An interesting discussion took place this morning on MSNBC's Morning Meeting with Dylan Ratigan.

The conversation took place between Ratigan, Nassim Taleb, Reza Aslan and Jonathan Capehart. The only recording of the conversation I could find is more of the preface to my takeaway item rather than the takeaway item itself.

Aslan and Capehart talk about the difficulties that the Iranian government is facing and how the United States government is planning on dealing with Iran.

To save yourself time, I recommend just going to the 4:20 mark of the video and watching the last minute of the video. Taleb begins an exchange between he and Ratigan about the nature of government change.

I have written before on the nature of revolutions and the varying elements that lead up to them. But today's discussion started me thinking about the similarities between the geological phenomena of tectonics and how it has a very real parallel in the governments of men.

The pressures that lead to revolutions are very real, just like the subsurface geological pressures that ultimately cause surface changes on the face of the earth. Yet, also like their geological counterparts, these pressures can lead to both immediate catatclysmic changes or gradual, long-developing landscapes.

The recent experiences of the nation of Honduras are only a latest example of how political pressures that build for years can be released by a single event to dramatically alter the geopolitical appearance of a region. It can, however, be stated that the Honduran government's inherent stabilizer - its constitution - acted as both a buffer and a catalyst for the changes that took place there.

The situation in Iran can also be said to have been building for quite some time, at least since the Islamic fundamentalist revolution of 1979. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's current crisis is part and parcel of that revolution's failures and his own coalition's heavy-handedness threatens to drive his nuclear-driven government to collapse. The safety of constitutional protection in Iran is trumped by the dominance of a Muslim theocratic oligarchy.

Whereas economists have for years applied the concept of chaos theory to classical economic models, there is little thought given to diastrophism (tectonics) in either economics or politics. In truth, however, an understanding of civic diastrophism could hold potential for understanding the substrata influences that direct the rises and falls of governments just as the understanding of plate tectonics increases our understanding of the changes we see on land masses.

© Copyright 2009, Rob Purdie