August 24, 2017 • 52 mins
Philosopher George Santayana said that 'Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.' If that’s true, then can an extensive understanding of past events help human civilization avoid future catastrophes? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Christian turn to the field of cliodynamics and its attempts to identify the cycles of social unrest and violence. Can we avoid the terror of history?
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, are welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Christian Seger. You know, Christian.
It seems that we should be able to look at
where we've been in the past and therefore extrapolate, predict,
(00:27):
even simulate where we're going in the future. Right, it does.
It does seem that way, And I think that that
maybe is a product of like the last century of
our uh scientific thinking. Does that make sense? Yeah, well,
I mean there's definitely one line in particular that we're
that we're often referring to and uh and in generally
(00:48):
misquoting I think a lot of the times, and that
comes from a philosopher, Georgia Santayana, who said, quote, those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
That would of course tend to imply, Hey, if you
can remember the past, then you can avoid these pitfalls
in the future. That there's some uh, there's some system
that can be employed that even though we're we're strapped
(01:11):
to this linear existence just hurdling through time into the future. Um,
if we have some concept of the road that we've traveled,
we'll have a better idea about the road to come right. Yeah,
and so of bring it back around to our nerdiness. Uh.
In our fandom for Stephen King and the newly popular
(01:32):
Dark Tower Universe. Uh, there's a quote from King here
that he used in the stand under the Guise of
Randall flag. Life was such a wheel that no man
could stand upon it for long, and it always, at
the end came around to the same place again. Uh.
This is a terrifying concept though, right, And at the
same time it is an idea that seems to fill
(01:54):
a lot of people with purpose because they can say, ah,
hold on, wait, I've got it figured out, and I
can predict what's going to happen next. And in fact,
we had a listener right into us about this very idea.
Her name is Allison, and she wrote us and said
she was wondering if we would do a show about
this is something that's been mentioned a lot on the
internet lately and apparent eighty year cycle of political social
(02:17):
upheaval in our world. And she said she was horrified
and intrigued the first time that she heard about it,
and so she started looking into this. Uh. And she
said that she's heard about the idea in general, but
that this the whole like seventy to eighty year cycle
as a devastating shake up, whether it's via war, war
or turmoil, was kind of new, right, and she wanted
(02:40):
to know if we could do some research on it
and see what we came up with and provide some
perspective on it. And interestingly, because I have also heard
about this in the last couple of months, Um, we
did the research and it turns out that the one
that's making the rounds is not the one that is
being academically researched. There's like a little bit of uh
(03:00):
confabulation going on here between two different uh specific theories
and one is more well, I guess we can describe
them as the fifty year theory and the eighty year theory. Yes, yeah, okay, yeah,
and these this is this is this is getting into
a realm of what is known as cleo dynamics, that
is cl i o dynamics. Yeah. So this is a
(03:23):
field where scientists are attempting to find meaningful patterns in history.
And it was named by a guy named Peter Turch.
And we're gonna talk a lot about him today after Cleo,
the ancient Greek muse of history. I have been having
the hardest time remembering this name trying. You came up
with a good idea earlier picture Cleo as miss Cleo
(03:45):
the psychic. Uh. The other one I'm thinking is like
letters to Cleo Dynamics, Like, I gotta figure out a
way to remember this because it's been hard for me.
But anyways, there's been a swell of efforts to apply
scientific methods to history by identifying in audeling broad social forces.
And one argument in favor of this is that historians
(04:06):
are too qualitative and that they point to samples of
cases from observations that Cleo Dynamics wants to use tools
like nonlinear mathematics and simulations that can model the interactions
of millions of people at once. Now, I want to
be clear about this upfront. It's criticized by traditional historians.
(04:26):
They usually believe that there are countless variables interacting within
a society that lead to violence and social unrest, and
they don't think that there's any one unified theory or
general law to history. So so what are we talking
about here? Then, Well, we're looking at decades or even
century long periods of population expansion, followed by long periods
(04:49):
of stagnation and decline price dynamics mirroring population oscillations, strong
expansionist phases followed by state failure socio political instead of
build pity and territory loss, repeated back and forth swings
in demographic, economic, social, and political structures. Uh, just to
give you an idea of what what kind of patterns
(05:11):
we're talking about here when we're when you're imagining, say
the the Cleo dynamics weather person standing in front of
green screen, like these are the kind of movements they
would be talking about her chart. That's a perfect analogy. Yeah. Now,
an example I came across was in the work of
two and two individuals, one of whom of which we're
going to talk about in greater depth, Peter Turchin and
(05:34):
Sergey A. Nevadov, And they have a book titled Secular
Cycles in which they looked at England, France, and Russia
throughout both the medieval and early modern periods and they
closely observed cycles of inequality. So, uh, Nevodov has a
great rundown of cleo dynamics and economic inequality as well.
In Ian magazine and a couple of other publications. I'll
(05:56):
try to include a link to this on the landing
page for the episode. But he says that in this case,
the cycles break down to this, you have expansion, stagnation, crisis, disintegration,
sort of a life cycle of a story arc for
for civilization. Right. However, uh Nfidov is quick to point
out that we're not talking about rigid clockwork here, So
(06:19):
these cycles don't occur in a machine. They occur in
a chaotic system in which a great number of variables
play apart. So in a way it is it is
a lot like the weather. The weather is a system.
We know what what's factors influence the movements of atmosphere
and weather patterns, but there's so many it's ultimately such
(06:39):
a chaotic system it becomes difficult to make um. You know,
long term predictions, even short term predictions are are are
open to uh to misinterpretation. And does anybody who's checked
the weather channel or their weather app on their phone
and gone outside and its raining. It's not that a
meteorologist doesn't know what they're taught king about. It's that
(07:01):
the the system is just that complex and difficult to
simulate even with the with our most complicated simulation systems.
So the idea here's the human cultures and civilizations. Also
that they're bumping up against each other, they're influencing each other.
Uh So, there are so many factors that make it
complex and it's it's again, it's not as simple as
(07:21):
just you know, running a computer versus computer game inside
of of a closed system. Still, he maintains that complex
interactions do add up to a general rhythm. So if
you kind of take a god's eye view of everything,
the idea here is that, yes, you will see patterns
emerge and then you can extract late that to the future.
(07:42):
So Cleo dynamics then is about observing these trends, observing
these cycles, this ebb and flow, and then predicting them
in the future. And you have a note here about
Mercy a eliads book The Terror of History, which I
remember reading in grad school. Yeah, and of the Eternal Return,
Yeah yeah, he involved in myth studies. Yeah yeah, So
(08:03):
he talks about this concept of the terror of history
in which humanity has abandoned a cyclical mythic view of
time that we used to have in favor of a
purely linear existence. We're forced to see history for what
it is, a senseless stream of blunders, atrocity, collapsed ideals
of fallen states, ruined megaprojects, and just sort of failure
(08:24):
in general. Um, it sounds like the greatest setting for
a role playing game. Yeah, but not one to live in.
It's what it is, legitimately worth thinking about when you're
when you're toying with, you know, dungeons and dragons, histories,
you know, or thinking about stuff like Game of Thrones. Yeah. Yeah,
there's a reason why all of these, like fantasy worlds
(08:44):
that are built from the ground up, have ruinous histories
to them that that they kind of look back on
in wonder. Yeah. So here's a quote from the myth
of the Eternal Return. Ileoti says, quote, in our day,
when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how and
man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history, from collective
deportations and massacres to atomic bombings, if beyond them he
(09:08):
can glimpse no sign, no transistorical meaning, if they are
only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces,
or even worse, only the result of the liberties that
a minority takes and exercises it directly on the stage
of universal history. So Eliade says that for the longest
humans were able to place everything within a metahistorical framework.
(09:33):
Uh so, yeah, something fell apart because it was the
end of a decade an age. It was the punishment
of God, et cetera. Now, Cleo dynamics stands in an
interesting place by comparison, because they are, in a way
attempting to resurrect a cyclical view of history. There they're
turning not to divine mechanics, however, or the imagined astrological
(09:55):
influence of the spheres. Uh, but rather to a modeling
of history sort of fluid dynamics based on cultural evolution,
macro sociology, economics, and other factors. Plus in a refreshingly
optimistic humanist twist that I really like. It also opens
the door for control over those cycles, right Yeah, And
(10:15):
I think that's absolutely crucial to keep in mind with
all of this. It's not just another version of Oh,
humanity is screwed. And here's why. There's the potential for
self awareness. Here, there's the potential for change. Right. So,
the general methodology that's being used in these studies at
least at least church and studies is to focus on
four main variables that are measured in several ways, and
and Robert you just mentioned many of these. He boils
(10:38):
them down pretty quickly to population numbers, social structure, state strength,
and political instability. And then he says, the way to
measure these is actually through proxies that are connected to
these things that you can measure quantitatively. So he looks,
for instance, at social structure, He looks at the quantitative
data on life expectancy and wealth in a quality, and
(11:01):
that's one of his measurement points. So who's this Peter
Churching guy that that like has just come out of
nowhere with the cleo dynamics At least it seems like that, right,
He's actually been doing it for a while. He's an
ecologist and evolutionary biologist and a mathematician out of the
University of Connecticut and stores he studies population dynamics and
takes mathematical techniques that he used to use to track
(11:25):
predator pray cycles in forest ecosystems, and then he applies
those to human history. Now, Turchen looks at historical records
of economic activity, demographic trends, and outbursts of violence in
the United States, and he argues history is not just
one damn thing after another. His main research questions are essentially,
(11:47):
first of all, what general mechanisms explain the collapse of
historical empires? And then how did large scale states and
empires evolved in the first place. So this is some
pretty big heavy stuff when it comes to anthropology. Now,
church and first conceived of Cleo dynamics in nineteen seven
when he felt that all major ecological questions about population
(12:11):
dynamics had been answered, so he turned to that's a
direct quote from him. That's not me. I don't I
don't know necessarily that they have all been answered. But
he turned to history. And actually his father had previously
looked into us. His father was Valentine Church and a
computer scientist, and he had written dissident writings about the
origins of totalitarianism that got him exiled from the Soviet
(12:34):
Union in nineteen seventies seven. Now, the younger Church and
he recognizes that this kind of search for patterns in history,
this is not a new thing, right. Obviously, we're all
familiar with the idea of there being a cyclical nature
to history. I remember learning about this in like, uh,
probably like a junior high history class. Well, I mean
(12:55):
it's just basically pattern recognition in history class. Right, Oh,
an empire rye is and then it falls, you know,
you have you're gonna end up with some sort of
horrible emperor ruler and then then there's a revolution that happens.
Like you just you just began to recognize the same
patterns within these different stories. Yeah, that was the way
it was framed to us when I was like whatever,
(13:15):
twelve maybe thirteen years old. They're essentially like war happens,
then like there's peace, then there's war, then there's peace,
then there's war, and they happen in these like they
actually were able to this elementary school tape teacher was
able to map it out for us, you know. And
that's essentially what he's doing, but with just like a
broader set of data points, right. And he's really currently
(13:36):
focused on coordinating something called the c CHAT Global History
Data Bank, And this is a database of history and
cultural evolution that is hoped to be used to empirically
test out theoretical predictions from Cleo dynamics. So they're essentially
housing as much data as they possibly can gather to
(13:57):
run these predictive models against. So there are a couple
of moments of other Cleo dynamics though too rite and
we don't want to confuse Urchin with too many of
the other folks that are involved in this. And we
haven't even gotten to the actual purported eighty year cycle
that is making the rounds right now. What we're really
talking about with Urchin is the fifty year and then
(14:17):
two hundred year cycles. But uh, there's actually and you
and I both found this. There's a peer reviewed journal
on Cleo dynamics and it's open access, meaning anybody out
there can get get it, and you can share it
and reuse it under a Creative Commons attribution. You'll find
lots of different articles about cleo dynamic views of history.
(14:37):
You try to include a link to that on the
landing page for this episode is stuff to about your
mind dot com. Yeah, so here's a couple of people.
Uh they they have been doing similar work to church In,
but they're not, you know, part of his necessary research projects.
So you've got Claudio sea Offee Reveala, who is a
computer social scientist in Virginia, UH. They're trying to use
(14:59):
cleo dynamics by running simulations on computer models. Specifically, his
team is looking at the Rift Valley region of East
Africa and the effects of modern climate change there. And
so they've seen that there was a drought there and
then subsequently labor specialization and vulnerability emerged spontaneously. So they
(15:19):
hope to be able to predict the flow of refugees
and identify potential conflict hot spots in the region using
using these Cleo dynamic methods. Another guy, Jack Goldstone, is
the director of the Center for Global Policy at George
Mason University. He's also a member of the Political Instability
(15:40):
Task Force, which is funded by the CIA to forecast
events outside of the United States. He's tried finding patterns
in past revolutions and he projects that Egypt will actually
have a few more years of struggle and another five
to ten years of rebuilding its institutions before it can
(16:00):
regain stability. Now this is in reference to the Arab
Spring Revolution of uh That might be a little bit this.
The information here might have been written closer to that
date than to our present date. So I take those
those numbers with a grain of salt. Goldstone, though, thinks
that cleo dynamics is only useful for looking at broad
(16:22):
trends and not useful for predicting unique events, so he
wanted to be clear about that. I think that's important
to note. And when we get into criticism later, you
do find that it's not necessarily the situation where people
are like cleo dynamics is awesome or Cleo dynamics is
is trash. It's a lot a lot of times it's
a discussion about to what extent these kinds of exercises
(16:45):
are useful or accurate. Right, Yeah. So another person who
felt the same way is Herbert Gentis, and this is
a retired economist working out of U mass Ammerst, who
also doubts that cleo dynamics can be used to predict
specific events, but he does think the patterns and causal
connections within it can reveal lessons for policymakers. So he's
(17:08):
essentially arguing this is something that people who are constructing
policy in our government should be paying attention to. And
the last person here I have here is Harvey Whitehouse,
who is an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, and
he oversees the construction of a database on rituals, social structures,
and conflict around the globe. Now, he believes this research
(17:31):
can complement the approach of Cleo dynamics by shedding light
on the triggers of political violence. In his argument, this
violence happens when individuals strongly identify with a political group,
and that identification is cemented through what he calls rituals.
And these can be frightening and painful. And the reason
(17:52):
why is the more frightening and painful they are, the
stronger the shared memories they create. Are This sounds very
familiar to us. We are you know, we're trying to
keep this episode evergreen, but we were actually recording this
the weekend after the riot events in Charlottesville, Virginia and
uh where you know, there were collisions between I guess
(18:16):
white nationalist protesters and counter protesters and there was a
woman killed by a car that drove into a number
of the participants in this. Uh, it's it was super upsetting.
It's still super upsetting. And as I'm reading about cleo
dynamics and these applications of it, it seems to be
(18:36):
like a moment that will obviously join this data set,
which sounds sounds somewhat unemotional, right because these are like
real people that it's affecting. But it also makes me
wonder like, how can this How could could we have
predicted events like this? Or can we trace back why
events like this are happening? Yeah, exactly, because again, it's
(18:59):
it's it's not just about knowing where we're going. It's
it's about being able to take control of it, being
able to sort of take control of the wheel to
a certain extent. Alright, let's take a break, and when
we come back, let's jump into this fifty year cycle,
this fifty year scale. Alright, we're back. So yeah, So
(19:23):
Turchen is actually the one who came up with the
fifty year scale, and this is the one that's getting
conflated with the eighty year scale that's making the rounds
on the internet right now. Uh, And we'll explain all
that later, but let's talk about what he actually means
with this fifty year scale. So the theory goes, he
calls this the father and Son's scale. The theory goes
that every fifty years there's a moment of violent upheaval
(19:45):
in the United States, and he looks at this as
beginning in eighteen seventy with the Civil War, then in
nineteen twenty there was violence over labor and race. Then
again in nineteen seventy we had the Vietnam War and
the Civil rights movement. So he's our you doing that
twenty is around when we're going to have our next
cycle and basically saying everybody needs to prepare themselves. We're
(20:07):
gonna go through another moment of turmoil. You know, I, UM,
I don't want to criticize this this because obviously there
are a number of issues going on, but I mean
instantly you think to yourself, oh, I'm glad there was
that stretch of a relative peace between ninety uh and
the and the nineteen seventy Um, you know obviously that's
when we had the World War two Great War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
(20:31):
He's not tracking events like that because they aren't, I guess,
specifically within the borders of the United States. So that's
an interesting But you're making a really interesting counter argument here,
which is like, what's the then diagram of overlap of
global events on top of this right? Right? And then
you I guess you can also say two are you
have these key moments generationally where you have all these
(20:52):
factors coming together and opening us up for the potential
for unrest. But I guess there's also going to be
this um, this possibility for cascading effects, and I imagine
you could apply that to to the you know, the
decades to follow. He sort of addresses that, and I'll
get to that in the future, because he calls that's
part of his two hundred year scale. But let's wrap
(21:15):
up the fifty year scale. Yeah, Actually, that's a good
that's a good times you're going to have like two
different bruds of cicadas emerging at the same time exactly.
So he argues all of this in a published article
in a July issue of the Journal of Peace Research,
and he believes the model that he presents there suggests
that violence will be even worse because of quote demographic
(21:39):
variables such as wages, standards of living, and a number
of measures of intra elite confrontation. Now, his reasoning for
all of this is that there's a period of sustained
explosive violence, and then that is usually followed and maintained
as peace for around twenty to thirty years until a
(22:00):
new generation arises and this generation hasn't experienced any of
the horrors of the previous generations. So church And thinks
that this cycle occurs every two generations, or every forty
to sixty years. So that's why he places its smack
in the middle there with a fifty year cycle. This
is why he calls it the father's and son's cycle,
which is a little gendered. But the idea here is
(22:23):
that the father responds violently to perceived social justice, and
then their son lives with that legacy of conflict and abstains.
But with the third generation, the cycle begins again. Now
church And compares this to a forest fire, and he
says it will burn out until underbrush accumulates, and then
the cycle recommences again. Okay, I can definitely follow that. Yeah.
(22:47):
I like looking at my life and how my lifespan
has played against the cycles that he's outlining. I can
see this, you know, Like I was born just after
the Civil Rights movement, just after Vietnam. I learned from
my parents that those events were catastrophic and that it
was you know, essentially I learned to try to be
(23:09):
peaceful as as he's arguing here, and then I think
we're seeing like the generation maybe two generations behind you
and I are they didn't they didn't have those lessons, right,
and so subsequently they're sort of feeling the pressures of economy.
Really is what it comes down to with Turchin's arguments
(23:31):
upon themselves and then looking for a scapegoat. Yeah, I mean,
I have thought a lot in the past about what
it means to be entering into an age in which
there are no uh, you know, fewer and then ultimately
no firsthand accounts of the Second World War, you know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
that totally ties into this. Yeah. So he also identifies
(23:53):
the cause as get this political entrepreneurs who are trying
to get power. There are people who are already in
the elite, but they want to overturn the political order
to better suit themselves. Does this sound familiar anybody? And
he says that this subsequently has a historical precedent of
(24:14):
leading to revolution. But hold on a second. You're probably
saying to yourself, wait a minute, there was no peak
in the eighteen twenties. If this fits a fifty year model,
If I go back to the eighteen twenties, there wasn't
any upheaval, then why and he says, actually, that's because
the social variables like wages and employment were excellent at
(24:36):
that time. So he's looking at and he's thinking that
our current polarization here in the United States and the
current amount of inequality we're experiencing will reach a peak
in our discourse and political class will become even more
fragmented than it already is right now. In addition, he
(24:56):
finds uh things that are indicators are corruption increase and
political cooperation unraveling. Right before there are these big periods
of instability or violence that are imminent. And again this
sounds eerily familiar. I guess I should try to place
this too. So the article was written in twelve. He
(25:17):
started talking about this stuff back, and what would I say? So,
you know, he's been talking about this for a while now,
and now here we are in seventeen and we're experiencing
a lot of the things that he predicted. I'm not
saying that that necessarily means for I agree with his
prediction or I agree with this model, but it is
kind of scary how a lot of this is playing out.
(25:40):
So remember that other CLEO dynamic speaker I mentioned earlier,
Harvey white House. He says that if Turchin's prediction of
unrest in the United States is correct, we can actually
expect to see an increase in tightly knit groups who
use rituals with a threatening quality. But these ritual is
also promised great rewards for their members. And again I
(26:05):
have to remind us we're recording this a couple of
days after Charlottesville, and that describes that to a t
is a group with a threatening quality that's promising great
rewards to its members. What's the great reward in that case?
I wonder, well, I think that talking about greatness. They
so I've told a lot of people about this. Their
Vice actually made a video on the ground there. It's
(26:28):
about like minutes long. It's super upsetting, but I highly
recommend watching it to sort of get a first hand
account of what's going on there. When you when you
watch the people in these groups talking about why they're there,
a lot of it is about it comes down to
a cultural reclamation of the country and economic like they
(26:51):
feel like something's been taken away from them that they deserve,
and so I think that's what the groups are sort
of promising. It's like, if you part us have paid
in this you will reap rewards in the end. Okay,
So there's talking about like the return of say jobs,
uh so you know, manufacturing jobs in particular, that may
(27:11):
not actually be coming back. Then they're talking about like
some sort of a cultural focus that that either you know,
previously was in place or is misremembered as being um,
you know, more central than it was. Yeah, exactly. In fact,
like there's there's an idea along these lines. So remember
that eighteen twenties example. That's sort of like if we can,
(27:35):
as a entire society and with our government get it
together and try to pull together are for instance, make
our wages better and make sure everybody is employed, that
would be something that could stave this off. But basically
the argument is like there's so much chaos going on
(27:55):
with all of this, this complex system at work right
now that people like church and doubt that that's possible
at this point. Now. Church And also identifies three kinds
of violence that he said leads to these upheavals. He
calls these group on group violence. This is when you
see riots in modern day America, just like what we
were just talking about. There's groups against individuals and his
(28:19):
his example of this is lynchings. And then there's individuals
against groups, which we refer to as rampage killings. And
Urchin makes a point that we could identify a person
killing a group by themselves as terrorism, except he needs
to make a specific here in America. When this violence
(28:40):
is an American on American, we tend not to talk
about it in terms of terrorism. So his examples are
the Dark Knight shooting in Aurora or Timothy McVeigh. These
are usually rampage attacks that are directed in institutions like
education or government and church, and says they've grown by
a factor of twenty in the last generation. So this
(29:03):
is actually I have to provide a personal note aside here.
This is why I find it really troubling when I
see a positive reaction to violence against white supremacists or
white nationalists. We're talking about the like punching Nazis thing. Yeah,
there's a lot of this on the internet. There was
a lot of this right after that one I don't
(29:23):
remember this guy's name, but that that one guy who's
like a leader of one of these groups got punched
in the head earlier this year, and everybody was sort
of with schaden freud laughing at him, and then, uh,
you know, after this weekend, there's just an increase of
rhetoric from people who are friends and family with that
are saying like, yeah, this is great, let's get them,
you know. And and the rhetoric of using violence really
(29:48):
troubles me, and especially because it comes right back to
what Church and saying. He's saying, if you allowed these
three types of violence to grow, it's going to lead
to this up evil where it's going to be even worse.
And I for and I makes the world go blind,
right exactly. So you actually have something here that's a
quote of hope after that maybe ten minutes of dour
(30:11):
research prediction. Well, yeah, I have a couple of quotes here.
The first one is from Sergey A and Nephidoff, who
I mentioned earlier, one of the co authors with the Church,
and and he said in his Ian magazine piece quote,
we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp in with the
US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction
is not a prophecy. I don't believe the disaster is preordained,
(30:34):
no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we
understand the causes we have a chance to prevent it
from happening. But the first thing we have to do
is reverse the trend of ever growing inequality. And then
church In himself said, the descent is not inevitable. We
can avoid the worst, perhaps by switching to a less
harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the roller coaster altogether. Yeah,
(31:00):
I um, I don't know if I a hundred percent
subscribe to Turchan's version of Cleo dynamics, but it does
seem a lot more grounded and quantitative data to me
than than other sort of predictive factors. I've talked about
on the show before about how my father thought the
world was gonna end like two years ago, and he
was like absolutely certain that there were It was exactly
(31:22):
like this, but it also like included historical events tied
into religious predictions, and he was certain the world was
gonna end. This is also like, uh, when we thought
like the Mayan predictions were gonna come true right or
well not weak, but you know, there there was a
lot of talk about about that, like, oh, is is
the world going to end in twelve because the mind's
predicted it. It's on these calendars. Yeah, I mean and
(31:44):
of course this comes back to weather forecasts again. You know,
it didn't rain on Wednesday, but they were saying it
was gonna gonna rain on Wednesday back when I checked
the weather on a Sunday. That doesn't mean the the
forecast was not based on scientific principles and and uh
an x up to patterns, but they're just too many
factors to properly chart. So and and to throw another
(32:06):
wrench into the works, this is where Turchands starts talking
about the two hundred years scale, and you alluded to
this earlier with the paper you referenced. He calls this
the secular cycle um and he talks about how there's
these two types of cycles. It's the fifty year wave
that we were just talking about. Then there's a longer
term oscillation that repeats every two hundred to three hundred years,
(32:26):
and depending on how these land, they can augment or
suppress those fifty year peaks. So his examples are the
Roman Empire, medieval France, and ancient China, with societies swinging
between peace and conflict every one hundred to one hundred
and fifty years. And he sees the United States as
a similar society to these previous empires, so he's predicting
(32:50):
that it will follow the same route. Now, he and
his associates, like I said, they call this the secular cycle.
They say it starts out first with an egalitarian society
where supply and demand for labor is roughly balanced out.
But then what happens is as the population grows, labor
begins to outstrip demands. Subsequently, you get elite classes that form.
(33:14):
This allows living standards for the poor to fall. Society
becomes top heavy with elites who start fighting for power,
and then political instability ensues and leads subsequently to collapse.
So his example of this, actually going back to that
other example earlier, is the Egyptian Uprising of eleven. He says,
you saw an interaction of the two cycles. They're explaining
(33:36):
events uh in Egypt, So he said, it seems like
Egypt's economy was growing and that poverty levels were low,
so you would have assumed that there would be stability.
But he argues that in a decade leading up to
the revolution, the country actually saw four times its amount
of graduates come out with no employment prospects. So for
(33:57):
church and it ultimately boils down. This is kind of
like a Marxist prediction, right, like it's based on economic factors,
how many workers you have, how many jobs are available,
how much money they've spent on education, so on. Alright,
on that note, let's take one more break, and when
we come back, we'll we'll discuss clear dynamics a little
bit more and then get into some of the some
of the criticisms and critiques. Thank alright, we're back. So
(34:24):
turch And he's actually taken the models of Cleo dynamics
and applied them as well to models of religious growth. Now,
one model he looks at here is linear. He says,
as believers start seeing the light quote unquote, the religion
will start to grow, right. But then he's got another model,
and he says religion can grow like a contagion sometime,
(34:46):
where converts increase exponentially. And so what he says is
he's he's mapped conversions for Islam in medieval Iran and
Spain and found that the data fits the contagion model
more closely than it does the linear model. There. Likewise,
he argues that there's models that explain the expansion of
Christianity in the first century a d. And Mormonism here
(35:10):
in the US since World War Two, so that's also
pretty interesting. Again, I don't know, I feel like you'd
really have to drill down deep to determine, like how
methodologically sound this is, um, But there is, like we said,
like there's this growing group of academics who are writing
about it and researching it and accumulating data to try
(35:30):
to see if it if it pans out, you know.
In researching all of this, I am, once again, in
my life, um disappointed that I have not read Isaac
Asimov's The Foundation books, because I know that what I
know of the books without getting into deep because I
don't want to spoil myself, is that it does concern
predictive models of the future and uh and and does
(35:52):
so you know, in great depth because it's Isaac Asimov,
So of course, of course you put a lot of
time into it. But sadly I have not. I have
not read those and did not have time to read
them before this recording. But I would love to hear
from anyone out there who has read the Foundation series
and and and has related inside on this topic. Yeah,
I'm curious if if those asthma seems like the kind
of guy who would explore through fiction like the arguments
(36:16):
against these kind of predictive models, right, because one thing
that people are concerned about is if you apply these
predictive models and then you start using them on a
policy level through government, then what happens when the predictive
model says things are going to get dire in in
the government suddenly becomes like really dictatorial trying to make
(36:38):
sure that that that negative outcome doesn't happen. Right, So
so you can get like a minority report kind of situation. Yeah,
it's kind of like envisioning. Okay, you're you're predicting the weather.
You're basing it on the natural state of the atmosphere
and weather patterns, and of course you're factoring and human
influence on the weather pattering patterns. But if you reach
(36:59):
the point where they humans can can and are intentionally
altering the weather, so like you know, I guess like
blasting tornadoes out of the sky or turning off her
acnes or diverting them, then you're you're having to factor
intentional human interaction, uh into the overall simulation and forecast
(37:19):
for the atmosphere. Yeah, wow, that's true. So that would
really that would be another factor added on to cleo dynamics.
Then is trying to figure out outside of the predictive models,
then what the influence of humans using the predictive models
upon the actual events would do to change the predictions.
I think so yeah. I mean, if you have individuals
(37:40):
who understand how it was working and are manipulating it,
then they have to factor that in. It's kind of like,
if you have one wizard in the world who can
bend uh natural law to their will, then that's one thing.
But then what if you have two wizards? Now it
seems like that that just doubles the complexity of the scenario. Well,
there is another wizard here, but he's not Churching and
(38:05):
so his name is Charles Hughes Smith and he writes
for Business Insider. I don't know necessarily that he considers
himself a cleo dynamicist. Is that what you would refer
to them as damn dynamos dynamo? Yeah? Maybe? Uh so Smith.
He's written about this in like I said, Business Insider,
(38:25):
in his own books. He has a website that's full
of this stuff. To the all of his theories, he
argues there are other reasons why we're looking at seeing
trouble somewhere between, he says, or two, so we can
put it off a couple of years. That's how he's frying.
I want to get all the Avatar sequels in before
that four or five movies. Man can't reme better start
(38:46):
cranking those out. So Smith says, there's four grand cycles.
And let me be clear. That eighty year cycle that
we were talking about that's floating around right now, that
is one of these four grand cycles. Now that that
first one is it's a generational cycle of eighty years,
that's every four generations, and it is said to lead
(39:08):
to nation changing social, political, and economic upheaval. This is
referenced in a book called The Fourth Turning by Willem
Strauss or William Strauss and Neil how And it also
argues that after eighty years, there are few humans who
can actually recall the last crisis. So your example of
World War two there, now, this is the one that
(39:29):
that's currently making the rounds uh. It's part of Hughes
sort of thing. His other cycles included here that we're
gonna hit peak oil, where there will be a depletion
of the global economy's reliance on fossil fuels, that credit
expansion and contraction will transition from a bubble to a collapse,
and that's subsequently going to lead to a global depression.
(39:50):
And I have to say from other articles, like all
of this doesn't really seem to be quantitatively mapped the
same way that Hurchin and other cleo dynamos are. This
seems to be more based on him citing other books
and he that includes Churchen's work. He does cite urchins work,
(40:12):
but he's providing observational, qualitative examples. And the last, the
last factor he throws in here is a hundred years
cycle of price inflation that is met by a stagnation
of wages. So this this seems a little bit closer
to what Churchens talking about here that leads to shortages, famine,
and crisis. He says this is because humanity is a
(40:33):
species tries to expand into every ecological niche when food
and energy supplies are rising, and so this he calls
a hundred years cycle of rising prices for food, energy,
and water. Uh And and Smith's argument is essentially, the
government might be able to deal with any one of
(40:53):
these things, but four of these things at once might
prove to be too much for any institution of human beings.
So I don't know where I really fall in terms
of these arguments, Like, if you apply traditional syllogistic logic
to these arguments, do they do they still hold up?
Does the evidence for these claims actually warrant a connection
(41:14):
between them? I'm not sure about that, So I want
to throw that out there. This is just we're accumulating
and presenting to you the variations on these cyclical theories.
All right, well, let's let's get into some of the
the arguments against cleo dynamics, some of the critiques of
cleo dynamics. So the weekend, you know, maybe wave this
out a little bit, right, So some people are arguing
(41:37):
that the mathematical models may simply be a case of
seeing patterns in random data. So so once again the hindsight,
Yeah exactly. Uh. And then also the data set that
Turchin is working with has been criticized for being too
short because it only covers a period from seventeen eighty
to So maybe cleo dynamics does work, but humanity probably
(41:59):
needs to back up another couple of centuries of good
record keeping before we can actually apply it in any sense. Also,
historians in general argue that cleo dynamics weakness is that
when it attempts to make predictions based on trends when
historical information availability is usually patchy at best. Right, So
(42:20):
our records are preserved or destroyed based on chance, for instance,
our palam sess episode, right, uh, and knowledge tends to
pool around narrow subject areas. The example that immediately comes
to mind for me on this, pop culture wise is
The Strain. I've started watching The Strain again. Oh man, well,
(42:41):
I'm actually I'm watching season three. I haven't hit the
final season yet, but yeah, they've got that book the
Lumen that is like the book of all the answers
on how to deal with these vampires translates to how
to kill vampire basically, yeah, yeah, And it's like they're
facing in the world of the Strain, this this total
(43:01):
upheaval as vampires start taking over the world and killing
off the human race. But the only record of how
to deal with this is in this one book that
takes what two seasons to find ye, and then they
find it and it takes another season to translate it.
So yeah, I think that's like, you know, that's obviously
a fictional example. But to be fair, you know, our
(43:23):
record keeping is hasn't been that great until recently. Yeah,
actually a recent by the time it's published, as it
will be a recent episode. But Joe and I did
an episode on Greek Fire, the Byzantine secret weapon, so
secret in fact that that it's a mystery regarding exactly
what it entailed in terms of formula and the system
of deployment. Yeah, you just have to go under King's landing.
(43:46):
That's where it's Okay, that's that's true, alright. So I
mentioned the you know, hindsight is because again that's one
of the criticisms here, that it's one thing to inflict
cyclical order on the past, because historians have been doing
this for ages. Right, Even our systems of the system
of years or classification of the ages and empires are
boiling down of of the past into narratives is ultimately
(44:09):
a form of this UM. And then plus there's always
the potential impact of unforeseen events that buck perceived patterns.
So we've talked a lot about outside context events um
the terminology coined by Ian and Banks before, but there's
also a similar notion explored in black swan theory. So
(44:30):
this was this is an idea that came from an
seem Nicholas Taleb and he he uh he takes this
to the name of this black swan theory from the
fact that before the discovery of Australia, scientific observation suggested
that all swans were white. Huh okay, there was no
such thing as a black swan as there uh was
(44:51):
a you know, no more than there was a green
or a purple one. But then the European explorers discovered
the world down under and they discovered black swans, so
that which was you know, possible but but had not
been observed yet, became reality. So the black swan here
was an outlier existing beyond the realm of reasonable expectation.
(45:14):
But the human mind depends on pattern recognition, so to
Leb writes in his Black Swan book that we humans
uh think up explanations for an outlier's occurrence after we
encounter it to make it explainable and predictable. So, you know,
the idea here is that we were looking back in time,
we're looking at history, and we're just reinterpreting black swan
(45:35):
events as being something that could have been predicted and foreseen,
and therefore thinking they will be foreseen uh perceived, perceivable,
and predictable in our future. But by their very nature,
outliers are unpredictable, and according to to to leave Uh,
this implies the inability to predict the course of history,
given how much outliers um have impacted our past, such
(45:58):
as he brings up the nineteen eighty seven market crash,
the demise of the Soviet block, uh, the September eleven
two one terrorist attacks. How these drastically informed the shape
of human events. But we're not necessarily predictable. Now that's,
of course, you can get into a whole argument about
to what degree these were predictable, But that's kind of
(46:20):
playing into his argument to saying that again you look
back hindsight. It's one thing to look back and say, no,
this was predictable, look at these patterns, but are you
just informing? Are you are you just enforcing a pattern
on the past. Now, all of this being said, I
want to stress what I restress what I said earlier
is that there you don't see a lot of people saying, oh,
cleo dynamics, who just is just all crap? Just throw
(46:42):
it all out the generally, your argument is, I don't
think that these models are as precise as you would
want them to be, or that we can predict the
future as well as as the proponents of cleo dynamics
are claiming. Right, Yeah, And also like this isn't a
again bringing it back to minority report, It's not like
(47:03):
if we get cleo dynamics just right, we're gonna have
the equivalent of psychics in a bathtub that tell us
you know when crimes are going to be committed, Like
and even that, as we've seen in that Philip K.
Dick story, is fraught with peril. Right, So where does
that leave us at the end here? Well, I think
what we have to ask, and I'm asking you too, listeners,
(47:23):
is this a valid scientific method? Like like, is cleo
dynamics something we should be continuing to look into? And
like should we be following what's going on in this journal? Uh?
And then how does you know somebody like a smith
for instance, like how did his predictions which don't seem
to be as as grounded in data sets? How do
(47:44):
how do those play together with it? So I'm curious
about that. But then also many of you, like myself
are probably wondering during these events of turmoil we're experiencing, now,
how do we prevent this violence? Right? Well, Urchen, he says,
if I'm right, this is how I think we can
help things. He argues, first of all, inequality is almost
(48:06):
always a bad thing for societies, So he says, to
prevent violence, we have to learn from history, and to
do that, we need to create more jobs for our
graduates while acting decisively to reduce inequality. But others are
arguing maybe a revolution, maybe uprisings, These are for the
(48:27):
best because they can remedy social stresses. For example, people
look back at the Civil rights movement and they say,
was that a bad thing? What came out of the
Civil rights movement is quote good, right, But there were
certainly violent upheaval and turmoil during that period of time
as well. I guess it depends on what what uprising
(48:49):
you're looking at, because certainly, you know, it's one thing
to say, you know, the civil rights movement was it
was a positive movement, but nobody wants an uprising, say
like the kind we see in the hands tail Yeah exactly,
And I think to like when you're talking about it
in those terms, like it's sort of like talking about
a fever burning and illness out of your body, right,
And I don't know. I don't know. I try to
(49:12):
as much as possible. I try to fall back on
non violence and so any ways in which we can
try to avoid that. Look, I'm gonna be supportive of
So I look at this and I see what turch
and saying. It doesn't sound illogical to me. It sounds like, yeah, sure,
if there were more jobs available for graduates in this country,
that would be great. I don't I don't know how
(49:33):
to do that, right, And then how do you reduce
inequality across a broad band? You know, I mean, it's
something we've been working on for decades. Now. We get
into some of those wicked problems, right exactly. Yeah, So
if you don't know what we're speaking of there, we
have another episode similar to this one actually kind of
looking at broader sociological issues about a theory called wicked problems.
(49:56):
If you go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
type in Wicked Problems that episode of them up, or
you can find it on any of your podcast readers. Yeah,
but it does get into a lot of a lot
of the similar territory here, So I would highly recommend
that episode if you found this episode of very thought,
Let's try to uh on the landing page for this episode,
let's try to link back to Wicked Problems. Okay, So
I asked you that question. Do you think it's a
(50:18):
valid scientific method? If you do, If you don't, there's
ways to let us know. We're on social media. You
can talk to us about Cleo Dynamics on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and Instagram. We also have our Facebook discussion module up
where if you want to have just like a closed
conversation with people who are like fans of the podcast. Specifically,
(50:40):
it's a closed group on Facebook. Uh, try to join
us over there. You can find the link to that
on our Facebook page. Right. Yeah, And you know, I
just in all of this, I do want to stress
that I think there is optimism in this topic. Um,
you know, the very fact that people are doing this
research lends to optimism. So I would I would encourage
everyone to take the optimist excite of this because for starters,
(51:03):
optimism is a place of action. You can you can
act out of optimism. Uh, It's often very difficult to
act in any constructive way out of a state of pessimism.
So so yeah, take take this as you know, individuals
who are trying to use the best tools available to
us to figure out where we're going, and how how
to get to the places we want to go, how
(51:24):
to avoid all the strife, you know, and and and
maybe even get to that point where we eventually have
some sort of a post scarcity society and will be
arguably largely immune to some of these societal pitfalls. Exactly.
I think you said that perfectly, all right, And uh yeah, finally,
if you want to get in touch with us directly,
(51:46):
then you know which email addressed to turn to. That
is blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com.
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks
dot com. Hey, are welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert lamp and I'm Christian Seger. You know, Christian.
It seems that we should be able to look at
where we've been in the past and therefore extrapolate, predict,
(00:27):
even simulate where we're going in the future. Right, it does.
It does seem that way, And I think that that
maybe is a product of like the last century of
our uh scientific thinking. Does that make sense? Yeah, well,
I mean there's definitely one line in particular that we're
that we're often referring to and uh and in generally
(00:48):
misquoting I think a lot of the times, and that
comes from a philosopher, Georgia Santayana, who said, quote, those
who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
That would of course tend to imply, Hey, if you
can remember the past, then you can avoid these pitfalls
in the future. That there's some uh, there's some system
that can be employed that even though we're we're strapped
(01:11):
to this linear existence just hurdling through time into the future. Um,
if we have some concept of the road that we've traveled,
we'll have a better idea about the road to come right. Yeah,
and so of bring it back around to our nerdiness. Uh.
In our fandom for Stephen King and the newly popular
(01:32):
Dark Tower Universe. Uh, there's a quote from King here
that he used in the stand under the Guise of
Randall flag. Life was such a wheel that no man
could stand upon it for long, and it always, at
the end came around to the same place again. Uh.
This is a terrifying concept though, right, And at the
same time it is an idea that seems to fill
(01:54):
a lot of people with purpose because they can say, ah,
hold on, wait, I've got it figured out, and I
can predict what's going to happen next. And in fact,
we had a listener right into us about this very idea.
Her name is Allison, and she wrote us and said
she was wondering if we would do a show about
this is something that's been mentioned a lot on the
internet lately and apparent eighty year cycle of political social
(02:17):
upheaval in our world. And she said she was horrified
and intrigued the first time that she heard about it,
and so she started looking into this. Uh. And she
said that she's heard about the idea in general, but
that this the whole like seventy to eighty year cycle
as a devastating shake up, whether it's via war, war
or turmoil, was kind of new, right, and she wanted
(02:40):
to know if we could do some research on it
and see what we came up with and provide some
perspective on it. And interestingly, because I have also heard
about this in the last couple of months, Um, we
did the research and it turns out that the one
that's making the rounds is not the one that is
being academically researched. There's like a little bit of uh
(03:00):
confabulation going on here between two different uh specific theories
and one is more well, I guess we can describe
them as the fifty year theory and the eighty year theory. Yes, yeah, okay, yeah,
and these this is this is this is getting into
a realm of what is known as cleo dynamics, that
is cl i o dynamics. Yeah. So this is a
(03:23):
field where scientists are attempting to find meaningful patterns in history.
And it was named by a guy named Peter Turch.
And we're gonna talk a lot about him today after Cleo,
the ancient Greek muse of history. I have been having
the hardest time remembering this name trying. You came up
with a good idea earlier picture Cleo as miss Cleo
(03:45):
the psychic. Uh. The other one I'm thinking is like
letters to Cleo Dynamics, Like, I gotta figure out a
way to remember this because it's been hard for me.
But anyways, there's been a swell of efforts to apply
scientific methods to history by identifying in audeling broad social forces.
And one argument in favor of this is that historians
(04:06):
are too qualitative and that they point to samples of
cases from observations that Cleo Dynamics wants to use tools
like nonlinear mathematics and simulations that can model the interactions
of millions of people at once. Now, I want to
be clear about this upfront. It's criticized by traditional historians.
(04:26):
They usually believe that there are countless variables interacting within
a society that lead to violence and social unrest, and
they don't think that there's any one unified theory or
general law to history. So so what are we talking
about here? Then, Well, we're looking at decades or even
century long periods of population expansion, followed by long periods
(04:49):
of stagnation and decline price dynamics mirroring population oscillations, strong
expansionist phases followed by state failure socio political instead of
build pity and territory loss, repeated back and forth swings
in demographic, economic, social, and political structures. Uh, just to
give you an idea of what what kind of patterns
(05:11):
we're talking about here when we're when you're imagining, say
the the Cleo dynamics weather person standing in front of
green screen, like these are the kind of movements they
would be talking about her chart. That's a perfect analogy. Yeah. Now,
an example I came across was in the work of
two and two individuals, one of whom of which we're
going to talk about in greater depth, Peter Turchin and
(05:34):
Sergey A. Nevadov, And they have a book titled Secular
Cycles in which they looked at England, France, and Russia
throughout both the medieval and early modern periods and they
closely observed cycles of inequality. So, uh, Nevodov has a
great rundown of cleo dynamics and economic inequality as well.
In Ian magazine and a couple of other publications. I'll
(05:56):
try to include a link to this on the landing
page for the episode. But he says that in this case,
the cycles break down to this, you have expansion, stagnation, crisis, disintegration,
sort of a life cycle of a story arc for
for civilization. Right. However, uh Nfidov is quick to point
out that we're not talking about rigid clockwork here, So
(06:19):
these cycles don't occur in a machine. They occur in
a chaotic system in which a great number of variables
play apart. So in a way it is it is
a lot like the weather. The weather is a system.
We know what what's factors influence the movements of atmosphere
and weather patterns, but there's so many it's ultimately such
(06:39):
a chaotic system it becomes difficult to make um. You know,
long term predictions, even short term predictions are are are
open to uh to misinterpretation. And does anybody who's checked
the weather channel or their weather app on their phone
and gone outside and its raining. It's not that a
meteorologist doesn't know what they're taught king about. It's that
(07:01):
the the system is just that complex and difficult to
simulate even with the with our most complicated simulation systems.
So the idea here's the human cultures and civilizations. Also
that they're bumping up against each other, they're influencing each other.
Uh So, there are so many factors that make it
complex and it's it's again, it's not as simple as
(07:21):
just you know, running a computer versus computer game inside
of of a closed system. Still, he maintains that complex
interactions do add up to a general rhythm. So if
you kind of take a god's eye view of everything,
the idea here is that, yes, you will see patterns
emerge and then you can extract late that to the future.
(07:42):
So Cleo dynamics then is about observing these trends, observing
these cycles, this ebb and flow, and then predicting them
in the future. And you have a note here about
Mercy a eliads book The Terror of History, which I
remember reading in grad school. Yeah, and of the Eternal Return,
Yeah yeah, he involved in myth studies. Yeah yeah, So
(08:03):
he talks about this concept of the terror of history
in which humanity has abandoned a cyclical mythic view of
time that we used to have in favor of a
purely linear existence. We're forced to see history for what
it is, a senseless stream of blunders, atrocity, collapsed ideals
of fallen states, ruined megaprojects, and just sort of failure
(08:24):
in general. Um, it sounds like the greatest setting for
a role playing game. Yeah, but not one to live in.
It's what it is, legitimately worth thinking about when you're
when you're toying with, you know, dungeons and dragons, histories,
you know, or thinking about stuff like Game of Thrones. Yeah. Yeah,
there's a reason why all of these, like fantasy worlds
(08:44):
that are built from the ground up, have ruinous histories
to them that that they kind of look back on
in wonder. Yeah. So here's a quote from the myth
of the Eternal Return. Ileoti says, quote, in our day,
when historical pressure no longer allows any escape, how and
man tolerate the catastrophes and horrors of history, from collective
deportations and massacres to atomic bombings, if beyond them he
(09:08):
can glimpse no sign, no transistorical meaning, if they are
only the blind play of economic, social, or political forces,
or even worse, only the result of the liberties that
a minority takes and exercises it directly on the stage
of universal history. So Eliade says that for the longest
humans were able to place everything within a metahistorical framework.
(09:33):
Uh so, yeah, something fell apart because it was the
end of a decade an age. It was the punishment
of God, et cetera. Now, Cleo dynamics stands in an
interesting place by comparison, because they are, in a way
attempting to resurrect a cyclical view of history. There they're
turning not to divine mechanics, however, or the imagined astrological
(09:55):
influence of the spheres. Uh, but rather to a modeling
of history sort of fluid dynamics based on cultural evolution,
macro sociology, economics, and other factors. Plus in a refreshingly
optimistic humanist twist that I really like. It also opens
the door for control over those cycles, right Yeah, And
(10:15):
I think that's absolutely crucial to keep in mind with
all of this. It's not just another version of Oh,
humanity is screwed. And here's why. There's the potential for
self awareness. Here, there's the potential for change. Right. So,
the general methodology that's being used in these studies at
least at least church and studies is to focus on
four main variables that are measured in several ways, and
and Robert you just mentioned many of these. He boils
(10:38):
them down pretty quickly to population numbers, social structure, state strength,
and political instability. And then he says, the way to
measure these is actually through proxies that are connected to
these things that you can measure quantitatively. So he looks,
for instance, at social structure, He looks at the quantitative
data on life expectancy and wealth in a quality, and
(11:01):
that's one of his measurement points. So who's this Peter
Churching guy that that like has just come out of
nowhere with the cleo dynamics At least it seems like that, right,
He's actually been doing it for a while. He's an
ecologist and evolutionary biologist and a mathematician out of the
University of Connecticut and stores he studies population dynamics and
takes mathematical techniques that he used to use to track
(11:25):
predator pray cycles in forest ecosystems, and then he applies
those to human history. Now, Turchen looks at historical records
of economic activity, demographic trends, and outbursts of violence in
the United States, and he argues history is not just
one damn thing after another. His main research questions are essentially,
(11:47):
first of all, what general mechanisms explain the collapse of
historical empires? And then how did large scale states and
empires evolved in the first place. So this is some
pretty big heavy stuff when it comes to anthropology. Now,
church and first conceived of Cleo dynamics in nineteen seven
when he felt that all major ecological questions about population
(12:11):
dynamics had been answered, so he turned to that's a
direct quote from him. That's not me. I don't I
don't know necessarily that they have all been answered. But
he turned to history. And actually his father had previously
looked into us. His father was Valentine Church and a
computer scientist, and he had written dissident writings about the
origins of totalitarianism that got him exiled from the Soviet
(12:34):
Union in nineteen seventies seven. Now, the younger Church and
he recognizes that this kind of search for patterns in history,
this is not a new thing, right. Obviously, we're all
familiar with the idea of there being a cyclical nature
to history. I remember learning about this in like, uh,
probably like a junior high history class. Well, I mean
(12:55):
it's just basically pattern recognition in history class. Right, Oh,
an empire rye is and then it falls, you know,
you have you're gonna end up with some sort of
horrible emperor ruler and then then there's a revolution that happens.
Like you just you just began to recognize the same
patterns within these different stories. Yeah, that was the way
it was framed to us when I was like whatever,
(13:15):
twelve maybe thirteen years old. They're essentially like war happens,
then like there's peace, then there's war, then there's peace,
then there's war, and they happen in these like they
actually were able to this elementary school tape teacher was
able to map it out for us, you know. And
that's essentially what he's doing, but with just like a
broader set of data points, right. And he's really currently
(13:36):
focused on coordinating something called the c CHAT Global History
Data Bank, And this is a database of history and
cultural evolution that is hoped to be used to empirically
test out theoretical predictions from Cleo dynamics. So they're essentially
housing as much data as they possibly can gather to
(13:57):
run these predictive models against. So there are a couple
of moments of other Cleo dynamics though too rite and
we don't want to confuse Urchin with too many of
the other folks that are involved in this. And we
haven't even gotten to the actual purported eighty year cycle
that is making the rounds right now. What we're really
talking about with Urchin is the fifty year and then
(14:17):
two hundred year cycles. But uh, there's actually and you
and I both found this. There's a peer reviewed journal
on Cleo dynamics and it's open access, meaning anybody out
there can get get it, and you can share it
and reuse it under a Creative Commons attribution. You'll find
lots of different articles about cleo dynamic views of history.
(14:37):
You try to include a link to that on the
landing page for this episode is stuff to about your
mind dot com. Yeah, so here's a couple of people.
Uh they they have been doing similar work to church In,
but they're not, you know, part of his necessary research projects.
So you've got Claudio sea Offee Reveala, who is a
computer social scientist in Virginia, UH. They're trying to use
(14:59):
cleo dynamics by running simulations on computer models. Specifically, his
team is looking at the Rift Valley region of East
Africa and the effects of modern climate change there. And
so they've seen that there was a drought there and
then subsequently labor specialization and vulnerability emerged spontaneously. So they
(15:19):
hope to be able to predict the flow of refugees
and identify potential conflict hot spots in the region using
using these Cleo dynamic methods. Another guy, Jack Goldstone, is
the director of the Center for Global Policy at George
Mason University. He's also a member of the Political Instability
(15:40):
Task Force, which is funded by the CIA to forecast
events outside of the United States. He's tried finding patterns
in past revolutions and he projects that Egypt will actually
have a few more years of struggle and another five
to ten years of rebuilding its institutions before it can
(16:00):
regain stability. Now this is in reference to the Arab
Spring Revolution of uh That might be a little bit this.
The information here might have been written closer to that
date than to our present date. So I take those
those numbers with a grain of salt. Goldstone, though, thinks
that cleo dynamics is only useful for looking at broad
(16:22):
trends and not useful for predicting unique events, so he
wanted to be clear about that. I think that's important
to note. And when we get into criticism later, you
do find that it's not necessarily the situation where people
are like cleo dynamics is awesome or Cleo dynamics is
is trash. It's a lot a lot of times it's
a discussion about to what extent these kinds of exercises
(16:45):
are useful or accurate. Right, Yeah. So another person who
felt the same way is Herbert Gentis, and this is
a retired economist working out of U mass Ammerst, who
also doubts that cleo dynamics can be used to predict
specific events, but he does think the patterns and causal
connections within it can reveal lessons for policymakers. So he's
(17:08):
essentially arguing this is something that people who are constructing
policy in our government should be paying attention to. And
the last person here I have here is Harvey Whitehouse,
who is an anthropologist at the University of Oxford, and
he oversees the construction of a database on rituals, social structures,
and conflict around the globe. Now, he believes this research
(17:31):
can complement the approach of Cleo dynamics by shedding light
on the triggers of political violence. In his argument, this
violence happens when individuals strongly identify with a political group,
and that identification is cemented through what he calls rituals.
And these can be frightening and painful. And the reason
(17:52):
why is the more frightening and painful they are, the
stronger the shared memories they create. Are This sounds very
familiar to us. We are you know, we're trying to
keep this episode evergreen, but we were actually recording this
the weekend after the riot events in Charlottesville, Virginia and
uh where you know, there were collisions between I guess
(18:16):
white nationalist protesters and counter protesters and there was a
woman killed by a car that drove into a number
of the participants in this. Uh, it's it was super upsetting.
It's still super upsetting. And as I'm reading about cleo
dynamics and these applications of it, it seems to be
(18:36):
like a moment that will obviously join this data set,
which sounds sounds somewhat unemotional, right because these are like
real people that it's affecting. But it also makes me
wonder like, how can this How could could we have
predicted events like this? Or can we trace back why
events like this are happening? Yeah, exactly, because again, it's
(18:59):
it's it's not just about knowing where we're going. It's
it's about being able to take control of it, being
able to sort of take control of the wheel to
a certain extent. Alright, let's take a break, and when
we come back, let's jump into this fifty year cycle,
this fifty year scale. Alright, we're back. So yeah, So
(19:23):
Turchen is actually the one who came up with the
fifty year scale, and this is the one that's getting
conflated with the eighty year scale that's making the rounds
on the internet right now. Uh, And we'll explain all
that later, but let's talk about what he actually means
with this fifty year scale. So the theory goes, he
calls this the father and Son's scale. The theory goes
that every fifty years there's a moment of violent upheaval
(19:45):
in the United States, and he looks at this as
beginning in eighteen seventy with the Civil War, then in
nineteen twenty there was violence over labor and race. Then
again in nineteen seventy we had the Vietnam War and
the Civil rights movement. So he's our you doing that
twenty is around when we're going to have our next
cycle and basically saying everybody needs to prepare themselves. We're
(20:07):
gonna go through another moment of turmoil. You know, I, UM,
I don't want to criticize this this because obviously there
are a number of issues going on, but I mean
instantly you think to yourself, oh, I'm glad there was
that stretch of a relative peace between ninety uh and
the and the nineteen seventy Um, you know obviously that's
when we had the World War two Great War. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
(20:31):
He's not tracking events like that because they aren't, I guess,
specifically within the borders of the United States. So that's
an interesting But you're making a really interesting counter argument here,
which is like, what's the then diagram of overlap of
global events on top of this right? Right? And then
you I guess you can also say two are you
have these key moments generationally where you have all these
(20:52):
factors coming together and opening us up for the potential
for unrest. But I guess there's also going to be
this um, this possibility for cascading effects, and I imagine
you could apply that to to the you know, the
decades to follow. He sort of addresses that, and I'll
get to that in the future, because he calls that's
part of his two hundred year scale. But let's wrap
(21:15):
up the fifty year scale. Yeah, Actually, that's a good
that's a good times you're going to have like two
different bruds of cicadas emerging at the same time exactly.
So he argues all of this in a published article
in a July issue of the Journal of Peace Research,
and he believes the model that he presents there suggests
that violence will be even worse because of quote demographic
(21:39):
variables such as wages, standards of living, and a number
of measures of intra elite confrontation. Now, his reasoning for
all of this is that there's a period of sustained
explosive violence, and then that is usually followed and maintained
as peace for around twenty to thirty years until a
(22:00):
new generation arises and this generation hasn't experienced any of
the horrors of the previous generations. So church And thinks
that this cycle occurs every two generations, or every forty
to sixty years. So that's why he places its smack
in the middle there with a fifty year cycle. This
is why he calls it the father's and son's cycle,
which is a little gendered. But the idea here is
(22:23):
that the father responds violently to perceived social justice, and
then their son lives with that legacy of conflict and abstains.
But with the third generation, the cycle begins again. Now
church And compares this to a forest fire, and he
says it will burn out until underbrush accumulates, and then
the cycle recommences again. Okay, I can definitely follow that. Yeah.
(22:47):
I like looking at my life and how my lifespan
has played against the cycles that he's outlining. I can
see this, you know, Like I was born just after
the Civil Rights movement, just after Vietnam. I learned from
my parents that those events were catastrophic and that it
was you know, essentially I learned to try to be
(23:09):
peaceful as as he's arguing here, and then I think
we're seeing like the generation maybe two generations behind you
and I are they didn't they didn't have those lessons, right,
and so subsequently they're sort of feeling the pressures of economy.
Really is what it comes down to with Turchin's arguments
(23:31):
upon themselves and then looking for a scapegoat. Yeah, I mean,
I have thought a lot in the past about what
it means to be entering into an age in which
there are no uh, you know, fewer and then ultimately
no firsthand accounts of the Second World War, you know. Yeah, yeah, absolutely,
that totally ties into this. Yeah. So he also identifies
(23:53):
the cause as get this political entrepreneurs who are trying
to get power. There are people who are already in
the elite, but they want to overturn the political order
to better suit themselves. Does this sound familiar anybody? And
he says that this subsequently has a historical precedent of
(24:14):
leading to revolution. But hold on a second. You're probably
saying to yourself, wait a minute, there was no peak
in the eighteen twenties. If this fits a fifty year model,
If I go back to the eighteen twenties, there wasn't
any upheaval, then why and he says, actually, that's because
the social variables like wages and employment were excellent at
(24:36):
that time. So he's looking at and he's thinking that
our current polarization here in the United States and the
current amount of inequality we're experiencing will reach a peak
in our discourse and political class will become even more
fragmented than it already is right now. In addition, he
(24:56):
finds uh things that are indicators are corruption increase and
political cooperation unraveling. Right before there are these big periods
of instability or violence that are imminent. And again this
sounds eerily familiar. I guess I should try to place
this too. So the article was written in twelve. He
(25:17):
started talking about this stuff back, and what would I say? So,
you know, he's been talking about this for a while now,
and now here we are in seventeen and we're experiencing
a lot of the things that he predicted. I'm not
saying that that necessarily means for I agree with his
prediction or I agree with this model, but it is
kind of scary how a lot of this is playing out.
(25:40):
So remember that other CLEO dynamic speaker I mentioned earlier,
Harvey white House. He says that if Turchin's prediction of
unrest in the United States is correct, we can actually
expect to see an increase in tightly knit groups who
use rituals with a threatening quality. But these ritual is
also promised great rewards for their members. And again I
(26:05):
have to remind us we're recording this a couple of
days after Charlottesville, and that describes that to a t
is a group with a threatening quality that's promising great
rewards to its members. What's the great reward in that case?
I wonder, well, I think that talking about greatness. They
so I've told a lot of people about this. Their
Vice actually made a video on the ground there. It's
(26:28):
about like minutes long. It's super upsetting, but I highly
recommend watching it to sort of get a first hand
account of what's going on there. When you when you
watch the people in these groups talking about why they're there,
a lot of it is about it comes down to
a cultural reclamation of the country and economic like they
(26:51):
feel like something's been taken away from them that they deserve,
and so I think that's what the groups are sort
of promising. It's like, if you part us have paid
in this you will reap rewards in the end. Okay,
So there's talking about like the return of say jobs,
uh so you know, manufacturing jobs in particular, that may
(27:11):
not actually be coming back. Then they're talking about like
some sort of a cultural focus that that either you know,
previously was in place or is misremembered as being um,
you know, more central than it was. Yeah, exactly. In fact,
like there's there's an idea along these lines. So remember
that eighteen twenties example. That's sort of like if we can,
(27:35):
as a entire society and with our government get it
together and try to pull together are for instance, make
our wages better and make sure everybody is employed, that
would be something that could stave this off. But basically
the argument is like there's so much chaos going on
(27:55):
with all of this, this complex system at work right
now that people like church and doubt that that's possible
at this point. Now. Church And also identifies three kinds
of violence that he said leads to these upheavals. He
calls these group on group violence. This is when you
see riots in modern day America, just like what we
were just talking about. There's groups against individuals and his
(28:19):
his example of this is lynchings. And then there's individuals
against groups, which we refer to as rampage killings. And
Urchin makes a point that we could identify a person
killing a group by themselves as terrorism, except he needs
to make a specific here in America. When this violence
(28:40):
is an American on American, we tend not to talk
about it in terms of terrorism. So his examples are
the Dark Knight shooting in Aurora or Timothy McVeigh. These
are usually rampage attacks that are directed in institutions like
education or government and church, and says they've grown by
a factor of twenty in the last generation. So this
(29:03):
is actually I have to provide a personal note aside here.
This is why I find it really troubling when I
see a positive reaction to violence against white supremacists or
white nationalists. We're talking about the like punching Nazis thing. Yeah,
there's a lot of this on the internet. There was
a lot of this right after that one I don't
(29:23):
remember this guy's name, but that that one guy who's
like a leader of one of these groups got punched
in the head earlier this year, and everybody was sort
of with schaden freud laughing at him, and then, uh,
you know, after this weekend, there's just an increase of
rhetoric from people who are friends and family with that
are saying like, yeah, this is great, let's get them,
you know. And and the rhetoric of using violence really
(29:48):
troubles me, and especially because it comes right back to
what Church and saying. He's saying, if you allowed these
three types of violence to grow, it's going to lead
to this up evil where it's going to be even worse.
And I for and I makes the world go blind,
right exactly. So you actually have something here that's a
quote of hope after that maybe ten minutes of dour
(30:11):
research prediction. Well, yeah, I have a couple of quotes here.
The first one is from Sergey A and Nephidoff, who
I mentioned earlier, one of the co authors with the Church,
and and he said in his Ian magazine piece quote,
we are rapidly approaching a historical cusp in with the
US will be particularly vulnerable to violent upheaval. This prediction
is not a prophecy. I don't believe the disaster is preordained,
(30:34):
no matter what we do. On the contrary, if we
understand the causes we have a chance to prevent it
from happening. But the first thing we have to do
is reverse the trend of ever growing inequality. And then
church In himself said, the descent is not inevitable. We
can avoid the worst, perhaps by switching to a less
harrowing track, perhaps by redesigning the roller coaster altogether. Yeah,
(31:00):
I um, I don't know if I a hundred percent
subscribe to Turchan's version of Cleo dynamics, but it does
seem a lot more grounded and quantitative data to me
than than other sort of predictive factors. I've talked about
on the show before about how my father thought the
world was gonna end like two years ago, and he
was like absolutely certain that there were It was exactly
(31:22):
like this, but it also like included historical events tied
into religious predictions, and he was certain the world was
gonna end. This is also like, uh, when we thought
like the Mayan predictions were gonna come true right or
well not weak, but you know, there there was a
lot of talk about about that, like, oh, is is
the world going to end in twelve because the mind's
predicted it. It's on these calendars. Yeah, I mean and
(31:44):
of course this comes back to weather forecasts again. You know,
it didn't rain on Wednesday, but they were saying it
was gonna gonna rain on Wednesday back when I checked
the weather on a Sunday. That doesn't mean the the
forecast was not based on scientific principles and and uh
an x up to patterns, but they're just too many
factors to properly chart. So and and to throw another
(32:06):
wrench into the works, this is where Turchands starts talking
about the two hundred years scale, and you alluded to
this earlier with the paper you referenced. He calls this
the secular cycle um and he talks about how there's
these two types of cycles. It's the fifty year wave
that we were just talking about. Then there's a longer
term oscillation that repeats every two hundred to three hundred years,
(32:26):
and depending on how these land, they can augment or
suppress those fifty year peaks. So his examples are the
Roman Empire, medieval France, and ancient China, with societies swinging
between peace and conflict every one hundred to one hundred
and fifty years. And he sees the United States as
a similar society to these previous empires, so he's predicting
(32:50):
that it will follow the same route. Now, he and
his associates, like I said, they call this the secular cycle.
They say it starts out first with an egalitarian society
where supply and demand for labor is roughly balanced out.
But then what happens is as the population grows, labor
begins to outstrip demands. Subsequently, you get elite classes that form.
(33:14):
This allows living standards for the poor to fall. Society
becomes top heavy with elites who start fighting for power,
and then political instability ensues and leads subsequently to collapse.
So his example of this, actually going back to that
other example earlier, is the Egyptian Uprising of eleven. He says,
you saw an interaction of the two cycles. They're explaining
(33:36):
events uh in Egypt, So he said, it seems like
Egypt's economy was growing and that poverty levels were low,
so you would have assumed that there would be stability.
But he argues that in a decade leading up to
the revolution, the country actually saw four times its amount
of graduates come out with no employment prospects. So for
(33:57):
church and it ultimately boils down. This is kind of
like a Marxist prediction, right, like it's based on economic factors,
how many workers you have, how many jobs are available,
how much money they've spent on education, so on. Alright,
on that note, let's take one more break, and when
we come back, we'll we'll discuss clear dynamics a little
bit more and then get into some of the some
of the criticisms and critiques. Thank alright, we're back. So
(34:24):
turch And he's actually taken the models of Cleo dynamics
and applied them as well to models of religious growth. Now,
one model he looks at here is linear. He says,
as believers start seeing the light quote unquote, the religion
will start to grow, right. But then he's got another model,
and he says religion can grow like a contagion sometime,
(34:46):
where converts increase exponentially. And so what he says is
he's he's mapped conversions for Islam in medieval Iran and
Spain and found that the data fits the contagion model
more closely than it does the linear model. There. Likewise,
he argues that there's models that explain the expansion of
Christianity in the first century a d. And Mormonism here
(35:10):
in the US since World War Two, so that's also
pretty interesting. Again, I don't know, I feel like you'd
really have to drill down deep to determine, like how
methodologically sound this is, um, But there is, like we said,
like there's this growing group of academics who are writing
about it and researching it and accumulating data to try
(35:30):
to see if it if it pans out, you know.
In researching all of this, I am, once again, in
my life, um disappointed that I have not read Isaac
Asimov's The Foundation books, because I know that what I
know of the books without getting into deep because I
don't want to spoil myself, is that it does concern
predictive models of the future and uh and and does
(35:52):
so you know, in great depth because it's Isaac Asimov,
So of course, of course you put a lot of
time into it. But sadly I have not. I have
not read those and did not have time to read
them before this recording. But I would love to hear
from anyone out there who has read the Foundation series
and and and has related inside on this topic. Yeah,
I'm curious if if those asthma seems like the kind
of guy who would explore through fiction like the arguments
(36:16):
against these kind of predictive models, right, because one thing
that people are concerned about is if you apply these
predictive models and then you start using them on a
policy level through government, then what happens when the predictive
model says things are going to get dire in in
the government suddenly becomes like really dictatorial trying to make
(36:38):
sure that that that negative outcome doesn't happen. Right, So
so you can get like a minority report kind of situation. Yeah,
it's kind of like envisioning. Okay, you're you're predicting the weather.
You're basing it on the natural state of the atmosphere
and weather patterns, and of course you're factoring and human
influence on the weather pattering patterns. But if you reach
(36:59):
the point where they humans can can and are intentionally
altering the weather, so like you know, I guess like
blasting tornadoes out of the sky or turning off her
acnes or diverting them, then you're you're having to factor
intentional human interaction, uh into the overall simulation and forecast
(37:19):
for the atmosphere. Yeah, wow, that's true. So that would
really that would be another factor added on to cleo dynamics.
Then is trying to figure out outside of the predictive models,
then what the influence of humans using the predictive models
upon the actual events would do to change the predictions.
I think so yeah. I mean, if you have individuals
(37:40):
who understand how it was working and are manipulating it,
then they have to factor that in. It's kind of like,
if you have one wizard in the world who can
bend uh natural law to their will, then that's one thing.
But then what if you have two wizards? Now it
seems like that that just doubles the complexity of the scenario. Well,
there is another wizard here, but he's not Churching and
(38:05):
so his name is Charles Hughes Smith and he writes
for Business Insider. I don't know necessarily that he considers
himself a cleo dynamicist. Is that what you would refer
to them as damn dynamos dynamo? Yeah? Maybe? Uh so Smith.
He's written about this in like I said, Business Insider,
(38:25):
in his own books. He has a website that's full
of this stuff. To the all of his theories, he
argues there are other reasons why we're looking at seeing
trouble somewhere between, he says, or two, so we can
put it off a couple of years. That's how he's frying.
I want to get all the Avatar sequels in before
that four or five movies. Man can't reme better start
(38:46):
cranking those out. So Smith says, there's four grand cycles.
And let me be clear. That eighty year cycle that
we were talking about that's floating around right now, that
is one of these four grand cycles. Now that that
first one is it's a generational cycle of eighty years,
that's every four generations, and it is said to lead
(39:08):
to nation changing social, political, and economic upheaval. This is
referenced in a book called The Fourth Turning by Willem
Strauss or William Strauss and Neil how And it also
argues that after eighty years, there are few humans who
can actually recall the last crisis. So your example of
World War two there, now, this is the one that
(39:29):
that's currently making the rounds uh. It's part of Hughes
sort of thing. His other cycles included here that we're
gonna hit peak oil, where there will be a depletion
of the global economy's reliance on fossil fuels, that credit
expansion and contraction will transition from a bubble to a collapse,
and that's subsequently going to lead to a global depression.
(39:50):
And I have to say from other articles, like all
of this doesn't really seem to be quantitatively mapped the
same way that Hurchin and other cleo dynamos are. This
seems to be more based on him citing other books
and he that includes Churchen's work. He does cite urchins work,
(40:12):
but he's providing observational, qualitative examples. And the last, the
last factor he throws in here is a hundred years
cycle of price inflation that is met by a stagnation
of wages. So this this seems a little bit closer
to what Churchens talking about here that leads to shortages, famine,
and crisis. He says this is because humanity is a
(40:33):
species tries to expand into every ecological niche when food
and energy supplies are rising, and so this he calls
a hundred years cycle of rising prices for food, energy,
and water. Uh And and Smith's argument is essentially, the
government might be able to deal with any one of
(40:53):
these things, but four of these things at once might
prove to be too much for any institution of human beings.
So I don't know where I really fall in terms
of these arguments, Like, if you apply traditional syllogistic logic
to these arguments, do they do they still hold up?
Does the evidence for these claims actually warrant a connection
(41:14):
between them? I'm not sure about that, So I want
to throw that out there. This is just we're accumulating
and presenting to you the variations on these cyclical theories.
All right, well, let's let's get into some of the
the arguments against cleo dynamics, some of the critiques of
cleo dynamics. So the weekend, you know, maybe wave this
out a little bit, right, So some people are arguing
(41:37):
that the mathematical models may simply be a case of
seeing patterns in random data. So so once again the hindsight,
Yeah exactly. Uh. And then also the data set that
Turchin is working with has been criticized for being too
short because it only covers a period from seventeen eighty
to So maybe cleo dynamics does work, but humanity probably
(41:59):
needs to back up another couple of centuries of good
record keeping before we can actually apply it in any sense. Also,
historians in general argue that cleo dynamics weakness is that
when it attempts to make predictions based on trends when
historical information availability is usually patchy at best. Right, So
(42:20):
our records are preserved or destroyed based on chance, for instance,
our palam sess episode, right, uh, and knowledge tends to
pool around narrow subject areas. The example that immediately comes
to mind for me on this, pop culture wise is
The Strain. I've started watching The Strain again. Oh man, well,
(42:41):
I'm actually I'm watching season three. I haven't hit the
final season yet, but yeah, they've got that book the
Lumen that is like the book of all the answers
on how to deal with these vampires translates to how
to kill vampire basically, yeah, yeah, And it's like they're
facing in the world of the Strain, this this total
(43:01):
upheaval as vampires start taking over the world and killing
off the human race. But the only record of how
to deal with this is in this one book that
takes what two seasons to find ye, and then they
find it and it takes another season to translate it.
So yeah, I think that's like, you know, that's obviously
a fictional example. But to be fair, you know, our
(43:23):
record keeping is hasn't been that great until recently. Yeah,
actually a recent by the time it's published, as it
will be a recent episode. But Joe and I did
an episode on Greek Fire, the Byzantine secret weapon, so
secret in fact that that it's a mystery regarding exactly
what it entailed in terms of formula and the system
of deployment. Yeah, you just have to go under King's landing.
(43:46):
That's where it's Okay, that's that's true, alright. So I
mentioned the you know, hindsight is because again that's one
of the criticisms here, that it's one thing to inflict
cyclical order on the past, because historians have been doing
this for ages. Right, Even our systems of the system
of years or classification of the ages and empires are
boiling down of of the past into narratives is ultimately
(44:09):
a form of this UM. And then plus there's always
the potential impact of unforeseen events that buck perceived patterns.
So we've talked a lot about outside context events um
the terminology coined by Ian and Banks before, but there's
also a similar notion explored in black swan theory. So
(44:30):
this was this is an idea that came from an
seem Nicholas Taleb and he he uh he takes this
to the name of this black swan theory from the
fact that before the discovery of Australia, scientific observation suggested
that all swans were white. Huh okay, there was no
such thing as a black swan as there uh was
(44:51):
a you know, no more than there was a green
or a purple one. But then the European explorers discovered
the world down under and they discovered black swans, so
that which was you know, possible but but had not
been observed yet, became reality. So the black swan here
was an outlier existing beyond the realm of reasonable expectation.
(45:14):
But the human mind depends on pattern recognition, so to
Leb writes in his Black Swan book that we humans
uh think up explanations for an outlier's occurrence after we
encounter it to make it explainable and predictable. So, you know,
the idea here is that we were looking back in time,
we're looking at history, and we're just reinterpreting black swan
(45:35):
events as being something that could have been predicted and foreseen,
and therefore thinking they will be foreseen uh perceived, perceivable,
and predictable in our future. But by their very nature,
outliers are unpredictable, and according to to to leave Uh,
this implies the inability to predict the course of history,
given how much outliers um have impacted our past, such
(45:58):
as he brings up the nineteen eighty seven market crash,
the demise of the Soviet block, uh, the September eleven
two one terrorist attacks. How these drastically informed the shape
of human events. But we're not necessarily predictable. Now that's,
of course, you can get into a whole argument about
to what degree these were predictable, But that's kind of
(46:20):
playing into his argument to saying that again you look
back hindsight. It's one thing to look back and say, no,
this was predictable, look at these patterns, but are you
just informing? Are you are you just enforcing a pattern
on the past. Now, all of this being said, I
want to stress what I restress what I said earlier
is that there you don't see a lot of people saying, oh,
cleo dynamics, who just is just all crap? Just throw
(46:42):
it all out the generally, your argument is, I don't
think that these models are as precise as you would
want them to be, or that we can predict the
future as well as as the proponents of cleo dynamics
are claiming. Right, Yeah, And also like this isn't a
again bringing it back to minority report, It's not like
(47:03):
if we get cleo dynamics just right, we're gonna have
the equivalent of psychics in a bathtub that tell us
you know when crimes are going to be committed, Like
and even that, as we've seen in that Philip K.
Dick story, is fraught with peril. Right, So where does
that leave us at the end here? Well, I think
what we have to ask, and I'm asking you too, listeners,
(47:23):
is this a valid scientific method? Like like, is cleo
dynamics something we should be continuing to look into? And
like should we be following what's going on in this journal? Uh?
And then how does you know somebody like a smith
for instance, like how did his predictions which don't seem
to be as as grounded in data sets? How do
(47:44):
how do those play together with it? So I'm curious
about that. But then also many of you, like myself
are probably wondering during these events of turmoil we're experiencing, now,
how do we prevent this violence? Right? Well, Urchen, he says,
if I'm right, this is how I think we can
help things. He argues, first of all, inequality is almost
(48:06):
always a bad thing for societies, So he says, to
prevent violence, we have to learn from history, and to
do that, we need to create more jobs for our
graduates while acting decisively to reduce inequality. But others are
arguing maybe a revolution, maybe uprisings, These are for the
(48:27):
best because they can remedy social stresses. For example, people
look back at the Civil rights movement and they say,
was that a bad thing? What came out of the
Civil rights movement is quote good, right, But there were
certainly violent upheaval and turmoil during that period of time
as well. I guess it depends on what what uprising
(48:49):
you're looking at, because certainly, you know, it's one thing
to say, you know, the civil rights movement was it
was a positive movement, but nobody wants an uprising, say
like the kind we see in the hands tail Yeah exactly,
And I think to like when you're talking about it
in those terms, like it's sort of like talking about
a fever burning and illness out of your body, right,
And I don't know. I don't know. I try to
(49:12):
as much as possible. I try to fall back on
non violence and so any ways in which we can
try to avoid that. Look, I'm gonna be supportive of
So I look at this and I see what turch
and saying. It doesn't sound illogical to me. It sounds like, yeah, sure,
if there were more jobs available for graduates in this country,
that would be great. I don't I don't know how
(49:33):
to do that, right, And then how do you reduce
inequality across a broad band? You know, I mean, it's
something we've been working on for decades. Now. We get
into some of those wicked problems, right exactly. Yeah, So
if you don't know what we're speaking of there, we
have another episode similar to this one actually kind of
looking at broader sociological issues about a theory called wicked problems.
(49:56):
If you go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com,
type in Wicked Problems that episode of them up, or
you can find it on any of your podcast readers. Yeah,
but it does get into a lot of a lot
of the similar territory here, So I would highly recommend
that episode if you found this episode of very thought,
Let's try to uh on the landing page for this episode,
let's try to link back to Wicked Problems. Okay, So
I asked you that question. Do you think it's a
(50:18):
valid scientific method? If you do, If you don't, there's
ways to let us know. We're on social media. You
can talk to us about Cleo Dynamics on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler,
and Instagram. We also have our Facebook discussion module up
where if you want to have just like a closed
conversation with people who are like fans of the podcast. Specifically,
(50:40):
it's a closed group on Facebook. Uh, try to join
us over there. You can find the link to that
on our Facebook page. Right. Yeah, And you know, I
just in all of this, I do want to stress
that I think there is optimism in this topic. Um,
you know, the very fact that people are doing this
research lends to optimism. So I would I would encourage
everyone to take the optimist excite of this because for starters,
(51:03):
optimism is a place of action. You can you can
act out of optimism. Uh, It's often very difficult to
act in any constructive way out of a state of pessimism.
So so yeah, take take this as you know, individuals
who are trying to use the best tools available to
us to figure out where we're going, and how how
to get to the places we want to go, how
(51:24):
to avoid all the strife, you know, and and and
maybe even get to that point where we eventually have
some sort of a post scarcity society and will be
arguably largely immune to some of these societal pitfalls. Exactly.
I think you said that perfectly, all right, And uh yeah, finally,
if you want to get in touch with us directly,
(51:46):
then you know which email addressed to turn to. That
is blow the mind at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com.
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