taxes, the economy, and how people were with each other through periods of boom and bust and peace and war,
and how they unfolded in cyclical ways, like the tide coming in and out.
I saw that when these struggles took the form of healthy competition that encouraged human energy to be put into
productive activities, they produced productive internal orders and prosperous times and when those energies took
the form of destructive internal fighting, they produced internal disorder and painfully difficult times. I saw why
the swings between productive order and destructive disorder typically evolved in cycles driven by logical
cause/effect relationships and how they happen in all countries for mostly the same reasons. I saw that those who
rose to achieve greatness did so because of a confluence of key forces coming together to produce that greatness
and those who declined did so because these forces dissipated.
I also saw that going from one extreme to another in a long cycle has been the norm, not the exception—that it is a
very rare country in a very rare century that doesn’t have at least one boom/harmonious/prosperous period and one
depression/civil war/revolution, so we should expect both. Yet, I saw how most people thought, and still think, that
it is implausible that they will experience a period that is more opposite than similar to that which they have
experienced. That is because the really big boom periods and really big depression/revolution periods come along
about once in a lifetime, and once-in-a-lifetime experiences are naturally surprising…and because the swings
between great and terrible times tend to be far apart, the futures we encounter are more likely to be more opposite
than similar to those that we had and expect.
For example, my dad and most of his peers who went through the Great Depression and World War II (which came
about because of the Roaring ’20s debt boom) never imagined the post-World War II economic boom because it
was more opposite than similar to what they had experienced. I understand why, given those experiences, they
wouldn’t think of borrowing or putting their hard-earned savings into the stock market, so it’s understandable that
they missed out on profiting from the boom. Similarly, I understand why, decades later, those who only
experienced debt-financed booms and never experienced depression and war would borrow a lot to speculate and
would consider depression and war implausible. The same is true with money: money used to be “hard” (i.e.,
linked to gold) after World War II until governments made money “soft” (i.e., fiat) to accommodate borrowing and
prevent entities from going broke in the 1970s. As a result, most people now believe that they should borrow more
of it even though borrowing and debt-financed booms have historically led to depressions and civil wars.
I have come to believe that while the lessons and warnings of history are clear if one looks for them, most people
don’t look for them because most people learn from their experiences and a single lifetime is too short to give
them those lessons and warnings that they need. In this chapter I will share with you the lessons and warnings that
I think I have learned from my experiences and explorations. Remember that while I am doing my best to be as
accurate as possible, I am not sure that my perspective is right, so I am simply presenting how I see things for you
to evaluate for yourself.
To do that, in the first part of this chapter I will take you through what I believe are timeless and universal
principles of how domestic orders typically change from one set of conditions to the next. The way I see it, at any
moment in time there are both 1) the existing set of conditions that include the existing domestic and world orders
and 2) timeless and universal forces that cause changes in these conditions. Most people tend to pay too much
attention to 1) what exists relative to 2) the timeless and universal forces that produce the changes. I want to do the
opposite because understanding the timeless and universal forces that produce changes is most important. I will do
this exploration in two parts. In this chapter I will focus on the timeless and universal forces that produce the
changes— including the timeless and universal drivers behind them and the six stages of the archetypical cycle—
and in Chapter 9 I will delve into these six stages in much greater depth and look at where the US now stands
within this context.
The Timeless and Universal Forces That Produce Changes to the Internal
Order
The following four timeless and universal dynamic forces are those that I believe are the most important in driving
changes.
1) The Wealth and Power Class Struggle Dynamic