[Note: This content is for entertainment purposes only]

I WAS FIRST introduced to the concept of cycles through my career in financial services. The idea was that the natural world operates in waves, recurring patterns or “cycles” of varying lengths of time. The general premise is that people are part of nature and thus generate predictable patterns–and anything of predictive value was, of course, deemed useful to investors.

One longer-term social cycle that is starting to get attention is the eighty-year cycle; history has produced some evidence that a serious calamity occurs roughly every eighty years. The most recent “serious” calamity was World War Two–which started eighty years ago in 1939 (we didn’t enter until 1941).

Eighty years before that it was the Civil War, which started in 1861. Eighty years before that? The U.S. Revolutionary War was still underway. 

If this clock is right, things could get messy any time now. Now most people argue that these events could occur every eighty years by chance, but others offer explanations.
One such explanation is that after a serious calamity, it takes several generations before the memory of the horrors and deprivation subside, creating a sense of complacency.

Even if the eighty-year cycle wasn’t signaling an imminent calamity, an objective look at the world suggests that we might indeed be in for one: nationalist candidates are gaining favor everywhere, versions of the Truth are batted about like ping-pong balls, and we’re back to picking sides reminiscent of fascism versus socialism like Europe in the 1930s.

[What should a person do who buys into this voodoo? –Hint: Read 1984 again]

 

WRH