I am midway through my 70th year.
I always had a premonition that life would get shitty around this time. My Dad went though WW2 and it was over when he was 25. It was all gravy after that. I was born in the gravy, but I always knew, somehow, it wouldn't last forever. I “read'' history in school, (as opposed to ‘studied’; I never studied anything.) And from my reading I came to believe that everything was cyclical, from the vibrations of subatomic particles to the business cycle, and to the alternate stages of peace and war, chaos and harmony, etc. The cycles of history seemed more likely to me than the inexorable rise from the Flintstones to the Jetsons. Then I went to China, and learned that this cyclical stuff was all old ground for them, that they saw that yin and yang, and the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ controlled the ups and downs of everything.
I think that these cycles have sped up, the amplitude, (the measure of how shitty it is going to get) and the technology coefficient 'b', have both increased causing the sine curve to get steeper and narrower.
Below is a “Natural” sine curve. The Amplitude on the Y axis is the severity of “disturbance” or distance from the harmony. An Amplitude of ‘1’ is ‘normal’, whatever that is.
X axis is time. The ‘period’ in is π,but in this case, it is x number of generations. When the curve is near zero life is good. As it approaches zero on the X axis it is getting better, as it moves away it is getting worse.
When amplitude is at its zenith, the maximum benefit of the technological shift is enjoyed, but it is also the point where the retrenchment against the effects of technology begin to consolidate.
Our current state - amplitude has increased, and each cycle is farther from harmony. Time (number of generations) between cycles has shortened.
Technology coefficient T = 2
The amplitude (a) increases to 2 as T increases.
The period decreases as T increases. Multiple the reciprocal of T by the base period π = π/2.
So as ‘T’ increases, (technological innovation) the time between cycles shortens, and the severity of the cycle increases. If π= One lifetime, (a measure of the change in the 20th century, say 70 years) then we should expect one cycle every 35 years or so. As tech innovation increases, it will get shorter still, and the amplitude will correspondently increase.
In my life we in the U.S. have gone from fear of nuclear annihilation, the McCarthy era of fear and silence, with legalized racial discrimination, to a youth revolt against injustice and the constant preparation for war, to a kind of stability in international relationships (with the opening of China and the Fall of the Soviet Empire) leading to a sense of progress, an ‘end of history’. Social attitudes softened, people’s differences began to be accepted, and from the outside it appeared that we had a general agreement as to how we want to live. (Of course there was the Balkan War, the Falkland War, and all kinds of other nasty occurrences to provide fodder for naysayers).
Now that seems to be unraveling. We have passed zero on the x axis, and are moving toward a downward amplitude, perhaps a very steep amplitude. The decline started with the Bush/Cheney unprovoked War in Mesopotamia, then Russia fell back into tyranny, and started an unprovoked war in Ukraine, China reneged on its pledge to leave Hong Hong alone for fifty years after 1997, and now seems to be saber rattling in the Taiwan Straits. We just came out of a worldwide plague, and frequency of mass murder in the US, much of it racially motivated, is increasing.
Global deaths in combat
This shortening of the period, and the increase in the amplitude (the ‘b’ coefficient getting larger) is driven by technology, which has been shrinking the world over the last two millennia. Shrinking the world, as in driving us closer together. Over the first thousand years after Rome, it moved very slowly, but then in the Renaissance, it began to speed up. In the last 600 years, technology gave us the printing press, voyages of discovery, gunpowder, steam engines, transatlantic cables, the airplane, dynamite, wireless communication, Relativity, rocketry, nuclear bombs, the computer, smart phones, and social media. Did humans evolve fast enough to keep up? Maybe not.
Think about the past, and here I speak of the cycles in Western civilization. Starting with the disintegration of the Roman Empire, which took a thousand years if you count Byzantium (Constantinople) , to the herding of wandering tribes into nation states, the rise of monotheism and the countless wars it engendered, the slow advances in agriculture which moved people into cities, where they discovered politics, and diseases like the Black Death discovered them. All of those processes took centuries. People’s lives didn’t change much, they lived and died in the same village they were born in. And over the course of generations - they changed but only imperceptibly. Stirrups arrived from the Steppes putting soldiers on horses, creating a demand for bigger horses, allowing deeper and earlier plowing to increase food supply, increasing populations. But while all this was happening, nobody noticed. Century after century, stuck on the same farm, families developed habits and customs that suited their unchanging lives. They were sure about their place in the universe.
But now this process has been upended. In the 20th century, people born on the farm died in the city. Now we are born into towns that die off between grammar school and high school, while some become so rich on this process of capitalistic 'creative destruction" that their wealth buys a ticket off the planet, while others are stuck, and social statistics say they will stay that way. And many look back and wonder if it was worth it, if it is better now. If you read social media, you know you are a loser, you know you are missing out on everything, that they are getting rich and having fun are you are not. You look out at the weather - is it really changing? If it rains, the forest grows too fast, and when it is dry there is more fuel to burn. And storms more storms are on the way.
Our system of resource allocation has led us into some vicious traps as well. Capitalism proved effective at first, but it led to a new class of tyrants, and a deep wealth divide. Capitalism was based in part on an unlimited supply of natural resources. We have come to the end of that supply. Now we have to control our use of nature, or we will end our rise as a species, and perhaps begin a catastrophic decline.
Now the world is listening to the call of the demagogue again.
The nation state is dying. The would-be American nationalists are looking abroad for allies. Putin wishes Trump was still President, because he knows he would have green-lite his invasion. American conservatives are worshiping Hungary's Viktor Orban who has ended free expression in Budapest.
In China and Russia I admire those democrats and liberals who refuse to break, even if they have to remain quiet for now. Only by destroying their own lives and their families lives can they oppose their governments. Nevertheless some still stand up and oppose.
We know we in the US might be one election away from being in the same 'State'.
Politics is slowly becoming international. I have compatriots in Russia and China, and political opponents in the U.S.
I am with my compatriots fighting authoritarians, not with the Americans in Budapest.
Geography, ethnicity, and language are fading as barriers. We are divided by social media, a ‘Meta” political landscape. Neighborhoods and families are being fragmented. ‘Texas’ is controlled by the same “party” that controls Russia now. Millions of good Texans are stuck in a state that they don’t seem able to change, just like the people in St. Petersburg, Russia.
We have no agreement that any of this is true. This is a fart in the wind. People will dispute every detail of this, and in the end, will avoid the questions until we can no longer ignore it. We have seen how this plays out. We ignored the rise of Fascism after WW1, then we didn’t, and after that we seemed to begin a long steep dive toward zero.
When did the peaks occur? Was one in 1969? Woodstock, Charles Manson and the Moon landing? Maybe, maybe not, but we have definitely passed the zero, and are on our way to another amplitude. If the last peak was the end of the Clinton administration, when did we pass zero? When will we hit perigee?
