Yes, Eric, I see the next Saeculum as a megacrisis that will likely see the end of Western civilization. I see the saeculum after the American and French Revolutions as the High of the
Modern Age, that established thenormative institutions while still preserving much of the old value systems. This is the period when dueling and public judicial torture and other vestiges of the middle ages (like Britains last public drawing and quartering) finally faded out. The value systems of the Modern Age weren't truly established until after the US Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war.. The cycle just ending was the most personally and economically fulfilling,and saw the products if modernity spread worldwide. It however, also saw the West lose all sense of confidence and conviction, as both traditional Christianity and modernism emerged tarnished. Public Christanity, birthrates, the teaching of Latin and Greek to the educated, the empires, all the things that had defined the civilization that had emerged in the wake of antiquity's collapse. I think this crisis will culminate in the end of the US empire, the fracturing of the EU, and the end of the West's privileged position in the world.

Of course, I might also beat this poor horse right under the ground by postulating that there is a SuperSaeculum, with each MegaSaeculum as a turning within it. Thus, the Dark Ages were a recovery, the High Middle Ages an Awakening where new value systems were born the Renaissance cycle an Unraveling, and the Modern Age the crisis of the postRoman world. The new cycle will start, and be the PostMidern SuperSaeculum, who will look back on this civiization as the lost golden age, as they huddle miserably together during the long polar night, bemoaning the Fall of the Internet that cut them off from mist of the wisdom of their ancestors.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

I'm not sure I see the Glorious Revolution as different from Depression/WWII

That makes the Glorious outward like the Depression and disrupts the pattern.[/QUOTE]

Originally Posted by Chas'88

Again, I'm moving more and more towards how we mythologize history and how that mythology impacts us.

~Chas'88

But if the historical correlation doesn't fit, how can you do that? A revision on your part would seem advisable, as you continue on your interesting quest.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Yes, Eric, I see the next Saeculum as a megacrisis that will likely see the end of Western civilization. I see the saeculum after the American and French Revolutions as the High of the
Modern Age, that established the normative institutions while still preserving much of the old value systems. This is the period when dueling and public judicial torture and other vestiges.... (?)....

1780s-1860s as a High is not a good correlation. but whatever....

Do you have a vision of what will replace Western Civilization in the 22nd Century?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

That makes the Glorious outward like the Depression and disrupts the pattern.

It's a good point, as I said; my only reply is that the previous 2T was very much more internal, and it was the major Revolution in British history, which climaxed in the 4T.

It probably wouldn't change my astrological view of it though, since the USA horoscope didn't exist in the 1680s/90s. My forecast is only based on one prior instance, the Civil War, (plus the other two being more focused in the 9th house of foreign affairs), so it may not work out. We'll see. But I noticed that the USA became a world power in the 1890s when Neptune crossed over the Descendant (into the upper houses of the chart, and the house of war), but in the 1970s it crossed back over the Ascendant and went below the horizon, and we have been pulling in our horns more and more since then, although counter-trends have happened too like PNAC.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

Yes, Eric, I see the next Saeculum as a megacrisis that will likely see the end of Western civilization. I see the saeculum after the American and French Revolutions as the High of the
Modern Age, that established thenormative institutions while still preserving much of the old value systems. This is the period when dueling and public judicial torture and other vestiges

I am still hoping that the 2020s will see enough transformation that an ending of "Western Civilization" will have happened by then, fitting it to continue in altered form, and receiving more alteration as we go. The "Decline of the West" began in the 1890s and World War One, your "mega-awakening." But this "West" was seen as the Renaissance era of Western conquest and exploration. That has already ended; attempts like P-NAC to resurrect it notwithstanding.

If the 1780s/90s was the beginning of "Western Civilization," then its meaning is democracy and republics. If you really see that as ending in this century, then I wonder what would replace it except a new Dark Age of tyranny. That would be not a very high new "High." We'll just have to climb back someday, in that case, and do it all again. I tend to see the principle of democracy as still viable; it just needs periodic reforms, and we are more than overdue. The proposals for reform are out there now; we just need more vision and courage, and to put the 3T-Reaganoid ideologies in the waste-basket where they belong. They are what is blocking reform now, and ONLY they. Why can't we unblock this, during THIS 4T? Why must we conceive of an end to democracy in a whole "mega-crisis," rather than just admit that some outdated and temporary 3T ideologies need to be outvoted?

See above. Tentative name, Hyperborean civilization.

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

See above. Tentative name, Hyperborean civilization.

I don't see such a vision "above." Flesh out what Hyperborean Civilization would be, please.

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

Ok, but why is regulation the only variable for consideration here, and exactly which measures created the panic?

There is no variable under consideration. The measures taken in the 1930's were not experiments intended to extend human knowledge. They were policies implemented by politicians for political reasons.

Nevertheless, the policies had the rather desirable effect of eliminating panics. Considering we just had a panic don't you thing taking a look at what was done back then just might be worth a spin?

It isn't a textbook case of ceteris parabus because the financial industry, monetary system, population, and general economy wasn't exactly static between Glass-Steagall and Graham-Leach-Bliley.

So? Why is this a problem? You aren't going to learn anything or achieve anything simply worrying over stuff you cannot control. You do the best job you can, but you don't just wring your hands.

Which changes were necessary to deal with modernization of international economies and which changes triggered the panic?

Since there weren't any relevant changes that were "necessary to deal with modernization of international economies" this isn't really an issue. As for which changes explicitly did the job, we don't know. But should that stop us from repeating the experiment? Can you say that the consequences of what was done in the 1930's (implement very high tax rates, Glass-Steagall etc.) were worse than the consequences of the Iraq war? If we can do the war, why not the higher tax thing?

What if external forces or other internal forces (access to and quality of education, popular media culture, proliferation of relatively new and relatively untested medications, shifts toward factory farming, changes in popular religious belief, just to name a few things that might positively or negatively affect a population's economy in the long run) contributed more significantly than some regulation about which hoops an investor has to jump through?

Since what we are talking about is investor overvaluation of financial assets, investor behavior is obviously relevant. It is hard to see how any of the things you listed would have a significant effect on this parameter. So why suggest them?

It is well established that financial panics result from asset bubbles. Not all bubbles lead to panics. but you need a bubble to get a panic. So one way to not have panics is not have bubbles. Is there any reason to suspect that blocking bubbles will cause harm. Well we did block bubbles for almost fifty years after the last panic in 1933, and the economy did not collapse, in fact it did rather well. So is there any rational reason to be fearful that suppressing bubbles will hurt the economy? Will suppressing bubbles affect people? It will affect investors adversely, and so it is rational for them to oppose such policies. Since investors are citizens and pay taxes, they have a right to representation. The Republican party, for example, is absolutely committed to stopping any attempt to raise taxes by even small margins and would not countenance a return to the sort of taxes that would affect investor behavior sufficiently to suppress bubbles..

But... even if we could identify every competing variable...

But you don't have to. I don't know any scientist who does this. You start with a list of reasonable variables and proceed from there. Most variables don't have a big impact and you can ignore them. Other you try to control for as best you can.

I'm not saying that social science is useless or a waste of time, either, but the most it can do on its own is raise new questions and add some meat to the very subjective social debates of the day.

OK fine

I mean, it's one thing to prove that smaller classes result in better educated students, and you could probably even show a strong relationship all the way to average community incomes. However, that study isn't suddenly going to change the way every voter and politician feels about taxes, not the same way or timeframe that a breakthrough study on a new drug can put that drug in pharmacies.

But why would you expect that?

I edited my post above. I am typing this out on my phone. A full "vision" will have to wait until I get home.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

But if the historical correlation doesn't fit, how can you do that? A revision on your part would seem advisable, as you continue on your interesting quest.

With time everything becomes myth, and through myth anything is possible.

You see it in small ways in the ways we "retell" our memories naturally in our lives. Quite close to the event we remember it quite well and have all the "dirty" and "uneven" parts of the story that don't fit as part of the story. However as we retell the story again and again, we subconsciously re-write those memories and clean up the stories, until a more and more fictionalized account of the event is remembered by us. This is an actual phenomenon that occurs in your brain naturally. I've caught myself in a few instances where I have seen myself re-remember something not exactly the way I should remember it.

That's one thought I've been coming to dwell on more and more. You find the concept in Northrop Frye, but also other writers and critics throughout the ages. I forget which ancient Greek coined the idea where he imagined going to an island where he discovered all the gods and goddesses were once real people who'd lived so long ago they'd been built up in cultural memory as Gods, but I know one of them did that.

The past is a fiction, the future is a story yet untold, and thus the present is the only "reality".

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by JohnMc82

..

But the issue at hand is the megasaeculum. A four saeculum pattern was proposed as a repeating cycle. Shouldn't it be necessary to show evidence for this concept before it is simply accepted to exist? A sequence of four repeating saecula requires that you have at least eight saecula to look at to see if the pattern even exists. For example, a megacrisis features a revolutionary 4T. The example given was the saeculum that contained the American revolution. It was the only example given. How can you claim a repetitive pattern exists with one instance? Shouldn't you have to take a look at the 4T four saecula before (i.e. the Plague crisis) to see if that 4T was revolutionary like the American revolution 4T? If you do you will see it wasn't. Shouldn't this be a problem?

A good practice might be to check out some of the facts before coming up with a conjecture. There really is no reason to believe that the megasaeculum, as defined in the first few posts, exists.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

But the issue at hand is the megasaeculum. I four saeculum pattern was proposed as a repeating cycle. Shouldn't it be necessary to show evidence for this concept before it is simply accepted to exist? A sequence of four repeating saecula requires that you have at least eigth saeculum to look at to see if the pattern even exists. For example, a megacrisis features a revolutionary 4T. The example given was the saeculum that contained the American revolution. it was the only example given. How can you claims a patterne exists with one instance? Shouldn't you have to take look at the 4T four saecula before (i.e. the Plague crisis) to see if that 4T was revolutionary like the American revolution 4T? If you do you will see it wasn't. Shouldn't this be a problem?

A good practice might be to check out some of the facts before coming up with a conjecture. There really is no reason to believe that the megasaeculum, as defined in the first few posts, exists.

Amen, amen.

The blockage of bubbles probably requires the presence of people who remember the last period of economic distress. With their eventual disappearance, would younger people exercise prudence?

Originally Posted by Mikebert

But the issue at hand is the megasaeculum. I four saeculum pattern was proposed as a repeating cycle. Shouldn't it be necessary to show evidence for this concept before it is simply accepted to exist? A sequence of four repeating saecula requires that you have at least eigth saeculum to look at to see if the pattern even exists. For example, a megacrisis features a revolutionary 4T. The example given was the saeculum that contained the American revolution. it was the only example given. How can you claims a patterne exists with one instance? Shouldn't you have to take look at the 4T four saecula before (i.e. the Plague crisis) to see if that 4T was revolutionary like the American revolution 4T? If you do you will see it wasn't. Shouldn't this be a problem?

A good practice might be to check out some of the facts before coming up with a conjecture. There really is no reason to believe that the megasaeculum, as defined in the first few posts, exists.

This is a good point for a number of reasons, but the most powerful may be the simple force of progress. We can study cycles in fixed media, so the existance of cycles in the 10,000 year long Agricultural Age (I don't think there were, but assume them for the point of discussion) should be easier to see than ones stratttling the Agricultural, Industrial and Information Ages.

Then there is the Super-saeculum of 16 saecula. Assuming that, we should be in some degree of sync with the 4th or 5th century. At the next higher level, we would be looking into prehistory for our analog. At these the time scales, I find it hard to believe that the links can be more than tenuous.

But for all of that, the megasaeculum can be a real cycle, just not one that is crystal clear. Too many things have changed over that span: generation and saecular length, human longevity, the rate and expanse of infomation gathering and transfer, and productivity in general.

Originally Posted by TimWalker

The blockage of bubbles probably requires the presence of people who remember the last period of economic distress. With their eventual disappearance, would younger people exercise prudence?

Just looking at relatively recent history tends to say no, they can't.

As I posted awhile back, Michio Kaku noted a pattern in which bubble periods were separated by roughly a human life time.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

I am still hoping that the 2020s will see enough transformation that an ending of "Western Civilization" will have happened by then, fitting it to continue in altered form, and receiving more alteration as we go. The "Decline of the West" began in the 1890s and World War One, your "mega-awakening." But this "West" was seen as the Renaissance era of Western conquest and exploration. That has already ended; attempts like P-NAC to resurrect it notwithstanding

The world has changed so much that we must move on.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

But for all of that, the megasaeculum can be a real cycle, just not one that is crystal clear.

But why would you believe in something for which there is no evidence? The megasaeculum is simply a notion that was tossed off in a few posts. There was apparently no attempt to see if the proposed pattern fit with observation. After all, the megasaeculum labels the Reformation as a mild awakening while the Puritan one is divisive. How can a turning that divided Christians into Catholics and Protestants not be divisive? A whole series of religious wars ensued from this split. Surley it was at least as divisive as the Puritan awakening. Isn't it more likley that the Reformation was simply overlooked when coming up with the idea, and if it had been considered it wouldn't have been proposed in the first place?

I guess my question is, how do you see what S&H did? Is buying the idea akin to liking a band or of film, that is a matter of taste, or it is an aspect of empirical reality?

Ok, am home. Like I said Eric, if you look at the post you quoted of me from the top of the page, the one that ends in "vestiges", you'll see that I fleshed it out a bit. I was posting from my phone, and was having trouble with the viewer. That's what I was referencing when I said "above".

As far as the whole constellation of "bitter", "mild" "triumphant" and "revolutionary" crises is concerned, I'm not caught up on the whole message board yet. All I did, upon being convinced of the possibility of a MegaSaeculum, was to count back 240 years from 2030 (3 saecula of 80 years) and count back by 400 years (4 cycles of 100) before that. By that very crude measure, one would predict Awakenings in the 12th and 16th centuries, thereabouts, and a Crisis during the 14th century. Which basically jibed with my grasp of European history, and was confirmed by Wikipedia. So like I said, at first glance, it looks like the theory could have some legs.

Now, concerning, a SuperSaeculum, I really did that just to be cheeky, and also just to see how far it could be pushed. After all, if we're proposing a MS, an SS would be the logical next step, right? However, again at first glance, it does kind of fit. The roughly 400 years between the Antonine Plague during the reign of the 5 Good Emperors to the Plague of Justinian that coincided with the Gothic Wars and the final collapse of the Western Roman population could be considered a SuperCrisis. Conveniently, this is also the period denoted late antiquity, so the time frame has been grouped together independently. The next 400 years covers the early Middle Ages, which also denotes exactly the time frame this would be referring to. As the previous SuperCrisis had been a failure from the point of view of Classical Civilization, which no longer existed, this was not so much a "High" as it was a "recovery". Manoralism, Christianity, the remnants of (and backward looking longing for) Classical knowledge and culture, and the tribal traditions of the various peoples of the Migration period were all present, but not wholly integrated. This would make the High Middle Ages a SuperAwakening. Which could make sense, if you look at them as being the first truly new civilization to emerge in Europe since the fall of Rome. All of the components of Western Civilization (Christianity, Classical Thought, and tribal traditions) were fused into feudalism and common law (and civil ) and the Catholic Church. The Universities and guilds and money economy that would rise to displace this order also have their roots in this period. The period from the Renaissance to the Revolutions would then be a SuperUnraveling, when these different value systems (capitalism, Catholicism, rationalism, etc.) would coexist awkwardly within the same society. This might conveniently explain why the MegaAwakening of the Reformation would tear society apart, while the MegaAwakening of the Middle Ages built society up. The dawn of the Modern Age would see the conclusive defeat of some of those values (the Death of God, etc.), while mobilizing society in a direction that would lead to either paradise or perdition, the march of progress. Like a Crisis.

Again, just something I thought of in the last day or so.

Eric, as to your request for that exercise in narrative fiction masquerading as my "vision of the Hyperborean Age", give me a second. It's coming.

Now if you will excuse me, I have to go take my meds.

Originally Posted by Marx & Lennon

Then there is the Super-saeculum of 16 saecula.

Where does this come from? It seems that you believe in a family of cycles of length 4^i times the length of a saeculum, where i is an integer. Why should this be so?

Originally Posted by JordanGoodspeed

As far as the whole constellation of "bitter", "mild" "triumphant" and "revolutionary" crises is concerned, I'm not caught up on the whole message board yet. All I did, upon being convinced of the possibility of a MegaSaeculum,

How could you become convinced of the possibility of a megasaeculum if you are unfamiliar with the whole constellation of "bitter", "mild" "triumphant" and "revolutionary" crisis. The MegaSaeculum is defined in terms of this constellation; it is in the first three posts that introduce the thread.

Well clearly by only reading and responding to recent posts and not things from 5 years ago.

I was proposing a different framework based solely upon the 4 turnings already established by S & H. I had read a number of posts made in the last couple of months (when I started reading) referencing 4X4 archetypes all the way up and down. I was merely extrapolating from there. As I said, I came up with some results that seemed fairly reasonable, in the sense that ages and awakenings and crises were all roughly where I would expect them.

Is it a real thing? I have no idea. I don't know about the whole 4T theory in general, when it comes to that. It just seemed interesting.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

What does "culture has run away with its narrative" mean. Culture doesn't DO anything. It's like saying the marriage failed. Marriages don't DO anything either. It's people who are the actors.

Culture doesn't actively do anything, but it's the ultimate passive verb. It provides information, and shows us roles we fill and roles how those roles play out. So because the two people come into playing different roles in marriage, if those roles don't fit, the marraige fails not because the roles are good, but because the the institution of marriage doesn't fit both. Hence Marriage failed to provide a working framework for the relationship. Now, were the two people's inadaptability largely to blame, yes, but it doesn't absolve the general culture either.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Culture doing stuff cannot explain anything because culture is not an actor. The rest seems to me to be what S&H propose, which I showed does not work at all for the long cycles, and is problematic for the modern cycle because of the observed fact that generations are not all that different from each other. For every Eric who fits into the prophet archetype you have someone like me who doesn't. You may identify with the Hero archetype, but Wiz '83 very emphatically does not. There was a poster at the old site, The Dude, who made what I thought at the time was a compelling case for this.

That's probably because there's multiple stories that get told in each successive generation. So while Eric meets the S&H "wizard" type of prophet, you are probably another type, and Marx&Lennon another. Wiz '83 probably doesn't fit in the S&H archetype because it presumes that all Civics are Luke Skywalker, as opposed to there being a Leia and a Wedge, and a Biggs, and you also have. The kid from the Never Ending Story is there, too but he's not really relevant to the saeculum. He's still there, though. Also there's loads of kids in Hogwarts, and they all have their roles, but the emphasis is on Potter.

However, if I meet 4 Weasleys and a Snape, I know which roles I have available, and where I am in the story. Same as if I encounter 2 Randalls, a Jay and 15 Silent Bobs. Who cares if I encounter 1 The Dude or 1 Doc Emmit Brown, if I find myself in a sea of Captain Kirks, I know what kinda stories are going to be told.

Knowing that requires less fact to cement the story, because the roles are there, and it takes less time to navigate the permutations necessary to culminate each turning, and as each turning changes, so do the relevant roles. There's no need for a Gandolf in a 2T or the 3T, but they have to come from somewhere, so what will be the future versions will be there in the 2T, they just won't be relevant in that era. Furthermore, we've probably got several Philip Marlowe types whose story just isn't relevant this go round, but were in another time.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

This doesn't really say anything. No offense intended, but it’s kind of amorphous.

It is amorphous. That doesn't make it untrue or useless. The quantifiable, while relevant, doesn't account for everything in the wide range of human experiences, and even if it could we'd spend far more time quantifying it than doing anything about it. Even if we had the ability to measure everything, we'd never have the resources to do so.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

To what stories are you referring? Don't you think that if we were being told stories that instructed us to conform to some sort of archetypical behavior, we would be aware of it? It seems to me that what you get out of a narrative is a function of what you bring to it.

All naratives. We force our history into narratives, we take them from other cultures, we romanticize our own stories and turn them into documentaries and later into fictions based on a true story and then fictions based on that fiction. We have science fiction stories we tell ourselves to discuss current events or possibilities we fear now, we have classics that we consider relevant to our own modern lives. The bigger the well, the more narratives and types you have. And so while your type isn't necessarily what you think of yourself as, it's what drives you to interact with people the way that you do.

For instance, you and several others on the site have me pegged as a Millennial. You all more or less treat me as such, and generally I do tend to trend that way even though I'm slightly out of range for it (1981). Meanwhile Eric sees 81 and treats my like an Xer, his ancient enemy du jour. Now, given the way he responds to Millennials, I rather prefer that continue that treatment, but that's beside the point.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

On the other hand my experience when coming of age is quite different from yours simply because I came of age in a world very different from the one we have today. It was in its dying phase and I saw the Prophet->Nomad generation change happen in real time over 1981-1982 when I was in grad school (although I had no idea what it was at the time). Someone like Marx and Lennon is old enough to remember large amounts of the ancien regime, I remember less, but I do remember the sort of advice I got from Silents in the late 1970’s (rules based on the mechanics of that dying 1T world).

Learning a set of rules for a world that no longer exists when the time comes to apply them is a powerful coming of age experience, the sort of thing that can affect a whole swath of like-aged people helping to brand them as a generation type. This sort of mechanism isn’t role development from consuming stories, it’s more like learning from “the school of hard knocks”.

I had a similar experience coming of age in 2004. However, again, it's all narrative. We didn't have the "times are tight and young people are just getting a raw deal" narrative, we had the "everything's economically amazing and anyone who is having a hard time is lazy or deffective" narrative. So when people encountered me, they didn't know how to respond. It took time to overcome the prior narrative and replace it with this one.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

Why should the cycle speed up because we tell stories? Haven't we always told stories?

Yes, but we tell and consume more stories than ever. And more different kinds of stories. So there's leess time spent having to wander "new" area. We know the way the story goes based on the characters who've showed up.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

This seems to me to be a bit of a cop out. It seems to say we cannot say anything verifiable about this and so the normal requirement to provide evidence for our beliefs should be waived. Part of our 4T problems is that so much of our discourse is based on these kinds of unverified ”knowledge”. The result is many policymakers inhabit an alternate reality divorced from the real world. For example, a dominant view of how the economy works is what I call the Field of Dreams school of economics, which says “if you build it (promote investment) they (good economy) will come. It worked in the film because it was a fantasy but it doesn't work in the real world.

Actually, I think that we've ventured into the relm of stories we never managed to complete is really the issue. We don't have a narrative that really completes where the story goes "but then things got good. Ominously good. And then all the good guys became badguys and they stole all the stuff." It's a rather ridiculous narritive, to be sure. Just like the narrative change over from 2004 to 2008, it takes us time to process the new stories.

Originally Posted by Mikebert

But why would you believe in something for which there is no evidence? The megasaeculum is simply a notion that was tossed off in a few posts. There was apparently no attempt to see if the proposed pattern fit with observation. After all, the megasaeculum labels the Reformation as a mild awakening while the Puritan one is divisive. How can a turning that divided Christians into Catholics and Protestants not be divisive? A whole series of religious wars ensued from this split. Surely it was at least as divisive as the Puritan awakening. Isn't it more likely that the Reformation was simply overlooked when coming up with the idea, and if it had been considered it wouldn't have been proposed in the first place?

I guess my question is, how do you see what S&H did? Is buying the idea akin to liking a band or of film, that is a matter of taste, or it is an aspect of empirical reality?

The idea that the saecular cycle is fractal is appealing to me ... even though I doubt it is. I understand the desire to find a pattern that can be scaled and remain true, I just doubt it's possible. History isn't as well behaved as climate, and that's hard enough to model.

But your real question is directed at the work of S&H. I think they’ve found something real enough, but I’m not sanguine that looking back very far in time for repeating patterns is valid.

It seems likely that the driving factor in the cycle is the mental need we seem to have to progress at all costs and our failing appreciation of history in general. How far back can we go before the society of the time functioned primarily on tradition? I don’t see that driving a cyclic pattern, do you? Yet today, the pattern is nearly the polar opposite.

Don’t you find it odd that we are here in the second decade of the 21^st century, baffled by problems we addressed successfully in the first half of the 20^th? We seem to discount the past entirely. Today, the saeculum works.

So in short, the saeculum is real and dynamic. Modernity is changing its character as we observe it, so this discussion can continue ad infinitum. There is not likely to be an end point, but the pattern should repeat and possibly even strengthen until the underlying social dynamic changes. By then, we should be otherwise engaged.