Amerika

Humans tend to view things in the moment: the dog over there has immutable properties that do not succumb to time. That is, he will be forever as he is now, or at least, this is how we approach thinking about him until we remind ourselves of time, which we really do not want to think about because we are mortal.

For those of us living in physical reality, everything runs in cycles. These consist of peaks and troughs like a sine wave as the passage of the thing tends through a quasi-Hegelian process toward the mean. The mean at each time changes based on where it is in a cycle.

A smart leader knows how to avoid pushing too far because he wants to keep his organization in the middle of a cycle. This means somewhere between destruction and creation a happy medium exists where the two are in balance, and this time can remain a golden age for quite some duration.

When Rome seemed to be at its peak of wealth, its death was already calling. It had pushed too far and become inertial. Its momentum was carrying it to the inevitable end. Our civilization has already gone too far, but if we peel back those changes and focus instead on finding a happy balance, we can restore our goodness and prosperity.

Tags: cycles, cyclic history, rome