Big Systems, Cycles, the Weather
I was thinking this morning about how those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Also doomed to repeat it: those who do study history.
My reasoning is basically this: individual will isn’t a large enough node in the big system to cause specific change, at least not relative to the far larger aggregated influence of popular sentiment and its equal/opposite counterculture, plus the scattered offshoots of seemingly unique small movements.
In retrospect it’s easy to place any present-moment unique movement into a pretty much accurate philosophical or historical box. That was a boom, that was a bust, that was a populist movement, that was a revolution.
The movement over time of all these different movements and pockets of pressure coming from different angles is like a satellite view of shifting weather patterns. Pressure systems do this and that when they bump together. This one will be flavored by that third component. This years warmer bulging ocean will bring some added erraticism to the way these pockets interact. Here’s the 7 day forecast.
But we are all very aware that no matter how hot it is for a week in July, its going to be cold again by January in the north.
I guess I think saying that (only those) people(s) who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it is a bit like saying those who don’t reflect on the seasons of a year are doomed to repeat it the next 12 months.
Why do these things inevitably repeat?
Because the axis of the earth is not 90 degrees to the plane of its rotation around the sun; because the earth is spinning which result in layers of lagging rotation l from atmosphere down to the deep ocean; because water holds/stores heat well; and because things have a tendency to disperse to an equilibrium. And since you can’t ever get an equilibrium when the entire world is spinning etc, it just keeps sloshing around in somewhat predictable cycles.
This is my view of politics, and why I’m not a conspiratorial thinker, or particularly critical of the different wings that fight for influence, and jostle for power in an inevitably shifting environment. Any individual person’s or even group’s contribution to the problem or the solution (however any observer might define either) seems to me about like fan gently blowing air into the wind.