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	Forecasting America's Destiny ... and the World's

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 25-Nov-2010
25-Nov-10 News -- Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving!

Web Log - November, 2010

25-Nov-10 News -- Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving!

Today's world isn't so different from the 1600s

Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving!

One of the properties of a fractal is that you can zoom into a tiny portion of it, and it still looks like the original fractal.

Fractal

Fractal

From the point of view of Generational Dynamics, history is like a fractal. Today there are about 250 countries in the world. But if you go back to the time of the first Thanksgiving, there were about 300 Indian tribes in what is now the U.S., and the interactions between those tribes were similar in many ways to the interactions of countries today.

Pick any moment in the 20th century, and there were probably some 30-40 wars going on in the world at that moment. So it's reasonable to assume that there were around 40 wars going on in the United States in 1620, and perhaps several hundred around the world.

So let's zoom in to one place, southern New England in 1620, when the Pilgrims arrived. Little is known about the history of the region prior to 1620, but there's evidence of a major crisis war among the Wampanoag, Narragansett and Mohawk tribes in the 1590s, devastating all three tribes.

We have no way of knowing the details of what the Indian tribes had fought over, but chances are it was over what most wars are fought over -- land. Each tribe wanted the best hunting, fishing and farmland for its own use, so its people wouldn't starve.

Wampanoag chief Massasoit was most likely in the Hero generation, a warrior of the previous crisis war, and by 1620, the tribe was in a generational Awakening era, as described in Generational Dynamics: American History.

So, when the pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock in 1620, in the midst of the Wampanoag tribe, they had little trouble developing a pleasant cooperative relationship with Massasoit and his Awakening era tribe. The Wampanoag taught the colonists how to hunt and fish, and in autumn of 1621, they all shared a Thanksgiving meal of turkey and venison.

This friendliness extended to trade. Before long, there was a mutually beneficial financial arrangement between the Indians and the colonists. The colonists acted as intermediaries through whom the Indians developed a thriving business selling furs and pelts to the English and European markets, and they used the considerable money they earned to purchase imported manufactured goods.

By the 1660s, the region was entering a generational Crisis era, and things started to go wrong.

Massasoit died in 1660, leading to xenophobia and some dramatic changes. Historians Eric B. Schultz, Michael J. Tougias point out: "The relationship between English and Native American had grown inordinately more complex over forty years. Many of the important personal ties forged among men like Massasoit and Stephen Hopkins, Edward Winslow, and William Bradford had vanished. The old guard was changing on both sides, and with it a sense of history and mutual struggle that had helped to keep the peace."

Massasoit was replaced as Chief by his oldest son, Wamsutta -- who died under mysterious circumstances that were blamed on the colonists. The younger brother, Metacomet, nicknamed King Philip by the colonists, became Chief.

Things REALLY began to turn sour in the 1660s for another reason: Styles and fashions changed in England and in Europe. Suddenly, furs and pelts went out of style, and the major source of revenue for the Indians almost disappeared. This resulted in a financial crisis for the Indians, and for the colonists as well, since they were the intermediaries in sales to the Indians.

But that's not all. Roughly 60-70 years had passed since the end of the last tribal war. The Mohawk War (1663-80) began, and created pressure from the west. The colonists were establishing ever-larger colonies in the east. In this pressure cooker atmosphere, the Wampanoag tribe, led by a young chief anxious to prove himself, allied with their former enemy, the Narragansett tribe, to fight their new enemy, the colonists.

There were numerous provocations in the 1660s, with many Indians brought to trial. The trial process was brought to a head in 1671, when King Philip himself was tried for a series of Indian hostilities, and required by the court to surrender all of his arms; he complied by surrendering only a portion of them.

After that, the trial process seems to have fallen apart, as the colonists began to lose their patience and willingness to compromise. Trials were still held, but they became mere provocations: they were kangaroo courts with the results preordained, and the Indian defendants were always guilty.

These mutual provocations kept escalating, until King Philip's War began with Philip's attack on the colonists on Cape Cod.

The war was extremely savage and engulfed the Indians and the colonists from Rhode Island to Maine. There were atrocities on both sides, and the war ended with King Philip's head displayed on stick. His wife and child were sold into slavery. King Phillip's War was the most devastating war in American history on a percentage basis, with 800 of the 52,000 colonists killed. It was equally devastating for the Indians.

Now, if we zoom back out to the fractal world of today, it's easy to believe we're nothing like those people in the 1600s, with our iPods and skyscrapers, but really, the basics are all the same.

We have one crisis with continual provocations by North Korea, a nation desperately close to starvation. We try to deal with the provocations with international inquiries and sanctions, and demands that the North Koreans surrender their nuclear weapons, but nothing happens. At this writing, a US carrier strike group is headed for the region, in response to North Korea's latest warlike acts.

Another crisis today is in Europe, where people used to derive great incomes from hedge funds and real estate, but as the bubbles burst, they've lost their primary sources of revenue and earnings. We're watching an unfolding financial crisis, an "age of austerity," and riots and demonstrations spreading across the region, as countries face insurmountable debt.

Around the world there are "megacities," each containing tens of millions of people living in shacks or abandoned warehouses, with no access to farmland. Families in poverty in those cities often survive by foraging in large garbage dumps for scraps of food left over by people who can afford to buy food. As population continues to increase, these megacities multiply. These problems have gotten many times worse in the last two centuries because medical discoveries have lowered the infant and child mortality rate from 40-50% to 1-2%, leading to huge masses of young men needing to feed their families, and ready to fight wars. That's why 20th century wars killed many times more people than 19th century wars.

So all the iPods in the world don't change the fact that we're still the same human beings with the same DNA, facing the same challenges that human beings have faced for millennia and, indeed, the same kinds of challenges that all forms of life face.

And so, as you zoom from the world into your own home and share Thanksgiving dinner with your family and friends, think about how your little home and family is like one of those homes and families in the 1600s, a tiny dot in a huge world where anything can happen.

(Comments: For reader comments, questions and discussion, see the 25-Nov-10 News -- Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving! thread of the Generational Dynamics forum. Comments may be posted anonymously.) (25-Nov-2010) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 25-Nov-2010 25-Nov-10 News -- Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving!

Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving!

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 25-Nov-2010
25-Nov-10 News -- Have a very merry fractal Thanksgiving!