial Revolution, railways, steel, electricity, automobiles, and the digital revolution. These innovations spur growth until their saturation leads to stagnation, setting the stage for a new cycle.

To explain Kondratieff cycles through the lens of philosophers, we can connect the four phases of these economic cycles with key philosophical ideas about history, technology, and social change.

1. Expansion (Boom) – Hegel and the Dialectic of Progress

Hegel’s dialectical method is useful for understanding the expansion phase. He argued that history moves forward through a process of thesis (an idea or status quo), antithesis (a challenge or opposition), and synthesis (a resolution or transformation into a new stage). During the expansion phase, new technologies and ideas (thesis) create rapid economic growth. The economy appears to evolve, building toward higher complexity and productivity, much like Hegel’s vision of progress toward absolute knowledge.

2. Recession (Crisis) – Nietzsche’s Will to Power and Disillusionment

Nietzsche’s concept of the will to power can describe the recession phase, where the initial optimism of progress gives way to a sense of disillusionment. In this stage, the forces that drove the boom have reached their limits, and the economy is no longer growing at the same rate. Nietzsche viewed human striving as driven by a fundamental will to dominate and overcome limitations. Here, the over-extension of economic power and ambition hits a wall, leading to a breakdown in the system’s capacity to innovate or expand.

Both Schopenhauer and Sartre offer valuable perspectives for understanding Kondratieff cycles, particularly when it comes to the experience of individuals and societies within these economic phases. Their existential and pessimistic insights highlight the human condition in response to these broader cyclical changes.

Schopenhauer – The Will and Pessimism in Contraction and Crisis

Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will, which he saw as an irrational, blind force driving all life, can be connected to both the recession and depression phases of the Kondratieff cycle. For Schopenhauer, the Will is never satisfied; it continually strives for more, leading to suffering.

In the recession phase, we see society’s collective Will in action—overreaching and pushing the economy toward crisis. Like the unsatisfied individual, the economy struggles to sustain itself, chasing growth that no longer comes. There’s a sense of exhaustion, as the economic system, driven by blind ambition, reaches the limits of its power. Schopenhauer would interpret this stage as a demonstration of the futility of economic striving—everything that seemed promising in the boom turns into frustration and decline, mirroring his view of life’s inevitable suffering.

In the depression phase, Schopenhauer’s pessimism deepens: the system collapses into stagnation, reflecting the general weariness and disillusionment he often spoke about. People experience this economically as job loss, scarcity, and social despair. Schopenhauer believed that through the recognition of the futility of the Will’s striving, one might seek ways to detach from these cycles of desire and suffering, but at a societal level, this period reflects collective burnout.

Sartre – Existential Freedom and Absurdity in Expansion and Recovery

Sartre’s philosophy of existentialism emphasizes freedom, choice, and the burden of responsibility, which aligns well with the expansion and recovery phases of the Kondratieff cycle.

In the expansion phase, Sartre’s notion of existential freedom comes to the forefront. The technological innovations and economic growth present during a boom offer societies new possibilities for defining themselves. Sartre emphasized that individuals and societies are condemned to be free—they must constantly choose their paths, even though this freedom is often experienced as a burden. In a boom, the choices seem endless, and society exerts its freedom in new directions, fueled by optimism and growth. However, this freedom also brings anxiety, as Sartre would argue, because every new opportunity carries the weight of responsibility and uncertainty about what comes next.

In the recovery phase, Sartre’s ideas about absurdity and the reinvention of meaning take center stage. After a period of depression, where the structures and values of society seem to collapse, the recovery phase can be understood through Sartre’s belief that humans must constantly reinvent meaning in the face of an absurd universe. The economy, having suffered through stagnation and crisis, begins to find new directions, much as individuals must redefine their lives after experiencing a crisis of meaning. In this sense, recovery is not just an economic resurgence but a moment of existential rebirth, where society, like the individual, takes on the freedom to create itself anew out of the chaos.

Summary

  • Schopenhauer represents the pessimism of recession and depression, focusing on the futility of striving and the inevitable suffering when growth halts and ambition falters.
  • Sartre captures the existential freedom and absurdity of expansion and recovery, where societies must confront their freedom to choose new paths and redefine meaning in the face of the void left by economic crises.

Both philosophers add a rich, existential layer to Kondratieff cycles by emphasizing human suffering and the need to confront our freedom within these long waves of economic change.

3. Depression (Contraction) – Heidegger’s Technological Enframing

In the depression phase, we can turn to Heidegger’s concept of enframing (Gestell), which describes how technology becomes a dominating force, reducing everything to a resource to be optimized and consumed. In this phase, the earlier technological innovations now lead to stagnation as they no longer provide growth but instead trap the economy in overproduction and excess capacity. The human experience of being becomes overshadowed by technology’s instrumental logic, and the economy mirrors this, becoming rigid and lifeless.

4. Recovery (Revival) – Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizomatic Rebirth

Finally, the recovery phase aligns with Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome—a decentralized and non-hierarchical network that spreads in unexpected ways. In this stage, new technological or economic ideas emerge unpredictably, breaking free from the old system’s constraints. These new innovations create new pathways for growth, much like how a rhizome grows horizontally, creating new possibilities that reinvigorate the economic structure. This reflects the creative destruction that brings renewal and leads to a new cycle.

In this philosophical view, Kondratieff cycles are not just economic but also shifts in the broader social and cultural logic, shaped by the underlying human drive for power, the constraints of technology, and the renewal of creative potential.

Here’s a list of Kondratieff cycle phases paired with philosophers:

  1. Expansion (Boom) – Hegel (Dialectic of Progress)
  2. Recession (Crisis) – Nietzsche (Will to Power and Disillusionment)
  3. Depression (Contraction) – Schopenhauer (The Will and Pessimism) / Heidegger (Technological Enframing)
  4. Recovery (Revival) – Sartre (Existential Freedom and Absurdity) / Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizomatic Rebirth)
  1. Expansion (Boom) – Hegel (Endless Dialectic, Great Pretender)
  2. Recession (Crisis) – Nietzsche (Power Trip, Reality Check)
  3. Depression (Contraction) – Schopenhauer (Relentless Pessimism), Heidegger (Techno-tyranny)
  4. Recovery (Revival) – Sartre (Freedom’s Burden), Deleuze & Guattari (Rhizomatic Chaos)

Master Vs Slave/Weapons of the Strong vs Weapons of the Weak

Strip away the polite lies and what do you have? A rigged game, a con job. The master-slave morality—a stale binary, stinking like a two-day-old corpse. These roles, fixed, rigid, like a bad wiretap that feeds back on itself, echoing the same sick tune. But the con, you see, isn’t in the master or the slave—it’s in the idea that these roles are real.

The master and the slave are just puppets, caught in a dead-end loop, jerked around by strings no one remembers tying. Language is the real pimp here, selling the illusion of a hierarchy where there isn’t one. A neat little package where one term always tops the other, but that’s just the surface scam. Dig deeper, and you find the dirty secret: these roles only exist because they’re defined against each other, and the lines between them are shifting, always shifting—never real, never fixed.

In the world of the simulacrum, the real and the fake, the master and the slave, they’re all part of the same con. A world so drenched in images, so thick with signs, you can’t tell what’s real anymore—if anything ever was. Power? Just another bad commercial, flashing on loop in the back of your mind. The old roles dissolve into static, a buzz that drowns out anything genuine.

And the master? He’s got nothing. He’s empty, just another poor bastard chasing after recognition that’ll never satisfy, needing the slave to validate him, but the slave’s recognition is like a needle that never quite hits the vein. The desire for power is just a junkie’s itch, and no fix is ever enough. The whole structure collapses in on itself, a house of cards built on an illusion, ready to blow over with the slightest gust of reality.

So why buy into the scam? Power doesn’t flow down from on high, doesn’t come with a title or a whip. It’s in the cracks, the spaces where things slip through, where the real action is. Desire isn’t a hole waiting to be filled; it’s a force, an engine that keeps the machine running. And the machine doesn’t care about masters or slaves—it chews them up, spits them out, moves on to the next con. Forget the binary. It’s all about the connections, the networks, the rhizomes running beneath the surface. That’s where the real power is, hidden from view, slipping through the cracks of the old order, tearing down the walls of the binary trap.

So break the script, tear up the old roles, and let the system eat itself alive. There’s a world beyond the scam, a life beyond the loop, but you’ve got to see the con for what it is before you can walk away.

The Master-Slave Morality is a Stale Binary:

Strip the morality play down to its bones, and what you’ve got is a binary—a fixed, lifeless dichotomy. The master on one side, the slave on the other, both locked in a dead embrace, like two drunks leaning on each other to stay upright. This binary is a relic, something from the days when power was clear-cut, a matter of the strong lording over the weak. But that’s the con. It’s a story sold to keep people locked into their roles, believing in the reality of their chains.

This binary is static, a snapshot in a world that’s always in motion. It pretends to show us who’s in control, who’s got the power, but it’s as dead as a rotting fish. The master isn’t really the master, the slave isn’t really the slave—they’re just labels slapped onto people by a system that needs to keep the wheels turning. The binary is an illusion, a trick to keep the marks in line, believing that power only flows in one direction, top to bottom. But once you see through the trick, the whole thing starts to unravel.

The Roles of Master and Slave Are Puppets, Not Real:

Behind the curtain, it’s all strings and smoke. The master and the slave—they’re not real. They’re puppets, jerked around by unseen hands, stuck in a script they didn’t write. Their roles are defined by each other, locked in a codependent loop where one can’t exist without the other. The master needs the slave to feel like a master; the slave needs the master to justify their existence. It’s a game of mirrors, reflections bouncing off each other, but no substance, no core.

This setup is a trap, a con that tricks both parties into thinking they have some kind of identity, some fixed place in the world. But the truth is, those roles are just masks, and the hands pulling the strings belong to the system itself. Power isn’t something that the master holds and the slave lacks—it’s a product of the relationship between them, a fiction that exists only because both believe in it. The real trick is in getting people to buy into these roles, to believe that they are either one or the other, when in reality, they’re just playing parts in a bad play.

Language is the Pimp, Selling the Illusion of Hierarchy:

Language, that slick-talking pimp, is the real hustler here. It’s the one selling the lie that there’s a master and a slave, that power is something you can possess, hold onto, use like a weapon. But all language does is wrap us up in a neat little package, tie a bow around the chaos, and call it order. It creates these binaries, master and slave, by giving them names, by making them seem like they’re real things, fixed and unchangeable.

But language is a double-edged sword. It doesn’t just create meaning; it also hides it, defers it, pushes it just out of reach. The meaning of “master” depends on “slave,” but that difference is never fixed, never solid. It’s always shifting, like sand slipping through your fingers. The words trap us in a game where the rules keep changing, but the players don’t even know it. The supposed hierarchy is nothing more than a linguistic con, a way of organizing people, roles, and power in a way that seems natural but is anything but.

In the World of Hyperreality, the Master-Slave Distinction Becomes Meaningless:

We’re living in a world where the real and the fake have blended into one. The old markers of power, the clear lines between master and slave, they’ve dissolved into the noise, replaced by images, simulations, signs that don’t point to anything real anymore. In this hyperreality, the master-slave relationship isn’t just irrelevant—it’s impossible. The signs have taken over, and what they signify doesn’t matter. Power isn’t held by anyone; it’s diffused, scattered across a network of images and ideas, none of which has a solid grounding in reality.

In this world, where everything is a copy of a copy, where the image is more real than the thing itself, the old roles of master and slave lose their meaning. They’re just part of the simulation now, stripped of any real substance, just another flickering image on a screen. The whole idea of a hierarchy, of one person being above another, gets lost in the static. Power becomes something that circulates, detached from any person or position, existing only as part of the endless loop of signs that make up our reality.

The Master’s Power Is an Empty Concept:

The so-called “master” is a hollow man, puffed up with the illusion of power that doesn’t really exist. The master’s authority, his power over the slave, is nothing but a ghost, an empty signifier that carries no real weight. This power is supposed to be something solid, something that defines the master, but it’s all smoke and mirrors. The master is as much a slave to the system as the slave is, trapped in a need for recognition that can never be satisfied.

The master’s power is not about control, but about needing to be seen as in control. It’s a performance, a role that requires the slave to play along, to validate the master’s sense of self. But the recognition the master craves is always just out of reach, always incomplete. The master’s power is a mirage, something that seems real but disappears when you try to grasp it. It’s an empty concept, a shell that hides the truth: the master and slave are both caught in a cycle of unfulfilled desire, neither truly in control, neither truly free.

Power Flows Through Connections, Not Hierarchies:

Forget the old idea that power flows from the top down, that it’s something you can hold onto like a scepter or a crown. Power isn’t a vertical structure; it’s a web, a network of connections, always moving, always shifting. It doesn’t belong to the master or the slave—it exists in the spaces between them, in the interactions, the relationships, the flows of desire and energy that make up the real world.

Desire isn’t a lack, something that needs to be filled, but a force, a current that drives everything forward. It’s not about needing something you don’t have; it’s about creating, connecting, building something new. This kind of power can’t be captured, can’t be held in place by a hierarchy. It’s fluid, it’s multiple, it’s everywhere and nowhere at once. The binary of master and slave tries to contain this power, to channel it into a fixed relationship, but it can’t. The power slips through the cracks, seeps out into the world, dissolving the old structures and opening up new possibilities, new ways of being, new ways of living that go beyond the constraints of the binary trap.

A certain Rigor

The humanities, a sprawling, amorphous beast, lumber through the intellectual landscape with all the grace of a mastodon in heat. While STEM, the sleek, metallic titan of academia, marches purposefully towards a quantifiable, deterministic utopia, the humanities flounder amidst a swamp of subjectivity, where meaning is a capricious, shape-shifting entity.

The humanists, bless their cotton-picking souls, have built a labyrinth of mirrors where shadows dance and meaning dissolves into a miasma of self-referential fog. These are realms where logic, the sturdy scaffolding of the STEM-world, is but a quaint relic, a forgotten tool in a workshop of smoke and echoes.

The humanities, a vast, spongy archipelago of thought, drift in a sea of subjective tides, their contours ever shifting, their depths unplumbed. A stark contrast to the austere, linear archipelago of STEM, where islands are numbered, charted, and conquered with a ruthless, quantitative precision.

Consider the plight of the neophyte philosopher, a hapless soul adrift in a sea of ink-stained parchment. Armed with naught but a cursory glance at Nietzsche’s aphoristic fireworks, they venture forth into the labyrinthine realms of post-structuralism, phenomenology, and existentialism. These are territories where logic, that old, stolid bourgeois, is routinely handcuffed and thrown into a dumpster fire of paradox and ambiguity. The hapless wanderer, accustomed to the linear, cause-and-effect narratives of scientific inquiry, is ill-equipped for the dizzying, Möbius strip logic of Derrida or the existential abyss of Sartre.

One stumbles into this intellectual jungle armed only with a Nietzschean machete, hacking away at the undergrowth of post-structuralist vines and phenomenological brambles. It’s a perilous expedition, fraught with the risk of getting lost in the existential swamp, mired in the quicksand of counter-intuitive thought. The problem, you see, is not merely the density of the foliage, but the lack of a sturdy map. A soul adrift in the master-slave dialectic, fixated on the spectral weaponry of the will to power, is scarcely equipped for the topological intricacies of Being-in-the-World. Such a novice is like a flatlander confronted with a Klein bottle, their mind a frantic hamster on a wheel of confusion.

Post-structuralism, phenomenology, and existentialism, these are the siren songs of the intellectual deep, their melodies as enchanting as they are maddening. Logic, that sturdy, oak-beamed tavern of the mind, is here but a ramshackle hut, its roof leaking in the tempest of these ideas. And without a sturdy foundation in the classical, without the bone-deep knowledge of master and slave, of the will to power, one is apt to drown in these metaphysical maelstroms. For without such ballast, the mind is but a cork bobbing aimlessly, subject to the whims of every passing intellectual current.

It is as if one were to parachute into the heart of a Borgesian library, expecting to find a neat Dewey Decimal system and instead discovering a labyrinth of interconnected texts, each a portal to a different reality. No wonder, then, that our intrepid STEM dabler is reduced to mumbling about “master” and “slave” morality, a pathetic echo of Nietzschean thunder, while the true mysteries of Being and Nothingness slip through their grasp like grains of sand.