table, to help convey the picture, I converted most of our measures into colors with bright green being a very favorable reading and bright red being a very unfavorable reading. It is the average of these readings that defines at what stage the cycle is in, in much the same way as it was the average of the eight readings of power that I used as my measure of total power. Like those power readings, while one could reconfigure them to produce marginally different readings, they are broadly indicative in a by-and-large way. I am showing this to exemplify the typical process, not to look at any specific cases. I will look at the specific cases and their readings in the conclusion of this study. More specifically, from studying history it appears to me that the stages of the archetypical big internal cycle from internal order to internal disorder and back are as follows: Stage 1 when the new order begins and the new leadership consolidates power, which leads to… …Stage 2 when the resource-allocation systems and government bureaucracies are built and refined, which if done well leads to… …Stage 3 when there is peace and prosperity, which leads to… …Stage 4 when there are great excesses in spending and debt and the widening of wealth and political gaps, which leads to… …Stage 5 when there are very bad financial conditions and intense conflict, which leads to… …Stage 6 when there are civil wars/revolutions, which leads to… …Stage 1, which leads to Stage 2, etc., with the whole cycle happening over again. Each stage presents a different set of conditions that the people facing them have to deal with. Some of these circumstances are much more difficult than others to resolve. For example, early in a long-term debt cycle, when there is plenty of capacity of governments to create debt to finance spending, it is easier to deal with the circumstances at hand than late in the long-term debt cycle when there is little or no capacity to create money and credit to finance spending. For these reasons the range of possible paths forward and the challenges that leaders face depend on where in the cycle a country is. These different stages present different challenges that require different qualities, understandings, and skills from leaders in order to effectively deal with them.1 How well those facing these circumstances—e.g., you facing your circumstances and our leaders facing our collective circumstances—understand and adapt to them affects how good or bad the outcomes will be within the range of possibilities that exist given the circumstances. Different cultures have different established ways of approaching these circumstances. Those leaders and cultures that understand them and can adapt to their circumstances will produce much better outcomes than those who don’t. That is where timeless and universal principles come in. While the length of time spent in each of these stages can vary a lot, the evolution through them generally takes 100 years, give or take a lot and with big undulations within the cycle. This evolution occurs because of logical cause/effect relationships in which existing conditions propel the changes that create the new set of conditions that propel the next changes and so on like a perpetual-motion machine. Because a given set of conditions creates a limited set of possibilities, by properly identifying the conditions and understanding the cause/effect relationships, one can improve one’s imagination of the possibilities of what will come next. The cycle’s archetypical evolution transpires as shown in the following diagrams.2 Like evolution in general, the evolution of internal orders typically occurs in a cyclical way in which one stage typically leads to the next through a progression of stages that repeat and, in the process, evolve to higher levels of development. For example, Stage 1 (when the new internal order is created by new leaders who came to power via a civil war/revolution) normally comes after Stage 6 (when there is a civil war/revolution, which is the low point in the cycle), which leads to the next stage and so on up to Stage 3 (which is the high point in the Big Cycle because there is a lot of peace and prosperity in that stage), which gets overdone in Stages 4 and 5 and so on, leading to the next new order (Stage 1). That happens over and over again in an upward-evolving way. Again, that archetypical cycle typically takes 100 years, give or take a lot.3 Within each of these big cycles are similar, smaller cycles. For example, there is a short- term debt cycle that leads to bubbles and recessions that come along roughly every 10 years, there are political cycles that move political controls between the right and the left that come along with roughly equal frequency, etc. Every country is going through them, and many of them are at different stages. For example, China and India are at very different stages than the United States and most European countries. What stages they are at in relation to other countries affects the relations between countries and is the primary determinant of the whole world order. We will explore all of these in the last chapter of this book rather than digress into them now. These cycles have taken place for as long as there has been recorded civilization (and probably before) so many cycles are linked together like so (figuratively speaking), and they are upward-sloping because of evolutionary gains that are made over time. The following chart shows our estimates of China’s absolute powers and its figurative Big Cycles going back to the year 600. This is an ultra-simplified chart (e.g., there were many more dynasties and complexities) that I am presenting in this way so you can see how this evolution transpired from the 50,000-foot level.