Are we condemned to repeat history?

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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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

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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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

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 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 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 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 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

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. 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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

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.

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 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

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 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,

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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

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. 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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.

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

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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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,

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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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.